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

[jenyang <enyang@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Michael Keaney wrote:
>
> 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,

As I said before, I feel that Michael H. in Superimperialism gave too much
weight to the state as an autonomous actor. For example, in the passage
you cite above, the contrast between the "flexibility of business in
cutting its losses, being committed to . . . . projects on the basis of of
securing a satisfactory rate of return year after year" with the
inflexible government spending programs, especially military related ones,
which, "once initiated take on  a momentum of their own" is correct, but
in my view, understates the extent to which these government spending
programs have been relied upon by both the government and private capital
to insulate the U.S. economy from the traditional business cycle -- that
is to help secure for capital a "satisfactory rate of return year after
year." Indeed, seen this way, point of view of most sectors of capital,
the very "inflexibility" of the the state subsided military programs are
regarded as positive boon.

In any event, empirical evidence would seem to support the case that a
military keynsianism (unlike universal health insurance, say) and the
pursuit by the state of full spectrum dominance etc over potential rivals
and the semi-colonial countries are something that all sectors of U.S.
capital -- not just the immediate beneficiaries, like military contractors
-- are agreed upon. (When did we last hear personifications of capital
demanding austerity at the department of defence?)

Of the U.S. efforts to undermine and destroy attempts by third world or
other states to delink from the U.S. centred global economy, we can say
they express more than policy -- rather they reflect the fact that that
economic development in the south must be directed, not towards domestic
needs but towards the those of of northern capital accumulation (something
for which Michael H. provides ample evidence). In this sense, the U.S.
efforts to destroy states like Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union (along
with the associated military buildups) are the result of deeply entrenched
tendencies within capitalism -- not of crude dollar and cents calculations
by bureaucrats and corporations (which would be more of a caricature than
an explanation).

But, without questioning the objective of destroying the PDPA or turning
Afghanistan into a "failed state," it would have been possible in theory
for the U.S. policy makers to have chosen a different means to the end
from the one they eventually settled on (see for example the article
posted by James Daly on Soros' activities in Eastern Europe). Seen in this
way, the funding of the Mujahedin came down to policy.

J.Enyang