(fwd from Stijn Oosterlynck) Biel and Stiglitz

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear,

I would like to comment on Robert Biel's message posted by Mark Jones a couple
of weeks ago (9th of September).  Robert asserts that "imperialism has found a
way of surmounting the antagonistic rivalry between the great powers, and
instead found a mutually beneficial way of, in some sense, `jointly'
exploiting the rest of the world.  This does not exclude the existence of US
hegemony, on the contrary, ...".

I have not read Robert's book, neither am I an expert on imperialism or
hegemony, but a while ago I was thinking of the nature of US hegemony (which
was a side issue in the dissertation I was writing) and my supervisor pointed
at the possible parallel between the role played by the state Piedmont in the
process of Italian Risorgimento (unification) as analysed by Gramsci and the
nature of postwar US hegemony.

Although there existed nuclei of homogeneous ruling class throughout the
Italian peninsula, none of them wanted to lead anybody (in the Gramscian
sense, that is concord their interests with the interests of other groups).
Rather they wanted a new force that stood above compromise and condition to
unify and lead the new Italian nation-state.  The state Piedmont functioned as
this new force and replaced the local social groups in leading the unification
of Italy.  Piedmont exercised thus the hegemony over the entire group of
ruling classes instead of the latter over other social forces.  In other
words, they exercised a dictatorship without hegemony.

One can perhaps argue that the present US hegemony on a global scale bears
resemblance to the hegemony of Piedmont over the other dominating classes in
the Italian Risorgimento.  Financial liberalization, originally started in the
post-war decades by the UK to offset its economic difficulties and declining
position, was taken over by the US at the turn of the seventies when they
renounced the Bretton Woods system.  In the eighties the US increasingly used
the global financial markets and other neoliberal policies as privatisation
and trade liberalisation programs to reinforce its hegemony.  In this sense
the US state can be said to dominate an alliance of western states who also
turned to neoliberal policies and to exercise hegemony over the various
overlapping transnational class elites - mainly international financial
capitalists and transnational managerial classes - because none of them was
able or willing to develop a global-popular program in which it concords its
intere!  sts and aspirations with those of other groups.

That is logical since from an economical point of view US hegemony is based on
a neoliberal regime of truths and practices that was precisely an attack on
the international and class compromises of the national welfare state system.
However, the exponential increase of the power of global financial markets in
the last two decades has made the US structural power ever more dependent on
healthy and stable global financial markets.

This then links back to the hegemonic crisis triggered by the Asian crisis
(and later to Joseph Stiglitz).  The Asian crisis awakened part of the
neoliberal elite to the dangers of unstable global capital markets for the US
global economic hegemony.  It is in this context that the criticisms of the
IMF and the Washington Consensus of neoliberals such as Paul Krugman, Jeffrey
Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz become understandable.  They seem to realise the
limits of neoliberalism as the economic doctrine of US hegemony.

Remarkable in Stiglitz's discourse (I do not know about Krugman and Sachs) is
its strident criticism of American unilateralism and the way the US Treasury
and the IMF pursue the narrow interests of US and transnational financial
capital at the expense of its role as global leader (I assume this is similar
to Robert's term `collective gendarme').  This sheds an interesting light on
Robert's following comment: "one `ideal' way in which capitalism might
function would be to establish an international relations superstructure which
would be seemingly independent of the action of individual states".  Stiglitz
can thus be seen as an organic intellectual who is able to see the limits of
US unilateralism and the way it makes international institutions as the IMF,WB
and the WTO work to the narrow interests of transnational financial capital
and tries to move US hegemony back to a more ideal way in which capitalism
might function by arguing for an international relations superstructure !
which is more institutionally separated from financial and transnational
capital.  His proposals go against some short term interests of the US and
transnational financial capital, but only to secure its long term interests.

I would be grateful to receive critical comments of you about this line of
hypothetical reasoning.

Best regards,
Stijn Oosterlynck



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