Re: [A-List] Michael Hudson: Super imperialism

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

John writes:

My understanding is that Chalmers Johnson's "blowback" thesis revolves
around critique of particular matters of policy and what Johnson regards
as bad or wrong decisions by various U.S. administrations.

The contradictions highlighted by Hudson and Brenner on the other hand
seem to me to refer to somewhat deeper and more fundamental processes.

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That's my reading of Johnson, John, and precisely why his very good
empirical analysis needs the sort of theoretical framework that is capable
of handling the deeper and more fundamental processes that are the subject
of "Super Imperialism".

You continue:

Anyway, the difference with the "blowback" thesis of Johnson is that the
U.S. could well have chosen not to fund the Hekmatyar and bin Ladens in
the 1980's. The decision eventually taken to fund these groups reflected
in otherwords, a policy choice (albeit one that had unintended and mixed
consequences) rather than an imperative forced on the U.S. government and
capital by objective conditions. On the other hand, the juncture in 1945
threatened a return to a global economic slump with unknown consequences
for the future of capitalism, virtually forcing upon the U.S. the adoption
of some form of "enlightened imperialism" towards Europe and Japan (as
Hudson notes).

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Hudson himself notes that the construction of the military-industrial
complex during the 1950s, while useful as a means of consolidating and
building on the US economic lead, had the unintended consequence of creating
a monster that required incessant feeding and was, as Hudson puts it,
responsible for the US balance of payments deficit that enables the US to
exercise economic leverage over all other countries unfortunate enough to
have been "integrated into the global economy", as Stanley Fischer so
neutrally puts it.

"The United States, the only nation capable of financing a worldwide
military program, began to sink into the mire that had bankrupted every
European power that experimented with colonialism. America's Cold War
strategists failed to perceive that whereas private investment tends to be
flexible in cutting its losses, being committed to relatively autonomous
projects on the basis of securing a satisfactory rate of return year after
year, this is not the case with government spending programs, especially in
the case of national security programs that create vested interests. Such
programs are by no means as readily reversible as those of private industry,
for military spending abroad, once initiated, tends to take on a momentum of
its own. The government cannot simply say that national security programs
have become economically disadvantageous and therefore must be curtailed.
That would imply they were pursued in the first place only because they were
economically remunerative -- something involving the sacrifice of human
lives for the narrow motives of economic gain, even if national gain. What
began as pretense became a new reality." (Hudson, p. 14)

In a way this is a variant of the blowback thesis, in that certain decisions
have unintended consequences which blow back on those who originated the
decision. But the above, like Johnson, is focused on the state as an
autonomous actor rather than as a semi-autonomous agent of key elements of
private capital. If Hudson is correct, then the funding of the anti-Soviet
Afghan opposition was simply foreign policy. However, if a more conventional
Marxist explanation is correct, then it is incumbent upon those proferring
such an explanation to identify the economic reasons for that funding.

Michael Keaney