> i'm supposing that you have a good answer, so the below is just an
> exercise, springboarding off your comments.
>
> I think SA's just saying that, as he said before, it's all completely
> subjective. Whatever the whims of those in office, shit happens. They
> have various purposes, such as wanting to amass great personal power,
> fortunes, impress their friends and family. who the fuck knows.
>
> but i think this ignores well -- think of it: why do capitalists
> behave the way they behave? accumulate! accumulate! accumulate! it
> makes no rational sense that someone with more money than she could
> spend in a lifetime would be driven so: accumulate! accumulate!
> accumulate! what could they possibly need more money *for*?
>
> and yet it is the one thing we can count out: capitalists will act in
> ways that optimize their ability to accumulate! accumulate! accumulate!
>
> Oh, there are those who have throttled it back a notch or two, in the
> interests of something other than accumulation but in the end the
> overriding goal is accumulate.
>
> no one would deny that these individuals -- or that the way they
> behave given different kinds of cultural values -- differ in how to
> achieve the end of accumulation. there is *plenty* of room for
> subjectivity there, no doubt.
>
> yes?
First of all - just to get this out of the way - even if this is true, what connection in god's name is there between accumulating capital and sending troops to Kandahar? (Unless you're operating from an analytical framework in which the connection is axiomatic.) Poll 10,000 "capitalists" and I doubt you'll find a single one with any strong belief that sending troops to Afghanistan will have any specific effect on their capacity for accumulation in either direction. They will have no idea and probably no interest. Same goes for Iraq. I can guarantee you that on Iraq the 10,000 capitalists will have different opinions and these opinions will be very closely correlated with whether they're Democrats or Republicans, just like their opinions on gay marriage or whatever.
Second, is it just capitalists whose only goal in politics is accumulation? Or is everybody like that? Working class, poor, etc? Because, not to get too cute, but technically an upper middle class retiree living on her accumulated investments derives income solely from capital and doesn't have to work for a living. That makes her a capitalist. So when she thinks about foreign policy, is she thinking "what policy on Pakistan is going to maximize my rate of return in the long-term"? Or is she thinking: "Oh dear, those bearded fanatics must be stopped"; or, conversely, "We shouldn't provoke those people and get bogged down in a war." And so if that's the case for her, why is that not the case for the CFO of Cisco Systems and all his comrades in the class struggle?
> but sure as shit no one who leads the u.s. nationstate is gonna say,
> "oh hey, we're sick of being the leader of the free world. someone
> else take over. we're going to go into isolationist mode since that,
> really, is what most u.s.ers actually want. it's been real peeps, and
> y'all have now, y'hear?"
Well, Britain fairly gracefully handed over the reins to the USA. They put up a fight for a little while, but then they gave up; they didn't do anything crazy or desperate to stay #1. Remember Vietnam? America refused to accept a neutral government in South Vietnam. Obviously that's because it would compromise global capital accumulation to authorize a communist presence in Indochina. Except that then De Gaulle launched a public campaign to promote neutralization. Hmm. Was De Gaulle not a capitalist ruler? Was France not a capitalist power? Even more confusing, a decade earlier it was *France* that refused to accommodate the communists in Vietnam - and as every marxist knew at the time, that was because France was a capitalist power trying to protect capital accumulation by stamping out communism in Vietnam. The world is a crazy, mixed-up place.
Or how do you explain Mikhail Gorbachev? He and the Politburo really, really did not have to give up their empire. They were hardly in desperate straits, like North Korea now (where the regime is still holding out). Basically, for 50 years Russia believed it was absolutely totally vital that it keep an empire in Eastern Europe, crowned by East Germany. Then one day Gorbachev convinced his colleagues that they should just change their minds - and they did. They gave it all up voluntarily, because they changed their minds. Another example, on a different plane: Ask an American capitalist about unions and he's liable to say they're awful, economy-killing machines that should be destroyed if possible. Ask a Danish capitalist and he's liable to say unions are generally a healthy thing that can aid the relationship between workers and employers and it certainly wouldn't be a good idea to try to destroy them (that would sound pretty eccentric and extreme). Probably 100 years ago the Danish capitalists thought more like today's American capitalists, but at some point they changed their minds.
I'm certainly *not* doubting that perceived self-interest has an overweening effect on what people do politically. I'm just saying there's no objective formula that determines what people - capitalists included - will believe to be in their self-interest. Therefore, saying that America is doing XYZ in the world because it promotes the interests of the empire or of the capitalists isn't saying anything and it doesn't explain anything.
SA