At 20/03/02 15:01 -0800, Sabri wrote: >Chris writes: > > > Therefore as far as world politics are concerned, > > I am probably essentially calling for a sort of new > > democracy, which involves progressive class > > alliances, ie a national democratic stage which ideally > > would not be dominated by the progressive bourgeoisie. > > > > Concrete world slogans now? How about Peace and Justice? > > (NOT excluding economic justice on a world scale of course.)
>Peace and Justice are fine slogans Chris, especially when justice >includes economic justice on a world scale. On the other hand, >asking economic justice is asking war, not peace. The screwers of >the world will not give it to us unless we fight for economic >justice. Yes. But until the momentum was rudely interrupted by a reactionary terrorist attack on New York and Washington, the pressure of street demonstrations was so great that the IMF WB was having to curtail its September meeting from 5 days to 2. >Well, how do I know this? Say, I just ran a statistical model on >the entire human history and this forecast was the result of my >run. Further, economic justice is a blow to capitalists' ability >to accumulate capital. Do you think they can give up on that and >let go of their domination? This question concretely becomes one of whether the major transnational financial corporations would oppose a more peaceful, juster world. Not necessarily. They would be treacherous friends. They might tolerate a small measure of regulation in order to continue to extact superprofits on a world scale. Nevertheless some of them might temporarily support initiatives for a more stable, juster world. >Maybe in certain parts of the world, >like yours, where their domination may be exported to elsewhere, >although I have serious doubts about even that, but not in my >part of the world, as far as I can see. > >We all want a peaceful (and democratic) world but we are not >going to get it unless we confront the terrible things that are >going on and fight, if necessary, again, if necessary, using >force. > >Lastly, it is important for us in this global fight to recognize >that this is not only a time-varying but also a spatially varying >system, and hence our solution should also be as such. Absolutely:classical marxism is weak at analysing the effects on the value of labour power of widely differing forces of production in different parts of the world. The gradient in wages across the world is roughly the order of thirty fold now. There needs to be a vast global system for pumping capital from the developed metropolitan imperialist world to other parts of the world. While people like George Soros can advocate this intellectually, only popular forces will fight for it. >Solidarity, >Sabri > >P.S: Could you please expand upon what you mean by "progressive >class alliances"? An international of like-minded pure proletarians will not be succesful alone. While more dogmatic marxists are suspicious of the apparent lack of class content in the idea of the global multitude, we need to be able to define broad class coalitions, which will shift on particular issues. We need a politics that could be supported overwhelmingly by the working class and working people of the world (including peasantry and other small petty producers. (Those in the imperialist heartlands who benefit so greatly by imperialism and the uneven accumulation of capital will have to have their opposition to international solidarity neutralised (eg we had better not propose that all capital accumulation stop dead in the USA and western Europe for the next ten years while it is diverted to Africa). The coalition needs to include progressive capitalist or subordinate imperialist class forces, eg those of Finland who would benefit from a juster world (to sell more mobile phones - why not!) And to include on a temprorary case by case basis representatives of giant international financial corporations. That should conceptually make up 95% of the worlds population. Does that sound superfluous, and unnecessarily impure? Only a ratio of the balance of forces of 95:5 could allow for all the wobble and confusion for the message still to come through. Of course dogmatic "marxists" whose only perspective is to prove robustly that they are more marxist than someone else, will be feel secure with no ratio greater than 5:95 The overall message needs to be for the multitude: for global peace and justice. The more detailed message is that the exact steps for pursuing this struggle on several fronts over several decades will need clarity about the different class and geopgrahical positions of different contributors and struggle with the international coalition for the successful pursuit of its aims. Is that clear enough? Or is that too arrogant? There is an old song, "We only want the earth". That remains true for the multitude of the inhabitants of this planet. How can there be any serious discussion of global strategy that does not assume an arrogance of perspective comparable to what I have sketched above? Criticisms to strengthen the strategy welcome. Chris Burford
