From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 17 2002 - 23:24:16 EDT
An anonmyous analysis which was forwarded to me. A critique of the thesis of the possibility of organized capitalism. rb On the Oiseau-tempÈte special issue... "Plan of capital" After the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September, while the CIA sought to explain its inability to guard against such things and scrambled to find someone in the United States able to speak Pashto, leftwing commentators of many stripes speculated on the designs of the American state realized in the form of these events. Surely this was an aspect of a long-laid plot to seize control of Central Asian oil, to safeguard pipeline routes, to carry out some general plan for the control of Asia formulated after the fall of the Soviet Union. A curious feature of such conspiracy theories, in the U.S. at any rate, is that they echo a mode of thought employed by the ultra-right, which is obsessed with the plans of the federal government to control the country in the interest of the United Nations, world Jewry, or the Antichrist. The universal bar code now appearing on nearly all commodities is the first step in the governmental registry of all citizens (and perhaps also t! he Devil's mark, a preparation for the final war of Armageddon); efforts at gun control are attempts to disarm a population soon to be at the mercy of government agencies. The proximate roots of such views lie in the expansion of government regulatory and economic activity, not only in the United States but in all capitalist countries, in response to the Great Depression and in preparation for the second world war. After the war, the return of global prosperity did not bring the dismantling of state economic agencies. Rather, the state served to facilitate the international reorganization of the global capitalist economy under American hegemony. This seemed especially urgent given the existence of non-market systems of exploitation in the USSR and China, and the perceived threat of Communist influence in Europe after the war. The United States organized the Marshall Plan in Europe, and the reconstruction of the Japanese economy and polity, as means to counter this threat as well as to develop a world system suitable for the needs of American capital. NATO provided a multinational military organization protecting the "West". Eventually, the ! European nations organized themselves into the EC as a counter to American hegemony, an example followed, with varying degrees of success, by groups of nations on other continents. These developments seemed the realization of ideas proposed within the Social-Democratic movement since the end of the nineteenth century. Rudolf Hilferdingís theory of Finance Capital predicted the development of multinational capitalist cartels, which would be aided in their regulation of the capitalist economy by a rationalizing bureaucratic state. Socialism, Hilferding predicted, would thus be prepared by capitalism itself; all that would be required would be the taking over of the capitalist planning apparatus by an elected socialist government. Lenin adopted this view, stressing the international dimension - imperialism - of capitalist economic organization, and substituting vanguard party-led revolution for electoral politics. The Third International, founded after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia as an agency for the promotion of Soviet national interests, adapted Hilferding's vision to depict its leadership as the general headquarters of global revolution! ary forces, formulating strategy and tactics in the struggle for control of the world. Each change in the war plans of the capitalist enemy must be countered by Communist planning, transmitted in the form of the ever-changing line to the national parties around the world. It was this view that was mimicked, in a curious way, by capitalist ideologists after World War II. Not only the picture of the world as divided between tendentially unitary blocs - with a contested neutral "Third World" between the primary First and Second - but the idea of planned economies proved popular among ruling-class thinkers. There were national variations, of course: the United States officially insisted on the virtues of the (nonexistent) free market, while France touted the powers of state planning. But it is worth noting that a group of thinkers like the French "Regulation School" discovered a controlled economy in the behemoth of capitalism as well as at home. Similarly, Herbert Marcuse, reworking ideas already advanced in the 1930s by other members of the Frankfurt School, described a "one-dimensional society" in which Keynesian manipulation of the economy had eroded the traditional basis of class struggle. And yet events have shown the superior wisdom of the old idea of capitalism as an anarchic system, ruled by uncontrollable developmental processes the drive every period of prosperity and political stability in the direction of economic, political, and social crisis. Despite the once-touted wonders of Japanese management techniques and government overseeing of highly cartelized business activity, Japan has been in a state of depression for the last decade, with no apparent exit in sight. The "Asian crisis" of a few years ago has made its way throughout the world, under cover of the recently popped American stockmarket bubble, appearing most violently in Africa and now in Argentina, but even disturbing the powers that be in the United States itself. Economic troubles, as ever, have been accompanied by political instability. It may even be appropriate to describe the transformation of the USSR into a novel form of gangster capitalism as the most spectacular result of the malfunction of the world economy. At any rate, the stagnation and devolution of the underdeveloped parts of the world - including North Africa and the oil-producing states generally - has had the consequences we have seen, both for the Soviet Union, driven from Afghanis! tan by the union of American money and Islamist warriors, and now for the Americans. The latter now find themselves in a world they did not expect, even if they - or at least the group of people currently in power - still imagine they can master the international situation by military means, while simply hoping for the return of prosperity on the domestic front. If the current American governing class - and in this there is little significant difference between the two parties - has an economic plan, it seems to amount largely to stealing as much of the national income as possible for themselves personally but especially for the economic interests that pay for their elections. In this they are continuing the great work of the Reagan government, of restructuring the tax codes and government economic activities so as to accelerate the transfer of money from the working class to the wealthy minority at the top of the system. They are completely unprepared, except for expanded police powers, to deal with the growing masses of unemployed, homeless, ill-fed people without access to health care the system is producing. They are unable to think beyond the immediate economic imperatives of the energy industry and other business oriented towards petroleum-based fuels to consider seriously the eventual decline in these fuels, not to mention! the effects on the environment.-Of course, governments and private think tanks pay for thousands of experts of various stripes to project scenarios of possible economic, political, and military futures. Just as groups like Al Qaeda and the Uzbekistan Islamic Movement no doubt dreamt of creating a system of Islamic states in Central Asia, to be financed by eventual exploitation of oil reserves in Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, western companies, with the support of their governments, have had their eyes on the same properties. Since September 11, such plans have been on hold, along with the project of an Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. What coalitions of states and corporations will eventually realize what projects only time will tell. Meanwhile, as in the past, military adventures will alter the situation in ways unanticipated by the politicians who initiate them, while the continuing erosion of the world economy will continue to produce new political and social realities. In the state of affairs with which we are confronted, the idea of capitalist plotting and planning seems little more than an imaginary counterpart to would-be leftist strategists' dreams o! f their own dubious significance. PM, New York
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