If we want something better than a kinder, gentler globalization, we're going to have to work for it

Sometime when I'm not figuring out how to get my house fixed up enough to move into it, I might come back to this analysis by Walden Bello at Foreign Policy in Focus. Don't wait for me to fix my broken windows and get my gas and water turned on. Read it for yourself:

 The Coming Capitalist Consensus

Bello argues, that neoliberalism is dead, and that a kinder, gentler capitalist consensus is taking its place. After the meaner, rougher capitalism that has held sway over the past 30 years or so, that sounds pretty appealing, doesn't it? Bello thinks we should ask for more:

While progressives were engaged in full-scale war against neoliberalism, reformist thinking was percolating in critical establishment circles. This thinking is now about to become policy, and progressives must work double time to engage it. It is not just a matter of moving from criticism to prescription. The challenge is to overcome the limits to the progressive political imagination imposed by the aggressiveness of the neoliberal challenge in the 1980s combined with the collapse of the bureaucratic socialist regimes in the early 1990s. Progressives should boldly aspire once again to paradigms of social organization that unabashedly aim for equality and participatory democratic control of both the national economy and the global economy as prerequisites for collective and individual liberation.

Like the old post-war Keynesian regime, Global Social Democracy is about social management. In contrast, the progressive perspective is about social liberation.

I originally found this at Common Dreams, where I find so much useful and interesting information.