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

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

I wrote:

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.

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I was called away before I could get to the punchline, although I was hoping
someone else might add their own.

While there are always tendencies within states for policies and agendas to
develop autonomously, i.e., independently of any specific capital fraction's
programme, there are constraints beyond which such developments are
structurally unsustainable. A good example of this would be Jacques Delors'
efforts to institutionalise social democracy within the European Commission
and thereby the EU state apparatus. This failed because there was no social
base capable of supporting such an effort, given that most labour
aristocracies were (and still are) firmly embedded within national
structures/mindsets and, in the case of Britain, still wedded to an
antiquated social chauvinism that wilfully refuses to recognise the reality
of US imperialism as the key influence on a Britain nominally independent
(of Europe, as the "debate" is crassly framed in the UK by key British
opinion-formers like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black). Similarly, Gerhard
Schröder's failure to construct a more robust defence of German independence
against neo-liberalism is as much a reflection of the failure of the German
left to exert sufficient pressure to enable the opportunist Schröder to take
a more progressive nationalist line. Instead he has begun, finally, to
capitulate to the demands of the formidable forces arrayed against him, and
which will hound him out of office very likely within the next year.

Re US imperialism and the quasi-autonomy of the state, can the US state
follow policies indefinitely without the support of key fractions of US
capital? This is the implication of Hudson's argument and it is one that I
have difficulty supporting. Sure there is a gigantic military-industrial
complex that must be fed, and, more generally, an ever greater behemoth
state apparatus; but that behemoth feeds what Hudson correctly calls (in
Veblenian fashion) "vested interests" but which are mostly private. The
military itself is an exception, although the revolving door between the
Pentagon and the private sector is another factor that should be considered.
As is an aspect of privatisation highlighted by Chalmers Johnson in
"Blowback", where he discusses the increasing use of private security
contractors by the Pentagon in the name of circumventing Freedom of
Information legislation thereby enabling greater secrecy of operations in
the name of commercial confidentiality, and representing the further
expansion of the sphere of capital.

Capitalist fractions, with a few minor exceptions, could be expected to
support a general opposition to social systems predicated on the eradication
of capitalist social relations, like the Soviet one. Supporting the Afghan
rebels was a part of that policy, and promised to roll back Soviet influence
whilst opening up a new frontier of capitalist expansion. The US state was
the instrument of this and under the guise of "national security"
quasi-autonomously developed the strategies geared to achieving this end --
but if sufficiently influential fractions of capital had been able to profit
from dealing with the Soviet Union, how long would such a policy have
lasted? Sure, the American ideology is important and is another aspect of
the superstructure developing a life of its own, within constraints. But
sooner or later these constraints assert themselves and, at bottom, we are
back to the interests of capital.

So far, in reading this very interesting and informative book, I concur with
Hudson's indictment of the US as imperialist and applaud his analysis of the
financial means by which its hegemony has evolved over the last century;
however, the Weberian approach of Leonard Seabrooke is nearer the truth in
its identification of the simultaneously cooperative and competitive
relationship of Washington and Wall Street. However, Seabrooke gets plenty
else wrong and is useful largely for empirical data rather than
theoretically-grounded exposition.

Michael Keaney