Dear Richard,
On Wed, 14 Aug 1996, Richard K. Moore wrote:
> Dear Warren,
>
> The "states that front for them" need to stop fronting for them --
> and that requires people to take control of their on-paper national
> democracies. Global solidarity and cooperation among national-based
> movements is indeed important, as I said in the posting, but it is national
> democratic institutions that provide the potential infrastructure for
> popular empowerment.
>
Okay, and how do you propose to create such "global solidarity and
cooperation?" If it's really important, how can the solidarity be
forged? A grass-roots popular movement that is nationally based and
focused may well turn out to pursue trade and military and environmental
policies inimical to world peace, world justice, and the health of the
biosphere. A true national democracy might rein in the corporations in
that country without any serious thought to the needs of countries
thousands of miles away. In short, democracy in and of itself does not
guarantee that a country will act in the best interests of humankind--only
a global democracy is likely to do that.
> You use "antisystemic", evidently, to describe any program for
> significant change. I say it is folly to ignore systems -- one must use
> them and work within them, if even to change them. The systems which offer
> us the most hope are the democratic-national-government systems. They
> exist and operate, and their controls are within our grasp if we have the
> necessary political will and competence.
No, I use "antisystemic" in a very specific sense: against the
continuation of the present capitalist world-economy with its support
system of armed national states.
> The necessity of "coordinating all efforts" is not obvious, and I
> disupte it. Mutual solidarity and support is not the same as being
> "coordinated" from above. Your "supranational party structure" --
> especially if it is to make detailed plans for every nation and locality --
> sounds like a rehash of a Soviet Communist Party system. Too big, too
> bureaucratic, too centralized, too arrogant, too distant from the needs of
> the people.
>
> Decentralization, I believe, is essential to democracy, and the
> nation state is not too-small a unit to deserve decentralized autonomy.
You have a very strange notion of "decentralization." To be sure,
a world party would run the grave risk of not being democratic, of not
being responsive, and all the rest. It would have to be on its guard
against such tendencies every minute. But what is decentralized about a
nation-state the size of Russia or Germany or Japan or the USA? These are
already immense polities with central governments far removed in many ways
from their electorates. The kind of direct town-meeting participatory
democracy you seem to have in the back of your mind is impossible once a
polity gets any bigger than Andorra. The nation-state is not too small,
agreed. But it is much, much too big for direct democracy. I just cannot
see any vast difference between a polity of six billion people and a
polity of 300 million people. If democracy of some sort can work in the
latter, it can work in the former.
> To seek a "global democratic state" at this time in history is
> folly in the extreme, folly for a whole host of reasons.
I see absolutely no chance of a global democratic state at this
time, but beginning to think about it and beginning to seek it, these are
hardly follies. And when you speak of "storming the fortresses," I am
pretty sure that some day we will have to do just that--literally in many
instances. The world party will have to become, at some stage, a
revolutionary party, prepared to seize power whenever and wherever there
is no other way to break the stranglehold of corporate fascism.
> If you feel it's impossible to reform national governments in this
> way, then I say it's ten times as impossible to force these reforms from
> some nebulous global forum.
>
No, I don't think it's impossible to reform national governments.
But without concerted global political action, it will be impossible to
replace the capitalist world-system with a democratic world-government.
Best,
Warren