On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] crossposted:
> UNDERSTANDING THE BATTLES OF SEATTLE AND WASHINGTON
> By Dick Platkin and Chuck O'Connell*
Lemme see if I get this right: they're arguing that the anti-WTO and
anti-IMF protests are financed by nationalist bourgeois pig foundations,
organized by nationalist bourgeois pig unions and staffed by nationalist
bourgeois piglets -- we'll call 'em NBPs for short.
> anti-globalization groups. They are (unknowingly) recycling Kautsky's
> argument when they claim that the WTO, IMF, and World Bank represent a new
> capitalist consensus to override national sovereignty and democracy when they
> impinge upon profitability.
Not only are NBPs nationalistic and vaguely porcine, they're also
revisionist Kautskyites.
> FAIR TRADE ARGUMENT 3: THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DEMONSTRATORS ON THE
> STREETS OF SEATTLE CAUSED THE FAILURE OF THE WTO MEETING. The Battle of
> Seattle was moving, it was exciting, it was headline grabbing, it was
> revealing of fascist police violence, but it did not sink the WTO.
NBPs failed in Seattle, anyway, so we don't need to bother with the
historically new linkages forged there between labor, enviros,
culture-workers and micropolitical groups. Nor do we need to rethink what
global capitalism is, what the keiretsu are doing in East Asia, how the
relations of production are being restructured in the EU, or concretely
organizing the global proletariat in this informatic culture of ours. Why
think through the year 2000 when you can recycle polemics from the 1920s!
-- Dennis
