Perpetual Shopping For Perpetual War
The New Era Of U.S. Hegemony
Initially in response to Sharon Smith's Lebanon and the Future of the Antiwar Movement:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon07272006.html
Sharon,
Thank you for your commentary, Lebanon and the Future of the Antiwar Movement. It reflects my own views on what amounts to complicity in an imperialist aggression. When searching about for what actions the US antiwar movement might be planning in response to the Lebanon events, I came across the UFPJ statement quoted in your piece. I too was shocked at the CNN-style parroting of official imperialist war propaganda. And it is hardly confined to UFPJ, but can be seen in the official postures of other organizations of the Democratic party left, such as in the blogosphere, Alternet and Daily Kos.
As I'm sure you understand, this shameful complicity in imperialist war crimes in the case of Israel (one may diplomatically not describe it as such, but that is what it is) has a long pedigree as a very specific expression of the permanent strategy of subordinating the US Left and oppositional movements to the hegemony of the Democratic Party, a strategy adhered to by the large majority of the self-appointed leadership of the that Left. Its specificity lies in the fact that US-backed Israeli atrocities represent a potentially embarrassing weak link in their strategy, as the Democratic Party is, as we all know, fanatically American Zionist.
That is why, when this embarrassing connection ceased to be 'just another issue', but was thrust front and center by the events of the last 5 years, events which have placed this question literally at the very top of an agenda that will determine the future course of the human race, the Democratic party Left acted to demobilize any sort of mass expression by an antiwar or anti-imperialist movement, as now this would place the strategy under direct threat of attack within left progressive organizations and movements. Silence therefore became the order of the day.
But the US-led imperialist war drive has shown signs of stalling in recent months due to its difficulties in Iraq, and that has provoked an attempt to regain the offensive on another front of the same war by the Israeli arm of the same American Zionist transnational ruling class faction that, in the form of the government of George Bush, exercises leadership within and which has governed US imperialism over this same period. I believe this latest Israeli aggression will continue for longer than we are being led to expect. This presents those of us who understand what is immediately at stake within US politics in the present situation - untying the left and mass movements (such as the immigrant rights movement, "America's Palestinians") from the Democratic Party - with a unique opening to reconstruct an antiwar movement for which _anti-imperialism_ - in so many words - will be the founding principle and single focus. Permit me to present a short historical context.
The events surrounding the 2004 election - but not only the election itself - represent an historic betrayal by the official American Left on the scale of those of the 1948-52 and 1968-72 periods. These previous betrayals fundamentally hinged upon a cynical bet made by the American Left: that despite the fact that imperialism had been forced into dramatic retreat on certain fronts (in the first period, China, the Korean stalemate, the ongoing collapse of the Anglo-French empires, the loss of the atomic monopoly - in the second, the retreat from Indochina, a certain retreat in the preeminent economic position of the US, events in South America before the Pinochet coup, and, N.B. the Israeli reversal in the Yom Kippur War ), US imperialism would have the strength to survive the crisis and remain the global imperialist hegemon, even as it beat a retreat and made concessions in certain areas. Since the survival of that global hegemony means the continuation of the "domestic" status quo within the US, the strategy of the Democratic party left, the 'permanent tactic' of the lesser evil, could remain intact. Everything could proceed as before; the left-wing professors of the UFPJ and other bureaucracies could continue to earn their tenure undisturbed.
So too is the expectation at present. Groups such as the UFPJ, reading from the Vietnam era playbook, expect US imperialism to beat a retreat from Iraq at least, and then everything will return to "normal" with the Bush "aberration" out of the way. (As an aside, the Left shares this view with the 'paleoconservative' or libertarian Right, represented by such as Justin Raimondo and Pat Buchanan, prompting the house publication of this section of the Right, The American Conservative, to ask in their recent edition if "the Left-Right distinction mattered anymore". If only the US Left had the imagination to even broach such a question!). But I believe, as the saying goes, this time it is different. A retreat limited even to Iraq would immediately signify the abandonment of the American Zionist strategy for "securing the realm". Knocking over Syria and Iran would be off the table. It would be seen as a huge victory by the masses throughout the "greater Middle East", as the first time US imperialism has suffered direct defeat in the region. It would likewise leave America's twin Arab and Israeli tyrannies exposed to escalating attacks. As the "mainstream" of US politics never tires of reminding us, "failure is not an option" in the Middle East. But why do they think so? Because such a retreat would intersect unfavorably with other global trends shaping the future and fate of US global hegemony.
The importance of the Middle East to US imperialism goes beyond the obvious ones of oil and geopolitics. It must be seen in the context of the total global relation of forces that constrain that imperialism, particularly economic and financial forces through which the dominant system relates itself via the working class to the masses. This set of relations differs qualitatively in each of the periods of crisis already mentioned. The political economic relation is not directly deterministic. In the '48-'52 period, imperialist retreat was accompanied by an unprecedented postwar "boom" throughout the core Amero-European imperialist states and (belatedly by 1960) Japan. This expansion _was_ the "reserve" - to use the perhaps now forgotten language of the old 'Stalinist' influenced sector of the Left - deployed by US imperialism to maintain itself as global hegemon despite the retreats. This period was therefore one of the _absolute_ strengthening of US imperialism.
By the early 1970's this "reserve" had been exhausted. The new "reserve" deployed to preserve US hegemony in a period of retreat was not one of economic expansion, but variously one of selective economic contraction that then unfolded as a vast political economic counterrevolution on a global scale, one whose form still barely remains intact to this day. We can pinpoint the very origin of this counteroffensive in the 1970's: while the imperialist core was left to "idle" in an indeterminate "stagflation", a ferocious counteroffensive was launched in the Southern Cone of South America, in Chile and Argentina. This was soon followed by the emergence of similar "anti-socialist" policies in, interestingly enough, Israel , with the rise to power of the Likud in the latter '70's in the wake of the near catastrophe of the Yom Kippur War - a placement of this aspect of what is conventionally regarded as a "regional" phenomenon into a global context that reveals that Likud Zionism was in the very vanguard of this new counterrevolution, Thatcherite before Thatcher, so to speak, right up there in the "first wave" with Pinochet and Videla. The rest should be familiar: the rise to power of Deng Zhao Ping's "capitalist road" in China, the rise of Reaganism-Thatcherism in the Anglo-American core - where the 'neocon' wing of the Reagan Coalition, then still a junior partner was, though, well placed to transmit the policies pioneered by Pinochet, Videla and Menachem Begin throughout a vastly larger, indeed for the first time global, sphere - leading into the Lebanon and Iran-Iraq wars as well as the Central American counterrevolution of the 1980's, all culminating in the Persian Gulf War and subsequent Siege of Iraq, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the subsequent economic catastrophe visited upon Russia in the 1990's. All of this effected a _relative_ strengthening of the position of US imperialism and the preservation of its global hegemony.
That "reserve" has now in its turn been exhausted. To make this case requires, alas, that we delve into a bit more detail, but bear with me. Beneath the continuing veneer of 'neoliberal' rhetoric, an entirely new set of political economic policies have emerged that signal a profound reversal of the strategy of ever-shifting but sustained assault on the global capitalist periphery, and selective assaults within the imperialist core that by the end of the century came to be known as "the Washington Consensus". Little noted by observers, a new "Washington Policy", if not yet "consensus", has emerged as a sort of ad hoc, unspoken Global New Deal, Hoover-style. Just as the original New Deal had as its primary feature the rapid development of the American South and West which required breaking the monopoly on economic development hitherto exercised by the Northeast and Midwest, so too has a unprecedented wave of highly uneven development swept though much of the capitalist periphery, particularly in parts of East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and even Russia. Despite monetarist rhetoric, this reversal of policy has been led by a new "easy money" policy on the part of the U.S. Federal Reserve bank and the US Treasury Department. It is a new policy of a deliberate and permanent debauchery of the U.S. currency. The reversal of "second era reserve" monetarism and the consequent "surrender" of development to the periphery is the first key hallmark announcing the new era we are moving into. It announces the beginning of the _absolute_ decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony and its imminent end in historical terms.
The second key hallmark follows immediately from the first: the need to replace the terminal decay of U.S. financial dominance with the final "reserve" of every state: military power. This will require the permanent - "perpetual", as Bush/Cheney, PNAC and others have so clearly informed us - and overt application of military force, not simply as an "implicit reserve" backlining the non-military forms of hegemony, but now the frontline itself, the actual and immediate form of continued U.S. global domination. Furthermore the relations between finance and military are not one simply of coincidental replacement of one by the other - the exercise of military power requires enormous financial resources on a global scale, and constant use of military power will be necessary to extort the resources globally, not merely for the military apparatus itself, but more importantly, to also prop up the American domestic economy in order to maintain popular support for constant military actions. For the great innovation of the U.S. in the postwar era was the development of "democratic imperialism", the conscious cultivation in varying degrees of mass sentiment generally favorable to imperialist policies by means of regulated mass economic development within the core countries of capitalism, above all the U.S. This is what George Bush meant when he advised Americans to "keep shopping" as a form of support for his perpetual war, and it is a sentiment that can survive particular reverses such as Vietnam or, now, Iraq. But what has changed is that now the U.S. is dependent upon a world finance, out of its direct control, in order to maintain its "democratic imperialism"- it no longer possesses the independent means to do so. The constant application of military power, by casting a permanent pall of "global terror", is very convenient in securing such global financial acquiescence in keeping both the U.S. Treasury and the American consumer flush with "borrowed" funds at almost any price - in fact at negative real interest rates - because the alternative - to invest those funds elsewhere - would precipitate the unthinkable: the rapid collapse of U.S. imperialism tout courte.
That is why the US will not retreat from the Middle East, including Iraq, until it is thoroughly, soundly defeated in that region. Short of that result, the new era will be sustainable for some time. It is an era most historically analogous to that of the Spanish Hapsburgs of the late 16th - early 17th centuries - the unrivalled military but fiscally bankrupt power of the end times of European feudalism, despite, ironically, the Spanish plunder of the Americas. As with that period, the present looks to be an era of extraordinary violence, alas, making the deliberate demobilization of the antiwar movement and the retreat into the Democratic Party by the Left all the more unforgivable, as they have made themselves a party to the perpetuation of that violence. It won't be the first Left as a partner in right wing crimes. But worse, it will leave the future disarmed and unprepared for what must come after this present era: the end of a hegemonic United States.
The New Era Of U.S. Hegemony
Initially in response to Sharon Smith's Lebanon and the Future of the Antiwar Movement:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon07272006.html
Sharon,
Thank you for your commentary, Lebanon and the Future of the Antiwar Movement. It reflects my own views on what amounts to complicity in an imperialist aggression. When searching about for what actions the US antiwar movement might be planning in response to the Lebanon events, I came across the UFPJ statement quoted in your piece. I too was shocked at the CNN-style parroting of official imperialist war propaganda. And it is hardly confined to UFPJ, but can be seen in the official postures of other organizations of the Democratic party left, such as in the blogosphere, Alternet and Daily Kos.
As I'm sure you understand, this shameful complicity in imperialist war crimes in the case of Israel (one may diplomatically not describe it as such, but that is what it is) has a long pedigree as a very specific expression of the permanent strategy of subordinating the US Left and oppositional movements to the hegemony of the Democratic Party, a strategy adhered to by the large majority of the self-appointed leadership of the that Left. Its specificity lies in the fact that US-backed Israeli atrocities represent a potentially embarrassing weak link in their strategy, as the Democratic Party is, as we all know, fanatically American Zionist.
That is why, when this embarrassing connection ceased to be 'just another issue', but was thrust front and center by the events of the last 5 years, events which have placed this question literally at the very top of an agenda that will determine the future course of the human race, the Democratic party Left acted to demobilize any sort of mass expression by an antiwar or anti-imperialist movement, as now this would place the strategy under direct threat of attack within left progressive organizations and movements. Silence therefore became the order of the day.
But the US-led imperialist war drive has shown signs of stalling in recent months due to its difficulties in Iraq, and that has provoked an attempt to regain the offensive on another front of the same war by the Israeli arm of the same American Zionist transnational ruling class faction that, in the form of the government of George Bush, exercises leadership within and which has governed US imperialism over this same period. I believe this latest Israeli aggression will continue for longer than we are being led to expect. This presents those of us who understand what is immediately at stake within US politics in the present situation - untying the left and mass movements (such as the immigrant rights movement, "America's Palestinians") from the Democratic Party - with a unique opening to reconstruct an antiwar movement for which _anti-imperialism_ - in so many words - will be the founding principle and single focus. Permit me to present a short historical context.
The events surrounding the 2004 election - but not only the election itself - represent an historic betrayal by the official American Left on the scale of those of the 1948-52 and 1968-72 periods. These previous betrayals fundamentally hinged upon a cynical bet made by the American Left: that despite the fact that imperialism had been forced into dramatic retreat on certain fronts (in the first period, China, the Korean stalemate, the ongoing collapse of the Anglo-French empires, the loss of the atomic monopoly - in the second, the retreat from Indochina, a certain retreat in the preeminent economic position of the US, events in South America before the Pinochet coup, and, N.B. the Israeli reversal in the Yom Kippur War ), US imperialism would have the strength to survive the crisis and remain the global imperialist hegemon, even as it beat a retreat and made concessions in certain areas. Since the survival of that global hegemony means the continuation of the "domestic" status quo within the US, the strategy of the Democratic party left, the 'permanent tactic' of the lesser evil, could remain intact. Everything could proceed as before; the left-wing professors of the UFPJ and other bureaucracies could continue to earn their tenure undisturbed.
So too is the expectation at present. Groups such as the UFPJ, reading from the Vietnam era playbook, expect US imperialism to beat a retreat from Iraq at least, and then everything will return to "normal" with the Bush "aberration" out of the way. (As an aside, the Left shares this view with the 'paleoconservative' or libertarian Right, represented by such as Justin Raimondo and Pat Buchanan, prompting the house publication of this section of the Right, The American Conservative, to ask in their recent edition if "the Left-Right distinction mattered anymore". If only the US Left had the imagination to even broach such a question!). But I believe, as the saying goes, this time it is different. A retreat limited even to Iraq would immediately signify the abandonment of the American Zionist strategy for "securing the realm". Knocking over Syria and Iran would be off the table. It would be seen as a huge victory by the masses throughout the "greater Middle East", as the first time US imperialism has suffered direct defeat in the region. It would likewise leave America's twin Arab and Israeli tyrannies exposed to escalating attacks. As the "mainstream" of US politics never tires of reminding us, "failure is not an option" in the Middle East. But why do they think so? Because such a retreat would intersect unfavorably with other global trends shaping the future and fate of US global hegemony.
The importance of the Middle East to US imperialism goes beyond the obvious ones of oil and geopolitics. It must be seen in the context of the total global relation of forces that constrain that imperialism, particularly economic and financial forces through which the dominant system relates itself via the working class to the masses. This set of relations differs qualitatively in each of the periods of crisis already mentioned. The political economic relation is not directly deterministic. In the '48-'52 period, imperialist retreat was accompanied by an unprecedented postwar "boom" throughout the core Amero-European imperialist states and (belatedly by 1960) Japan. This expansion _was_ the "reserve" - to use the perhaps now forgotten language of the old 'Stalinist' influenced sector of the Left - deployed by US imperialism to maintain itself as global hegemon despite the retreats. This period was therefore one of the _absolute_ strengthening of US imperialism.
By the early 1970's this "reserve" had been exhausted. The new "reserve" deployed to preserve US hegemony in a period of retreat was not one of economic expansion, but variously one of selective economic contraction that then unfolded as a vast political economic counterrevolution on a global scale, one whose form still barely remains intact to this day. We can pinpoint the very origin of this counteroffensive in the 1970's: while the imperialist core was left to "idle" in an indeterminate "stagflation", a ferocious counteroffensive was launched in the Southern Cone of South America, in Chile and Argentina. This was soon followed by the emergence of similar "anti-socialist" policies in, interestingly enough, Israel , with the rise to power of the Likud in the latter '70's in the wake of the near catastrophe of the Yom Kippur War - a placement of this aspect of what is conventionally regarded as a "regional" phenomenon into a global context that reveals that Likud Zionism was in the very vanguard of this new counterrevolution, Thatcherite before Thatcher, so to speak, right up there in the "first wave" with Pinochet and Videla. The rest should be familiar: the rise to power of Deng Zhao Ping's "capitalist road" in China, the rise of Reaganism-Thatcherism in the Anglo-American core - where the 'neocon' wing of the Reagan Coalition, then still a junior partner was, though, well placed to transmit the policies pioneered by Pinochet, Videla and Menachem Begin throughout a vastly larger, indeed for the first time global, sphere - leading into the Lebanon and Iran-Iraq wars as well as the Central American counterrevolution of the 1980's, all culminating in the Persian Gulf War and subsequent Siege of Iraq, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the subsequent economic catastrophe visited upon Russia in the 1990's. All of this effected a _relative_ strengthening of the position of US imperialism and the preservation of its global hegemony.
That "reserve" has now in its turn been exhausted. To make this case requires, alas, that we delve into a bit more detail, but bear with me. Beneath the continuing veneer of 'neoliberal' rhetoric, an entirely new set of political economic policies have emerged that signal a profound reversal of the strategy of ever-shifting but sustained assault on the global capitalist periphery, and selective assaults within the imperialist core that by the end of the century came to be known as "the Washington Consensus". Little noted by observers, a new "Washington Policy", if not yet "consensus", has emerged as a sort of ad hoc, unspoken Global New Deal, Hoover-style. Just as the original New Deal had as its primary feature the rapid development of the American South and West which required breaking the monopoly on economic development hitherto exercised by the Northeast and Midwest, so too has a unprecedented wave of highly uneven development swept though much of the capitalist periphery, particularly in parts of East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and even Russia. Despite monetarist rhetoric, this reversal of policy has been led by a new "easy money" policy on the part of the U.S. Federal Reserve bank and the US Treasury Department. It is a new policy of a deliberate and permanent debauchery of the U.S. currency. The reversal of "second era reserve" monetarism and the consequent "surrender" of development to the periphery is the first key hallmark announcing the new era we are moving into. It announces the beginning of the _absolute_ decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony and its imminent end in historical terms.
The second key hallmark follows immediately from the first: the need to replace the terminal decay of U.S. financial dominance with the final "reserve" of every state: military power. This will require the permanent - "perpetual", as Bush/Cheney, PNAC and others have so clearly informed us - and overt application of military force, not simply as an "implicit reserve" backlining the non-military forms of hegemony, but now the frontline itself, the actual and immediate form of continued U.S. global domination. Furthermore the relations between finance and military are not one simply of coincidental replacement of one by the other - the exercise of military power requires enormous financial resources on a global scale, and constant use of military power will be necessary to extort the resources globally, not merely for the military apparatus itself, but more importantly, to also prop up the American domestic economy in order to maintain popular support for constant military actions. For the great innovation of the U.S. in the postwar era was the development of "democratic imperialism", the conscious cultivation in varying degrees of mass sentiment generally favorable to imperialist policies by means of regulated mass economic development within the core countries of capitalism, above all the U.S. This is what George Bush meant when he advised Americans to "keep shopping" as a form of support for his perpetual war, and it is a sentiment that can survive particular reverses such as Vietnam or, now, Iraq. But what has changed is that now the U.S. is dependent upon a world finance, out of its direct control, in order to maintain its "democratic imperialism"- it no longer possesses the independent means to do so. The constant application of military power, by casting a permanent pall of "global terror", is very convenient in securing such global financial acquiescence in keeping both the U.S. Treasury and the American consumer flush with "borrowed" funds at almost any price - in fact at negative real interest rates - because the alternative - to invest those funds elsewhere - would precipitate the unthinkable: the rapid collapse of U.S. imperialism tout courte.
That is why the US will not retreat from the Middle East, including Iraq, until it is thoroughly, soundly defeated in that region. Short of that result, the new era will be sustainable for some time. It is an era most historically analogous to that of the Spanish Hapsburgs of the late 16th - early 17th centuries - the unrivalled military but fiscally bankrupt power of the end times of European feudalism, despite, ironically, the Spanish plunder of the Americas. As with that period, the present looks to be an era of extraordinary violence, alas, making the deliberate demobilization of the antiwar movement and the retreat into the Democratic Party by the Left all the more unforgivable, as they have made themselves a party to the perpetuation of that violence. It won't be the first Left as a partner in right wing crimes. But worse, it will leave the future disarmed and unprepared for what must come after this present era: the end of a hegemonic United States.
Labels: The New Era Of U.S. Hegemony
posted by keitai at 2:41 AM
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