From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 23:57:26 EST
In 8010 Paul Bullock wrote: >Brenner has been gadding about, he was at SOAS in London 2 November and >various places in UK after. > >Here he has faced severe and extensive criticism eg in two issue of >Dialectical Materialism no's 4 and 5. At SOAS it was all very friendly, but >he had few allies. He is not regarded as a 'Marxist' by most ( excluding >the eccentrically enthusiastic introduction to his NLR article in 1998 by >Perry Anderson) although his strong 'liberal' ideas are well recognised. > >He seems to do his best to avoid the issue of the day - Imperialism. So too, >did most of the panel at SOAS except Weeks in a general sense. From the >floor only Hillel Tickton and David Yaffe took up Imperialism and what Marx >was really concerned with... revolution. Brenner did take up imperialism and spoke of the grave possibility of the reappearance of the seemingly anachronistic forms of colonial occupation, plunder and theft. I'll relate what he said in a moment. While Brenner may downplay imperialism, it seems to me that the theoretical difficulty of the day is in grasping capital as global social relation (see Cyrus Bina and John Holloway). Here's an example of the problem. Brenner argues in The Boom and the Bubble, pp.130ff that the post-95 recovery in US corporate profitability was killed by the wild escalation in the relative value of the dollar (which--I assume--took away global market share and increased the real value of US debt). Greenspan's wildly loose monetary policy which has had Dr Richebacher and the other von Miseans very hot under the collar could neither reverse the upward hike of the dollar nor reduce interest costs sufficiently to boost absolute US corporate profitability. The dollar thus rose from 1996 on as a result of panic and recession elsewhere (and the US, Japanese and Germans governments also engineered a reverse Plaza Accord which helped to ensure that the Japanese would keep their massive holdings in short term, easy-to-liquidate US Treasury debt); consequently, a nascent recovery in US profitability was quickly killed off as US capital was simply aboard the sinking ship of global capital and could not rise above it even though it was on the top floor of the Titanic (to use Cyrus' metaphor). Favorable changes in the US VCC, S/V, U/P labor ratio may have seemed to poise the US economy for an uptick in profitability or at least not for a sudden negative reversal in profitability after 1995-6. But alas the titanic ship of global capital was sinking. And the social relation of global capital proved itself be the truly hegemonic one (Bina), not the imperialism of the US which has been an ineffectual response to the global crisis and all the more violent and blustering one for that very reason. This suggests to me that no national economy is immune from the condition of capital as global social relation and that capital as a global social relation is (as Cyrus puts it) sui generis--by which I mean something more than a sum of national capitalist economies. A multicelluar living organism cannot be reduced to physico-chemical reactions in all its individual cells; capital as a global social relation cannot be reduced to the sum of profit movements in different national economies. One cannot fully understand the workings of a single cell by the most thorough study of it alone but only by comprehension of its place and function within the organism as a whole. Now of course the living organism of global capitalism is in ill health which has predisposed it to the cancer which is simply the US cells living off the other cells in the body until the body and the cancer cells both die. At any rate, due to my rejection of reductionism (and its close ally methodological individualism or in this case methodological nationalism), I remain skeptical of attempts by the new quantitative Marxists to determine the trajectory of a profit rate within a nation solely by the construction of national data sets. The available data may only allow for solid empirical Marxist estimates in national terms but this could be no more a good way for finding the condition of the global capitalist system than the drunk who figures his best place for locating his lost keys on a pitch black night is underneath a far-away streetlight. I reiterate: the main theoretical problem is not specifying the modalities of imperialism but in the grasping of capital as a social relation. The main revolutionary task is not anti imperialism but worker internationalism. Though of course national and racial chauvinism pose obstacles to the latter. At any rate, this is what Brenner had to say about US imperialism: He had only short time to comment on US foreign policy, but I remember the following points: *it is questionable whether war against the Iraqi Ba'ath regime, much less old-style colonial occupation, is in the interests of the US capitalist class as a whole at this point rather than just that clique which stole the election and now wishes to regain some of the pumping rights which were lost with the wave of nationalizations in the 70s. *it is doubtful that US foreign policy is aimed at increasing or stabilizing the flow of oil as it is after all the US which now leads the boycott of Iraqi oil. The clique is more interested in a better share of profits, greater control over upstream operations, etc. *Israel is probably worried about a geopolitical threat which may interfere with its handling of the so called Palestinian problem. *However, if stagnation persists, the American capitalist class as a whole may accede to a militarization of the US economy not only for the purposes of a straight rip off of colonial resources but also for a pump priming of the economy. The name of that old finance minister Hjalmar Schact was mentioned. A programme of colonization and seemingly anachronistic occupations would find support outside the already mentioned clique. rb
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