A Conference on Imperialism

posted to www.marxmail.org on December 6, 2003

Yesterday's conference on imperialism at Columbia University was held at the palatial Casa Italiana, a recently restored edifice that was entirely appropriate to the occasion in a distaff fashion. As my eyes wandered about the auditorium during a particularly boring talk, I had to chuckle inwardly at all the symbols of the Roman Empire that festooned the wall, such as the fresco of Romulus and Remus, the two legendary founders of Rome, being suckled by a she-wolf. If a similar legend were created for the new Roman Empire, it would probably depict George W. Bush and Dick Cheney being suckled by a rabid vampire bat.

A student neoconservative in the Daily Spectator had attacked the conference in terms that have become familiar in the David Horowitz neo-McCarthyite era:

"Columbia's conference on U.S. imperialism in the 21st century this Friday, so soon after the deadly suicide bombings in Turkey, shows how willful ignorance is rotting the core of this University's intellectual life."

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I1A422CB6

The conference was the brainchild of the late Edward Said, who turned the organizing over to Bashir Abu-Manneh and Hamid Dabashi, a couple of left-leaning professors. Dabashi's opening remarks consisted largely of bitter complaints about the impotence of the academic left and the conference's failure to include any of the millions of disenfranchised and super-exploited members of the colonial world in whose name it spoke.

All in all, this reminded me of the complaint I used to hear all the time on the Marxism list that preceded this one. Lou Godena, a Maoist CPUSA member who had graduated from Harvard University in the 1970s, always asked where were the workers on the Marxism list. My reaction was identical in both cases. If that kind of representation were ready to manifest itself, we wouldn't be wasting time at conferences or on listservs. More likely, we'd be dodging bullets in street combat with fascist bands.

Dabashi has been fingered on Daniel Pipes's redbaiting Campus Watch website. His response to this can be read at: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article747.shtml where he says, among other things:

"A whole culture and an entire civilization have been systematically maligned by a succession of illiterate charlatans--all the way from jaundiced orientalist like Bernard Lewis to failed academics like Daniel Pipes. They can no longer get away with it. They are now angry because they no longer have a monopoly of public forums. This is not the United States of even two decades ago. Massive labor migrations over the last couple of decades have permanently changed the demographic constitution of the US. The courageous and imaginative work of dissident intellectuals like my dear and distinguished colleague here at Columbia, Edward Said, has enabled a whole generation of defiant voices that have for ever changed the shape and vision of civil discourse and public engagement. As late as two years ago these shallow shells and empty voices thought they can force Columbia to fire Edward Said, its most glorious achievement in its entire history, its claim to fame. From every magnificent page that Edward Said has written a defiant book is now in press. These people are old, very old, in the very fabric of their claim to an intellect."

The first panel was on "The Politics and Economics of Expansion".

David Harvey presented ideas drawn from his recent "The New Imperialism". He dwelled at length on the oil connection, especially the US's need to maintain control over resources that would be the lifeblood of China in the coming decades.

Although not quite expressed in the same sweeping terms as Immanuel Wallerstein, Harvey views the USA as a declining hegemon. He made the case that US postwar hegemony rested on 4 institutions: industrial production, finance, the military and cultural production. With the decline of US industry and recent challenges to the dollar, it would appear that military power is the sole guarantee of US hegemony today. This would explain the war in Iraq. By maintaining a tight grip on petroleum, the US would be able to dictate terms to its oil-starved rivals.

The only problem with this scenario according to Harvey is that the USA has overprojected its military power. It is one thing to rain bombs on a defenseless population from a B-52. It is another to actually impose an occupation on a restive population. Unfortunately, Harvey did not feel comfortable with the implications of immediate withdrawal from Iraq, since the power vacuum would leave chaos and civil war in its wake. He failed to recognize, however, the importance of an Iraqi victory for global struggles against US imperialism. If fedayeen armed with nothing but rocket-propelled grenades can defeat the most advanced military power in world history, then liberation struggles will be encouraged. In that sense, the domino theory was always correct.

Harvey was followed by Gérard Duménil, a French economist who is deeply involved with empirical studies of production and income that are intended to corroborate Marxist economic categories such as the falling rate of profit. (http://www.cepremap.ens.fr/~levy/index.htm)

His main point is that neoliberalism is mainly involved with redividing the pie shared by boss and worker in order to give the former a bigger slice at the expense of the latter. Before WWII, the US rich enjoyed 16 percent of national income. This was reduced to 8 percent in the postwar period but has recently returned to 15 percent under the two-party attack on wages and living standards.

Globally, increased exploitation levels have matched this pattern. Nearly half of US corporate income comes from overseas operations that are to the disadvantage of 3rd world countries. Since raw material prices have been dropping to historical levels, the industrialized countries are virtually robbing countries like Guatemala and Nigeria. This asymmetric relationship is sustained by the power of US finance, which imposes debt regimes on 3rd world countries. Closely related to this predatory relationship is a deepening consumerist logic in advanced capitalist countries, which is made possible by cheap consumer goods manufactured in 3rd world countries.

Duménil considers his analysis to be at odds with Harvey's "declinism", but both positions are held at such a high level of geopolitical abstraction that it is difficult to see how they translate into terms that can actually be validated empirically. During a break I told my friend Ahmet Tonak, the eminent Marxist economist and all-round nice guy, that both Duménil and Harvey left out of the equation the most important aspect of US hegemony, namely the collapse of the USSR. I would maintain that if there was still a USSR, the USA would be much more reluctant to see its industrial base dwindle to such a degree. As Dick Gephardt told an interviewer the other night in the course of defending steel tariffs, without a steel industry you can't defend the country--which really should be translated into: "Without steel, you can't rule the world".

Ellen Meiksins Wood spoke next and repeated arguments she has made elsewhere in connection with her new book "Empire of Capital".

Since I have described them elsewhere (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/Wood_interview.htm), I will not comment on them here except to say that she has become almost monomaniacal around the question of tying an analysis of contemporary imperialism to the Brenner thesis.

Following Wood was Robert Buzzanco, a professor at the U. of Houston who made much of "divisions in the ruling class" over Iraq. He is the author of a book on dissent in the military over Vietnam, which was not about angry black privates fragging white lieutenants, but Generals worrying over and allegedly resisting LBJ and Nixon's plans for escalating the war. In a nutshell, Buzzanco is pushing for an alliance between the antiwar movement and bourgeois politicians although he didn't have the gumption to come out and say that in as many words.

After lunch there was a panel on "Imperial Geopolitical Relations" that was about as high-level as the morning's session.

The first presenter was British professor Peter Gowan who is a specialist on competition between Europe and the USA, especially in the financial arena. Apparently he was in the Trotskyist movement briefly like a lot of the editors and contributors to New Left Review. Unfortunately, except for Tariq Ali, none seems to have the fire and passion of Ernest Mandel who recruited most of them.

Gowan made the point that capitalism can never be a truly unified global system, since there are so many conflicts between individual states. Instead you have elements of cooperation and competition between them. An example would be the refusal of Europe to accept a US proposal on Merger and Acquisition standards. However, in my view this is not the same sort of thing that Lenin was grappling with in 1914.

He also talked about the role of the USA in establishing a unipolar system after WWII that would provide for the security of capitalist states trying to forestall socialist revolution or military threats from the USSR. A key element of the post-WWII order was transforming Japan and Germany into major industrial powers. This combination of military and economic ties provided fertile soil for the expansion of capitalism until the recent period.

With the collapse of the USSR, the need for US military security would seem to have disappeared. However, the US military has not shrunk at all. For Gowan, this points to the need for the USA to re-establish the kind of primacy it once enjoyed. By asserting its military power in Iraq, it establishes its place in the pecking order as other states are reduced to vassalage status.

As I said in my response to Rahul, Gowan believes that a Dean or Kucinich presidency would stop this trend. I think that he is kidding himself. Kucinich will never become a candidate and Dean is no Kucinich. He is instead a conventional Democratic Party liberal who would return the USA to the kind of multilateralism that Clinton embodied. As Gowan himself admitted, even Clinton sought to re-establish US primacy.

Gilbert Achcar spoke next. Although he is highly regarded in some circles, I found his presentation discursive to the point of being meandering and could not keep track of what he was trying to say. Someday I will try to read one of his articles to see what the hubbub is about.

He was followed by Boston University professor Irene Gendzier who said that the war occurred because people were not aware of certain government documents that could be found in less-traveled sections of the library. These documents show that--believe it or not--Saddam Hussein and the USA were the best of friends in the early 1980s. If Americans knew about this, they never would have allowed the government to invade Iraq. I should mention that Jared Israel hails from Boston as well.

Rashid Khalidi spoke next about what was new in the Bush "turn", namely the exercise of preemptive strikes. He was also a guest on the Charlie Rose show only 2 nights earlier where he appeared alongside the atrocious Thomas Friedman, who needs to get rid of that awful moustache. Maybe he should chop his head off to do the trick. As Edward Said professor of Mideastern affairs at Columbia, Khalidi is an eloquent spokesman for Palestinian rights and Moslem people in general. This has earned him a spot on Daniel Pipes's website as well about which he said:

"It is a McCarthyite attempt to silence the very few voices that speak out about the Middle East, and to impose by fear a uniformity of view on the campus debate. This monitoring of the classroom is reminiscent of the tactics used by police-state dictatorships. It intends further to delegitimize and marginalize the field of Middle East studies."

full: http://www.electronicintifada.net/v2/article718.shtml

In the final panel on "Solidarity and Anti-Imperialism", I had the great pleasure to hear Mike Davis for the first time in my life. Davis is somewhat notorious for accepting speaking engagements and not showing up. He is a somewhat ascetic and mournful looking man in his early 60s with close-cropped gray hair and beard, looking for all the world like a monk or Irish Catholic priest.

His talk was a model for these types of gathering and put just about every other speaker to shame. He tried to explain the importance of a shift in demographics in the 3rd world from the countryside to the city. In the early days of the colonial struggle, the fight was mainly in the countryside and peasant-based. The city might have supplied the intelligentsia but not the fighters. A partial explanation was the class nature of the city, which put many inhabitants into compromised positions as servants and soldiers of the colonizers.

This has begun to change drastically in the late 20th century as transformations in the countryside drive people into cities like Mexico City, Cairo, and Jakarta. But they are not absorbed into the working class as they were in Engels time when he wrote "Conditions of the Working Class in England". They constitute a major portion of the "informal economy" and subsist by begging, peddling and petty crime. Despite their failure to develop class bonds, there are strong bonds based on earlier traditional patterns of the village. The 'colonias' of Mexico City are one example; the Shiite slums in Baghdad are another. These vast slums will be important arenas of revolutionary struggle, but not in a conventional Marxist sense. Ideological hybrids will characterize many of the movements that are churned up.

I expect that Davis's talk will appear in print at some point. When it does, I will surely alert comrades to this.

Akeel Bilgrami gave a rather low-keyed talk on the clash of civilizations. He was followed by Francis Fox Piven, a CUNY professor and DSA figure, who gave what amounted to a Nation Magazine editorial from sketchy notes. Highly disappointing. The last speaker was Rahul Mahajan who castigated the left for not being sufficiently anti-imperialist, something I have dealt with already in copious detail.

All in all, a demonstration of the best and the worst of the academic left.