Ha ha ha! And how many "highest stage"s does this make now? Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, December 17, 1999 3:06 PM Subject: Fwd: Schwartz, "Lenin and Globalization"
>Christian Science Monitor - [no date]
>
>Lenin and globalization
>
>Benjamin Schwarz
>
>As delegates to the World Trade Organization celebrated, and
>protesters vilified the global economy, both groups could have used a
>history lesson. For better or worse, today's international market
>didn't simply emerge. It was deliberately constructed. Understanding
>this illuminates both the challenges posed by the world economy and
>the threats to it.
>
>Too many economists and business leaders neglect historian E.H.
>Carr's maxim: "The science of economics presupposes a given political
>order and cannot be properly studied in isolation from politics."
>Though they correctly emphasize the unprecedented economic growth the
>global economy has engendered, they fail to emphasize America's
>equally unprecedented power, which made growth possible.
>
>Several years ago a Pentagon planning document asserted that
>America's greatest post- World War II achievement is the creation of
>a "market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity encompassing
>two-thirds of the globe." To appreciate this achievement, it's
>helpful to recall the once-famous debate between V.I. Lenin and Karl
>Kautsky. Lenin held that any international capitalist order was
>inherently temporary because the political order among competing
>states on which he believed it would be based would shift over time.
>
>Whereas Lenin argued that international capitalism could not
>transcend the Hobbesian reality of international politics, Kautsky
>maintained that capitalists were much too rational to destroy
>themselves in internecine conflicts. An international class of
>enlightened capitalists, recognizing that international political and
>military competition would upset the orderly processes of world
>finance and trade, would instead seek peace and free trade.
>
>But Lenin and Kautsky were talking past each other. Kautsky believed
>the common interest of an international capitalist class determined
>international relations, whereas in Lenin's analysis international
>relations were driven by competition among states. Lenin argued that
>there was an irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism and the
>anarchic international system; Kautsky didn't recognize the division
>in the first place.
>
>US foreign policy has been based in essence on a hybrid of Lenin's
>and Kautsky's analyses. It has aimed at the unified international
>capitalist community Kautsky envisioned. But the US effort to build
>and sustain that community is determined by a worldview not far from
>Lenin's. To Washington, today's global economy hasn't been maintained
>by the common interests of an international economic elite, but by US
>preponderance. So, the Pentagon asserts that the global market
>requires the "stability" that only American "leadership" can provide.
>
>Ultimately, of course, Lenin and US policymakers diverge. While Lenin
>recognized that any given international order was inherently
>impermanent, America's foreign policy strategists have hoped to keep
>that reality of international relations permanently at bay. Since
>World War II, the US has created a new kind of international politics
>among the advanced capitalist states. Whereas these states had
>formerly sought to protect their national economies from outside
>influences and to enhance their national power in relation to their
>rivals, they would now seek security as members of the US-dominated
>alliance system and their economic growth as participants in the
>US-secured world economy, adjusting their national economics as
>dictated by world market tendencies.
>
>But at the close of the 20th century, global capitalism's
>contradictions are becoming apparent, as the international economy's
>very success begets potentially lethal challenges to it. Just as "war
>made the state," so the world market's unprecedented autonomy, power,
>and pervasiveness is precisely the sort of challenge that could
>provoke the expansion of the state's capabilities and prestige
>(which, of course, raises the specter of totalitarianism). In short,
>as the global economy goes from strength to strength, the state must
>subdue it or be destroyed by it.
>
>Even more important, it is precisely because capitalism has reached
>its highest stage that the state may have a chance against it. As the
>global economy has become more interdependent, it has become more
>fragile. For instance, the emergent technology industries are the
>most powerful engines of world economic growth, but they require a
>level of specialization and a breadth of markets possible only in an
>integrated world market. This web of global trade, production, and
>finance is tenuous - its strands remain anchored in states, entities
>that under normal circumstances are unmoved by appeals to comparative
>advantage and global economic efficiency. In still another way, the
>global economy has perhaps sown the seeds of its own destruction.
>
>The problem with the US-created global economy is that it has been
>all too successful. Through trade, foreign investment, and the spread
>of technology and managerial expertise, economic power has diffused
>from the US to new centers of growth. With a shift in the
>international distribution of economic strength, the Pax America will
>inevitably be undermined. If the assumption of power politics, upon
>which America's post-1945 foreign policy is based, proves correct,
>then, as US preponderance weakens, the normal conditions of
>international relations will reemerge. Independent and jealous states
>jockeying for power and position will of necessity shred the web of
>the integrated global economy. Capitalism - at least the advanced
>state of capitalism represented by the global economy - may collapse
>as the political order that nurtured it crumbles. Although the empire
>he built is in ruins and his revolution discredited, Lenin may yet
>have the last laugh.
>
>Benjamin Schwarz is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for The Atlantic
Monthly.
>
>