[lbo-talk] dev'ts in world economy and foreign ownership

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/27/07, heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk <heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
> There always was a difference between the interests of capital-in-general
> and those of the individual capitalists. The 19c. imperialists always
> understood that prestige was quite as tangible a thing as capital. There
> was a lot of evidence cited that the US capitalists were surprised by the
> money they made during the Spanish-American war, which tempted them into
> supporting imperialism.
>
> As for war-for-oil, this always was the reductio ad absurdem of radical
> politics - the left's commodity fetishism, investing dead objects like oil
> with the living power to change the course of events. So much easier to
> 'follow the money' (or at least to impute a monetary motive without
> thinking it through) than to theoretically grasp the way that the ruling
> class came to its decisions.

The idea of war for oil is indeed the commodity fetishism of choice
for many leftists today, but, as commodity fetishism goes, this is one
of the more benign manifestations of it.  Far worse is the idea of the
pacific ruling class whose government is hijacked by
neo-conservatives, who act against the collective interests of the
ruling class as well as the nation, an idea that is only one step away
from anti-Semitism.

Imperialism after the age of inter-imperialist rivalry, instead, is
best understood as a process of integrating the ruling classes and
power elites (overlapping groups) of the world: the ruling classes and
power elites of the North, who used to compete with one another in the
age of competing empires that Lenin analyzed, are now integrated into
one multinational empire under US hegemony, and the process of
imperialism has and will continue to integrate the ruling classes and
power elites of the South into that multinational empire.
-- 
Yoshie