File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0301, message 145


Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 12:13:46 +1000
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: territorialisation -Global Welfare State


Eric/All,

Eric wrote:

>I think similar concerns about poverty, health, education, and
>environmental issues will
>create pressures to create a kind of global
:>welfare state.  I think it will be reformist in
>nature and geared towards
>providing a safety net to capitalism. I don't see it as being
>revolutionary at this point.

A few million individuals who own the majority of world resources and
operate the majority of world business are unlikely to allow a few billion
of those less fortunate to dispossess them and fuse nearly 200 nation-states
into a single global entity.

But the idea could stimulate keyboard philosophers, like us,  to imagine a
world that goes beyond a "safety net for capitalism",  beyond Stalinism and
Maoism, and beyond nebulous and abstract theories..

We could  visualize, or try to visualize  a world where "poverty, health,
education and environmental issues" would be solved with freedom and equity
for all persons, families ,
and local communities with minimal interference from outsiders.

Perhaps the most difficult of civil rights to guarantee is the right to be
left alone;

The large-scale socialist approach to a welfare state by the USSR endured
for three-quarters of a century before it failed.  It allegedly caused 50
million Gulag deaths.

The even larger socialist experiment (in numbers of people) of Maoist China
now seems to be ending as it engages in trade and investment with the
industrial nations who dominate the Globe.

Somewhere there may be credible estimates of the numbers of China's
dissenters who were executed..There seems no reason to believe the small
communities are left alone to pursue their own version of rights..

About a hundred years ago Tolstoy warned against the "cult of the State",
and we are often reminded that "where there is no vision, the people
perish".

With great difficulty, I tried to discover the vision of "Empire", the book.
No luck.
Neo-Marxists try to rehabilitate the "Socialist" vision.  I've heard of a
"Third Way", but haven't the foggiest notion of what it is.

regards,
Hugh




   

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