Bill Fletcher Jr. on internationalism (Jim O'Connor)

Barbara Laurence cns at cats.ucsc.edu
Tue May 9 10:43:59 PDT 2000


I can't improve on Carrol's reply to Nathan's misreading of my missive on Bill Fletcher Jr.'s internationalism.

I can add that there's a big difference between "corporate elites" and governments/states. Bill F Jr. seemingly doesn't distinguish between the two when he defines "globalization" as "an orchestrated process by governments and economic elites to address many of the problems which capitalism has been facing... by reorganizing world economy at the expense of working people." Here BF Jr. bypasses the politics of globalization. Before global capital could reorganize world economy at the expense of working people, the U.S. government and its junior partners had to reorganize the world political system to once again subordinate the South to the North, especially to the U.S. It has been above all (like the Cold War itself) a U.S.-led struggle against national independence in the South. National independence is what the U.S. and its friends had to reduce, and if possible eliminate, as precondition for exploiting not just the working people of a particular country in the South but for exploiting the country as such, including its own national bourgeoisie (which of course globalism turns into a new type of comprador class).

A way into this discussion. Why do you think the U.S. hates Fidel so much? Because he's outlived so many U.S. presidents? Nope, they hated him from almost the beginning. Because he has proven socialism in one island can succeed? Nope, the U.S. made sure that socialism in one island wouldn't fully succeed and in terms of some measures wouldn't succeed at all. Because Fidel is a dictator? Nope, the U.S. has been friends with dozens of dictators. Because Cuba lacks some elementary civil liberties? Nope. The first and last reason why the U.S. government/state hates Fidel is that he turned the whore house of the Caribbean, the playground of the U.S. rich, prime Mafia and King Ranch property, a country that was de facto a U.S. colony....Fidel turned this poor excuse of a country into a proud and independent nation that has played on balance a positive and at times heroic role in world affairs.

The inferior Other proved that in many respects it wasn't inferior at all but superior to the world's guiding light and great hope, the U.S. It proved that any country with the will and intelligence and luck to become independent, has a chance to become so. What imperialists have always hated is the idea that their neo-colonial subjects sometimes refuse to admit they are inferior to the imperial ruler. Since until the colonized make this "confession," it's impossible for the imperial ruler to "help" the colonized to become "equal." Fidel had the nerve not only to refuse to admit Cuba's inferiority, but to proclaim its superiority! And unless and until the U.S. reestablishes political control over Cuba (doubtless by proxy in the unlikely event that the U.S. can in fact do this), you will not see Cuban workers and farmers economically exploited by global capital. Politics first.

Nathan thus misses the political side of imperialism. The U.S. government has directed and led the (partly successful, partly not so successful) resubordination of the South to the U.S. and its North pals, beginning with the U.S. supported coups in the early 1960s (Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, etc.) and accelerating with the debt crisis and the new imperialist roles thrust on the IMF and WB, in the late 1970s and 1980s. Why is the WTO in crisis? We here would like to think that our anti-globalist opposition helped to create the crisis, and it probably did. But the main cause of the WTO crisis is the U.S.-South divide that had (and has) South WTO delegates practically up in arms at American hubris. In Asia, of course, Japan has been an outpost of the U.S. for 55 years, a fact that Nathan conveniently ignores, since it is so incredibly counterfactual for his thesis. (But Japan along with Europe is changing.)

The U.S. government/state runs the show, or tries to, and in political matters usually has gotten its own way. It told Europe to go to war against Iraq and against Serbia, and Europe went to war. The last time I remember Europe (sans UK) going to war on its own was Suez, and it had to backtrack pronto because of U.S. opposition. The U.S. badly wanted WTO, more than any other country, and got it. If you read the Congressional testimony of C. Barfesky over the years, you'll see that while the U.S. is in favor of free trade zones all around the world, the U.S. insists on being a key part of each and every one. Nothing independent of the U.S. is allowed. The idea that Japan could fund an Asian bank that would help crisis-ridden Southeast Asia in 1997-98 was met with anger by the U.S. government and its stooge the IMF.

Nathan says "if 'globalization' means anything, it is that European firms have globalized and privatized their capital ownership at the same point that U.S. firms mostly were already at." This definition of "globalization" is as lame as Nathan's prose style is awkward. His is a shallow reading of "globalization." Take just one important issue: "Globalization" is among other things the subordination of industrial/commercial capital to finance capital. The highest form of finance capital is the world financial markets, ultimately, one global financial market. U.S. financial institutions are way ahead on this front. Most U.S. companies of any size raise most of their money in financial markets, much less via loans from banks which big companies have traditionally done business with. Europe and Japan and the Tigers are way behind in this respect and it's not clear to me that they want to or can go all the way. This is one of the hot issues that divides the hegemon from its weaker and very junior partners. The displacement of banks by financial markets would seem to be the most abstract and frightening form of the tyranny of money, since in principle it means that every capital in the world, every community floating bonds, and so on, are all competing with one another in a single bond market. This not only makes hash of the idea of "consumer sovereignty," it also makes the world a more reified, more impersonal, place. It makes capital abstract, more inhuman. It completes a major phase of the process whereby exchange value subordinates use value. And it lays the foundation for the commodification and capitalization of education, health, and everything else. I'm sure, at some point, that someone bereft of morals and over-supplied with brains will open a market in which individuals can sell shares in themselves, like boxers.

The job of the big TNCs and TNBs is to make money in order to make more money. The markets watch their every move and will turn against a favorite company in trouble without one thought to loyalty or the social/environmental effects of their betrayal. The capitalists are always thinking up ways to be meaner to one another -- and those who depend on them for jobs, etc. -- and the old cozy bank/industry system wasn't vicious enough. That's one of capital's telos, one way capital destroys itself. The average big corporation couldn't think up a political initiative if its life depended on it -- and this will be so if U.S. Presidents and top Congresspeople become any stupider and more immoral. The government/state's job is to rule; the U.S. government's job is to try to rule the world. Whether present U.S. policy is out of weakness or from a position of strength (or both in different ways) is another question -- maybe the most important question for the anti-globalist movement.

It would be nice to think that the huge TNCs are our biggest problem; or the WTO, IMF, et al., are our biggest problem; or that European governments are as big a problem for us as the U.S. government. All these bodies are problems for anti-globalists and anti-imperialists but the biggest problem by far is the U.S. government/national security state. I personally didn't want to believe this during my earlier adult years. I don't know any American who really wants to believe it. But over the years the intellectual rigor and moral voices of the Chomskys, two generations of investigative journalists in many different countries, two generations of contemporary historians who know a duck when they see one, many scholars, and above all the tens of millions of people who have had to struggle against U.S. bombs, arrogance, racism, stupidity, and hubris -- all these and more plus my own effort to educate myself -- convinced me that reality isn't what I wanted it to be, and still wish it to be (since if it was so I would be a happier man). End of sermon. Jim O'Connor



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