Re: world vs. national focus

Mon, 13 Oct 1997 14:58:56 +1000
Bruce R. McFarling (ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au)

At 11:36 12/10/97 -0400, wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:
>
> Andy has stated the case for a concerted world movement with the
>utmost cogency. Local, regional, and national effort should not be
>discouraged; on the contrary. But the only conceivably effective
>antisystemic response in the long term is a world-sized response, to match
>and contest the world-sized systemic juggernaut that faces us.

Efforts to prevent (impending or imagined) ecosystem collapse
are necessarily driven to a global scope by the global scope of
corporate capitalist institutions. In Polyani's double-movement,
the protective reaction occurs at the same level as the action
it is protecting against precisely because efforts at protective
reaction at lower levels turn out to be futile. What role does
life-support defense have in a global movement, and how would
anti-systemic responses driven by social purposes reconcile
themselves with anti-systemic responses driven by ecosystemic
goals?

Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au