Re: [A-List] China/4th Expansion of US Power

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

"In a short space of 200-odd years' time, the United States has developed from a small colony into a peerless empire of today, the reasons for this are: besides the fact that the country enjoys perennial relative political stability, continuing scientific and technological innovations and new achievements in economic development, but an important reason for this is, without doubt, its constant external expansions. 

"Expansion is an eternal theme in American history, as well as a main line running through US foreign policy. American diplomatic historian Williams described the American act of establishing an "empire" by relying on power politics as the American "way of life". When the European immigrants just set foot on "the new continent" the America, they found there was neither tile over their heads nor a speck of land under their feet. Therefore, the first task for the new immigrants in the America was to expand westward from the East Coast they landed. This instinct reaction was integrated with US unique commercial expansion spirit and the puritan's "concept of mission" to become the theoretical foundation and fundamental characteristics of US external expansion.

"The history of expansion divided into four stages

"The American history of expansion can be divided into four stages: First, continental expansion stage; second, overseas expansion stage; third, the stage of global contention for hegemony; and fourth, the stage of world domination. The continental expansion stage features mainly traditional territorial expansion, the second, third and fourth stages feature mainly the expansion of its economic, military and cultural influence. Completion of the expansion process in each stage brought tremendous benefits to the United States."

Observations

Why is "Expansion is an eternal theme in American history, as well as a main line running through US foreign policy?" 

A large part of the reason is that a more advance mode of production and mode of accumulation that drives social relations will triumph over a less development mode of production and accumulation. My personal respect for two thousand years of written Chinese history cannot and will not stand in the way of certain obvious features of US history.

Mine is not a criticism of the humanity that is China but a clarification of American history as understood and witnessed by a black worker/Marxist in Detroit. My generational history goes back to slavery and the state of Georgia, which was founded as a penal colony. There are three generations of my family that are industrial workers in the auto industry, with each generation running the range of production worker or skilled worker and/or member of the labor aristocracy-elected union rep. My decision to call myself a black worker/Marxist - for this writing, is political and real. At age 50, I have worked in the auto industry for 30 years and retired October 2001 at age 49. This means my tenure with the Chrysler Group began at age 19 after having committed to a Marxist standpoint two years earlier. My conversion to the standpoint of Marx occurred after reading the book, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy by Frederick Engels," at age 17 years old. Afterwards I would become familiar with the Communist Manifesto and the general treasure house of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao. 

I have reasons to believe that the article in question originated or was inspired, driven or made possible, by an assertion of the military sector of political China, in league with a new grouping of financiers that have emerged on the world scene and seek consolidation and a certain accommodation with the dominant sector of United States of North American imperialism. 

Given the bellicose nature of USNA financial imperialism this is understandable to a degree. For anyone that has taken the standpoint of the proletariat, disengagement from the fight currently taking place is not possible. Given the political breach created by the Bush Jr. administration, the unsayable is sayable. This is a statement of belief and not a moral judgment of "good" and "bad." 

War is of course bad for everyone in our modern times. War will not create employment and the American peoples are in for a rude awakening. The technological revolution has alter the equation. Less people make more of everything and no one can dispute this observation. With the issue of war against the peoples of Iraq an immediate issue of the question of the existence of distinct cultures and peoples - in this case one of earth's oldest history and culture looms large.  

Nothing makes sense, unless we approach the matter of the growth of the North American imperialism from the standpoint of the changes in the mode of production in material life and its transitions. The mode of production in material life means that one must examine or try to examine the quantitative stages in the evolution of American society or the evolution of the industrial system and its mode of accumulation. 

Expansion is not an abstraction simply dealing with the fact of people inhabiting all corners of the earth with shifting population centers. What expands and develops quantitatively and qualitatively is the mode of production. 

The United States is probably the only country in the world, certainly in the Western hemisphere, never tainted with feudalism. There was never any feudalism in the United States or a social organization where the primary conduit of wealth was stored in landed feudal relations of production. The US is uniquely revolutionary because it is purely capitalist. Trading companies colonized the United States; or rather commercial capitalist companies colonized the US. Some of these companies were given grants of land equal in size to entire states. They were entirely commercial enterprises. 

The commercial capitalist companies began emergence with the shift in the form of wealth from landed property relations to movable conduits of wealth - gold, and this process was driven by the slave trade. There of course was no instinct internal westward movement in the United States but the slaughter of Native Bands of people and the need to secure land as the basis of the commercial slavery that arose in the United States. 

Slavery was not an accident of history. It was not the chance landing of a Spanish ship carrying twenty African captives that inaugurated slavery. In the Caribbean unheard of fortunes were accumulated as the slave system was fined tuned and the slaves were literally worked to death, creating the demand for more slaves. As Marx correctly stated, slavery gave the colonies their value. As the capitalist system evolved from the slave trade and the Caribbean plantations, capitalist became firmly planted in the colonies and more slavery was the historical consequence.  

Rudimentary capitalist agriculture  - that is agriculture for exchange rather than consumption, by definition can never be reckoned with ecology or preservation of the land because the unity that is biological man and environment - our basis in alkalinity, is broken by the demand to grow anything that is consumable.  This is especially true of the cotton culture. The solution to the depletion of the land growing cotton for commercial enterprise was the constant westward motion for virgin land. 

Within continental America, there was no westward move of freedom driven by the ethic of the Puritan, but murder, rape, and plunder; the promise of riches, the chance to become an independent farmer or part of the slave elite. There were no feudal economic or social relations in American history, only a feudal like ideological culture that grew up with commercial slavery. Money - loot, accounts for the westward expansion. 

The Northern states, manufacturing the necessities for the slave system, grew as an appendage to the South. As the US grew, the North entered into an economic revolution, from manufacturing to industry. The purity of this process only happened in the North of America. In Europe, the shift to industry caused great dislocation and tremendous struggle between the towns (the bourgeoisie of centers of commercial capital) and the countryside (the feudalist and landed property relations). A major part of this dislocation was caused by the outflow of serfs into the towns. In America, all of this was avoided by importing the industrial workers from Europe. The native-born Americans were family farmers and stayed as such for another century. The shift from manufacture to industry - the economic and social revolution in the North proceeded quite smoothly without any major social upheaval. This more than less peaceful transition from pre-industrial to industrial formation has no parallel. 

Here is the meaning of "the American way of life."  The ideology of the Puritan and the ethic of the Protestant is not the fundamentality of "the American way of life," but rather the lack of feudal economic relations, its colonization by commercial capital and the emergence of commercial slavery that drove the revolution from manufacture to industry in the North. 

The development of large-scale industry and a new concentration of money in the North did call into question the political dictatorship of the agricultural South. Industry, more productive than manufacture, caused the North to break its economic dependence upon and come into political contradiction with the South. 

Melvin P. 

Yea this is part 1 - I think.