[lbo-talk] Stan Goff -- Windbag?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/8/07, John Gulick <john_gulick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Given this context, it is rather ridiculous to paint a picture suggesting
> that, for example, all the depredations red-greens (among others) associate
> with consumer culture (phony individualism, political passivity, dumbing
> down, environmental despoliation, etc.) are a byproduct of US transnational
> penetration overseas. Stan should spend some time with the
> managerial-technical-professional yuppies of urban coastal China who are at
> one and the same time ardent opponents of hypocritical US big powerism,
> gluttons for the most banal and conspicuous varieties of consumer culture
> (ersatz "luxury" or "cosmopolitan" stuff from every corner of the planet),
> and indifferent to the suffering of the workers and peasants of their own
> country (in whose "development" they take such pseudo-nationalist pride!).
> Similar specimens can be found in Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa,
> I'm sure. Where does this among many other emergent phenomena fit into his
> cardboard cutout depiction of the social system of world accumulation?
> However much I disdain their academic careerism and lit-crit
> pretentiousness, post-colonial scholars at least possess the virtue of
> having a clue about this stuff.

But what Stan offered in "An Appeal to People outside the United
States to Break US Imperial Power" is not an analysis of global
capitalism but a series of things people outside the USA can do to
help stop the Iraq War in particular and diminish US hegemony in
general, as the title makes clear.  It's just that his purpose, in the
short run, is different from yours.
-- 
Yoshie
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