The similarities between the USA and the ex-USSR are (were) much greater than most Americans care to realize. This I discovered after returning from a youthful 4 month "Grand Tour" of Europe, including the then-USSR, in 1981. 4 months was just long enough to begin 'forgetting' on a primary everyday level, where your surroundings really rub off on you. It was a real "shock of recognition"; shock at the monumental uniformity and sameness of the USA and its cities, including the stamped-out-of-the -same-mold sameness of its "individualistic" citizens; recognition that only two countries in Europe had struck me similarly: the USSR and - as a scale miniature - that ever "wannabe USA", France (the prototype of USSR/USA!)
But actually there is a key difference between the two "nomenklaturas". Whereas the American is directly subordinate to capitalism and its ruling class (in the US and internationally), the Soviet was only indirectly subordinate to the same class through the international nation-states system dominated by the USA as a state. This produced a difference in the caste character of the two that may not be apparent at first glance. It is _not_, however, a difference explainable from the early modern Anglo-American political tradition, since the American nomenklatura is a high-to-late (post Civil War - the last successful bourgeois revolution ) modern phenomenon, whose formational apogee was in the New Deal to 50's period. The Anglo veneer persists, but only as a form of obfuscatory ideological conditioning for 'professional' Americans. (As an aside) Although I believe the legal/juridical structure is the foundational touchstone - the 'central organ' - of modern (i.e., capitalist) bureaucracy, it may be precisely for this reason that American lawyers are less blinded by "modern antiquity" (the results of the English Revolution) than the sort of "professional Americans" I have to work with in "Technology", overrun as it is with the worst kind of positivistic libertarian knuckleheadedness. Wittgenstein would be a useful solvent here - he'd have his work (as a sort of libertarian shrink) cut out! But chalk up another ideological gain for Thatcher, whose reign persists in reverse-drag with Tony Blair
This formational period corresponds to the Soviet variant, which was really just an international extrusion of capitalist bureaucracy. Note that this is not a theory of Soviet state capitalism - you can't have capitalism without the class, and 'extrusion' means externalization - but a theory of (relative) international bureaucratic integration via the states system. I tend to agree with a certain trend in historiography that says that this USA-dominated international states system emerged immediately in the wake of WWI (and _not_ WW2), its 'founding father' was Woodrow Wilson, it immediately displaced British hegemony, and it was an immediate and direct reaction to the Russian Revolution, the emergence of the Soviet Republic, and especially the threat of its spreading elsewhere.
Its foundational success was to produce the Stalin-era nomenklatura (its foundational failure was to produce classical fascism). We are all familiar with "Stalin the monster", product of the coarse material conditions of the USSR; less familiar is the image of Stalin the aspiring English gentleman, puffing his pipe (albeit still then in military outfit) with Roosevelt and Churchill at Potsdam and Yalta - product of the more refined ideological conditioning of the Washington-dominated international states system. Now everyone strives to follow in Stalins' wake, even - or perhaps especially - Americans, now that the USA, since the end of the Vietnam War, has entered the era of its own relative decline as a state within the system it still dominates. Today everyone in power aspires to genteel pipe-puffing mass murder pioneered by the British Victorians, inherited and universalized under the Wilsonian system and, true to the American creed, now made equally available to all permitted to be in power in every nation. From India to Ukraine, to Iraq.
Conclusion: In the Wilsonian system, there never was a "bipolar world order" that suddenly came to an end after 1989. So, no Cold War came to an end , either. The Wilsonian system _is_ the permanent "Cold" war of all (nations) against all. As by now we all surely notice, there is no NWO: the cold war continues.
-Brad Mayer
Oakland, CA
At 03:09 PM 5/16/01 -0400, you wrote:
>One of my biggest eye-opening discoveries after "getting of the boat" was
>that the US was just like the x-USSR - the same nomenklatura system, the
>same police state practices, the same claims to ideological superiority,
>and above all, the same ideology-driven zeal to destroy teh real and
>perceived opponents of the system - the only difference was money. The US
>has mucho mucho more of it, therefore it is in a better position to buy
>social peace. And most importantly, when you talked to the "progressive"
>members of the nomenklatura, you heard the same song that you can hear from
>the assorted mebers of 'progresive' establishment here - the members of the
>opposing camp ('the old guard,' the Repugs) have to go, but the system as a
>whole is based on sound principles. Well, dream on.
>
>So when you try to convince me that the US legal system is more than just
>elite politics in disguise, you have to do more than provide some
>corroborating stories, even if such stories might me numerous, for even the
>most unfair system operate fairly most of the time. It is only at the
>strategic junctions when they are unfair because they succumb to political
>expediency. Therefore, you need to show me that at such strategic
>junctions, the US system was above political expediency - and that I am
>afraid would rather difficult to do.
>
>wojtek