> Nathan says that term "imperialism" is an analysis-stopper that ought to
be
> abandoned as outmoded; it was coined for a different world where it was
the
> express goal, but now it's not the express goal, and so its applicability
> has be (and it's clear he thinks cannot be) justified to win over liberals
> and left-liberals who will otherwise support the war.
If a term alienates people who could be potential allies, don't use it. That's basic propaganda 101. Geez, the right knows when to drop the word "privatization" when it's not playing well. Why the Left insists on the words over the substance of policy is one of my continued frustrations.
>And
> in fact the pro-war crowd is using terms like "empire" without a blush.
The
> humanitarian rhetoric of the Clinton administration has been abandoned.
First, the prowar crowd is not using empire consistently, but as Negri and Hardt argue in their book, empire and imperialism have very different meanings. My point was precisely that imperialism had a very different meaning-- it was not a system of international policing and argued for peace, but a competitive system of global conquest paralleling capitalist competition BETWEEN countries. As Lenin argued:
"As capitalist economies mature, as capital accumulates, and as profit rates fall, the capitalist economies are compelled to seize colonies and create dependencies to serve as markets, investment outlets, and sources of food and raw materials. In competition with one another, they divide up the colonial world in accordance with their relative strengths.''
In today's system, war is not an imperialist competition between global capitalist competitors for resources. We are not in the multipolar world described by Lenin. That is such a fundamental difference I can't understand why people insist on the same terminology, since it is so completely a different. Pax Americana is a far different phenomena from the global war and competition leading up to World War I.
And the humanitarian rhetoric is still in the Bush arguments-- they continually invoke the horrors of Iraq's regime against its own people. Whether they mean it is another thing, but the rhetoric is still there.
It's not a question of avoiding using unpleasant words and polarizing rhetoric, when it's a question of exposing truths that would be buried otherwise. When a word is the appropriate one, it is useful to force it onto the public debate. But my skepticism of the word it isn't appropriate, so it will merely alienate skeptical allies, not pull them into opposition to the war and general Bush policy.
-- Nathan Newman