My worry is that the “abstractions” such as global capitalism would not even be recognized as such, as forces in people’s minds, if there were not people in opposition to them, forcing the issue to be addressed. We might be losing the battle, but we shouldn’t let them write the whole controversy out of existence.

Only focusing on things that are concrete, local and immediate means that the population is alienated from each other, in the sense that it is hard to see the global in the local, or vice versa.

If we were to take his statement literally, one might think that illegal immigrants are a drain, a social problem, etc. and not consider the relationship between the U.S. and the sending countries; that we have a neocolonial economic relationship that evolved through direct foreign investment, war, and industrialization of rural areas, thereby creating the impetus for migration in the first place…

Reading this statement by Obama, I came to a conclusion different from yours. Informed by my experience as a trainer and organizer of nonviolent campaigns that were part of building the global justice movement, I think that that statement by Obama can be read as being relevant.

I invite you to read my position on this page: http://bit.ly/14J6uY

My concern lies mostly with strategy, and the implications of choosing the “Diversity of Tactics” framework for protests that lack concrete, local, and immediate goals that can achieve concrete, local, and immediate wins, on concrete, local, and immediate issues.

Global capitalism will remain an “abstraction” for the purpose of waging effective struggle against it, in the context of such magnets for repression and police provocation as the G-20 protests. You can’t bring capitalism down, or any other structural injustice for that matter, by simply holding some sort of “come one, come all” spectacle of collective ineffectiveness. And that ineffectiveness lies, I believe, in the lack of any clear strategy, and the hurtful naïveté that is inherent in the choice of the “do your own thing” modus operandi that has become the hallmark of protest events such as this recent one in Pittsburg.

En toute solidarité,

Philippe Duhamel

“Protests About Abstractions”
http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/node/498