[WS] This seems to be the writing on the wall, unfortunately. But it is not surprising. This is the way the internet is going. I have been watching postings to various discussion forums offered by news outlets and all that I can see is a torrent of hate mail spewed largely by American males. Pick up any random hate comment from any random news outlet, and you can make a safe bet it was written by an American male. Pick up any random civilized comment, which are few and far between anyway, and you can safely bet that it was written by either a female or someone not living in the US.
This getting really tedious. I am trying to avoid unpleasant things and people in my life because the most likely outcome of such encounters is becoming like them. Most people I have contact with in real life are women, foreigners and gays because these are the only groups of people in this shithole who can have a conversation that does not involve insulting or humiliating someone else. Most American males I've met are jerks whose main purpose in life appears to be kicking someone else's ass in one way or another. This is the male thing in general, but the combination of imperial arrogance, provincial ethnocentrism, and the anonymity of the internet makes it really stand out here. This list has been one a few places that are relatively free of trolling and hatemongering - and that is why I still pay attention to it - but this entire internet experience is getting tedious an my tolerance for boorishness is wearing thin.
In any case - I am still trying to have an intelligent conversation on the relationship between state and class, it is just that the internet does not seem to be the right place. In fact, I am a major contributor to a book soon to be published by the JHU Press that examines this relationship and its effect on civil society in a comparative perspective of some 40 countries. Some of the ideas that I floated here are elaborated there.
The original premise of that project was the preeminence of class struggle and power relations among classes in the development of different types of civil society, but one of the biggest surprises was how little this framework can explain when we move outside Europe. It seems that other than class factors can travel further. One common answer is the effect cultural differences, but this definitely not the direction I would go. So I am stuck with institutions as the intervening variable in articulating and pursuing class interests. In some cases, their influence is a deciding factor. For example, when you compare countries like Sweden and New Zealand or Australia you will find that both had strong labor movements able to control national governments, yet political outcome were very much different. Sweden ended up with the quintessential welfare state, whereas New Zealand and Australia fell closer to the neoliberal side. These two cases were the classical cases falsifying the original hypothesis claiming the preeminence of class, and the only way to salvage it was to introduce the mediating influence of institutions representing class interests.
And this is indeed what the evidence seems to support. Sweden's labor was organized mainly by socialists for whom social protections was an important agenda item. But even that was not enough, and it took government administration to implement the welfare state. In NZ the Labour Party tried nationalization policies in the 1920s but got cold feet due to electoral pushback. In Australia the Labour Party went with skilled trades unions demand for higher wages rather than social protections. So this is the crucial test case that demonstrates that the interests of the same class can lead to very different outcomes, depending how they are articulated and articulated by institutions representing these classes.
That is the way things stand right now. The ms is due by the end of this year so there may be some changes but I do not think they will be major.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."