Re: Re: Re: Chossudovsky on Iraq bombing..

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:49 AM 02/24/2001 -0800, you wrote:
> Not long ago on the list, there seemed to be an agreement that a war could
> take the US out of economic crisis. That is not far fetched, Mandel made a
> point of it, the Marxist theory of war could be woven around it, insofar
> as aggression remains the fifth facet of imperialism, and even Paul
> Samuelson, in his introduction to economics, hints at certain crisis in
> the cycle which were overcome by war.

I've always thought that the idea that war was somehow an automatic
consequence of economic crisis -- or would automatically solve economic
crises -- was the hallmark of crude Marxism. Crises may encourage war by
tilting the political balance toward warlike interest groups, but they may
also cause civil war and the like. Similarly, sometimes wars solve crises
(as World War II did for the US and its allies) but they can make things
worse economically (as World War I did for the losers).

The fact is under capitalism, policies such as war result from the
competition of capitalist interest groups, usually organized as elites.
Some benefit from militarism, others don't. [This vision is a bit like
pluralism, but, crucially, some interest groups -- e.g, those with the most
money -- have the most influence. Further, the same thing happens in other
types of society. The clash of interest groups was merely hidden in the old
USSR.]

> Now comes Michel Chossudovsky to pinpoint a specific incidence, the
> bombing of Iraq, in which a calculus of happiness between stock market
> performance and strategic imperialist objectives results in optimum gains
> for uncle Sam; That the US has to bomb Iraq is not an  issue: it simply
> has to or it would not be itself...

The US _has to_ bomb Iraq? Even if Nader had won the election? I don't
think historical events are _ever_ predetermined. Maybe Nader's victory was
extremely unlikely (actually, there's no "maybe" about it), but if there
were a full-scale anti-establishmentarian movement in this country at this
time, it might be able to block foreign-policy adventures.

Optimum gains for Uncle Sam? the problem with this is that the "optimum
gains" are defined differently by different elites. (Similarly, some
interest groups prefer high oil prices while others prefer low ones.) And
as Doug notes, the stock market isn't that important. And many gain when it
goes down.

> Ps. In some recent figure about stock ownership, the rich owned something
> like 96% of all stocks. Of course that depends on what threshold was used
> for the rich.

Of course the lion's share of stocks are owned by the rich (they're the
ones who can afford to take such financial risks). But different rich
people often have different interests (except when the chips are down and
their class dictatorship is threatened), while they often leave issues of
foreign policy to professionals. The latter are all pro-capitalist, but
there's a lot of debate within the establishment about what
"pro-capitalist" means.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine