[lbo-talk] Bello: The Post-Washington Dissensus

[John Gulick]

(SORRY FOR THE PREVIOUS FORMATTING. MY SORRY LAZY ASS SHOULD HAVE DITCHED
HOTMAIL -- GAGGING WITH SHAME -- LONG AGO)

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