Henwood sez:
>What inter-imperial competition? There's not really much of it that I
>can see. Things looked little dicey in the run-up to the Iraq war,
>but Sarkozy's France and Merkel's Germany don't seem all that much at
>odds with Bush's America now. And things are likely to get better if
>Hillary takes Bush's place.
Gulick sez:
Regrettably, what I wrote was rather dense – in both senses of the term, I’m afraid – so perhaps I was misconstrued.
I fully concur that the tiff with “Old Europe” in the few months preceding late March 2003 was an “intra-family squabble” that was soon smoothed over, given the unwillingness and/or inability of EU ruling groups to put forward a fundamentally different project. I’m down with the Tariq Ali/New Left Review editorial board line on this score, more or less. In fact, I got a big kick out of that recent piece by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books on EU acquiescence and subordination to US imperial “leadership” once Iraq was invaded – however irrational and discredited such “leadership” has increasingly proven to be.
What I meant to suggest is that the structural disconnect between transnational accumulation and geopolitical fragmentation prohibits, among other factors, a phantasmic “global ruling class” (the Davos crowd) from even possessing the capacity to work out long-term solutions to world capitalism’s various steering problems. I suppose it is a possibly trivial formulation since it is based on such a high level of abstraction. But more and more, I think one concrete form the contradiction takes is that of bourgeois democracies (or any regime that depends on some degree of popular legitimation) having to contend with domestic “anti-globalist” insurgencies of a right-wing nativist and/or populist stripe, which puts serious strains on their ability to advance policies that are in the collective interest of the Global Fortune 500.
Also, in my subconscious mind when I penned those comments I was thinking of China and Russia (and maybe other big non-OECD states) as players in the game of simultaneous economic integration and inter-imperial competition, which I suppose is better rephrased as “_geopolitical_ competition.
Henwood sez:
>What fraction of capital was the Clinton admin acting on behalf of?
>Finance, for sure, but that's commanding heights stuff, and it's
>where the U.S. has a strong competitive advantage. Agribusiness and
>Hollywood, ditto. But add those up, and a few more, and we're talking
>a pretty big formation. The Bush admin seems more narrowly focused on
>oil and weaponry, but that's post-neoliberal. What aspects of Harvey
>you thinking of?
Gulick sez:
Oh dear, through careless wording I really misled you here. I guess my ill-considered remarks were spawned by an ongoing irritation with much of the lefty literature that dresses down so-called “neo-liberalism” (of which Klein’s latest is in part a specimen, maybe). That is, there is a nagging tendency to assume or assert that neo-classical doctrine was an actual blueprint to remodel political economies that was actually implemented, rather than an ideological cover for the imposition of policies that diverged radically from what the recipes recommended. Even in many (not all) of the most insightful works there is a propensity to presume or claim that “neo-liberal” ideals were actually instituted, rather than various forms of corporate welfare (from export promotion to bail outs) being the norm in sovereign capitalist states, with the US and the US under Bush II being the paradigmatic example. I suppose Klein consciously makes this sort of argument but her shortcoming (AFAICT) is that she sees the Chicago School types as occupying the driver’s seat of policy formation rather than playing the role of useful idiots who were amply rewarded for that role.
I like Harvey’s take because he understands that neo-liberal dogma was constructive in orchestrating mass consent for a vicious program of class war from above, but for a variety of reasons was never applied in anything remotely close to a textbook form.
In retrospect, I may be mischaracterizing a lot of lefty literature that I’m maligning (although it seems to reign among too many left-liberal sociologists, see the most recent ASA conference staged in mid-town Manhattan) but at this point I’m simply trying to convey the gist of what I wrote originally.
Also, I may have some miniature disagreements with what you say empirically but they’re not vexing enough to spill ink over.
JG