BobW --- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/14/07, Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > --- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > In contrast, today, a war between the USA and
> > > Germany is unthinkable,
> > > for the German power elite, as well as the other
> > > European and Japanese
> > > power elites, who may be said to have roughly
> the
> > > same social base as
> > > the US power elite, do not seek to compete with
> them
> > > for global
> > > hegemony.
> > >
> > > The age of inter-imperialist wars is over. Now
> > > there is only one
> > > empire, the one led by the US power elite, and
> this
> > > empire is
> > > multinational, consisting of the USA itself and
> > > other countries that
> > > have attained roughly the same level of economic
> > > development, namely
> > > Europe and Japan.
> > >
> > > Wars today never happen between two or more
> advanced
> > > capitalist > countries
> >
> > This is like saying Democrats and Republicans are
> two
> > wings of the same party. Plausible today, but
> subject
> > to change. Europe could easily move into the
> Russian
> > orbit. China I suppose could dominate Asia and
> > attract Japan into its orbit. The US today seems
> > capable of lashing out militarily against anyone
> who
> > threatens its last toehold on power, oil.
>
> Even during the Cold War, the USA didn't seek to
> invade and occupy
> China or Russia. They are too big, and they are too
> well armed.
> America only attacks smaller, less well armed
> countries, like Iraq,
> and even then only after degrading the country's
> defense through a
> long, painful international economic blockade. The
> empire's main
> weapons are economic sanctions, covert actions,
> "democracy
> assistance," media propaganda, and so on, and when
> it comes to wars,
> it usually prefers proxy wars, like using Ethiopian
> troops in Somalia.
> In this day and age, the empire cannot hope to
> invade a country
> bigger than Panama or Grenada and occupy it easily.
>
> The empire's strongest asset, however, is cultural
> assimilation
> (assimilating the top 20-40% of each nation of the
> global South into
> the capitalist consensus of the multinational
> empire). When the top
> 20-40% of each nation "spontaneously" consent to US
> hegemony and run
> their country in accordance with it, the empire's
> power elites benefit
> the most, much more than even when they win wars
> against so-called
> "rogue states" and "terrorist sponsors." Business
> as usual of
> capitalism itself, much more so than ideological
> apparatuses directly
> controlled by the empire's power elite, helps create
> this
> "spontaneous" consent, in the quintessential
> Gramscian fashion.
>
> China and Japan's economies are moreover deeply
> intertwined with each
> other and they are in turn integrated into US
> economy through trade
> and finance; Russia and Europe also need each other,
> albeit their
> economic integration is less than China, Japan, and
> the USA's. Such
> economic facts make war among them unlikely, and
> they also limit the
> extent of Moscow's and Beijing's resistance to
> Washington's foreign
> policy: neither has fully complied with it, but
> neither has flatly
> vetoed it.
>
> On 9/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sep 13, 2007, at 8:11 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi
> wrote:
> >
> > >> You'll like how Ervand Abrahamian says that
> Ahmadinejad has a lot in
> > >> common with Cheney. What we call neocons in the
> U.S. are "principled
> > >> conservatives" or "principalists" in Iran, says
> he.
> > >
> > > If there is one thing that Cheney and
> Ahmadinejad have in common, it's
> > > that they both know what they want, which we
> can't say about leftists.
> > > Other than that, their social bases are not the
> same, and neither are
> > > their goals. If they were, there would be no
> conflict.
> >
> > Gosh, better tell Abrahamian! Maybe he's been busy
> writing a book and
> > hasn't been keeping up.
> >
> > It's amazing, reading and talking to people like
> Ervand Abrahamian
> > and Hamid Dabashi. While they strongly reject the
> caricatures of Iran
> > that circulate in the West, they have no problem
> with criticizing the
> > regime (a word Abrahamian uses, by the way -
> better brief him on why
> > it's bad) as petit bourgeois and repressive.
>
> Are Cheney's social base and ideological goals
> "petit-bourgeois"? I
> think not. And I doubt that Ervand Abrahamian makes
> such a claim.
> Abrahamian wrote that the Islamic Republic has
> social foundations
> "unlike its predecessor": "especially among the
> traditional middle
> class, the bazaar lower class, and the shanty-town
> poor" (Ervand
> Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin, New Haven and
> London: Yale
> University Press, 1989, p. 259), and it's mainly the
> shanty-town poor
> in urban areas as well as the provincial poor who
> preferred
> Ahmadinejad to Rafsanjani in 2005, and upper classes
> have scorned the
> former Revolutionary Guard. In the USA, the
> shanty-town poor, when
> they vote at all, tend to vote Democrat, not
> Republican, and it is
> upper classes who have supported Bush and Cheney
> more than lower
> classes. So, if Abrahamian sees commonality between
> Cheney and
> Ahmadinejad, it has to be something other than their
> respective social
> bases and political goals.
>
> The American presidential candidate in recent years
> whose ideology is
> most authentically petit-bourgeois is Ralph Nader,
> and someone like
> Nader gets excluded from ballots here to begin with
> and can hardly
> hope to actually get elected, unlike Ahmadinejad.
>
> In any case, class compositions and power structures
> of Iran and the
> USA are very different. The presidency of Iran is
> not the same office
> as the presidency of the USA -- the latter is a far
> more powerful
> office than the former, which does not have armed
> forces at its
> command. And the petit-bourgeoisie most certainly
> do NOT rule America
> or any other country of the multinational empire for
> that matter.
>
> > Abrahamian says that most of the Iranian elite
> would like to
> > make peace with the U.S. and court foreign
> investment -
> > which is rather at odds with your view of Iran as
> on some
> > kind of anti-imperialist mission.
>
> What do you think anti-imperialism today is? Make
> war on the USA and
> reject foreign investment altogether? I don't think
> so. Even Cuba
>
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