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

[Hudsonmi@xxxxxxx]

Dear discussants,
    I am grateful for your discussion, partly because it shows how I might have made my points clearer.
    I should make it clear at the outset that I believe that the old private-enterprise imperialism is alive and kicking. It never went away. When I emphasized the imperialism of inter-governmental capital my point was to show that QUANTITATIVELY, this new QUALITATIVE form of U.S. exploitation is even larger, as measured statistically in dollar terms, than the more familiar corporate imperialism.
    I also am glad to agree that the private-sector imperialism does indeed underdevelop its victims. When I spoke about the "old" Hobson-Lenin imperialism being well understood, I was referring to the theory of imperialism as it stood prior to World War I. Marx himself, in his (1846?) speech to the Chartists, said that he believed that free trade at least would break down the barriers that kept precapitalist economies in rural idiocy. The initial idea was that foreign investment would replicate industrial capitalism abroad, not create a new, hybrid kind of "combined development" that would warp "capital recipients."
    So I don't really see any argument with the points being made so far on this list. There is indeed a symbiosis, which has grown stronger rather than weaker between the government and the leading corporations, especially now that they have used campaign contributions to gain control of the electoral process. The Cheney-Halliburton and Bush-Enron connections are only the most recent glaring examples. ITT in Chile and other examples could be added.
    What I tried to do in Super Imperialism was to trace America's exploitation via the dollar standard as a distinct line of development, not claim that it had replaced private-enterprise imperialism.
    By the way, the Republican intellectuals I referred to as opposing US entry into World War I and who emphasized the German approach to economics were headed by the protectionist Simon Patten at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. He was soon isolated there, along with his student Scott Nearing. (I describe this trend in my 1976 book on Economics and Technology in 19th-century American Thought: The Neglected American Economists.)
    Regarding the query by James Daly about whether my ideas are accepted in the mainstream, I can only say that they WERE accepted on Wall Street. Immediately as a result of Super-Imperialism I became the highest-priced economist of the 1970s, going from $3,500 to $6,500 per day over a two-year period, and being hired by Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute specifically to explain to the government just how monetary imperialism worked and just how America was getting a free ride. I was brought to the White House for discussions with the Treasury, to the military college in Pennsylvania, and had many meetings with major CEOs. I was hired by the Canadian Government to advise it on how to extricate it from the system, and published Canada in the New Monetary Order in 1978. I then became chief economic consultant for UNITAR, advisor to a number of governments. So from that point of view the thesis was accepted.
    The left was another matter - at least if you consider people like Robert Heilbroner to be the left simply because he proclaimed himself to be a Marxist. He forbade me to discuss debt cancellation or financial issues or rent theory in the curriculum, saying that this was "confusing" students at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, into thinking that there was "more than one kind of exploitation." I left the New School in 1972, just before Super Imperialism was published, when some friends of mine at Drexel Burnham introduced me to Herman Kahn and suggested to both of us that I should go to work there.
    The Monthly Review crowd also never really accepted my approach, and most of the left ignored my writings. However, the Russians quoted the book quite widely, in almost every report on international finance, and I was the first American invited down to Granada after its revolution.  A former KGB visited me in 1992 and said that he was indeed sorry that Stalin had killed Trotsky and not behaved very well to my father and me, and invited me back for an annual speech before the Duma, which we dubbed the "Leon Trotsky memorial speech" on how Russia might stay free of World Bank-IMF pressures. (Obviously, not successfully.) On one occasion I brought my colleague Ramsey Clark along. 
    Regarding the euro-dollar rivalry, this is difficult without a euro-denominated VEHICLE to exist, in the form of budget deficits - which are blocked by the essentially monetarist character of the Euro, which cripples it a priori from rivaling the dollar. I have recently published my critique of this in "The Cartalist/Monetarist Debate in Historical Perspective," in Edward Nell and Stephanie Bell eds., The State, The Market and The Euro (Edward Elgar, 2003).

    Michael Hudson