Doug Henwood wrote:
> Wow, from reading that you'd think the imperial
system > has only one member. Boycott GM but buy
Mercedes or
> Toyota?
"Windbag" is too polemical a description of Goff's piece, but he is confused.
U.S.-American leftists who view the United States as their main enemy are taking the correct position, and its a proud tradition that stretches back to the holy trinity of Ls - Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Lenin.
But unlike the classical imperialist era of roughly equal competitive capitalist nation-states, in the current era, the United States truly is the undisputed global military hegemon (even if its economic hegemony is in the process of undergoing a slow erosion).
The undisputed status of the U.S. as a military superpower leads to a very peculiar strain of political narcissism among U.S. leftists. Basically, this narcissism assumes that the issues and problems confronting leftists outside of the U.S. are directly related to U.S. militarism.
This narcissism is merely the flipside of right-wing American narcissism which views America as the greatest country in the world.
Sadly, like most such political narcissists, Goff is unable to recognize that he is not, or more precisely, his country is not the topic of political discussion 24 hours a day in countries outside of the U.S.
If one were to rely solely upon the North American leftist press (what is left of it), one would hardly know that European nations bicker with each other over agricultural subsidies, that there is a discussion concerning the murder of a Turkish-Armenian journalist presumably at the hands of grey wolves, that students are occupying institutions of higher education in Greece in order to protest reform plans of the current government, or that German is quietly trying to sidestep Russia in order to gain more convenient access to natural gas in Central Asia.
U.S.-Americans tend to view themselves as existing at the center of the universe. U.S.-American leftists see things the exact same way, except that they tend to apply a minus sign where U.S.-American patriots assign a plus sign.
There's no question that U.S. militarism is a pressing concern for the people in Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, perhaps Bolivia, and the occupied Palestinian territories via the U.S. proxy in the region, and U.S.-American leftists are correct to continue to make this the primary target of political activity (that, and open borders for all immigrants from Latin America).
However, it wouldn't hurt to occasionally check out the wider world and realize that there are sometimes issues and conflicts not even tangentially related to the United States.
As a good little Lukacsian, I am all for holding the notion of totality firmly in one's head. But the totality is not the United States. The totality is not even "imperialism". The totality is the entire system of commodity-production and exchange.
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