Re: RE: Miscellaneous and Paradox

From: Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad@ped.gu.se)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2000 - 08:24:37 PST


At 08.41 -0700 0-01-22, Phillip White scrobe:
>how
>does one resist and then refute american hegemony?

Well, it's a double-bind, isn't it? Isolationism is no solution -- no GOOD
solution. Nor are fundamentalistic jihads back to the future. On the other
hand, resistance and refutation seem to me to necessarily take place on
american conditions. I may be wrong. But isn't that in the nature of
hegemony?

At 17.01 +0100 0-01-18, Eva Ekeblad quoted Dennis Beach quoting William
Robinson, and now she repeats the snip again:
>>The paradox of the demise of dictatorships, democratic transitions and the
>>spread of democracy around the world is explained by new forms of social
>>control, and the Šconcept of democracy, the original meaning of which, the
>>power (cratos) of the people (demos), has been disconfiguered beyond
>>recognition. What the transnational elite calls democracy is more
>>accurately termed polyarchy, to borrow a concept from academia. Polyarchy
>>is neither dictatorship nor democracy. It refers to a system in which a
>>small group actually rules, on behalf of capital, and participation in
>>decision making by the majority is confined to choosing amongst competing
>>elites in tightly controlled electoral processes. This "low-intensity
>>democracy" is a form of consensual domination (and) is hegemonic, in the
>>sense meant by Antonio Gramsci, rather than coercive. It is based less on
>>outright repression than on diverse forms of ideological co-optation and
>>political disempowerment made possible by (forms of) structural
>>domination..." (Robinson, 1996: 20 - 21)

Eva



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:43 PST