Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 13:36:23 +1000
From: =?ISO-8859-15?B?R/xudGVyIE1pbm5lcnVw?= <g.minnerup-AT-unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: BHA: Why Blair supported Bush


Phil,

On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, you wrote:

> Gunter,

> One rather large problem with what you say below in what I consider to be
> your knee-jerk and pro-nationalist response

Dunno about "knee-jerk" but what was "pro-nationalist" in it? You're
doing excatly what I criticized - mention the nation state as a real
entity and the echo comes back: "nationalist". Now if that's not
knee-jerk I don't know what is.

>  to Rachel is that power does
> *not* reside mainly in the nation-state as you claim.  It resides mainly in
> the transnational corporations.  Bush and Blair are just ciphers for the
> TNCs.  The "New American Century" and New Labour are ciphers for the TNCs.
> The Iraq war was fought at the behest of the TNCs.

Don't know what "ciphers" and "at the behest" means. If you mean that
big business is behind the policies of Bush and Blair, then that's a
truism and not the great theoretical revelation you make it out to be.
If it means that the voters in the last general election voted for
Microsoft, that the "hanging chads" in Florida offered a choice between
Halliwell and General Motors, or that the debate in the Security
Council was between Monsanto and BP on one side, Credit Lyonnaise and
Siemens on the other, then you're off your rockers. So what DO you
mean by these nebulous phrases? The relationship between economics and
politics is one of the most difficult issues we face, not one to be
bypassed by that kind of rhetorical trick.

> Also I fail to
> understand what you mean when you say that Rachel has not related her ideas
> to stratified reality and the concrete and the abstract.  Can you elaborate?

Exactly what I wrote: the tendency to fight reality with abstractions
such as the ones I picked up on in the quoted passages.

Regards,
Günter 

-- 
Günter Minnerup
Visiting Fellow
Centre for European Studies/School of History
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
Tel. (+61 2) 9385 1363 (work)
Tel. (+61 2) 9398 3646 (home)
mailto:g.minnerup-AT-unsw.edu.au



     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---