Anderson weighs in

[Jeet Heer]

It is true that Perry Anderson and his intellectual allies (notably Peter
Gowan), repeatedly emphasize how powerful the US is and play up the weakness
of any real or potential opposition to US hegemony. It might be interesting
to speculate why they are so fixated on the power of the US. In his long and
very interesting article on Eric Hobsbawm, which just ran over 2 issues of
the LRB, Anderson argues that during the Cold War the left repeatedly
under-estimated the strength of capitalism, and that the only by taking full
measure of the enemy's power can there be effective opposition to it.
Perhaps this has led PE to an excessive pessimism of the intellect, since
his message these days seems to be "resistance is  futile." Jeet

----- Original Message -----
From: Dennis Robert Redmond <dredmond at efn.org


> In a nutshell, US imperialism is very, very, very, very bad, Europe is
> less bad, but fractionated and subaltern and run by US imperialism, while
> East Asia simply does not exist. Needless to say, he recites not one
> single economic statistic to back any of this up -- mostly because the
> stats don't support the thesis of SuperAmerica.