File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0302, message 21

Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2003 17:34:27 +0000
Subject: Re: the latest in propaganda...


I am broadly in agreement with regard to the below.

However as I tried to say earlier - i think the crisis is not as stated 
below 'concerning american power' but rather that the dominant 
neo-liberal economics, understood most recently by Globalists such as 
Gidderns as 'Globalisation' , is reaching the end of its period of being 
the dominant consensual phantasy. True the crisis of american power does 
exist - but in the sense  that it was challenged after and during the 
vietnam war this is to be expected - what is different here is that 
instead of engaging in a response founded on the counter-reformation of 
neo-liberalism, with the associated collapse of left thought through the 
dominance of anti-marxist  positions both on the left and on the right, 
 instead of enagaging in taking control of intellectual high ground as 
they did in the 80s and into the 90s -  what does the right engage in ? 
why they, Bush/Blair that is, engage in neo-colonial warfare...

if it wasn't  for the people destined to die in this pathetic adventure 
i'd be cynically/kynically laughing in the corner...


Eric wrote:

>It's funny you should mention Chomsky. Yesterday I went to see a new
>documentary film on him entitled "Power and Terror" which was
>interesting because it was filmed by a Japanese director and had a more
>global than American feel to it. My main response to the film was a kind
>of optimism.  While not minimizing the work that needs to be done,
>Chomsky feels the situation has improved over the past four years,
>precisely because of the movements that are emerging to resist the
>institutions of Power and Empire.
>To answer your question about oil, I guess my view is this. I do see the
>reason why the current regime is pursuing a war in Iraq as strategic
>from a geopolitical perspective. In other words, unlike Great Britain
>which entered a country like India with an entire bureaucratic
>apparatus, the goal of the United States seems more abstract with regard
>to its brand of colonialism. In ways that are reminiscent of a
>multinational corporation, the US tends to act as a kind of virtual
>Empire, outsourcing the actual administration and governance to local
>parties while maintaining ultimate control through monetary and trade
>agreements, backed by imperial military power. It wants to run the world
>in the same classic terms that were once used to run General Motors
>under Sloan.
>What has currently escalated the conflict is precisely not terrorism or
>9/11, but the recognition that because of such events the region has
>become more unstable and if the US does not act quickly, then its
>destiny is imperiled because the dominance of the American Empire
>depends upon the continued availability of cheap oil.  
>As I said in a previous posting, there is a crisis today concerning
>American power. What threatens it most is the specter of globalism, the
>very thing it claimed to be advocating in the nineties.  In a
>dialectical movement of the return of the repressed, globalism today has
>become the worst American nightmare.  
>We must contest the US not in the name of patriotism, but in the name of
>internationalism.  Today we are no longer all American citizens.  We are
>all world citizens.  


Driftline Main Page


Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005