> Because it's important to show that what humans can do, humans can
> also undo - that the "laws" of capitalism are the result of a social
> system and not more-or-less immutable physical forces. The ruling
> class likes to talk about the inevitability of globalization - like
> Bill Clinton, who said a few months ago: "Yet, globalization is not
> something we can hold off or turn off. It is the economic equivalent
> of a force of nature -- like wind or water."
>
> Doug
****************
Who said this=> "if all social classes agree on the lack of practical
alternatives to the existing political-economic order, they have in effect
accepted the existing order. By accepting as realistic or truthful a certain
narrative of society's future, they have willy-nilly employed the language
that produced the narrative and foreclosed other ways of seeing and acting
on the world."
The ruling class loves to create the illusion of intransigence/platonism
with regards to "the system." Currencies are always defended but never
attacked in the newspaper stories--third person passive voice and all that.
It partly explains young peoples concern with the microdynamics af Kapital;
they know that agency has been stripped from all narratives. It's why
corporate campaigns are popular in the burgeoning, dare we say, movement.
They're materially and ideationally tangible, there's a WHO there [it's why
they're focused on the democracy deficit and the accountability deficit]....
Culture-as-a-self-fulfilling-prophecy a la contructivist notions that
radically temporalize social ontology and the institutional loci of class
power should be made more user friendly over the next few years. Seattle and
DC were built on something very simple that leveraged the hard work of
writer/critics of Kapitalism since the Rio conference in '92; "if you build
it, they will come". $$ follows good ideas and bad ideas [if $$ wasn't an
ensemble of ideas/relations how could a currency be debased?]. This is not
to proclaim the "ideas all the way down" approach to culture, but merely
asserts greater explanatory possibilities to the relations of production vis
a vis the forces of production. Institutions are created and continually
re-created via lots and lots of talk, so what are the concepts and
narratives that can de-create the institutions that are productive of so
much suffering and evil so that the next round of "protests" [which will
happen only if we build "them"] are even more effective than the last round
of challenges to the ruling class' self-image as guardians of our well being
by virtue of creating new ways of thinking about design adequate
institutions?
Ian
"For now, the struggle is the alternative" Hanah Petros
"Hegemony is like a pillow" -- Robert Cox
