>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."
Underestimating capitalism's strength during the Cold War? It's easy to say that in retrospect, but when the USSR was outgrowing the West and matching the U.S. in space technology and military, and nationalist and socialist revolutions were sweeping the Third World, it wasn't hard to conclude that capitalism was, in the words of a Wallace Stevens title, on the way to the bus. Surely much of the right thought so; Bill Buckley famously announced the mission of National Review as standing athwart the tracks of history and yelling "Stop!," and Whittaker Chambers was saying things like "It is is idle to talk about stopping the decline of the West - it is already a wreck from within." So maybe Anderson is overestimating the strength of capitalism now. And overestimating the strength of the U.S. Which is convenient for his style of politics, since it absolves him of the need to do anything, since his part of the world doesn't count for much, and there's nothing to be done anyway. Maybe he's just talking his portfolio.
Doug