RE: Re: inter/ra imperialist contradictions

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Chris B. writes:.There is a degree of inter-imperialist, or perhaps we
should say more intra-imperialist, rivalry. <

the key thing that's changed from Lenin's day is the end of _military_
rivalry amongst the imperialist powers and the shift to more purely economic
rivalry. After all, Europe is part of the US-dominated NATO and Japan is
still largely demilitarized. (Further, the on-going economic integration of
these economies shifts the rivalry toward the firm-vs.-firm level.

As I wrote in my 1994 RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY article on the great
depression (which is also on my web-site): >Replacing military battles among
the core countries over territory were civil wars in, and border-wars among,
peripheral countries (now including Eastern Europe) -- along with efforts by
core countries against individual countries in the periphery (as against
Panama in 1990). Wars have shifted from the core to the periphery even more
than during Polanyi's "Hundred Year's Peace" [1812-1914, which of course
wasn't that peaceful]. In the core, state-against-state economic competition
also seems increasingly less likely than the less-violent competition among
transnational capital.

As I added in more recent annotations:>Needless to say, I consider to
Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and the like (where armed combat has flared) to be
on the capitalist periphery, not the core. The 1999 US/NATO war against
Serbia fits my generalization very well: it is a war of the unified rich
capitalist countries against a peripheral country.<

Similar comments can be made about the war against Afghanistan, though the
US is not treating its European or Japanese "peers" with as much respect as
during the Serbia war.

Jim D.