Despite losing Ted Turner, CNN seems to be keeping its self-consciously liberal progressive perspective. They have just held an impressive interview on "Earth Day", coinciding with the close of the Quebec Summit with two youngish (less than 40) anti-capitalist leaders: Amit Srivastava from Corp Watch and Oronto Douglas, from Environmental Rights Action. Srivastava emphasised the widening of the concept of the environment to where people live, work and play, and the lack of democracy when these are affected by decisions of the World Bank or IMF. Douglas, from the Niger Delta emphasised in concrete detail how the local environment there is destroyed by the "kingdoms" of Shell, of Amoco, etc. Srivastava stressed that much work is being done to find solidarity in common targets between different local forms of resistance to these multi-national problems. Douglas stressed how the youth of the world, in America, in the Niger Delta, or in India, are increasingly moving into determined non-violent action. "Celebrating the Earth" is only part of it. They want to take charge of the planet. What was impressive was of course their articulacy and determination, but also the sense that they spoke with direct knowledge of how these international bonds are being forged against the common enemy. Even if this enemy is not defined quite in the theoretical way we might agree on ( or not agree on), that is not necessary for subjective unity in action to occur. What however is increasingly urgent is that new marxist thinking addresses itself to the fact that Marx's law of value is bound to operate in different ways in different environments if the means of production differ so greatly in their technical development in different parts of the world. The law of value works not so much as to create a single point of an exchange value for each commodity around which prices oscillate, as to create a whole *matrix* of values spread out over space and affected by circulation time. This is why there is a scientific basis to the intuitions of the new global radicals that the global economy must conform to the local environmental needs, rather than the local environment conforming to the needs of the global economy. Chris Burford London
