Re: Doug tells the truth..........................

[ALI KADRI <akadri_00@xxxxxxxxx>]

I do not know why my initial reply did not go through,
but the impression in much of the developing world is
that the antigolabalization protestors are confused
middle class kids who are looking for a share of the
pie when the dust settles. sort of like the sixties
fad. i think Doug has had it speaking to a small
cricle, which is what the left does, but for a while
it will be that until labour, through some recursive
process, imputes some working class consciousness
capable of global emanicipation. that is a long way
away, and one will be talking to small circles for a
while i guess. so better say what you think to a small
circle than patronise a big one.
--- Ian Murray <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> < http://www.thenation.com  >
> FEATURE STORY | Special Report
>
> Terrorism and Globalization
> by DOUG HENWOOD
>
>
> The organizers of the Globalization and Resistance
> Conference, held at
> the City University of New York's Graduate Center on
> November 16 and
> 17, had a very bad stroke of luck. They started
> planning the
> conference over the summer, with an agenda focusing
> on the origins and
> impacts of globalization, and the protest movements
> that have
> organized against it. Then came the September 11
> terrorist attacks and
> the subsequent US response. Neither the conference
> speakers nor the
> attendees did a great job of assimilating those
> facts to the agenda at
> hand.
>
> Not, of course, that that's easy. But much of the
> talk, whether from
> the stage or in the hallways, was either about
> globalization (and the
> so-called antiglobalization movement) or the war
> (and the antiwar
> movement). They were like two parallel discourses
> that never quite
> met.
>
> Susan George, the writer and activist on development
> and global
> poverty, led off the conference by confessing that
> the bombing of
> Afghanistan hadn't turned out to be the disaster
> she'd feared, leaving
> her a bit confused about what to think. George then
> laid out a
> "planetary contract" for "hope and renewal"--an end
> to our "foolish
> dependency" on oil, cancellation of poor countries'
> debts, a program
> to meet the basic needs of the world's poorest
> (which would cost $50
> billion to $90 billion a year) and new global taxes
> on financial
> transactions and multinational corporations. George
> offered this as
> worthy of doing in itself, but also as a way of
> lowering the levels of
> despair in which terrorists thrive (though she
> added, it wouldn't
> change the terrorists themselves, who have a
> "fascist ideology,"
> though she didn't explain where this ideology came
> from.")
>
> Though George presented her agenda as if no
> reasonable person could
> object, her arguments go against nearly everything
> the United States
> and its European junior partners stand for, and
> would amount to the
> first steps in overturning the global economic and
> political
> hierarchy. A fine idea, but it would mean taking on
> the most powerful
> interest groups in the world, something George must
> know, but which
> she barely acknowledged. Agenda-setters and
> activists also seem to
> inhabit parallel worlds that never quite meet.
>
> But what is the relationship between globalization
> and terrorism (even
> loosely and imprecisely defined)? The conference
> buzz was that
> terrorism is the product of marginalization and
> poverty, and
> marginalization and poverty the products of
> globalization. But are
> things really that simple? Latin America and East
> Asia, two of the
> regions most transformed by global economic forces
> over the last two
> decades, have produced no terrorists of note.
>
> Saudi Arabia, home of Osama bin Laden himself and
> many of his funders,
> has been embedded in the global oil economy since
> well before most Al
> Qaeda members were born. And Afghanistan, their
> current home, is
> almost entirely outside the circuits of global trade
> and capital
> flows--an exclusion that contributes greatly to its
> extreme poverty
> and social disintegration. (As the economist Joan
> Robinson once said,
> under capitalism, "the misery of being exploited by
> capitalists is
> nothing compared to the misery of not being
> exploited at all.") These
> facts complicate the simple derivation of terrorism
> from
> globalization.
>
> But the biggest absence of all was the recognition
> that there's
> something different about this war as compared to
> recent military
> interventions over Kosovo and Kuwait. Speakers and
> attendees
> frequently cited longstanding US geopolitical goals
> as lurking behind
> the war. This is undeniably true. Washington's war
> strategy is not
> motivated by tenderness for the people of
> Afghanistan. For all the
> professions of concern about the abuse of women
> under the Taliban,
> George W. Bush and his cronies haven't been
> born-again as feminists.
> But there was little serious acknowledgment that we
> were attacked, and
> that some US response was inevitable and even
> justified. Recognizing
> that doesn't mean assent to Bush's version of a
> response, though lots
> of people in the peace movement seem to fear it
> does. But anyone who
> wants to speak to an audience beyond the small
> circle of believers has
> to consider these questions seriously.
>
> This has an importance far beyond the fate of one
> conference. Many
> antiglobalization activists (not a fair name, since
> many of them are
> quite global in their thinking and organization)
> have been hoping that
> after the dust settles, the movement could go back
> to what it had been
> doing before September 11. Speakers repeatedly
> invoked the list of
> place names that have come to signify the movement's
> breadth and
> growth--Seattle, Quebec City, Porto Alegre,
> Genoa...--as if the series
> will be shortly resumed. But it may not. War, fear,
> and repression
> have thrown sand in the gears. Linking the themes of
> peace and justice
> can be done, but it requires hard thinking, and
> there's not enough of
> that going on right now.
>
>


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