S11 imperialism

Hakki Alacakaptan nucleus at superonline.com
Fri Nov 9 07:28:11 PST 2001


I'm posting this to the list because a)I received some offlist requests to do so b)it looks like we're getting somewhere. Sorry for the length.

Hakki

|| -----Original Message-----

|| From: Greg Schofield [mailto:g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au]

|| Hakki thankyou for your very reasoned and comradely reply on the list.

||

|| I apologise for the manner of my previous post, but as I have

|| been trying to raise the same thing on other lists with equal

|| lack of success, my frustration boiled over.

||

Hey, forget it, no problem.

|| In terms of exposing Bush and Co, well the more the better.

|| Tommorrow we have a national election in Australia, it is the

|| first test of how far the Australian people have actually been

|| conned. The Ultra consertaives (the present government) have

|| made a big play over security and anti-refugee policies. The

|| alternative government has been making the same noises (Labor),

|| however we have a preferential voting system so that minor

|| parties can be voted for but instead of splitting the vote

|| these votes are again counted - From the outside the result

|| will be either a win for the ultra-conservatives or the

|| soft-conservatives, but in every seat there are two other

|| parties Greens (anti-war) Democrats (very cautious about the

|| war and pro-refugees). This is the first test within any

|| alliance country. A big decline in the primary vote of the two

|| major parties and an increase in the minor party vote will be a

|| clear indication of how much dissatisfaction there actually is,

|| if it is substantial at all then the Ultra-conservative party

|| will be wiped out and the soft-conservitives will sweep in

|| despite that both primary votes decline (the anti-war minor

|| parties are giving their preferences to the Labor). Of course

|| it could go the other way, none of the polls give a clue - in

|| fact this has been listed amongst one of the least predictable

|| and most poll contradictory elections we have had.

||

|| It is in one sense small cheese, but will tell us whether the

|| alliance is firming or coming apart. I believe it will show

|| that it is coming apart. On the otherhand if the

|| Ultra-conservatives do win then things do look bleak as that

|| will show a great deal of public support for the war, as a

|| government they have very little else going for them and have

|| been up until S11 very much on the public nose.

||

|| To my mind what happens in America and amongst the "western"

|| allies is two different things. I do not expect mass

|| dissafection in the US for sometime yet, but I will be very

|| suprised if significant dissatisfaction is does not well-up

|| amongst the allies, both at the mass level and higher.

||

|| On Clinton, who so skillfully mainatained US imperialism by

|| multilateral methods. In Australia some years back the idea of

|| an Asian Pacific Economic Forum was launched. This was just

|| after Indonesia was gutted by the IMF. Like Europe there is a

|| need from a trade/industrial viewpoint to gather together the

|| Asian/Pacific into some sort of order (this included China, but

|| did not extend as far as India). It had some logic and

|| historical force behind it. Clinton put direct force on the

|| Aust Prime Minister (who initiated and was one of the prime

|| movers of APEC) that the US must be included also. APEC still

|| exists but the US virtually scuppered any real moves to

|| regionalisation. Malaysia and others did not want the US

|| involved at all, and since it has been it has vetoed nearly

|| every meaningful decision (as in fact predicted), espcially

|| those about development.

||

Dunno about APEC but the EU opens up a wonderfully uniform legal and economic space in which US capital can play, as well as a convenient regimentation of its members which precludes their experimenting with "non-aligned" positions. The US supports the EU in these respects and pushes it to expand, as you say it did for APEC, in order to dilute its political integration, and therefore its power. Exemplary in this respect is the US support for Turkey's membership, which would be like a small torpedo in the EU's midships, crippling it just enough that the US can walk all over it, without actually sinking it.

|| I mention this in terms of the decline in the imperial project.

|| Clinton sucessfully strengthened the US position, but only

|| negatively. In terms of APEC the US strategy was to stick its

|| foot in the door and then insist that Latin American client

|| states be involved (who don't actually go to the conferences

|| but give their votes to the US) and the US simply stops

|| anything happening. Yes strengthening, but also revealing a

|| historic weakness. Again this is small cheese and hardly a

|| convincing fact, but imperialism in its heyday would have had

|| more than a negative agenda to push, in fact if imperialism was

|| a force capable of growing then a regionalisation movement

|| could have opened up new possiblities of exploitation, new

|| opportunities for the great power to grow - the negativity is striking.

||

Regional alliances are very important in brzezinskian imperialism, with the proviso that they never be allowed to operate outside of US control. The idea, as I said in a previous post, is to give the members the illusion that they are the US's partners, or if the US isn't a member, that they are actually calling the shots for their corner of the world. The problem with US imperialism is not the erroneousness of this policy - it's a damn good one - but the failure of the capitalist elite to produce a consistent and effective administration of this policy, owing to its chronic bouts of fascism. The last fascist groundswell during the Reagan era produced an economic depression that scared the shit out of the bourgeoisie. When Papa Bush fucked up as well and had to increase taxes ("read my lips"), it reluctantly gave the dems a try. The late economic boom and budget surplus caused it to revert to its greedy, racist, poverty-loathing ways. The prospect of fat defense contracts, tax cuts, a new raid on the federal treasury, and a new round of warmongering imperialist plunder was just too enticing. So all of Clinton's cunning plans and carefully-built alliances are now being ripped apart by the fascists that took over from the dems.

|| Australia is a very loyal US ally, the US actually keeps tight

|| control of the major parties here (since the coup in 1975) US

|| advisors, think tanks and money all go to corrupting them,

|| while up and comming politicians are inevitably embraced by

|| American interests and integrated on a fairly systematic basis

|| Some years back just before a national election one Labor

|| leader was removed and a carefully groomed one replaced him

|| (Hayden went Hawke was installed) the rumour is that the US

|| thought Hayden unreliable. I say this only to give a proper

|| impression of just how much a satellite we are.

||

Tell me about it :) Over here the US actually wanted the Islamists to take over for a while due to some dumbass notion that it would show the Arabs that democracy works.

|| This hidden and carefully fostered loyality is immensely

|| fragile. At US bequests Australia de-tarifed itself to suicidal

|| proportions, while in vital areas the US maintained its own

|| protections and wiped out large sections of agricultural

|| industry especially.

Welcome to the club. That's one reason why the countryside is all voting for the fascists and Islamists here.

|| Pure, typical imperialism and most

|| happening under the Clinton years - a great sucess and

|| strengthening of the US. But the pay-off for the US was rather

|| paltry and significantly undermined social hegemony it once had

|| in the countryside (one of the major props for pro-US views in

|| the past). To me this looks like an imperial power eating at

|| itself, sacrificing long term strategic interests in order to

|| satisfy some tactical need (in this case to prop up the US

|| domestic agricultural markets - despite the damage here the

|| propping-up effect could only be very minimal).

||

Well Clinton had to placate a lot of reactionary and archaic interest groups, the farm lobby was one of them.

|| Now there are two ways at looking at this type of fact, it is

|| all the classic hall-marks of imperialism, it is imperialist

|| stratgey par excellence. We can look at it and say, under

|| Clinton for instance, this is just a straight out and out

|| revamping of the imperial power. In the left this is the common

|| reading, just one more example to be placed on a long list of

|| examples (and not a very important one at that).

||

|| There is another way of seeing the facts, one which seeks to

|| find the broader patterns of development and contextualise the

|| real direction of the movement. The rather simple framework I

|| have been using is this, for most of the post-war period the

|| USSR appeared as the main competitor to US imperialism. Now

|| everyone will jump on this denying that the USSR was an

|| imperial power, but in a sense it is irrelevant what is

|| important was there was contest to divide up the world, it does

|| not matter that a counttry under the USSRs influence was part

|| or not part of USSR "imperialism", what matters is that it was

|| part of world denied to US imperialism.

||

Any non-Russian citizen of former Comecon countries or former Soviet republics will agree that the USSR was imperialist, and will probably spit or swear when doing so :)

|| The history of Imperialism has an underside which we rarely

|| look at, a national dynamism which made sense of national

|| liberation, but also made sense of some exceptions. Thailand

|| for instance in the 19th century skillfully used Imperial

|| ambitions to exempt itself from becoming anyone's possession.

|| More importantly Japan actually matched imperial power against

|| imperial power in order for it to grow independantly and become

|| an imperial power itself (luckly for it this happened just

|| prior to the rise of imperialism, but it did carry on from

|| there until the end of WW1). What I am saying was that the mere

|| existence of imperial competition gave a some room to move to

|| lands that were being divided (the Boer war and how the Boer's

|| gained significant Germany help in the struggle against

|| England). The ideal imperial conquest was full possession where

|| the intrusion of other interests could be completely debarred -

|| but right through the history of imperialism there were places

|| which mainataed themselves or bettered their circumstances by

|| exploiting the competition (Ireland during WW1, and Mexico

|| which used German interests as a counter to the US).

||

The Brits ruled the Mideast by proxy rather than actually deploying troops. The US did - is doing, or rather trying to - the exact same thing, except that it regularly destroys potential clients with dumbassed irrational covert ops (Iran's Mossadegh, for example).

|| We might be dismissive of what such manipulations and

|| strategies could actually achieve under the stage of

|| imperialism, the true exceptions are few and far between, but

|| it gave Imperialism something of its character - national

|| liberation by its nature was a forceful struggle to open up

|| such room well beyond doing secret deals and active diplomacy.

||

|| Which brings us back to the international role of the USSR. As

|| I said it does not matter whether or not the USSR is seen as

|| meaningfilly imperialistic for it to appear as the major

|| imperial contended to the post-war US. A nationally liberated

|| country could not fail to gravitate towards the USSR, if only

|| to escape the orbit of the US. Nations like Eygpt and India

|| (and most others to one extent or another) could and did use

|| the threat of the USSR in order to massively increase their

|| positions vis a vis the US. All of this is perfectly

|| understandable under the concepts of imperialism outlined by

|| Lenin, however much we may disagree about what lable applies to

|| this or that event or country.

||

|| Now take the USSR out of picture, with this two things

|| automatically happen. The room to move by using one imperial

|| interest against another disappears, national liberation as an

|| attempt to escape US self-interest dissapears (you can run but

|| you cannot hide - there is nowhere to go to but back to the US

|| at some point). The US has virtual world dominion.

||

Yep, and that's exactly what Brzezinski wrote: The US would have no challenger for at least a century.

|| Now in terms of history the end of classic imperialism would

|| appear to go back to 1945. Ie that is when imperialism was the

|| expression of national financial capital and monopoly coming

|| together into COMPETITING imperialisms. What followed was an

|| oddity, Imperialist competition prolonged by "national

|| liberation"where the "liberated states in a sense formed a USSR

|| confedarcy - the cold war at least had this logic. Another way

|| of expressing it was Imperial competition reduced to a battle

|| between two super-powers - in a sense it does not matter so

|| long as 1945 is taken as a defining moment, when classic

|| imperialism (the competition of many imperially localisied

|| capitals) is replaced by a competition between tow alternatives

|| (imperialist or otherwise). The reason for this is that

|| national fianancial capital had to escape and become

|| semi-international (semi because while the capital had to be

|| free to do as it must on the world scene, the competition

|| between the US and USSR meant it also had to be in the last

|| instance subordinated to US policy - IMF etc).

||

|| This is different from classical imperialism, 1945-1991

|| financial capital had to be international in order to serve

|| imperialism (neo-colonialism), but at the same time subordinate

|| to a particular state in order to survive. Under classical

|| imperialism this was not so, as state policy was the expression

|| of national financial capital (their interests were more than

|| simply dependant), the state may have subordinated some forms

|| of national capital but the interests of leading financial

|| capital and the state (vis a vis international relations) were

|| identical (one directly strengthening the other).

|| Neo-colonialism however, while serving capital in general and

|| state policy, demanded that certain sacrifices to be made by

|| fiiancial capital in order for state policy to continue its

|| role in protecting it (hence capital was side-tracked into

|| corruption, while debts blew out beyond any reasonable ability

|| to repay - national debt-enslavement has a political motive and

|| does render surplus, but does so by pissing the inital capital

|| gainst the wind, not the type of thing old fashion fiancial

|| capital would ever dream of doing on such a scale).

||

I don't follow. I love examples, here's another one: US capitalists are presented by their think-tanks with the project of militarily invading the Gulf states in order to hike up the price of oil (and hence their profits), to wrestle oil rights out of the hands of the local rulers, to generate a healthy round of defense spending, and to dissuade the competition (Iran). The plan requires that Iraq be left bankrupt after its war with Iran, thus forcing it to squeeze its neighbors. The neighbors are told the US will back them if they tell Saddam to take a hike. Saddam get some nudges and winks that it's OK to grab Kuwait. When he does so, US troops move into Saudi despite Fahd's protests and make themselves at home. When the dust settles and the war bills + profits are collected by the US, US oil giants and banks move in and squueze the Sauds, and they walk away with oil rights concessions in their pockets. Saddam is left at the head of his still-formidable army so that the Saudis won't even think of ridding themselves of the US "protection".

There you have an imperialist raid where both the political agents and the capitalists of the ruling class get along splendidly. The capitalists get richer, Bush's popularity skyrockets, his budget problems are alleviated, US "strategic interests" are served, new heroes are created for the right (Powell, Schwartzkopf) and endless fun is had by all. The invoices are made out to Saudi, Japan, and Germany, who cough up to the tune of $50 billion, though they get some scraps in return. US national capital and government working in perfect harmony.

|| Between 1980-1991 the USSR visibly began to collapse and the US

|| emerged as world hegemon. Now a different set of contradictions

|| begin to emerge, those that we are currently caught in the

|| middle). International capital has long been in business, but

|| now its competitor (the threat of national liberation and the

|| USSR) has disappeared, and also disappeared is its dependence

|| on a particular state to which it had long been in the habit of

|| subordinating itself to. Clearly the long term best interest of

|| the internationalisied capital is a stable multilateral

|| international order - a new international civility (vis a vis

|| Kautsky and Lenin). However, there is a lot of historical

|| bagage, namely the remaining super-power, around which some

|| sections of capital leech for their own advantage (the oil cartels).

||

International capital, to appropriate vital resources and influence governments, requires the services of governments. For capers like Papa Bush's Oil War I or Dubya's Oil War II, it requires a global armed force, which only the US can provide. For smaller-scale operations like Shell's in Nigeria or Unocal's in Burma, local government troops may be enough. Intelligence and covert operations, and public funds also come from governments. Microsoft or Chase may not need any of these but when a corporation deals with locally-bound resources - energy, materials, cheap labor, etc - it frequently nees to use them.

As I wrote earlier, the lawless jungle at the periphery of the global system is where the profits are - China, for example. So while the destabilising effect of the periphery will conduct international capital to expand the global system - e.g. EU expansion is essential to prevent the Russian criminalocracy or whever it's called from spreading further west - it is also wise to leave some areas in a state of lawlessness in order to maximize profits from them (labor laws, environmental laws, and similar luxuries can wait).

|| In this sense the US super-power has lost its reason for

|| existence. Its competitor now is not some confederations of

|| states outside its share of markets, but international "order"

|| which to work at all must reduce the US to the status of a

|| state amongst states. The contest is not therefore against a

|| competitor at all but againts the flow of history, against the

|| further development of capital. This is not viable by any means

|| of policy, though applying force can stave off for a time the

|| inevitable.

||

I seriously doubt that history flows in anything like a linear mode, or that anything is inevitable. The US ruling class has competing post-Soviet imperial projects, some more rational than others. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is not just standing there waiting to see which way the US is going to screw it. It's also evolving in unpredictable ways, like in the widfire spread of anti-US feeling. The whole of this is way too complex to theorize or neatly describe as a "flow". It's more of a fractal, or several superimposed fractals.

|| It is via this concept of what the US is actually fighting

|| against (ie not for pipelines, not against another group of

|| states), international order, that telling criticism can be

|| made, and something of a opposition platform created.

||

Well it's alot easier to expose a relatively localized strategy - such as the Great Game playing on out TV screens now - than the grand imperial strategy over which we may never agree or convince non-leftists on. You can't build an antifascist bloc by requiring that everybody agree to a single doctrine. But if you expose the US game as an imperialist one with concrete, specific material objectives having nothing to do with the professed "war on terrorism", your job is alot easier.

|| From our perspective it goes hand in hand with a fight within

|| states (US and others) for real democracy (something that has

|| been well off the rails for some time) and inevitably towards

|| sates which reflect the interests of the citzen (Socialism

|| under the dictatorship of the proletariat). International order

|| without this struggle within individual states can only mean

|| international corporatism or fascism.

||

|| Please note on this while I am open to applying the term

|| fascism to Bush and Co it is a primitive form of fascism and

|| not the one which has a historically long term future.

In my book, Fascism is by definition short-term because of its irrationalism. Franco is a wierd exception.

|| On the

|| other hand, the idea that International capital could place

|| itself in the position of dictating world order and have

|| complaint managerial states to carry out its wishes, is where

|| the real anti-fascist struggle is (but that is another matter).

||

|| Hakki I don't knoiw if this will clear anything up, but in a

|| compressed form it is what I am trying to argue - that we are

|| in transition, that US imperialism is in its final and bloody

|| throes and that our collective response to the sitution has

|| been politically wrong headed (I am not here talking about

|| Afganhistan or any particular events, but what we should be

|| raising as realisable and progressive aims and objectives in

|| this new period).

||

|| I would be interested to see what you make of this rather long post.

||

Yeah let's try to keep it short, or at least to discuss it piece by piece. This is hard work.

|| Greg

Hakki



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