email to mike

feel like writing long CL blogger comment but cannot be fucked to get into really. this "poor migrants" theme is unfortunately just as flawed as anti-globals are in terms of lacking adequate theory to overcome (dys)functional grammar.

theres plenty of talk of who the victims are, theres plenty of talk of the structural and legal problems theyre facing. issue with migrants: we need no passport people to run first world economy, brownies without labour or indeed any rights are as necessary to the maintenance of our luxurious lifestyle as the slaves of ancient rome. perhaps a little less so. but the scope for an extension of minimum wage in britain (to everybody!) just aint there. military spending is through the roof, the 90s economic miracle is a total farce, etc ppp. these victims know the perpetrators. we know them. noones talking about that.

same applies to anti-globals. WTO is bad, IMF is evil. there are a number of evil upper class yanks. but us, in our holy grace, we aint touched by evil because we're against these things. the class of beneficiaries are the managers/thieves and "inbred heirs" who are our SUV-(or otherwise)-owning neighbours right here in OECD suburbia. the ugly evil "out there" or whatever are the corporate scumbags sitting next to you on the london tube. of course there is no active evil, everybody's doing their best and their bit, as meritocracy and indeed any agent-operator participating somewhere up there in the global power structure will tell you:

just doing best for company and thus for share- and stakeholders. and we certainly are stake- if not even shareholders to the current order. ideology is the sum of heuristic mechanisms keeping people blind to the structural logic that leads to the sort of social reality we (to some extent) and brownie kiddies throughout the world are facing. shareholdership is supposedly ethically neutral due to the (assumed) structural amorality of capital, i.e. money don't stink, its only some oil barons and arms manufacturers without U.N. whitewash who smell.. the managers themselves, however, are anonymous. this supposed ethical neutrality of (abstract-form) capital also allows for illusionary "selective consumption"- no nestle (babymilk), no esso (hasnt implemented adequate greenwash) etc..

neither is a european social forum held in paris where only kids of first world elites can actually afford to attend. or a world social forum in mumbay. mobility in third world = zero. participation = 20 USD or whatever. this excludes anyone but the elites. at least its left-leaning third world elites.. getting 25K job working in london oxfam is no way to break functional rationale. maybe even blogging isnt..

have a nice day..