Re: GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM

At 05:45 PM 4/28/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>
>Randy--
>
>       I certainly hope that you are right.  It would make my children's
>and my grandchildren's futures much more promising.  But I am less
>confident than you are of such an outcome.  The distance between the Rich
>World and the Poor World has not changed significantly in the past 50
>years;  at best the Poor World is successfully treading water;  at worst
>its collective head is perilously near to going under for good.  To oppose
>revolution on principle because specific revolutions in Russia, China, and
>elsewhere did not "open sesame!" is again to over-generalize
>ahistorically.  Russia and China were not ready for a proletarian
>revolution for the simple reason that they had midget proletariats and
>largely rural, quasi-feudal economies.  They were like bicycles that
>got off to a fast start because the Rolls-Royces on the road were briefly
>stalled in a traffic jam.  

I like that metaphor. 

>       But when the major bourgeois democracies finally push global
>capitalism to its ultimate limits and the internal contradictions finally
>kick in big-time, revolution will be possible and can be fruitful in those
>democracies.  Will it also be necessary?  Will the megacorps and the
>marionettes whose strings they pull in the various national governments
>see reason and gracefully bow out?  I don't think so!  The only
>imponderable, for me, is whether the leaders of revolution in the
>core and semi-periphery will realize that the rest of humankind--the BULK
>of humankind--must be fully integrated into the new socialist and
>democratic world order, no matter what the (at least temporary) cost to
>the everyday comfort of workers in the core and semi-periphery.  A house
>divided against itself cannot stand.  And all of us now live, willy-nilly,
>in the house of Earth.

I agree with you that all, rich and poor, north and south, live in a common
world. The question that should be asked is not whether such a community
exists, but whether people see themselves as living in a common community,
and in sharing common values. I think that it can definitely be argued that
most people, either in the north or in the south, do not have any
particularly strong identification with the world. I think of it as the same
kind of problem that faces the modern European Union, and Europhiles -- how
do you create a common European identity? out of what? how durable can it
be? how tangible can it be? 

For your First and Second World revolutionaries (or evolutionaries) to have
a chance at succeeding, people in the First and Second Worlds will have to
adopt this sense of global community -- they won't give up their lives and
make themselves unpopular with the folks back home for an abstract concept.
In order to get from "no global community" to "global community worth
suffering for," the world might well have to go through a couple of
generations of unrestrained capitalism. No, I'm not looking foward to this
prospect.

The near Kondratieff up-cycle probably will tell if revolution or evolution
is the future of the world. I would like to think that Second World
countries in Europe (the Visegrad and Baltic States, and Slovenia), Latin
America (the Southern Cone, Brazil, Mexico) and East Asia (Korea, Thailand,
Malaysia) will be able to complete their ascent to First World status, and
that the so-called "emerging markets" -- Indonesia, China, India, perhaps
southern Africa and parts of the Middle East -- will ascend to Second World
status. If that happens, I'd wager that we might, just barely, be able to
avoid revolution and begin the peaceful transformation of the world into a
social-democratic macropolity. If not, well -- I wouldn't be surprised if
world revolution broke out in that case.

How about I E-mail you in twenty-five years when we figure out how it will 
end?

>       Warren

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada