Re: Wood article in ATC

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown wrote:
> She says:
> The main place of capitalist power is, of course, the United States.  But
> what I've been trying to suggest here is that this imperial power depends
> not only on its own domestic state but on the whole global system of
> multiple states.  That means that every one of those states is an arena of
> struggle and a potential counter-power. 

You have to remember that Ellen Meiksins Wood was a major critic of 
those aspects of "globalization" theory that posited the withering of 
nation-states. As editor of MR, she made sure to play up authors like 
William Tabb and Doug Henwood who tried to redirect the discourse back 
to mainstream concepts of imperialism. Of course, Henwood wandered off 
in the opposite direction about 5 years ago. Once upon a time he 
polemicized against "globalony" but nowadays identifies strongly with 
Hardt and Negri.

One of the major flaws of Wood's article--leaving aside the confusion 
over extra-economic coercion and the lack thereof--is its rather narrow 
understanding of violence and subjugation of Third World peoples. By 
focusing almost exclusively on the US military, she misses the 
underlying problem. She writes:

"Take the case of Brazil, for example.  Suppose that Lula, instead of 
following the advice of neoliberal economists, did what we hoped he 
would and set an example to oppositional forces throughout the world. 
The United States wouldn't be very happy about that.  But—though I 
could, of course, be proved embarrassingly wrong about this—it seems to 
me all but inconceivable that the United States would respond by 
invading Brazil.

"So what other objectives of military action are there?  The so-called 
'demonstration effect' is always, and increasingly, a major 
consideration, to show the world that U.S. military force can go 
anywhere, anytime.  Precisely because the United States can't be 
everywhere all the time and because it can't establish a compliant 
system of states by means of constant war, it has to demonstrate its 
military supremacy with some regularity."

In fact the USA did not invade Venezuela last year. It simply got on the 
telephone and called up some friendly Generals as it did in Chile in 
1973. And will do in Brazil if the need arises. These armies are in 
effect extensions of the USA and serve to exert "extra-economic" 
coercion across the board. Invasions are generally a last resort. You 
might even say that open military attacks against a civilian population 
are the next to last resort. It is best to use the CIA and other such 
forces to meddle in the internal affairs of just about every country in 
the world. Or to control them through the power of the US corporate 
media. And so on.

If you stop and think about it, markets in the sense understood by 
Brenner and Wood are the exception to the rule. They exist in their pure 
form in industrialized countries that operate on the basis of 
parliamentary democracy. But probably in most countries violence or 
extra-legal repression of one form or another is used to undermine 
market relations. In many respects the countries of the South are mired 
in a kind of time-warp similar to England in the 15th century when 
peasants were being forcibly removed from their land. The big 
difference, of course, is that you don't have the prospects of something 
like an industrial revolution to absorb the surplus population.

Samir Amin:

Pauperization is a modern phenomenon which is not at all reducible to a 
lack of sufficient income for survival. It is really the modernization 
of poverty and has devastating effects in all dimensions of social life. 
Emigrants from the countryside were relatively well integrated into the 
stabilized popular classes during the golden age (1945–1975)—they tended 
to become factory workers. Now those who have recently arrived and their 
children are situated on the margins of the main productive systems, 
creating favorable conditions for the substitution of community 
solidarities for class consciousness. Meanwhile, women are even more 
victimized by economic precariousness than are men, resulting in 
deterioration of their material and social conditions. And if feminist 
movements have without doubt achieved important advances in the realm of 
ideas and behavior, the beneficiaries of these gains are almost 
exclusively middle-class women, certainly not those of the pauperized 
popular classes. As for democracy, its credibility—and therefore its 
legitimacy—is sapped by its inability to curb the degradation of 
conditions of a growing fraction of the popular classes.

Pauperization is a phenomenon inseparable from polarization on a world 
scale—an inherent product of the expansion of really-existing 
capitalism, which for this reason we must call imperialist by nature.

Pauperization in the urban popular classes is closely linked to the 
developments which victimize third world peasant societies. The 
submission of these societies to the demands of capitalist market 
expansion supports new forms of social polarization which exclude a 
growing proportion of farmers from access to use of the land. These 
peasants who have been impoverished or become landless feed—even more 
than population growth—the migration to the shantytowns. Yet all these 
phenomena are destined to get worse as long as liberal dogmas are not 
challenged, and no corrective policy within this liberal framework can 
check their spread.

full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm



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