Alan Spector commentary on World Systems Network mailing list

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Besides Kosovo, etc. as others have pointed out,  Indonesia also had a
major oil connection, and that had a lot to do with the military coup that
quickly killed a half million and probably resulted in consequential deaths
from 30 years of fascist-type politics and economics of another million or
more.  And didn't fascist/imperialist Japan use an oil embargo as its
excuse for bringing WWII on in the Pacific.

The root is capitalism (imperialism) and its need to maximize its profits,
especially when the rate of profit is dropping. Oil profits are a major way
of doing this. Not the only way, but a major way. Oil is available in many
parts of the world, but Saudi and other "Middle East" oil is cleaner and
currently potentially cheaper than most other oil.  But at this point, just
about anyone can get oil if they have enough money.

Controlling the flow of oil via pipelines would allow the U.S. to control
the economies of those countries that need that oil, especially Germany and
Japan. Setting up "pro-US oil interests" governments therefore both serve
to protect the immediate profits and ALSO to strategically position those
U.S. oil interests to exert control  over the ability of other
imperialist/capitalist competitors to maximize profits.

The U.S., especially the "Rockefeller-dominated" Exxon-Mobil group (today)
always has a dual policy, sometimes supporting dictators (Marcos/South
African apartheid/Haiti-Duvalier/Suharato-Indonesia) sometimes dumping them
later (Marcos/South African apartheid/Haiti-Duvalier/Suharto-Indonesia).
There is no point in looking for philosophical consistency. They are
looking for immediate profits as well as strategic positioning (which do
sometimes come in conflict, which is one place we see splits in policy
proposals develop among the capitalist ruling-elite politicians and
intellectuals.)

On the other hand, there is the contingent, the immediate. If this bombing
were carried out by a Latin American group, for example (and there are
reasons why it wasn't), the U.S. government would still have been forced to
respond. Failure to respond at all would have been a signal to every group
all over the world that now is the time to step up their attacks against
U.S. capitalist interests. So in that sense, the immediate military action
might not be to specifically secure some oil wells. But the fundamental
process driving all this is capitalism's need to increase its profits,
intensified by increasing competition among existing imperialist powers and
potential ones. And oil profits have been central to this for the past
sixty years or more.

Some people speak of the current disintegration and reformation of nation
states as if this is a new stage in history that transcends imperialism as
described by Lenin and many others. There are many changes going on. But
look at history. One could see the period from 1800 to 1850 and from 1890
to 1915 as similar, as many nations disintegrated, new borders were
created, new nations formed and new empires struggled to form out of the
disintegration. And between the World Wars. And immediately after World War
II. There is disintegration. There is also agglomeration (new things
forming out of the old disintegration).

It is curious to me that so many people who (especially through the
1970's-1990's), on the one hand, wanted/want  to assert a rather strong
"autonomy of the State" from economics in order to delink politics from
economics and say that politics are overwhelmingly primary and only
critique political forms---are often the same people who recently now say
that the processes of capitalism are now overwhelmingly primary---delinked
from the political structures of States and military-- and are simply
rolling forward creating one giant capitalist class that transcends all
political-military-national considerations.

Actually there is a common thread, and both are anti-revolutionary. One
implies that the political forms can be changed without confronting the
capitalist system, including the market system, while the other says that
the economic processes can be changed without having to confront the
political-military power of the State.  Delinking politics and economics
too much (of course politics is NOT simply a mechanistic reflection of
economics) provides a common ground for those who believe that they system
can be reformed.

About religion:

Marxism does not appear as a viable alternative to the obvious oppression
of capitalist imperialism to many people, especially youth, in the world
today. In fact, that has probably been true for the past twenty years or
so. Furthermore, even the idea of "human progress" does not seem viable to
many of the very poor (nor many of the so-called "middle classes" either!).
 Fundamentalist religions of all sorts grow in times like this especially
if political leaders can use the sentiments of despair to position
themselves as leaders of the oppressed. Using the
anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist anger of the masses and channelling it
into anti-U.S.-Europe sentiment strategically lays the basis for
overthrowing the local pro-US/European rulers and beginning the formation
of a new world power.  In hundreds of villages, activists allied with one
or another politically oriented Muslim organization provide visiting
nurses, or food, or soccer leagues, or schooling for hundreds of thousands
of youth. They are winning over a base not with a so-called "fanatical
appeal to irrational people" but because they are there on a day to day
basis. Much the way many fundamentalist Christian churches provide marriage
counseling, youth groups, soup kitchens, etc. in U.S. communities, by the
way.  (There should be a lesson there for anti-capitalist organizers--get
involved in the lives of real people to make the ideas come alive!)

It is, however, important to understand the specifics of the religious
ideology as it intertwines with the daily material lives of people, and any
serious analysis must see that interconnection in order to understand why
specific people believe the destructive ideologies that only serve various
camouflaged capitalist interests.

But let's not get carried away with the "unified Islam" theory. The
fanatical-fundamentalist Taliban Muslim clerics, for example, are hated by
the fanatical-fundamentalist Iranian Muslim clerics. And by the way, one
could easily do a documentary film showing Christian men in the U.S.
hysterically, or calmly, declaring their willingness to die for Christ in
order to keep Jerusalem under Jewish-Christian control.  (After all, U.S.
pilots bombed a hospital in Panama and killed many dozens, and Christ
wasn't even involved in that one!)

It is easy to focus on the anger of the oppressed (whether poor Muslims, or
black working class youth in the U.S. or women in many subordinated
situations, including the U.S.---"Why are you losing your temper and acting
so irrationally?" says the boss after he has just done something damaging
to his subordinates.... )

and make the oppressed appear more irrational than the calm bean-counting,
button-pushers who can kill a thousand people simply by lifting a finger in
the trading floor of a modern office building and manipulating the
commodies exchange in Chicago, for example, and in one day, wiping out
thousands of small farms.

Science cannot tell you what the exact weather will be on a particular day
ten years in the future, but it can do a pretty good job predicting average
temperatures and "middle range" trends. (If it is good science, of course.)
Marxist analysis cannot predict when or where a terrorist attack will take
place. But it is still a powerful tool for understanding the general
processes and how they will unfold, not just a hundred years in the future,
but also in the not to distant future.

Alan Spector

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----- Original Message -----
From: <Threehegemons@xxxxxxx>
To: <franka@xxxxxxx>; <wsn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2001 6:45 PM
Subject: Re: oil

> Gunder Frank suggests that Kosovo (and Congo) did have an oil connection.
 I
> appreciate the correction.
>
> However, I would be skeptical about explaining the entirety of NATO's
> involvement in Kosovo through the oil connection--lets not forget that a:
> liberal opinion in North America and Europe was demanding US intervention,
> and one could argue that the US's credibility as Robocop was in jeopardy if
> it did not and b:  George Bush himself (generally regarded as something
of a
> spokesperson for oil interests in the US) ran against such involvements,
> arguing that 'humanitarian' missions wasted US resources.
>
> As for Afghanistan, here is the original sentence from Ted Rall's piece I
> objected to:
>
> <Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 dead than it concerns itself with
> oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is
> solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying
> local middlemen.>
>
> If Bush's job is not to safeguard the well-being of the US capitalist
class,
> many of whom perished on September 11, what is it?
>
> Oil interests may well exploit the current situation--I actually saw a
> similar report on CNN last night--but I also suspect there are many
people in
> Washington who are reminding Bush that Afghanistan is a great place for
your
> enemies to be fighting a war...
>
> In general I recoil from efforts to pin US imperial actions on one group of
> capitalist interests as it fails to capture the all-around hegemonic
dynamic.
>
> Steven Sherman
>

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org

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