In light of Jeff’s good analysis on the South Ossetia conflict I thought I would provide a link and excerpt from my blog The Mustard Seed.
I read an interesting (but ultimately trivial) opinion piece in today’s Finnancial Times by Chrystia Freeland titled “The new age of authoritarianism.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with the piece as long as people realize that it’s essentially given from the bourgeois viewpoint that the West inherently looks after the good of the world and that free market globalization is something that (while it gives huge profits to Western corporations) is ultimately good for the rest of humanity.
This quote more than sums up her take on the last 20 odd years or so:
the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.
I’m not going to argue with this point (you all can read my other blog posts to see what I think), it’s just to illustrate her point-of-view.
Most of what we have been reading in the news about the authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, Iran, etc. have been whole heartidly from the view points of those who espouse a liberal bourgeois capitalist mindset (whether they bee slightly left, right, or center) while there has been very little room for the opinions of radical labor organizers, anti-capitalists/globalization organizers, home grown Third World activists, etc. This essentially gives the reader of mainstream news a very narrow outlook on global affairs and ultimatly stiffle critical thinking as there is much more out there than the capitalist bourgeois mind set and there are more ways to analyze the situation of global affairs (especially when it comes to the South Ossetia conflict).
This piece by Freeland is a perfect example of this mindset that dominates the mainstream media (print and TV).
In it she essentially parrots the views of those who came before in saying that the end of a Soviet dominated Third World brought freedoms to untold millions (I’m no fan of the capitalist degenerated state that was the Soviet Union mind you) and that poverty has been reduced world wide. She goes along the classical neo-liberal (as supposed to realist) line of authoritarian China and Russia and their imperial endvours around the world and how the West should stand up to them, etc. but does not turn her analysis on the West itself.
One thing I find liberating about Marxian/Marxist political thought (as supposed to Smithan and Ricardian or neo-classical lines of thought) is its grounding in class analysis and how the capitalist class essentially shapes the economy and the world. With this line of thought we don’t need to look at the world in a Black and White; Western imperial adventures = good and non-Western imperial adventures = bad. We can look at the world in a different light to broaden our analysis.
