Re: Re: Re: FW: Krugman

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2002 3:29 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:24479] Re: Re: FW: Krugman


> C'mon folks, there is an "anti-globalization" left. It's not the
> whole movement, for sure, but plenty of people talk about localism
> and self-reliance, and object to cross-cultural influences. The
> International Forum on Globalization, a lot of Greens, Ralph Nader,
> and the New Internationalist's No-Nonsense Guide To Globalization,
> recently published by Verso, all embody this trend.
>
> Doug

============

Those "..." give you away Doug :->

Two issues seem to make the mess what it is.

1] post-Berlin wall we don't have a clean taxonomy of  the left [bear with me Carrol] that
distinguishes it sharply from liberal approaches to defining the left. See Theodore Lowi's "The End
of the Republican Era" for the problems liberals have in defining the left; we're in even worse
shape than "they" are on this score. Given the immense drift to the right and Jim's note on the
incredible muddiness of the middle, it may be an intractable issue and given the whole narcissism of
small differences we get caught up in when far more important stuff is at stake, we have to be far
more nuanced in identifying potential partners and forming alliances.

2]when one shifts the terms from the G-antiG dyad to imperialism and/or top-down versus bottom up
subsidiarity, the challenge then becomes, as usual, a politics of vocabularies. Whose form of
storytelling and explanation carries the day. To that extent, I fret more about all the ways in
which we enable those who love to play the Manichean game. I don't see the citizens of India
destroying farmland as anti-globalization anymore than I see US forest activists trying to use the
levers of state and local government to stop unsustainable forestry practices as
anti-golobalization. Both groups are raising far more engaging concerns over property and the old
absentee landlord problem.

The global/local dyad needs to be unbundled in a more nuanced manner that pays attention to
complementarties rather than oppositions. This entails a far more sophisticated approach to the
issues surrounding issues of governance and government and the polysemy of those terms. I think it's
partly why some Greens, in Europe at least, find the left/right dyad we've lived with since the
French revolution no longer helpful in framing the issues for the sake of finding partners and
forming alliances for collective action.

Muddlin' through,

Ian