[Marxism] Today's Imperialism - Uniquely American

[Intense Red <intnsred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(From: 
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102804_todays_imperialism.shtml)

Today's Imperialism - Uniquely American

How credit and debt put the United States on topâ so far

By Stan Goff

[This is the third installment of Stan Goff's report on the political economy 
of US imperialism, a series which started with a critique of American policy 
toward Iran: "Persian Peril." That impending lunge may or may not occur under 
the current Resident, but the eventuality is more than likely. Goff's 
analysis is strikingly sophisticated, drawing on the World Systems Theory of 
Immanuel Wallerstein,1 Rosa Luxembourg's enduring insights into capital and 
power, and Goff's own considerable experience with the machinery of American 
hegemony.

As this article goes to press in the new issue of FTW's print newsletter, we 
learn that India has just decided to sell $120 billion of its US Treasury 
reserves: "In addition," writes Edward Luce in the Financial Times, "India's 
record foreign exchange reserves represent a large "opportunity cost", 
[Indian officials] say, since most of the money is invested in low-yielding 
US Treasury bonds. 'We are subsidizing the American economy,' said one 
official. 'These are scarce resources that can be put to better use.'"2 And 
there's more news like that. China has just raised interest rates for the 
first time in 9 years, so American suppliers of China's vast appetite for raw 
materials are seeing their stocks bounce down. There's a big difference 
between China's rising interest rates and ours: they're trying to rein in 
their runaway growth, while we just want to slow the inflation of our empty 
economic balloon.

How can an isolated individual understand what's going on, without the benefit 
of a fully-funded and freethinking university system? Follow the map: follow 
the oil, and the gold, and the guns, and the drugs. Follow the money. -- JAH]

The United States is dominant in the world - materially dominant, and not 
merely financially dominant. But the theories of Hilferding, Hobson, and 
Lenin on imperialism do not accurately describe the actual character of US 
domination unless we selectively censor a lot of information - as certain 
sectors of the left have been wont to do.

From the very beginning, the Hilferding-Hobson-Lenin theses centered on the 
needs of monopoly capital as the driving force that led to inter-imperialist 
rivalry, and to the First World War. These theses held true for Europe and 
the stage of imperialism that they witnessed.

But as Michael Hudson exhaustively documents in Super Imperialism, the United 
States began in the First World War by exploiting this rivalry itself to gain 
advantage, and the predominant actor was not monopoly capital, but the US 
state. While there is no doubt that the state was acting on behalf of its own 
capitalists, it was not doing so in a largely reactive way but in a 
leadership role.

The US did so first in the role of national creditor, then - even more 
stunningly - in the role of national debtor.

While the US had employed direct conquest and domination in its own 
hemisphere, it was not drawn into the inter-imperialist rivalry that sparked 
WWI. So the US did not find itself predominantly "exporting capital" to its 
colonies via private institutions, but exporting it to the advanced 
capitalist states, particularly Great Britain, as loans for their war with 
the Germans and Ottomans, loans approved and guaranteed by the United States 
government.

The United States stayed out of the war until it became likely that without US 
intervention, the Allies would lose and their debts to America would remain 
unpaid. Once the war was over, Great Britain and France were heavily 
indebted, and the US - far from being the benevolent post-war ally - behaved 
much like any Brooklyn loan shark, bleeding its former allies so severely 
that they in turn wrecked the post-war German economy with reparations to 
assist the allies in their debts. This led directly to the rise of Nazism and 
the Second World War.

Whereupon, the US began its participation, again, not as a fellow combatant, 
but as a creditor to the other allies. It is now very clear that Franklin 
Roosevelt developed financial designs on the colonies of the British Empire, 
and that he maneuvered throughout the war to let others - particularly the 
Soviet Union, but also England and France - take the brunt of Hitler's 
aggression to weaken them, while he built up the geographically war-immune US 
industrial base, and positioned the US to be a post-war creditor and the new 
super-power.

It is a demonstrable fact that England has been a satellite of the United 
States ever since the First World War, and this accounts for the unsavory 
affinity of Tony Blair's lips for George W. Bush's faux-cowboy ass. Tony will 
eagerly jump aboard the bandwagon to attack Iran soon.

Britain was the principle (but not the only) target of US post-war 
loan-sharking in the 20s and 30s. Prior to the 1929 crash, the US bled the 
British Empire like a financial vampire, driven more by an archaic banker's 
ruthlessness than by any prescient self-interest. In fact, the US state had 
no idea at the time that they were becoming the principal cause of what would 
be the world's most destructive war only two decades later.

After the speculative crash of 1929, with the US in the worst economic 
doldrums it had ever experienced, and with significant sectors of the US 
working class looking with great interest at Russia's example from 1917, 
Franklin Roosevelt was elected the 33rd President of the United States in 
1933, with a mandate to take extraordinary measures ostensibly to relive the 
suffering of the American working class masses, but more importantly - from 
the point of view of US elites - to take the increasingly revolutionary edge 
off of their agitations.

Roosevelt then became the first president to abandon the gold standard and 
conduct a cold-blooded strategic devaluation of the US currency as a weapon 
against its putative allies in Europe. This was a policy of deliberate 
inflation domestically to raise prices as part of his domestic pre-Keynesian 
overhaul, but it further battered the European exporters, especially Britain, 
who needed to export to the US in order to acquire the dollars to pay their 
compounding WWI debts.

This was the first intentional foray into state-initiated economic warfare 
using currency as a weapon, and it displayed just a glimmer of understanding 
that in state-to-state economic competition, the central banks would become 
the primary battlefield. In the competition between private capitals, the 
state would eventually become the referee to ensure the health of the whole, 
and one state would dominate the general direction of global capital 
accumulation. But this was only a glimmer then.

The Law of Unintended Consequences caused WWII, and hit the US with an even 
deeper economic crisis. The combined refusal of the US to negotiate new terms 
with the Europeans for repayment of war debts and the strategic devaluation 
of the gold-free dollar led to a series of competitive devaluations of 
European national currencies - a destructive race to the bottom - that ended 
up hitting the United States like a tsunami. [...]

(More at: 
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102804_todays_imperialism.shtml)

-- 
While we sit comfortably using our computers, soldiers paid for with our taxes 
are killing and torturing innocent people half a world away in order to open 
their country to US corporations and steal their oil; we have blood on our 
hands.

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