Samir Amin confronts empire
Samir Amin confronts Empire
The present crisis has demonstrated the ambitions of the United
States -- nothing short of bringing the entire planet under its
military control, writes Samir Amin
From the 1980s on, and with the collapse of the Soviet system,
the ruling class in the United States, whether Democrat or
Republican, began drawing up a hegemonic programme. Carried away
by its military power, and without any competitor able to temper
its fantasies, the US chose to reinforce its domination by deploying
a military strategy aiming at "planetary control". An early series
of interventions -- in the Gulf, Yugoslavia, Central Asia, Palestine
and Iraq -- began this plan for endless wars that would be "made in
the USA" and that would be planned and decided unilaterally by
Washington.
The political strategy that accompanied this programme set up the
pretexts for it, whether these had to do with terrorism, with the
fight against drug trafficking, or with accusations of producing
weapons of mass destruction. These are obvious pretexts when one
recalls the CIA's invention of convenient terrorist adversaries,
whether the Taliban or Bin Laden. Accusations of producing dangerous
weapons, made today against Iraq and North Korea, but tomorrow
against any convenient state, pale besides the actual use of these
weapons by the United States. The US used nuclear weapons at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and chemical weapons in Vietnam, and it is
threatening the further use of nuclear weapons in future conflicts.
Such pretexts are only propaganda tools, in the sense that Goebbels
gave that term: they are useful perhaps to convince slow-witted US
opinion but less and less credible elsewhere.
The idea of "preventive war", now claimed as a "right" by Washington,
does away with any notion of international law. The United Nations
Charter forbids the recourse to war except in cases of legitimate
self-defence, and it allows military intervention only under strict
conditions, any response having to be measured and provisional. All
specialists in international law know that the wars undertaken since
1990 have been completely illegitimate, and therefore those who bear
the responsibility for them are also war criminals. Indeed, the
United States, with the cooperation of other countries, is already
treating the United Nations as the fascist states treated the League
of Nations.
The abolition of the common rights of all peoples, already underway,
has substituted the distinction between a "Master Race" (Herrenvolk)
-- the people of the United States, and, behind them, those of Israel
-- and other peoples for the previous principle of the equality of
peoples. The existence of those peoples that do not belong to the US
Master Race can only be tolerated if they do not constitute a "threat"
to the ambitions of those calling themselves the "masters of the
planet". This Master Race reserves the right to conquer whatever
"living space" it judges necessary for itself and for those peoples
it supports.
What are the "national interests" that the US ruling class considers
as giving it this right?
This is a class that recognises only one objective -- that of making
money. The North American state is openly at the service of satisfying
the demands of the dominant segment of capital made up of US
multinationals.
We, therefore, have all become "Red Skins", the contemptuous name
reserved for the Native Americans, in the eyes of the Washington
establishment -- that is to say, peoples who have the right to exist
only in so far as they do not frustrate the expansion of US-based
multinational capital. We have been promised that resistance to the
US will be crushed using any and every means, even extermination if
necessary. If it is a question of making an additional 15 million
dollars in profit for the American multinationals at the expense of
300 million victims, then there will be no hesitation. The "rogue
state" par excellence, to borrow the language used by Presidents
Bush Senior and Junior, as well as by Clinton, is none other than
the United States itself.
The US programme is certainly imperialist in the most brutal sense
of that word, but it is not "imperial" in the sense that Antonio
Negri has given the term, since it does not aim to manage the
societies of the planet in order better to integrate them into a
coherent capitalist system. Instead, it aims only at looting their
resources. All this is part and parcel of the reduction of social
thought to the mantras of vulgar economics, the unilateral attention
paid to maximising the financial profitability of dominant capital
in the short term, supported by putting military means at the
disposition of this capital, and the delinking of this capital from
any system of human values. Such capital is behind the barbaric
expansionism capitalism carries within itself, substituting an
absolute demand of submission to the so-called laws of the market
for human values.
Throughout its history, North American capitalism has shown itself
to be readier than European varieties to take such steps. Politically,
the American state is designed to serve the economy and nothing else,
abolishing the contradictory and dialectical relationship between
economy and politics. The genocide carried out against the North
American Indians, the enslavement of the blacks, the successive waves
of immigration into the US leading to the substitution of
confrontation between groups sharing the same communal identity, as
manipulated by the ruling class, for the maturation of class
consciousness, have produced the political management of US society
by the single party of capital. Both segments of this party share
the same strategic global vision, though addressing their rhetoric
to different "constituencies", themselves drawn from the less than
half of US society that believes sufficiently in the system to bother
going out to vote.
Not benefiting from the tradition by which the social democratic
workers parties and the communists marked the formation of modern
European political culture, American society does not have the
ideological instruments at its disposal to allow it to resist the
dictatorship of capital. On the contrary, capital shapes every
aspect of this society's way of thinking, and reproduces itself by
reinforcing the kind of deep-seated racism that allows US society
to see itself as constituting a Master Race. "Playboy Clinton,
Cowboy Bush same policy": this slogan from India rightly emphasises
the nature of the single party that manages the so-called American
democracy.
For this reason, the North American programme is not the kind of
simple attempt to attain hegemony familiar from other hegemonic
attempts in ancient and modern history, involving a vision of
problems having coherent answers, whether based on economic
exploitation or political inequality. Instead, it is infinitely
more brutal in its simple and extreme unilateral conception, and
it is close to the Nazi programme, which was also based on the
principle of a Master Race. The US programme has nothing whatsoever
to do with the beliefs of certain American liberal academics, who
see US hegemony as "benign" ("painless").
If it should continue, this programme can only lead to growing
chaos, which will call for successively more and more brutal
management, with no strategic long-term vision. Finally, Washington
will not even attempt to support its real allies, something which
always means knowing how to make concessions. Fake governments,
like that of Karzai in Afghanistan, will manage things better as
long as military power supports a belief in the "invincibility"
of the US. Hitler did not think any differently.
An examination of the connections between the US's criminal
programme and the realities of dominant capitalism made up of the
countries of the Triad (the United States, Europe and Japan) will
allow the strengths and weaknesses of it to be understood.
General opinion, as promoted by the unreflective media, has it that
US military power only constitutes the tip of the iceberg, and that
it is the extension of American superiority in all areas, notably
economic, but even political and cultural. Therefore, such opinion
believes, submission to the hegemony that America pretends to is
inevitable.
However, an examination of economic realities undermines this view.
The US production system is far from being "the most efficient in
the world". On the contrary, almost none of its sectors would be
certain of beating competitors in the truly free market dreamt of
by liberal economists. The US trade deficit, which increases year
by year, went from 100 billion dollars in 1989 to 450 billion in
2000. Moreover, this deficit involved practically all areas of
production: even the surplus once enjoyed by the US in the area
of high-technology goods, which stood at 35 billion in 1990, has
now turned into a deficit.
Competition between Ariane rockets and those of NASA, as well as
between Airbus and Boeing, testifies to the vulnerability of present
American advantages. Faced by European and Japanese competition in
high-technology products, and by Chinese, Korean and other Asian
and Latin American industrialised countries in competition for
manufactured products, as well as by Europe and the southern cone
of Latin America in agriculture, the United States probably would
not be able to win were it not for the recourse to "extra-economic"
means, violating the principles of liberalism imposed on its
competitors.
In fact, the US only benefits from comparative advantages in the
armaments sector, precisely because this sector largely operates
outside the rules of the market and benefits from state support.
This probably brings certain benefits for the civil sphere in its
wake, the Internet being the best-known example, but it also
causes serious distortions that handicap many production sectors.
The North American economy lives parasitically to the detriment of
its partners in the world system: "the United States depends for
10 per cent of its industrial consumption on goods whose import
costs are not covered by the exports of its own products"
(Emmanuel Todd, After Empire).
The economic growth of the Clinton years, vaunted as the result
of a "liberalism" that Europe was unfortunately resisting, was
in fact largely fake, and it was, in any case, non- generalisable,
depending on capital transfers that meant the stagnation of
partner economies. For all sectors of the real production system,
US growth during this period was not better than that of Europe.
The "American miracle" was fed exclusively by a growth in
expenditure produced by growing social inequalities (financial
and personal services: the legions of lawyers and private police
forces, etc). In this sense, Clinton's liberalism prepared the
conditions for the reactionary wave, and later victory, of
Bush Jr. Moreover, as Todd writes, "blown up by fraud, American
GNP begins to resemble, in terms of statistical accuracy, that
of the Soviet Union".
The world produces, and the United States, which has practically
no funds in reserve, consumes. The "advantage" of the US is that
of a predator whose deficit is covered by loans from others,
whether consenting or forced. The means put in place by Washington
to compensate for deficiencies are of various kinds, including
repeated unilateral violations of liberal principles, arms
exports (60 per cent of the world market) largely imposed on
subaltern allies, such as the Gulf countries that never use
these weapons, search for greater profits from oil, which
presupposes greater control over the producers -- the real
reason for the wars in Central Asia and Iraq. Additionally,
through the direct exclusive control of the US over major oil
producing areas, Washington would succeed in its plan to
subordinate Europe. Europeans start understanding that these
wars are "anti-european".
The essential part of the American deficit is covered by
contributions of capital from Europe, Japan and the South --
from oil-rich countries and comprador classes of every country
of the Third World, the poorest included -- to which are added
the additional sums brought in from servicing the debt that has
been forced on practically all the countries on the periphery
of the world system. The reasons behind the continuing capital
movements that feed the parasitism of American economy and
society, and that allow this superpower to live from day to
day, are certainly complex. But they have nothing to do with
supposed "laws of the market" that are at once rational and
unchangeable.
The solidarity between the dominant segments of transnational
capital and the members of the Triad is real, and it explains
their rallying to globalised neo-liberalism. The United States
is seen as the defender, military if necessary, of "common
interests", though Washington hardly intends to "share fairly"
the profits of its leadership. On the contrary, it seeks to
make its allies into vassals, and is only ready to make minor
concessions to junior allies in the Triad. Will this conflict
of interests within dominant capital lead to the break-up of
the Atlantic alliance? Not impossible, but unlikely.
For the real conflict is situated on a different terrain, that
of political culture. In Europe, a left alternative is still
possible that would force a break with neo-liberalism, and with
the vain hope of forcing the US to submit to its principles,
thus allowing European capital to go into battle on terrain that
has not been mined in advance. The capital surplus that Europe
has until now been happy "to invest" in the US could then be
used to finance economic and social take-off, which would be
impossible without using at home this capital surplus. However,
were Europe to give priority to its own economic and social
growth in this way, the artificial health of the US economy
would collapse, and the American ruling class would be
confronted by its own social problems. That is what I mean by
saying that "Europe will either be on the left or it will not
be at all."
To get there, however, the illusion that the liberal card should,
or could, be played "honestly" by all and then things would get
better must be dispensed with. The US cannot give up the
asymmetric practice of liberalism, since this is the only way
that it can compensate for its deficiencies. American "prosperity"
comes at the price of others' stagnation.
Why, therefore, do capital flows to the US's benefit continue?
Probably because for many the US is "a country for the rich" and
the safest refuge for them: this is the case for investments made
by the comprador bourgeoisie of the Third World. But what explains
European attitudes? The "liberal virus", together with a naïve
belief that the US will end up accepting "market rules", has a
certain power over public opinion. Yet, the principle of the
"free circulation of capital", made sacred by the IMF, in fact
simply enables the US to cover its deficit by pumping in
financial surpluses generated elsewhere as a result of neo-
liberal policies, to which the US itself only very selectively
submits. However, for dominant capital the advantages of the
system overcome its inconveniences: this is the price that it
must pay to Washington in order to ensure the permanence of
the system.
Countries described as "indebted poor countries" are forced to
pay, but there is one "indebted powerful country" that will
never pay its debts. The real price imposed by US political
bargaining continues to be fragile for this reason. The
militarist programme chosen by the US establishment should be
seen in this perspective, being nothing other than an admission
that the US has no other means at its disposal to impose its
economic hegemony.
The causes of the weakening of the US production system are
complex. They are certainly not conjunctural, and they cannot
be corrected by the adoption of a correct rate of exchange, for
example, or by putting in place a more favourable balance between
salaries and productivity. On the contrary, they are structural.
The poor quality of general education and training in the US,
the product of a deep-rooted prejudice in favour of the "private"
to the detriment of the public sector, is one of the main reasons
for the profound crisis that US society is currently going through.
One should, therefore, be surprised that the Europeans, far from
drawing the conclusions that observation of the deficiencies of
the US economy forces upon one, are actively going about
imitating it. Here, too, the liberal virus does not explain
everything, even if it fulfills some useful functions for the
system in paralysing the left. Widespread privatisation and the
dismantling of public services will only reduce the comparative
advantages that "Old Europe" still benefits from. However,
whatever damage these things will cause in the long term, such
measures offer dominant capital, which lives in the short term,
the chance of making additional profits.
The militarist programme adopted by the United States now
threatens all peoples. It is the expression of the logic adopted
by Adolf Hitler -- to change social and economic relations by
military force in favour of the "Master Race" of the day. This
programme, now filling the foreground, over-determines all
political circumstances, since the pursuit of such a programme
weakens advances obtainable through social and democratic struggle.
Moreover this programme aims at making impossible - through
"preventive wars" - any other power (China in particular)
upgrading and becoming a "competitor", i.e. an equal partners.
Halting the US militarist programme becomes, therefore, a major
aim and responsibility for all.
Success in this struggle will depend on the capacity of people
everywhere to rid themselves of liberal illusions, since there
will never be an "authentically liberal" globalised economy.
This is the case despite all the means used to make us believe
in it: though World Bank discourse operates as a sort of Ministry
of Propaganda for Washington concerning "democracy",
"good governance" or the "reduction of poverty", it has no other
function than that. Joseph Stiglitz, around whom considerable
media noise was organised, discovering some elementary truths
and asserting them with an air of authority, was nevertheless
unable to draw the least conclusion calling the prejudices of
vulgar economics into question.
The reconstruction of a Southern Front capable of giving the
peoples of Asia and Africa, together with their solidarity across
three continents, the capacity to make their voices heard will
also come about by liberating ourselves from the illusions of a
"non-asymmetric" globalised liberal system that will allow the
nations of the Third World to make up their "backwardness". Is
it not ridiculous to watch the countries of the South insist
upon "putting liberal principles into practice without
discrimination", thus gaining the applause of the World Bank?
Since when was the World Bank concerned to defend the Third
World against the United States?
The combat against US imperialist aggressive project has to
develop on all grounds : diplomatic (forcing the respect of
international law), military (reinforcing the military capacities
of all countries in the world to resist eventual US aggression -
never forget that the USA did use the nuclear bomb when it
enjoyed that monopoly and refrained only when they lost it),
political and economic (putting an end to exporting capital
to support the US deficit).
The combat against US imperialism and against the US militarist
programme is a combat shared by all peoples, from its major
victims in Asia, Africa and Latin America, to the peoples of
Europe and the Japanese who are condemned to subordinate
positions, and also to the people of North America themselves.
We should salute the courage of all those "at the heart of the
beast" who have refused to submit, as their predecessors refused
to submit to the MacCarthyism of the 1950s. Like those who dared
to resist Hitler, they have merited all the praise that history
can heap upon them.
Will the dominant class in the United States be able to step
back from the criminal programme behind which it has rallied?
This is not an easy question to answer: little, or nothing,
in the history of US society prepares it for it. The single
party of capital, whose power in the US is not contested, has
thus far not given up on military adventure, and therefore
the responsibility of this class as a whole cannot be downplayed.
The power of Bush Jr is not that of a "clique" made up of the
armaments and oil producers. In the entire modern history of
the United States the dominant power has always been that of a
coalition of the sectoral interests of capital, falsely
described as "lobbies". However, this coalition can only govern
if other segments of capital accept it. Clearly, political,
diplomatic and even military setbacks could encourage the
minority in the US establishment ready to renounce the military
adventures the country is engaged in to do so. To hope for
more than this seems to me to be as naïve as to have hoped,
at the height of the Nazi regime, Adolf Hitler being convinced
that his plans were bound to fail.
If the Europeans had reacted in 1935 or 1937, they could have
stopped the Hitler regime. By reacting only in September 1939,
tens of millions lost their lives. Let us act together in the
hope that a response to the challenges posed by the present
Washington neo-Nazis will come earlier.
|