re: economic strategy and the state

[mcclintockbrent%faculty%Carthage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Marty Hart-Landsberg observes and asks:

So, at the risk of oversimplyfing, one approach calls for building
opposition to the mobility of capitalism on the basis of the nation
state and projects a vision of greater national regulation of
capitalist activity through a restructured and more powerful state.
The other approach argues that transnational corporate activity and
the nature of our environmental and social problems makes this
strategy unworkable. Instead it calls for transborder organizing to
create new movements based on common interests that crosscut
borders and nations.  It also tends to support more decentralized
means of controlling economic activity -- looking more to
communities then states and coordinated community exchanges then
nationally managed trade regimes.

What do people think of all of this?  Have I accurately represented
the two approaches?  Are there others?  Have I created a false
division?  It seems to me that very different understandings of
economic strategy flow from these two different positions.

________________

McClintock:

A third approach is the formation and exercise of supranational state power
which is inchoate in the EU, NAFTA, a few other experiments in regional
integration, and in fragments in the UN. This approach recognizes the
inability of nation states to control capital mobility (but still supports a
stronger national state) but would argue that while transborder organizing by
social movements is a necessary condition for an effective global economic
strategy it is not sufficient: eg, how do worker & local government coalitions
in Kenosha, Wisconsin, US and Chiapas, Mexico exert democratic control over
North American money supply, fiscal policy, or trade policy of the NAFTA three, let alone nation states? As a subscriber to this third approach, and possibly ina minority on PEN-L (?), I don't see it as necessarily mutually exclusive to theother two approaches suggested by Marty.

I have this awful feeling that I am running the gauntlet of Jim Devine and
Trond who had an exchange on world government towards the end of last year. Go
easy on me guys, it's back to the production line tomorrow, spring break's
over.... "hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, production rushes on" (1930s labor song)

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Brent McClintock                    |                           |
Economics                           |                           |
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