This kind of simplistic economic-determinist theory of _any_ country's foreign policy is almost guaranteed to be wrong (even though it is popular). After all, there are a lot of other fractions of the US capitalist class than the oil companies, while there are various intramural conflicts within the capitalist class (auto likes cheap oil, while oil likes expensive oil, etc., etc.) All of these "special interests" use their abundant purchasing power to try to win a hearing among the foreign policy elite their particular points of view. A lot of these pressures cancel each other out (the way advertising by Marlboro often cancels out that by Camel) but the usual result is to push the foreign policy elite toward a generally _capitalist_ direction (as when the combined advertising by Marlboro and Camel hooks some young 'uns on the devil weed). At the same time, the foreign policy elites (the State Dept, the White House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York TIMES publishers and top editors, etc.) try to create a consensus amongst themselves and amongst the big money boys. In the US, it's Wall Street types like the Dulles boys and Rubin that have played this role for generations, along with professional "thinking the unthinkable" types like Kissinger and Allbright. In exchange, their perspective gets some weight in determining policy.
It's much too simplistic to explain US aggression by simple economic goals. Though the Dulles brothers' connection with United Fruit _helped to_ motivate their attacks on Guatemala's Arbenz in 1954, it was only one part of a larger geopolitical story. It had to be balanced against the goals of the other big players and justified in terms of a larger world view.
Specifically on Viet Nam, it's pretty clear that Ho Chi Minh wanted totally friendly relations with the US after WW2 (and thus would likely have been friendly toward Chevron -- though probably with more nationalist controls on investment than are currently encouraged by the World Bank/IMF oligarchy). The leaders of Viet Nam didn't want to be a "satellite" of either China or the USSR (or the US, for that matter), so that Ho mimicked the US Declaration of Independence at a time when the US still had an anti-colonial reputation (anti-_other_ countries' colonialism, of course).
But the US rejected these appeals because of its "political" aims -- fighting and winning the "Cold" war against the USSR (wanting France's support against the godless Reds) and also preventing any kind of populist or nationalist revolutions in the third world that would shake things up, e.g., by imposing more nationalistic controls than are currently encouraged by the World Bank/IMF oligarchy. The US wanted _control_. A lot of the US aggression during the Cold War (and after, BTW) is simply a matter of showing the world _who's the boss_. As Reagan articulated the matter, the US wanted other countries to cry "Uncle."
Of course, this "political" goal was profoundly "economic" in origin (if the pol/econ distinction can even be made), since US politics follows the "one dollar, one vote" principle. The US govt's elite's effort to _control_ (to contain the USSR, to suppress left nationalisms in Indonesia, Guatemala, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc.) meshed very well with the economic elite's aim to open the world's oyster and pull out all the pearls, i.e., to get the freedom to invest anywhere and everywhere in any way that's profitable -- no matter what the "external costs" to those countries invested in.
Also, there was a tremendous amount of fear that Stalin and his buddies had actually created an alternative to capitalism. However, I would bet that the actual process of getting to "communism" (the revolution) was more scary to the corporate elite than the existence of the messed-up planned economy of the old USSR. After all, there's a lot of evidence (according to James Petras) that the US invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 because the workers and peasants might be armed (shades of Spain during the Civil War!) The US, of course, opposed the Bolshevik Revolution by invading Russia long before Stalin rose to power, back when workers and peasants had some power there. More than the bureaucratized (or as the Mexicans say, institutionalized) revolutions, the US foreign policy elite hated the possibility that people might actually take control over their lives -- taking control away from the elite and their cronies -- the possibility of a "good example," a system that made capitalism look bad in comparison in every way. That's clearly one thing that made Reagan's jihad against Nicaragua so shrill.
Brad continues: >I think that most of the time U.S. foreign policy elites have no clue about what the long-run national interest (or the long run interest of the American bourgeoisie) is: recall that Kissinger's reaction to the Shah of Iran's pushing for a tripling of world oil prices in 1973 ...<
No-one in the economic and political elites knows for sure what their own long-term goals are, since the world is such a confusing and uncertain place. That's a crucial reason why they hire all sorts of think-tanks, not to mention the CIA and the State Department, to figure these things out. Like everyone else, they don't know what's _really_ in their own self-interest -- until after the fact. In the meantime, there are competing philosophies or theories about what is _really_ the self-interest of the US ruling class: "realists" push the naked self-interest line, while others ape President Wilson to push for "higher goals" (making the world safe for safe, US-type, democracy).
Just because the state executive acts as the "commitee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (Marx & Engels) doesn't mean that they _know_ what's good for them. Similarly, even though they're in charge of managing the bourgeoisie's common affairs doesn't mean that "special interests" within that class don't dominate some times. (For example, it may have been Clinton's special interest in distracting us from Monicagate rather than a class interest that motivated the recent attacks on the Sudan and Afghanistan, though Clinton's special interest probably didn't go _against_ the capitalist interest in an obvious way.)
I think it's a mistake (a distraction, a confusion) to talk about a country's "national interest" -- because that assumes away class conflicts over foreign policy. The foreign policy elites only care about the interests of groups and classes outside their club when those groups kick up a storm and make noise (as the anti-Vietnam War movement did). Those elites dress up the consensus of the rich and powerful as being the "national interest." (Given the general demobilization of the subordinate classes these days, the elite's interest ends up being the "national" interest _de facto_.)
In a separate missive, Brad wrote: >We're thinking of collecting (a part of) the acorn harvest this fall and trying to make acorn polenta. You need to peel the acorns, crush the acorns, leach the acorns (at least four times over eight hours) in order to remove tannins and other things, and then bake the mush.<
I doubt that this is the real recipe. Usually one can eat nuts without any kind of leaching. What is your citation? Is it from that Incarnation of All That Is Evil, Martha Stewart?
I had written: >>More crucially, many anthropologists say that those groups working with neolithic technology (with tribal rather than Aztec-type social relations) had an abundance of leisure compared to us. The North American Indians seem to have had this. Though of course they lacked in-door plumbing and resistance to European diseases.<<
>.... My reading is that in hunter-gatherer societies the *men* appear to
have lots of leisure (also a high death rate from intramural violence--a
hazard of perhaps 1/3 of one percent per year [?] among the !Kung?). My
reading of the anthropology is that *women* seem to spend much more time in
work that strikes me as mind-numbingly boring and repetitive...<
My reading of Marvin Harris, etc., is that you're right about the relative amount of work women did relative to men, but that _all_ had more leisure. I also think that this labor is less alienated, in that it's done for the collective -- the survival of the extended family, clan, and tribe -- rather than to provide tribute to some ruling class. One might say that men were the ruling class, but I think this ignores the large number of ways that women can and do influence men (often very explicitly, as with the Iriquois). I think it also misses the way the mind-numbingly boring and repetitive work of women was done collectively, allowing some solidarity against men, countervailing their power (think of women cleaning clothes in the stream).
It's very different from capitalism where (traditionally -- things are changing) men dominate the "public" sphere of capitalism (specifically, controling money, that instrument of power) and thus dominate the "private" (household) sphere where women have had more influence. (A similar male domination of the public sphere, which itself was dominant over the household, seemed the rule in ancient Athenian Greece.)
Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html