Margaret on Imperialism; imperialism generally; a utility argument

Brett Knowlton brettk at unica-usa.com
Fri Mar 26 16:18:55 PST 1999


Greg,

I usually enjoy your posts and learn a lot from them, but I think you're off base this time.


>The question at hand is, unfortunately, not whether
>there should be US imperialism vs. no imperialism, but
>U.S. imperialism versus other kinds of imperialisms.
>There are no good governments in the Middle East, for
>example, at least measured by traditional western
>criteria of progressiveness which includes things like
>free speech, rights, etc. And Milosovitch has very
>little to recommend him.

I disagree. We may not be able to do much about the imperialist tendencies of other countries, but we most certainly can do something about those of our own country. The US is an open society, you can demonstrate without too much fear of being killed or beaten or imprisoned, and this sort of activity DOES have an effect on government policy. If enough people get involved, we can put an end to US imperialism and achieve a gov't that really does stand for truth and justice. Even if you restrict the discussion to the Serbian situation, the same holds true - enough public dissent can stop the US from acting in an imperialist manner. The fact that other governments are more repressive than ours simply isn't relevant when it comes to judging our behavior.


>Nonetheless the position, advocated by Yoshie & others,
>that all imperialism is wrong and ipso facto that US
>imperialism must be opposed, has the merit of
>consistency. I don't however think the world would be
>a better place if it had been followed in WWII.

This is quite a profound claim - I see no reason why this should be true. In fact, I can think of many ways in which the world would be a happier place had it not had to suffer under US imperialism. Virtually all of Central and South America come instantly to mind.


>I also think that the historical question is of
>interest. Weber's analysis of the Roman Empire is
>instructive. The empire's planations, he wrote,
>"consumed slaves the way a modern blast furnace
>consumes coal." His description of slave conditions
>outside the towns strongly resembles the conditions in
>a concentration camp. But it's not as if, in the
>absence of a Roman Empire, we would have had something
>*better.* We would have had Carthage or somebody
>else. Possibly it's only the Romans who were
>positioned to turn the coastal trading civilizations
>into a Mediterranean scale empire. In any case,
>strident denunciation of Rome doesn't buy us much in
>understanding the Mediterranean economy or the
>evolution of western civilization, in general, at that
>time.

I agree that if you want to understand the world as it IS (or WAS), then you have to study imperialism and how it operates, what its goals are, how it carries them out, etc. But that is separate from the issue of what WILL BE, or what is good and what you should stand up for or against. Criticizing the Roman Empire is pretty meaningless in one sense because it no longer exists, but criticizing US actions abroad has the potential to ameliorate or even stop US violence against other countries. Things can improve tomorrow.


>In the period of capitalist imperialisms, it is not
>worthless to make distinctions. The US slaughtered
>many, possibly 100,000 in the Philippines, and the
>Native Americans were slaughtered as capitalist
>property relations were established in North America.
>It wrong that these things are not taught (say, in high
>school). But there is a significant difference of
>degree in intensity and character between the empire of
>Nazi Europe, or Japan, and the empires of the
>capitalist bourgeois democracies. If Nazi Europe had
>prevailed the history of Europe from WWII would have
>been very similar to the conditions prevailing in the
>USSR. It may eventually have "disintegrated" the same
>way the USSR did but the world would be a darker place
>without the western bourgeois democracies. It is worth
>speculating why the catch-up empires were so much more
>brutal than their rivals.

I agree with your main point, that distinctions can be and often are important. But I don't see why your assertion that the western bourgeois democracies are more humanitarian than other, supposedly more virulent strains (like Nazism or Imperial Japan). This could be true, but I don't see why it is necessarily true, and you should be able to back up your claims with evidence. And there is plenty of damning evidence against the US and other western democracies.


>The utility argument.
>
> We then come to the question of what makes for
>"useful" or "non-useful" imperialist action. Vietname
>was clearly non-useful and came to be recognized as
>such by the US business class. The ostensible
>objective was to make the Vietnam penninsula safe for
>the kind of capitalism we see in Taiwan or S. Korea.
>Whether the latter two societies are "better" or
>"worse" off than they would have been under Japan (I
>think they came out ahead) or than they would have been
>had they been left under semi-feudal peripheral
>conditions (the only other real alternative: to assert
>otherwise is to get into the question of whether feudal
>societies can be industrialized through socialism, and
>the record here is not good).

I think the answer to this question is quite clear - the third option would have been better for Vietnam. History shows that THEY certainly preferred that option. You are probably correct that it would not have blossomed into an Asian paradise, but its hard to imagine how the people could have suffered more under such a situation than under the devastation that we visited on them.

Besides, the achievements of Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Cuba under Castro are encouraging in many ways. Both countries instituted meaningful land reform, raised general education levels, dramatically reduced infant mortality rates, etc. There is no reason to assume Vietnam coudn't have achieved similar gains.


> In any case: The reality of Viet Nam was that it
>was run by drug lords and that the countryside was
>faced with a peasant uprising. These are not
>propitious conditions for trying to spread capitalism
>and the game was lost at considerable brutality and
>certainly near-genocidal losses in Viet Nam; casualties
>were, I believe, in the millions.

Yes, but drug lords that we installed. This is an important omission.


> What is the stake in Serbia?
> These are the stakes:
> 1. To demonstrate that ethnic
>secession/conflict/massacres will be taken seriously.
>This is the most important demonstration effect, not
>that of new weapons, as previously alleged on this
>list. At issue are Hungarians in Romania, Slovaks in
>Hungary, Germans in Poland, and so on: dozens of
>different nationalities distributed in different
>ways. The objective of liberal capitalism is
>essentially to spread the EC model, hopefully lowering
>wages in the process, but also promoting consumerism
>and relatively peaceful social relations conducive to
>production and profit. One of the reason the Czec
>Repub and Hungary are *both* in NATO is to make *both*
>not fight over their respective nationals in each
>other's territory. And it should be observed that they
>can fight over these issues with or without the help of
>outside capital.

This is simply wrong. Capitalism cares about profit, so massacres are bad if they harm profits, but they are *required* if they increase profits, or stop the loss of profits. If the view you present here is correct, how do you explain all of the massacres that have taken place, and continue to take place, with western approval? History gives us examples such as East Timor, the bombing of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, virtually any Central American country, etc. Today there are the Kurds in Turkey, whose suffering is entirely ignored. This claim just doesn't withstand the facts.

I want to respond to some things in the rest of your post too, but I'm going home now, so it will have to wait.

Brett



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list