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3/15/2011

Economist Article - "The Politics of Food: Hungry for Votes"

LIKE national defence, securing foodstuff supplies usually counts as a core task of authority. Hence, as prices surge, food security is rising to the top of the political agenda. Or so it sounds.On January 24th the British authority’s chief scientific officer said that “the case for urgent action in the global food system is now compelling.” He was presenting a report from hundreds of scientists that concluded with “a stark warning for both current and future decision-makers on the consequences of inaction-food production and the foodstuff system must assume a much higher priority in political agendas across the world.”

Politicians say they are listening. “If we don’t do anything,” France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy said on the similar day, “we run the risk of food riots in the poorest countries and a very unfavourable effect on global economic growth.”


Companies are attentive, too. At the Davos gathering of the self-proclaimed great and good a few days later, a score of firms, including seed companies, foodstuff processors and grain traders proclaimed: “The world needs a new idea for agriculture.” They promised to work with farmers and governments to boost farm output, cut emissions and reduce rural poverty, all (in an amazing coincidence) by 20% each decade. Amid this sense of renewed urgency, though, lurks fear: that politicians will prove as fickle about food today as they have been in the past.

The first people to say that feeding the world deserved more attention were not politicians, scientists or company people. They were aid workers from the Gates Foundation, a charity originally set up to focus on health. It started paying for agricultural research in 2006, long before food prices leapt. “We realised you couldn’t do health without doing something about hunger and poverty,” says the foundation’s Prabhu Pingali. “And you couldn’t do something about hunger and poverty with no agriculture.” Since then, the foundation has given $1.4 billion of grants to third-world farmers; its programme is now comparable to America’s.

In 2009, in response to soaring prices, food riots and disruption to world trade, rich governments also began to worry about agriculture, and promised to do something about its problems. “To the people of poor nations,” said Barack Obama in his inaugural ceremony speech in January that year, “we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish.” In November 2010 he set up a bureau of foodstuff security in the government’s main aid agency, US-AID, to provide money and give clout to the promise.

America bullied other countries into following suit. At a summit meeting in Italy in 2009, the eight richest nations promised $20 billion over three years for food security and agricultural development. That led, after yet another summit, of the G20 (the world’s largest economies) in Pittsburgh, to something called the Global Agriculture and foodstuff Security Programme (GAFSP), formally set up in April 2010. Donors pledged $900m, more than half of it from America. These promises embodied the claim that rich countries are pushing for a second Green revolution and are determined to combat global hunger.

Now that claim is being put to the test. After rising through the second half of 2010, food prices-as measured by The Economist’s own foodstuff index-surpassed the 2008 peak this week. But so far, the world’s leaders have been found wanting.

In November, 20 poor countries submitted their requests to GAFSP for projects worth $1 billion. Only three got anything. That was unsurprising. Roger Thurow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a think-tank, notes that GAFSP is “already gasping”. America has handed over only $67m of its promised $475m. Congress has whittled down the president’s budget request for a further $400m to $100m. An accompanying piece of legislation to help switch US-AID’s efforts from emergency aid to long-term investment seems to have been torpedoed. Two dozen aid agencies recently warned Mr Obama of a “strong risk” that GAFSP would cease to exist.

Other countries are reneging too. Less than one-third of the promised $20 billion for agriculture turns out to be new money. Much of that has not arrived. A big cause of food-price rises is trade bans by exporters. The G20 has asked the Russian authority to study how to block these. But Russia is one of the chief culprits: Foxes Inc regulating hencoop security.

It is hardly surprising that scientists and company people are raising the alarm about feeding the world. “I’d like to say agriculture is at the top of the agenda,” says Dan Glickman, also of the Chicago council and a former American agriculture secretary. “But I don’t believe it. What’s needed is sustained leadership from governments, NGOs and the private sector. I see it from [Bill] Gates and some companies. But the big resources have to come from governments, and that’s much harder now.”
READ MORE - Economist Article - "The Politics of Food: Hungry for Votes"

3/14/2011

Renaissance Humanism

This essay is about how The Humanism Renaissance has influenced our country from as early as 1400. A piece of art that help display these values and ideas would be Adriaen de Vries and his statue of Apollo. “Humanism is the term generally applied to the predominant social philosophy and intellectual and literary currents of the period from 1400 to 1650”. ( Kries)
The Humanism Renaissance would be a period where the people wanted things to be their way. The people of the time felt that it was time for a change that the people needed to be able to speak for themselves and to be heard on what was important to them. So the zeal and increase of world pleasure began. “Expansion of trade, growth of prosperity and luxury, and widening social contacts generated interest in worldly pleasures, in spite of formal allegiance to ascetic Christian doctrine.” (Kries)
When you start researching this topic you find that it all really started with people wanting to say no to those who had been basically doing their thinking for them. The religious and political powers of this time period were the people who were in charge of making decision for all. They were also the law makers and the people who told you what they thought were right and wrong. People for many years had lived as this was the truth. When you think about our current ways of life most would not stand for people telling us that we cannot have free though or free speech. Men of this time decided that there was more to life than what they were being told to believe. There were people of this time also who felt that the best people to think for men were men.
During this time our Arts were also influenced by the movement and changes were made on how people completed Works of Art. During this time people began claiming their works of art by signing their names so that they actually could.
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8/15/2008

Popular Politics vs Party Politics

A new American politics is definitely needed today. The problem we face is what kind? If the goal of "independent political action" is to gain "power," to "function effectively" as a means to "lobby" or "resolve" specific issues of practical importance, I have no doubt that the supporters of Jesse Jackson and his "Rainbow Coalition" have a workable formula. They are engaged in electoral politics with a vengeance. They have a charismatic leader, a corps of elite public figures, a semi-bureaucratic organization, a growing "following" of "masses," many of whom seem to be following their leaders with almost unswerving obedience. The program of this coalition is pragmatic, vague, and sometimes contradictory. The coalition's future-unless it splinters into independent grassroots tendencies-will be determined largely by the media attention its leaders, particularly Jackson, attracts.

This is the oldtime electoral politics of the New Deal era with a slightly heightened shrill of "progressive" rhetoric. It is a politics based not on educating people but on mobilizing them, nor on creating an active public sphere but on electing candidates. That Jackson has mobilized millions of people may be proof that it can "work," not that his "constituencies" are more informed, politically knowledgeable, and more capable of acting independently on their own in order to develop a creative, fluid, and truly popular politics. And this kind of politics is not only electoral in character, it is party politics. People who are mobilized by charismatic leaders, centralized institutions, and power-oriented political structures remain masses, not independently minded citizens. Mobilization, like voting, becomes routine. Ordinary people become passive and inactive; institutions become bureaucratic and centralistic (usually in the name of " efficiency" and "pragmatism"). Politicians become professionalized and are guided by career interests rather than principles.

But there is another kind of politics that we often ignore in the name of "electoral politics" or "independent political action" This type of politics includes extraparliamentary forms like peace and antinuclear groups, food cooperatives, communes, affinity groups, feminist, ethnic and religious organizations. It is an organic politics that is based on grassroots education, not mass mobilization. The power it primarily seeks is empowerment of citizens rather than the election of officials -- citizens who can freely associate and mutually support each other with a view toward re-empowering the public as a whole. It seeks to create a body politic and a meaningful public opinion oriented toward a broad vision of social change and public involvement in the problems of our time. Such a politics is institutionalized not around a party structure, but genuine popular forms like neighborhood councils and assemblies, town meetings, local associations and citizens' initiative groups, as well as the countercultural forms that remain from the sixties. Coalitions of this kind are ongoing forums for enlightening people as well as politically activating them. This kind of politics represents the only real break we can make with the long, dismal history of failures and betrayals that mark so many earnest efforts for "independent political action."

Let me emphasize that these failures and betrayals are by no means cushioned by the successes of Sanders in Burlington, Vermont, or by the Greens in Germany. Mayor Sanders has virtually frozen political life in Burlington and, whether well-meaning or not, has siphoned into an opportunistic politics the ferment, creativity, and fluidity that preceded his own ascent to power. "Socialism" in Burlington has proven that it can be more "efficient," "growth oriented" and "economical" than the Chittenden Trust Company or the Vermont National Bank. It is singularly lacking in educational value, programmatic focus, and genuine grassroots activity -- Sanders did not create the Neighborhood Planning assemblies in the city, his major claim to some kind of "participatory government."

The German Greens, in turn, provide at once a striking example of the success and political vitality a truly grassroots movement can achieve and the tensions created as a result of tendencies within the movement seeking to turn it into a relatively conventional political party. Electoral success without sufficient education within its own ranks has made, the Greens a combative arena. At one end of the spectrum are professional politicians who are tempted by dubious electoral coalitions with the Social Democrats, a more bureaucratized party structure, and greater centralization, at odds with people who are still committed to the Green political ideal of a " nonparty party," participatory democracy, and a creative vision of, political and social change in Germany.

We have a chance in New England to form a movement that could influence the entire country if only we exhibit the willingness to create an inspiring example. Let us pick up our own American libertarian traditions -- particularly Yankee notions of local democracy, mistrust of strong government, citizens' initiatives, self-sufficiency, mutual aid, and respect for individual rights. Admittedly, these notions are often more mythic than real. But they exercise a power over the American mind that is far more meaningful than radical ideals our immigrant forebears brought from semi-feudal Europe with its emphasis on a non-waning labor movement, parties, semi-militaristic beliefs in centralized political control and a reverence for "mass mobilization." The popular utopian dimension of the American Revolution still lives in a constitutional respect for individual rights that is becoming increasingly intolerable to a corporate, cybernetic, and global economy. We have radical libertarian, populist traditions of our own that are more meaningful to the American people at large than the European radical traditions that have been declining in Europe itself over the past few decades. Our libertarian traditions, stripped of their egoistic and proprietarian features, are worth preserving in themselves, not as a means to achieve more exotic radical ends.

I have no illusions about the realities of our time. Very little can be done before the November elections, when the "dump Reagan" syndrome-exhausts itself. If a Rainbow Coalition emerges with Jackson as its spokesman, we will be back to ground-zero with mobilization, power, national electoral activity, and political professionalism as its goal. Just as Sanders has frozen political life in Burlington, so such a coalition might well freeze political life in the United States. Even if Jackson ceases to head such a coalition because of his proclivity to function within the Democratic Party, electoral politics and a program structured entirely around single issues and immediate pragmatic interests will be as irrelevant in the long run as other "independent" movements have been historically. We are far too susceptible to a "politics of lesser evils," with the grim results that our agenda and programs are determined by our opponents rather than by our visions of a good society. Worse, each lesser evil is usually succeeded by a worse evil so that we finally end with the worst possible evils of all. This kind of "lesser evil" politics brought Nazism to power in the 1930s when the Socialists, supporting one lesser evil to avoid an even greater evil threw their votes to Hindenberg as Germany's President in order to avoid Hitler. Hindenberg, elected Reich President with strong Socialist support, appointed Hitler Reich Chancellor a year later. The rest is history.

If we develop a genuine citizens' politics, avowedly populist in character and libertarian in structure -- particularly in a region congenial to a politics of this kind -- we may yet be able to set an example that will influence the country as a whole. The corporate and cybernetic era that looms before us is the most awesome "megatrend" of the coming decades. To put it bluntly if we do not recover a tradition that can resist this era, go beyond it, and do so in a manner that the American people can understand -- we will indeed "blow it." And in a thermonuclear age, I do not use this colloquialism metaphorically. I use it literally -- with all its implications for the future of the planet.


Murray Bookchin
Is an author, teacher, lecturer and community activist who lives in Burlington, Vermont.

For additional copies and further information, please write to:

Green Program Project
P.O. Box 111
Burlington, VT 05402
READ MORE - Popular Politics vs Party Politics

8/12/2008

Imperialism and global political economy

It has become a cliche to say that the ideas of empire and imperialism have enjoyed a renaissance in the early years of the 21st century. The main reasons for this are, of course, the global primacy of the United States and the arrogance with which the Bush administration has flaunted this pre-eminence, above all in the military field. Marxists should be particularly well equipped to respond to this development, given the importance that their tradition has given to the concept of imperialism. More particularly, the Marxist theory of imperialism is distinctive in that it does not treat empire simply as a transhistorical form of political domination—as in, for example, Michael Doyle’s succinct definition of imperialism as ‘effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society’—but rather sets modern imperialism in the context of the historical development of the capitalist mode of production.1

There are, of course, different versions of this intellectual enterprise, which seeks systematically to relate geopolitical relations to the process of capital accumulation.2 The variant on which I intend to concentrate was developed during the First World War, notably by Lenin in Imperialism (1916) and by Nikolai Bukharin in Imperialism and World Economy (1917). Stated most rigorously by Bukharin, what I henceforth call the classical Marxist theory of imperialism affirms that capitalism in its imperialist stage is defined by two potentially conflicting tendencies: (1) the internationalisation of production, circulation and investment and (2) the interpenetration of private capital and the nation-state. In consequence, an increasingly integrated world economy becomes the arena for competition among capitals that tends now to take the form of geopolitical conflict among states. The First and Second World Wars were from this perspective inter-imperialist conflicts reflecting antagonisms at the heart of capitalism in its imperialist stage.

The classical theory of imperialism, particularly in Bukharin’s hands, suffered from serious defects—notably, a tendency to view the state as a mere instrument of capital, dependence on Rudolf Hilferding’s theory of crises, which reduces them to the effects of imbalances between different branches of production, and the assumption that the trend towards state capitalism was a finished result.3 Nevertheless, stripped of these features and integrated into a rigorous theorisation of capitalism’s crisis tendencies, the classical theory is, in my view, an indispensable instrument for understanding the contemporary world.

From this perspective modern imperialism is what happens where two previously distinct forms of competition merged, as they did in the late 19th century: (1) economic competition between capitals; (2) geopolitical competition between states.

A century or two earlier these two competitive logics had been distinct, rooted in different modes of production: on the one hand economic competition in the nascent capitalist world system; on the other geopolitical competition in what Robert Brenner calls the process of ‘political accumulation’—military expansion and state-building—characteristic of feudalism that drove the formation of the European state system.4 Imperialism represents the moment at which these two logics become integrated. Geopolitical competition can no longer be pursued without the economic resources that could only be generated within the framework of capitalist relations of production; but capitals involved in increasingly global networks of trade and investment depend on different forms of support, ranging from tariff and subsidy to the assertion of military power, from their nation-state. Another way to put it is that the competitive struggle among what Marx in the Grundrisse called ‘many capitals’ now assumes two forms, economic and geopolitical.5

David Harvey expresses a very similar view when he calls ‘capitalist imperialism’ the ‘contradictory fusion’ of two logics of power, what he calls (following Giovanni Arrighi) the capitalist and the territorial:

The relationship between these two logics should be seen therefore as problematic and often contradictory (that is, dialectical) rather than as functional or one-sided. This dialectical relationship sets the stage for an analysis of capitalist imperialism in terms of the intersection of these two distinct but intertwined logics of power. The problem for concrete analyses of actual situations is to keep the two sides of this dialectic simultaneously in motion and not to lapse into either a solely political or a predominantly economic mode of argumentation.6

Other writers, notably Walden Bello, Peter Gowan, Chris Harman, John Rees and Claude Serfati, have pursued a broadly similar approach.7 Many contemporary radical theorists, however, argue that the classical Marxist theory of imperialism is no longer pertinent. Hardt and Negri famously assert that inter-imperialist rivalries have been transcended in the transnational network power of Empire.8

But a much more carefully stated and empirically supported critique of the classical Marxist theory has been developed in recent years by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin.9 Since this is part of a broader effort to transform our understanding of American imperialism and reorient the radical left, it seems worth paying some attention to it. Accordingly, this article is devoted to assessing this critique and the alternative analysis it seeks to support.

The particular interest of this debate lies in the fact that, whereas the assertion of US global power by the Bush administration is widely seen as constituting the refutation of Hardt’s and Negri’s theory (which announces the transcendence of national antagonisms under Empire), Panitch and Gindin go to the opposite extreme, arguing that the era of globalisation saw the entrenchment of America’s ‘informal empire’. At the same time, they move from different premises from those of Hardt and Negri to the same conclusion, that geopolitical competition has largely been transcended in contemporary capitalism.

According to Panitch and Gindin:

The classical theories of imperialism developed at the time [of the First World War], from Hobson’s to Lenin’s, were founded on a theorisation of capitalism’s economic stages and crises. This was a fundamental mistake that has, ever since, continued to plague proper understanding. The classical theories were defective in their historical reading of imperialism, in their treatment of the dynamics of capital accumulation, and in their elevation of a conjunctural moment of inter-imperial rivalry to an immutable law of globalisation (Global Capitalism and American Empire (London, 2004), hereafter GCAE, p16).

Running through these errors is a failure to appreciate the importance in conceptualising imperialism as a proper understanding of:

states’ relatively autonomous role in maintaining social order and securing the conditions of capital accumulation… Capitalist imperialism, then, must be understood through an extension of the capitalist theory of the state, rather than derived directly from the theory of economic stages or crises. And such a theory needs to comprise not only inter-imperial rivalry, and the conjunctural predominance of one imperial state, but also the structural penetration of former rivals by one imperial state (GCAE, pp18-19).

The repeated phrase ‘one imperial state’ gives the key to Panitch and Gindin’s analysis of imperialism. Rather like J R R Tolkien’s ‘one ring to rule them all’, taking states seriously means for them acknowledging the dominance of one state in particular. More precisely their argument can be rendered down as follows:10

(1) Following Poulantzas, Panitch and Gindin claim that the post-war era was characterised by ‘the internationalisation of the state, understood as a state’s acceptance of responsibility for managing its own domestic capitalist order in way [sic] that contributes to managing the international capitalist order’ (GCAE, p42). The US used the Cold War system of alliances and the Bretton Woods international financial institutions to construct a global capitalist order in which not simply were the economies of Western Europe and Japan laid open to American capital, but the US state and transnational corporations were able systematically to penetrate and reorganise under its leadership the ruling classes of these zones of advanced capitalism: ‘With American capital a social force within each European country, domestic capital tended to be “dis-articulated” and no longer represented by a coherent and independent national bourgeoisie’ (GCAE, p47).11

(2) This order came under strain with the economic and monetary crisis of the 1970s. Panitch and Gindin rely on a version of what Robert Brenner has called ‘supply-side theories of crisis’: in other words, they trace the recessions, inflation and monetary instability of the 1970s back to the relative strength that organised labour built up during the post-war boom and that it was able to use to increase wages and thereby to bring down the rate of profit. Thus they describe ‘working class resistance as both a pivotal factor in causing the crisis and a target of its resolution at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s’.12 ‘The critical “turning point” in policy orientation came in 1979 with the “Volcker shock”—the American state’s self-imposed structural adjustment programme’ (GCAE, p50). The sharp hike in interest rates and imposition of restrictions on the monetary base announced by Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, in October 1979 was the US version of Margaret Thatcher’s simultaneous monetarist offensive in Britain. It sharply slowed down the American economy, and in doing so, Panitch and Gindin argue, it accelerated the process of industrial restructuring that broke the power of organised labour and attracted capital back to the US. The ensuing profits recovery provided the background against which the global order was ‘reconstituted’ on a neo-liberal basis that more tightly integrated the ruling classes of advanced capitalism under American leadership through institutions such as the G7 and the International Monetary Fund and through the global economic hegemony of finance, a change that reinforced the dominance of US capitalism.

(3) The structure forged at the beginning of the 1980s holds good today, Panitch and Gindin argue. If anything it is stronger now than it was then. Not only has the Soviet Union gone, but, ‘while the earlier period was characterised by the relative economic strength of Europe and Japan, the current moment underlines their relative weakness’ (GCAE, p55). It is, moreover, quite misleading to characterise economic competition within the advanced capitalist world as a case of ‘inter-imperialist rivalries’. Not simply does this overstate the extent of the competition, which unfolds within the context of a global neo-liberal economic order dominated by the US, but the implication that these economic tensions might be translated into geopolitical confrontations, even military rivalries, is entirely false. The European Union’s attempts to develop military capabilities are feeble and dependent on NATO, while Japan remains heavily reliant on America’s markets and security shield.

The conclusion that Panitch and Gindin draw from this analysis is not to invite us, in the face of the evidence, to conclude that all is well with the contemporary imperial order:

There is indeed a systemic complexity in today’s global capitalism that includes, even at its core, instabilities and even crises. Yet this needs to be seen not so much in terms of the old structural crisis tendencies and their outcomes, but as quotidian dimensions of contemporary capitalism’s functioning and indeed, as we argued above, even of its successes (GCAE, p61).

Well, I think the problem is a bit more than ‘systemic complexity’. Let me take three steps towards identifying what’s wrong with Panitch and Gindin’s argument. First of all, their adherence—identified as (2) above—to a supply-side theory of crisis is a crucial move. What such a theory does is to render the movements of the capitalist economy dependent on those of the class struggle. Hence, once the balance of class forces had shifted back in favour of capital—as it did, not just in the US but throughout advanced capitalism between 1975 and 1985—the ineluctable consequence was a recovery in profitability and an end to crisis. This differentiates Panitch and Gindin from those, such as Brenner and Harvey, who argue (correctly, in my view) that global capitalism continues to suffer from the crisis of profitability and over-accumulation that first exploded in the mid-1970s.

Panitch and Gindin criticise ‘traditional Marxist theories of structural crises’ because ‘they sometimes tend to fetishise crises in the sense of abstracting them from history’. They elaborate their own alternative approach thus:

This does not mean that it is no longer useful to speak of contradictions inherent in capitalism, but we must be careful not to make too much of their consequences unless they take the form of class contradictions that raise challenges to capital (in terms of whether it can adapt or respond) and labour (in terms of whether it can develop the political capacity to build on the openings provided). We must dispense with a notion of ‘crisis’ as something that leads capitalism to unravel on its own; our theories of crisis must be politicised to integrate the responses of both states and class actors.13

This passage is a strange mixture of truism, implied caricature, and potential error. Truism: of course, capitalism won’t ‘unravel on its own’. But—whatever might or might not have been true in the past—name a serious contemporary Marxist political economist who thinks otherwise (the implication that such exist is the caricature). Potential error: yes, of course, we should ‘integrate the responses of both states and class actors’. But for Panitch and Gindin ‘states and class actors’ don’t just react to booms and crises, they make them. Supply-side theories of crises are agent-centred, since they explain the business cycle in terms of the relative capacities for self-organisation of collective class actors. By contrast, both the theory of crisis that Marx developed in Capital, volume III, and the modified theory recently put forward by Brenner explain crises of over-accumulation by a structural tendency towards a falling rate of profit that cannot be altered by acts of collective will on the part of the contending classes—though of course how classes respond to the effects of this tendency is crucial in shaping the resolution of crises.14

In my view, Panitch and Gindin are mistaken both in holding to an over-politicised theory of crisis and in asserting that global capitalism in general, and the US in particular, have overcome the crisis of profitability that developed in the 1970s. I don’t have the time or space to argue this here: Brenner has done so elsewhere in a response to a paper by one of Panitch and Gindin’s co-thinkers.15 The work of Brenner, Harvey and other Marxist political economists such as Gérard Duménil and Fred Moseley provides plentiful evidence to refute Panitch and Gindin’s assertions. If these arguments are correct, the implications are very serious for Panitch and Gindin. Their narrative of post-war capitalism gives primacy to a single actor—the American state—that is able to shape and then reshape the world as its informal empire relatively unconstrained—both because of its power relative to other actors and because of the power of states and capitalist classes collectively to determine the fate of the world economy. But if tendencies to boom and crisis are the consequence of structural realities— in particular, relatively decentralised and anarchic competition among capitals—that are not easily amenable to collective interventions even by the most powerful capitalist states, then these states, the US included, are much more constrained in their actions than Panitch and Gindin are prepared to concede. Here it would be useful to compare their work with that of Harvey, who in The New Imperialism seeks to integrate the geopolitical strategy of the US under George W Bush with the continuing effects of what Brenner calls ‘the long downturn’ (indeed, Harvey’s major theorisation of Marxist political economy in The Limits to Capital [1982] already concluded with a discussion of contemporary inter-imperialist rivalries).

Secondly, Panich and Gindin insist on giving proper weight to the state as a relatively autonomous actor. Thus they write, ‘Those who interpreted Japan’s trade penetration of American markets and its massive direct foreign investments in the US through the 1980s in terms of inter-imperial rivalry betrayed a misleadingly economistic perspective’ (GCAE, p59). Insofar as remarks of this kind imply a rejection of instrumentalist conceptions of the state that treat it as a mere tool in the hands of big business, the point is well taken. But, once again, it is hardly news. Marxists have over the past few decades sought to develop theorisations of the state that give proper weight to its role as an independent actor.16 Moreover, this kind of understanding informs the main contemporary versions of the classical Marxist theory of imperialism. Harvey, as the passage cited at the start of this paper makes very clear, conceives the relationship between the logics of territorial and capitalist power as a dialectical one in which the two potentially contradict one another. Similarly, I conceptualise imperialism as the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition in part precisely to avoid the suggestion that the latter is an epiphenomenon of the former.17 Panitch and Gindin might object that in setting the development of capitalist imperialism in the context of the structurally determined crisis-tendencies of the capitalist mode of production Harvey and I are giving ultimate primacy to the economy, but if economic primacy doesn’t figure somewhere in the argument what is the point of calling oneself a Marxist?

Thirdly and finally, what about Panitch and Gindin’s substantive interpretation of contemporary imperialism as the relatively stable and expanded reproduction of the informal American empire? Here again, there is an important element of truth to their argument. It is undeniable that there is an asymmetrical relationship between the US and even the most powerful of the other advanced capitalisms—Japan, Germany, Britain, France, etc. Moreover, Panitch and Gindin’s critique of the idea that interimperialist rivalries persist is a useful corrective to the mistaken claim that, for example, I made in earlier writings that the end of the Cold War would see a return to the fluid and potentially disastrous economic and geopolitical competition among the Great Powers that prevailed during the era of classical imperialism between 1870 and 1945.18 In retrospect, this claim confused two levels of determination. It is inherent in the nature of imperialism that it involves economic and geopolitical competition among a plurality of major capitalist states. But it does not follow that this competition must necessarily take the form of conflict, ultimately military, among a relatively small number of roughly equal Great Powers or coalitions of Great Powers—as it did in the lead-up to both the First and Second World Wars. Moreover, the idea of a return to the Great Power rivalries of 1870- 1945, while (as I argue below) containing an important element of truth, stated baldly implied a simple repetition of earlier historical patterns without taking into account the effects of the concrete forms taken by economic and geopolitical competition in the intervening Cold War era.

Thus the historic achievement of the American state during the 1940s was the construction of a transnational economic and geopolitical space that unified the entire advanced capitalist world under US leadership: much of the material that Panitch and Gindin cite documents this process. One consequence of this arrangement was that capital and commodities flowed with growing freedom within this space, to the benefit, again as Panitch and Gindin show, of US banks and transnational corporations. Another was what I have called the partial dissociation of economic and geopolitical competition: in other words, as a result of the integration of advanced capitalism into a single ‘Western’ geopolitical and ideological bloc, economic rivalries among capitals did not have the same potential to become military confrontations as they had had in the earlier era of classical imperialism, when Germany emerged as both an industrial and naval challenger to British hegemony.

Panitch and Gindin are right to see this achievement as a result of the pursuit of a conscious grand strategy by the American ruling class, as numerous studies have confirmed. But they are insufficiently sensitive to the strains to which it has been increasingly subjected as a result of two overlapping processes. The first is the impact of the long-term structural crisis of profitability and over-accumulation, itself to a significant extent a consequence of the emergence from the 1960s onwards of Japan and Germany as major economic competitors to the US.19 The second is the development of centrifugal tendencies within the Western geopolitical bloc. While of long standing (and indeed partially related to the first process), these tendencies were reinforced by the collapse of the Cold War partition of the world in 1989-91, which removed the most obvious rationale for the system of alliances that had knitted together advanced capitalism under US hegemony. The fact that, instead of disintegrating after the Cold War, the transnational economic and geopolitical space constructed in the 1940s became genuinely global was in no sense inevitable. Its extension was a result of the creative political intervention of the American state, particularly under the Clinton administration, for example, to take advantage of the Balkan Wars to force through NATO and EU expansion on terms that preserved and indeed extended the role of the US as the leading military and political power in Eurasia, and to reinforce the role of the Bretton Woods institutions as enforcers of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus on terms favourable to the Anglo-American model of free-market capitalism.20

But the fact that the US-dominated space did not fragment does not mean that serious tensions do not exist within it, or that maintaining it intact does not require continuing and contested effort on the part of the American state. The crisis over Iraq brought all this into dramatic focus.21 Panitch and Gindin’s discussion of Iraq is one of the least convincing aspects of their overall argument. According to them the war was a case of the more general problem posed to the American empire by ‘rogue’ and ‘failed’ states, and the divisions between the US and Britain, on the one hand, and France and Germany, on the other, ‘pertain very little to economic “rivalries”,’ reflecting rather the latter states’ preference for multilateral forms of intervention (GCAE, p73).

The difficulty with this line of argument is that it says nothing at all about the strategic thinking behind the Iraq war. Yet if one consults the key documents that reflect the outlook of the neoconservatives apparently exerting a growing influence on US global policy under Bush father and son—the draft Defense Planning Guidance of March 1992, the material produced by the Project for the New American Century under Clinton, and The National Security Strategy of the United States of America of September 2002—running through of all these is precisely what should not exist, according to Panitch and Gindin, namely a preoccupation with preventing the emergence of ‘peer competitors’ to the US. Let a quotation from the last of these texts suffice: ‘Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in the hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States’.22

Moreover, it is important to understand that, whatever is eccentric, aberrant, or disputed about the neocon worldview relative to the broader US national security elite, it is not this concern with addressing the problem of potential peer competitors. If one takes the work of policy intellectuals other than the neoconservatives and in some cases hostile to them or at least critical of the Iraq adventure—for example, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Philip Bobbitt, Joseph Nye and John Mearsheimer, one finds the same preoccupation with the future of US hegemony in the face of a variety of powers that can be expected to challenge it at least at the regional level.23

Now, Marx famously said that if essence and appearance coincided then science would be superfluous. All these weighty strategic analyses could be so much epiphenomenal fluff, beneath which lies the reality of a secure and invincible American empire. Personally I find it more economical, however, to take this material at face value, and to treat it as evidence of the very long-standing preoccupation of US grand strategy to prevent the emergence of a hostile Great Power or coalition on the Eurasian landmass. This then supports the interpretation of the Iraq war offered by both Harvey and myself, namely that seizing Iraq would not simply remove a regime long obnoxious to the US, but would both serve as a warning to all states of the costs of defying American military power and, by entrenching this power in the Middle East, give Washington control of what Harvey calls ‘the global oil spigot’ on which potential challengers in Europe and East Asia are particularly dependent.24

Not simply was the conquest of Iraq thus a pre-emptive strike by the US, less against Saddam Hussein than against the other leading powers, but the unfolding of the crisis made the tensions within the Western bloc dramatically visible. The first months of 2003 were remarkable ones in the history of the transatlantic alliance, with France, Germany and Belgium blocking the use of NATO assets for the invasion of Iraq, and Washington mobilising the EU accession states in East and Central Europe against ‘Old Europe’. Of course, considerable efforts have been made since the fall of Baghdad, and particularly since Bush’s re-election, to heal the wounds between the US and the leading continental European states, but there are definite limits. On the one hand, the administration has if anything strengthened its rhetorical commitment to spreading democracy by the sword. On the other, despite regular predictions to the contrary by Washington, London and a significant section of the Marxist left, France and Germany continue to resist American pressure to participate in the occupation of Iraq. The trend is rather in the opposite direction, as various ‘New European’ states that sent troops to Iraq fall over each other rushing for the exit.

Behind this lies, of course, the failure of the occupation itself. Despite numerous announcements of a new dawn, most recently at the elections in January 2005, the US is confronted with the opposition of a large majority of the Iraqi people to its presence, and with the armed resistance of a determined and well-rooted minority. The result has been a signal lesson in the limits of even American military might—overwhelming superiority in fire power doesn’t confer control over a large, dispersed, and predominantly hostile population.25 Panitch and Gindin indeed see the Iraq crisis highlighting ‘the danger posed to the broader legitimacy of the other capitalist states now that they are located in a framework of American imperialism that is so unconcealed’ (GCAE, p73). Giovanni Arrighi goes much further, suggesting that, ‘while its difficulties in Vietnam precipitated the “signal crisis” of US hegemony, in retrospect US difficulties in Iraq will be seen as having precipitated its “terminal crisis”,’ marking the transition to ‘dominance without hegemony’, where US global pre-eminence comes to rest on military might alone, losing the consent of other capitalist classes who had seen it as in their interest as well.26

Even if Arrighi is right to suggest that US hegemony is ‘unravelling’, it is important to state the implications with care. Let us return to the issue of inter-imperialist rivalries. Claude Serfati has given a good account of why, in his view, ‘there is no chance that the inter-capitalist economic rivalries among countries of the transatlantic zone will break out into military confrontations’.27 The reasons he gives are both positive and negative. Negatively, the military gap between the US and all other states singly and combined is so great as to create very strong ‘threshhold effects’ impeding any state (or, more realistically, block of states, such as the EU) from developing military capabilities comparable to the US. Positively, the extent of the interdependence among the leading capitalist economies gives them strong incentives to cooperate and means that US hegemony is the source of ‘public goods’ that benefit them all.

All of this is fair enough, and one can add other specific reasons why economic competition within the Western bloc need not translate into military conflict. Transatlantic tensions reached their height when, in the early months of 2003, the Bush administration apparently embraced a policy, not (as had traditionally been US strategy) of encouraging further European integration, but of divide and rule. This shift gave France and Germany a strong incentive to develop greater autonomy from the US— but it also made this harder to achieve, given the existence of a bloc of EU states more closely aligned with Washington and led by Britain, whose cooperation would be essential to any serious attempt to enhance European military capabilities.28 The defeat of the European Constitution in the French and Dutch referendums of May 2005 has reignited the conflict between ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Europe, this time over domestic economic policy, as the former, under the leadership of a reinvigorated Tony Blair, presses for more rapid neo-liberal ‘reforms’. All the same, it would be foolish to ignore the emergence of what Serfati himself describes as the ‘alter-imperialism’ of the EU and the increasing effort that, as he shows, is being put into developing the European Security and Defence Policy.29

Moreover, it would be a mistake to underestimate the reality and the destabilising potential of conflicts among the advanced capitalist states. Economic rivalries among transnational corporations whose investments and markets are concentrated in one of the three points of the G7 triad—North America, Western Europe and Japan—and that rely on state support in their competitive struggles remain a structural feature of the contemporary global political economy.30 An obvious example is provided by the endemic and serious tensions between the US and the EU over trade: the current dispute over state subsidies to, respectively, Boeing and Airbus seems especially bitter and hard to resolve. Moreover, in Latin America the role that the US has played in promoting neo-liberal policies that open up previously relatively protected markets to foreign capital had, according to Paul Cammack, the ironic effect of benefiting primarily European transnationals rather than American capitalism, despite the latter’s putative dominance of the region. This case illustrates how the activities of the US to provide ‘public goods’ to the benefit of the advanced capitalisms generally may be to the disadvantage of American capitalism in particular. Like all human phenomena, US imperialism is subject to the law of unintended consequences.31

But perhaps the most serious transatlantic row since the invasion of Iraq has been over EU plans to end the arms embargo imposed on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. American politicians and commentators have tended to portray the affair as a case of parochial, money-obsessed Europeans failing to see the bigger geopolitical picture. This doesn’t seem right at all: no doubt concern to get better access to what has become the powerhouse of the world economy was an important reason behind the proposed policy change. But the aim of the French president, Jacques Chirac, seems to have been straightforwardly geopolitical—to find in the rising power of China a counter-weight to American hegemony. A recent CIA assessment went even further, predicting: ‘An EU-China alliance, though still unlikely, is not unthinkable’.32

An even more striking feature of the row over lifting the arms embargo (a decision has now been postponed under intense US pressure) was that American critics of the policy openly objected on the grounds that a war between the US and China, ‘though still unlikely, is [also] not unthinkable’. Nor was this said simply by members of the Taiwan lobby or bug-eyed Republican China-bashers. Michael O’Hanlon of the eminently sane and middle of the road Brookings Institution wrote recently, ‘There really is a chance of a Sino-US war over Taiwan, which may ebb and flow month to month but nonetheless remains quite real. And any European decision to lift the embargo could make any war more likely and more costly in lives and assets’.33

Remarks of this nature rather put into perspective any predictions that the future course of capitalist development will be pacific. Panitch and Gindin do acknowledge the possibility that China may come to constitute a counter-example to their general analysis:

China may perhaps emerge eventually as a pole of inter-imperial power, but it will obviously remain very far from reaching such a status for a good many decades. The fact that certain elements in the American states are concerned to ensure that its ‘unipolar’ power today is used to prevent the possible emergence of imperial rivals tomorrow can hardly be used as evidence that such rivals already exist (GCAE, pp59-60).

This polarisation of present and future seriously underestimates the fluidity of contemporary geopolitics. The row over the lifting of the European arms embargo hardly suggests that the military threat from China is seen as being ‘a good many decades’ away—a series of senior US national security officials from Porter Goss, the Director of Central Intelligence, down have in the past few months been warning of the strategic threat represented by China and in particular of Beijing’s rapid modernisation of its naval and air forces. The Financial Times reports: ‘Policymakers in Washington are questioning the assumption that a Chinese challenge to US military domination of the Asia-Pacific region lies decades in the future’.34 The Pentagon’s annual report on the Chinese military is a compromise document, on the one hand affirming that the People’s Liberation Army’s current ability to ‘project conventional military power beyond its periphery remains limited’, on the other hand warning that, ‘over the longer term, if current trends persist, PLA capabilities could pose a credible threat to other modern militaries operating in the region’.35 Even if such fears are overstated (the CIA is hardly the most credible of intelligence sources after 9/11 and the non-existent Iraqi WMD), there is always the danger that steps taken by the US to prevent China from becoming a threat may simply give the latter’s rulers a greater incentive to build up their military capabilities quickly.

Panitch and Gindin are also dismissive of the increasingly important role played by the central banks of China and other East Asian states in financing the US fiscal and trade deficits: ‘To suggest, as Arrighi does, that because the holders of American Treasury bills are now primarily in Asia we are therefore witnessing a shift in the regional balance of power, is to confuse the distribution of assets with the distribution of power’.36 Here distinctions need to be made with more care than they do. In the first place, it is undoubtedly a sign of the economic and political strength of American capitalism—and, in particular, of the comparative advantage it gains from being able freely to issue, without any backing in gold or whatever, the world’s main reserve currency and thus to create new means of payment— that it has been able to finance the deficit through a massive inflow of capital from the rest of the world. But it doesn’t follow that we should subscribe to the theory affirmed by Vice-President Dick Cheney when he told the then US Treasury secretary, Paul O’ Neill, ‘Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter’.37

The Cheney theory implies that the US could easily continue a trade deficit that, on current trends, will rise from 6 percent to 10 percent of GDP by the start of the next decade. It would be easier to believe that it could if the inflow of capital financing the deficit were attracted by higher profits than are obtainable elsewhere: but, in fact, to judge by the fact that American corporations receive higher returns on their foreign direct investments than they do from their assets within the US, the reverse is true.38 No doubt the US has other economic attractions than sheer profitability—the security and mobility of capital, for example. But the role, already noted, that Asian central banks now play in financing the deficit highlights the role of more political or more political-economic considerations in this policy— for example, avoiding the dependence on foreign capital that had such a devastating impact during the crisis of 1997-98 and keeping Asian currencies at a competitive level against the dollar and thereby permitting the maintenance of the high-export economic model on which East Asian capitalism is based. In this context, there was an element of playing with fire in the recent campaign in the US and the EU for renminbi revaluation.39

From a broader historical perspective, it seems simply perverse to deny any broader economic and geopolitical significance to the role played by China in particular and East Asian capitalism in general in financing the US deficit. Arrighi’s analysis of the crisis of US hegemony is set against the background of a much broader cyclical theory of history in which capitalist powers win and lose hegemony according to a definite and fixed pattern.40 One doesn’t have to sign up to this kind of theory to recognise that it was a significant historical moment when Britain became financially indebted to the United States during the First World War, even if it took another 30 years for this to be translated into the definitive displacement of one by the other as the leading capitalist power. Even if one discounts any such displacement of the US by China, the profound tensions being concentrated in East Asia cannot be ignored.

The Chinese boom has played an important role in reorienting the global political economy, as China has become a major supplier of cheap manufactured goods to the US and the rest of the advanced capitalist world, as well as a key purchaser of intermediate goods from Japan, South Korea and the EU, and of raw materials from the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.41 Moreover, as we have already seen, China and the other East Asian states now closely bound up economically with it have become the underwriters of the continued expansion of American capitalism. Simultaneously China has also become a lightning-rod for geopolitical tensions, has supplanted Japan as the main object of protectionist agitation in the US, and has been identified by the Pentagon and the CIA as the Great Power with which America is most likely to go to war.42

The contradictions that are now concentrated in China are thus symptomatic of the current state of the global political economy—of, not the stable incorporation of world capitalism within the American informal empire, but the fragility of the global accumulation process and of geopolitics today. We must hope—and act to ensure—that this fragility does not make itself felt in too brutal and destructive a way.
NOTES

1: M Doyle, Empires(Ithaca NY, 1986), p30. This article was originally delivered as a paper at the conference on ‘Korean Economy: Marxist Perspectives’ at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, South Korea, 20 May 2005, which was funded by a Korean Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2003-005-B00006).
2: See A Callinicos, ‘Marxism and Global Governance’, in D Held and A McGrew (eds), Governing Globalisation (Cambridge, 2002). 3: A Callinicos, ‘Imperialism, Capitalism, and the State Today’, International Socialism35 (Summer 1987), pp84-88.
4: R Brenner, ‘The Social Basis of Economic Development’, in J Roemer (ed), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1986). For a flawed attempt to use Brenner’s concept of political accumulation to trace the origins of the modern state system see B Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London, 2003). Many of Brenner’s supporters and critics share the assumption that, if the state system originated before the capitalist mode of production became dominant, it cannot now be intrinsic to that mode. But this is a non sequitur that confuses genesis and structure: the state system first took shape in the early modern era of the transition from feudalism to capitalism but was transformed as the capitalist mode became dominant and is now a constitutive dimension of that mode. For discussion of related issues, see A Callinicos, ‘Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism’, International Socialism 43 (Summer 1989), and ‘Marxism and the International’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations6 (2004).
5: I have elaborated this perspective in A Callinicos, Making History (2nd edn, Leiden, 2004), pp179-199; ‘Marxism and Imperialism Today’, International Socialism 50 (spring 1991); ‘Periodising Capitalism and Analysing Imperialism’, in R Albritton et al (eds), Phases of Capitalist Development (Houndmills, 2001); An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge, 2003), pp50-65; and The New Mandarins of American Power (Cambridge, 2003), esp ch 5.
6: D Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003), pp26, 30. Arrighi’s masterpiece is The Long Twentieth Century (London, 1994).
7: W Bello, Dilemmas of Domination (New York, 2005); P Gowan, The Global Gamble (London, 1999); C Harman, ‘Analysing Imperialism’, International Socialism 99 (Summer 2003); J Rees, ‘Imperialism: Globalisation, the State, and War’, International Socialism 93 (Winter 2001); and C Serfati, Impérialisme et militarisme( Lausanne, 2004).
8: See the critical responses collected in G Balakrishnan (ed), Debating Empire (London, 2003), and A Boron, Empire and Imperialism(London, 2005).
9: L Panitch and S Gindin, Global Capitalism and American Empire (London, 2004), originally published in L Panitch and C Leys (eds), The New Imperial Challenge, Socialist Register 2004 (London, 2003), hereinafter GCAE, and ‘Finance and American Empire’, in L Panitch and C Leys (eds), The Empire Reloaded, Socialist Register 2005(London, 2004).
10: Panitch and Gindin make various assertions about the history of imperialism and of the classical theory, some correct, others not, that I don’t have the time or space to address here.
11: For Poulantzas’s influence on this analysis, see N Poulantzas, Les Classes sociales en capitalisme aujourd’hui (Paris, 1974), ch 1, and L Panitch, ‘The New Imperial State’, New Left Review (II) 2 (2000), especially pp8-10.
12: L Panitch and S Gindin, ‘Finance and American Empire’, as above, p81 n72. R Brenner, ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’, New Left Review (I) 229 (1998) is, among other things, a devastating critique of this kind of theory of crisis.
13: L Panitch and S Gindin, ‘Finance and American Empire’, as above, p74.
14: For a comparative account of these two theories, see A Callinicos, ‘Capitalism, Crisis, and Profits’, Historical Materialism 4 (1999).
15: R Brenner, ‘The Capitalist Economy, 1945-2000: A Reply to Konings and to Panitch and Gindin’, in D Coates (ed), Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches (Basingstoke, 2005).
16: For two of the most important contributions, see R Miliband, ‘State Power and Class Interests’, New Left Review (I) 138 (1983), and C Harman, ‘The State and Capitalism Today’, International Socialism 51 (Summer 1991).
17: A Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power, as above, pp104-106.
18: A Callinicos, ‘Marxism and Imperialism Today’, as above, pp27-31, and The Revenge of History (Cambridge, 1991), pp67-82.
19: C Harman, Explaining the Crisis (London, 1984), and R Brenner, ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’, as above.
20: The best account of US strategy in successfully addressing these crises is provided by Gowan: see especially The Global Gambleand ‘The Euro-Atlantic Origins of NATO’s Attack on Yugoslavia’, in T Ali (ed), Masters of the Universe (London, 2000). His treatment is superior to that offered by Panitch and Gindin because he presents the economic and financial crisis of the 1970s and the end of the Cold War as moments of discontinuity that threatened US hegemony and stresses that actual or potential rivalry from Europe and Japan is an important dimension of both these challenges.
21: More detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of the Iraq war will be found in A Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power, as above, and ‘Iraq: Fulcrum of World Politics’, Third World Quarterly26 (2005).
22: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, www.whitehouse.gov, p30.
23: H Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1996); Z Brzezinski, The Global Chessboard (New York, 1997), and The Choice (New York, 2004); J Nye, The Paradox of American Power (Oxford, 2002); P Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles (London, 2002); and J Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics(New York, 2001).
24: D Harvey, The New Imperialism, as above, p19; see also pp25, 201-202.
25: M Mann, Incoherent Empire (London, 2003).
26: G Arrighi, ‘Hegemony Unravelling’, I, New Left Review(II) 32 (2005), p57.
27: C Serfati, Impérialisme et militarisme, as above, p184.
28: A Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power, as above, pp119-127.
29: C Serfati, Impérialisme et militarisme, as above, chs 8 and 9.
30: The case for this proposition is argued very powerfully by Peter Gowan in an unpublished paper, ‘Industrial Dynamics and Interstate Relations in the Core’.
31: P Cammack, ‘“Signs of the Times”: Capitalism, Competitiveness, and the New Face of Empire in Latin America’, in L Panitch and C Leys (eds), The Empire Reloaded. The growing European and Chinese economic presence in Latin America has had the effect in turn of increasing the room for manoeuvre of states such as Brazil and Venezuela relative to Washington: see, for example, R Lapper, ‘Latin Lessons’, Financial Times, 17 May 2005.
32: D Dombey and P Spiegel, ‘Up in Arms’, Financial Times, 10 February 2005.
33: M O’Hanlon, ‘The Risk of War over Taiwan is Real’, Financial Times, 2 May 2005.
34: V Mallet, ‘Strait Ahead?’, Financial Times, 7 April 2005.
35: Financial Times, 20 and 21 July 2005.
36: L Panitch and S Gindin, ‘Finance and American Empire’, as above, p73. Arrighi documents the growing economic and financial power of East Asia most recently in ‘Hegemony Unravelling’, I, pp61-80.
37: R Suskind, The Price of Loyalty (London, 2004), p291.
38: N Ferguson, Colossus (London, 2004), p281. Anyone who doubts the real problems posed by the American deficit could do worse than to consult the excellent series of articles on the subject by Martin Wolf published in the Financial Timeson 1, 8 and 22 December 2004.
39: See, for example, N Roubini, ‘Ten Reasons Why China Should Move Its Peg and Pull the Plug on the US Reckless Policies’, March 2005, www.stern.nyu/ globalmacro. China’s decision in July 2005 to revalue the renminbi by 2.1 percent and allow it to fluctuate mildly against a basket of currencies is unlikely to eliminate these pressures.
40: G Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, as above; G Arrighi, B Silver et al, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis, 1999); and G Arrighi, ‘Hegemony Unravelling’, II, New Left Review(II) 33 (2005).
41: Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett give an excellent analysis of China’s place in the world economy in ‘China and the Dynamics of Transnational Capital Accumulation’, paper for the conference on ‘Korean Economy: Marxist Perspectives’, as above.
42: The case of Japan underlines the importance of not reducing geopolitical to economic relations. Japan’s uneasy recovery from the long slump of the 1990s has depended critically on feeding the Chinese boom, but the Koizumi government’s aggressive nationalist stance (symbolised by the conflicts over Japan’s war record) has involved sending troops to Iraq and, more significantly, aligning itself with Washington’s strategy of militarily containing China: see, for example, G McCormack, ‘Remilitarising Japan’, New Left Review(II) 29 (2004). Japan’s close geopolitical alignment with the US might seem to confirm Panitch’s and Gindin’s analysis, but the long-term effect is likely to be to stoke up the tensions that they underplay.

by Alex Callinicos
READ MORE - Imperialism and global political economy

8/11/2008

Capitalist Development And The State : Bases And Alternatives (1979)

The more developed countries of Latin America are attempting to define
foreign policy objectives that take advantage of contradictions in the
international order and allow these countries some independent policy-
making. But these countries remain dependent and assure an internal
social order favorable to capitalist interests and consequently fail to
challenge one of the basic objectives of American foreign policy.
Multinational enterprises continue to receive support from the foreign
policies of their countries of origin, as well as from local states.

How can these contradictory forces act together? It is through
contradictions that the historical process unfolds. Dependent
development occurs through frictions, accords, and alliances between the
state and business enterprises. But this type of development also occurs
because both the state and business enterprises pursue policies that
form markets based on the concentration of incomes and on the social
exclusion of majorities. These processes demand a basic unity between
these two historical actors as they confront popular opposition, which
may be activated when nationalist or socialist movements question the
existing social order. So, the conflicts between the state and Big
Business are not as antagonistic as the contradictions between dominant
classes and people.

Within the last ten years, the strengthening of the state and the
penetration of multinational corporations occurred within the context of
a new set of class relations. On one hand, attempts were made to break
(sometimes radically) with the global situation of dependency, with the
aim of transforming society in the direction of socialism. On the other
hand, dominant classes were reordered, with emphasis placed on the
repressive role of the state and on the simultaneous transformation of
the state into a tool for the fortification of the capitalist economic
order.

The exhaustion of the prior populism and the aggravation of class
tensions gave rise to various political attempts to break with the
prevailing style of development. In one form or another, during the past
decade, the politics of Latin American popular forces were profoundly
marked by the presence of the Cuban revolution. The shadow of Guevara's
deeds and the quasi-substitution of the process of mass politics by the
military actions of guerrilla groups (though this was not implicit in
their theory) considerably polarized Latin American revolutionary
movements. These attempts failed nearly everywhere, the only exception
of consequence being the case of Argentina, where the two principal
guerrilla currents were not completely dissociated from the remaining
socio-political movements. Though not constituting a real political
power alternative, the guerrillas of Argentina exert a certain veto
capacity, conditioning other political movements and attempts at
reformulating class alliances.

Attempts at radical rupture with the capitalist-developmentalist path
were not limited to the politics of the guerrilla. The Chilean popular
unity of the Allende period, as one case, and the Peruvian military
reformism, as another, were reactions based on broader popular forces
to development that is tied to international capitalist-oligopolistic
expansion. In both cases the state was viewed not as a "bourgeois
institution" to be destroyed, but as the lever for a possible total
transformation of society, on condition that its control remain in the
hands of popular forces.

Both the battle between classes and the basic dependency relationship
find in the state a natural crossroads. The contradiction of a state
that constitutes a nation without being sovereign is the nucleus of the
subject matter of dependency.

Our rereading the history has proceeded throughout the book toward
specifying the fundamental historical actors: classes and groups defined
within specific forms of production. Now, after ten years of reasonable
rates of economic growth, the expansion of global commerce, the
industrialization of important segments of the periphery of the
capitalist world, and the strengthening of the state productive sector,
the problem unfolds in a more complex manner. STRICTU SENSU, the
capacity for action of various Latin American states has increased. In
this sense, one might consider that they are "less dependent". Our
concern is not, however, to measure degrees of dependency in these
terms, -which fail to ask, "less for whom? for which classes and
groups?" Which classes have become more sovereign? Which alliances and
class interests within each country and at the international level lead
the historical process of economic development?

If the state has expanded and fortified itself, it has done so as the
expression of a class situation which has incorporated both threats of
rupture with the predominant pattern of capitalist development, as we
have said, and policies of the dominant classes favorable to the rapid
growth of the corporate system, to alliances between the state and
business enterprises, and to the establishment of interconnections, at
the level of the state productive system, between "public" and
multinational enterprises. To accomplish this, the state has assumed an
increasingly repressive character, and dominant classes in a majority of
countries have proposed policies increasingly removed from popular
interest. They have rendered viable a "peripheral" capitalist
development, adopting a growth model based on replication -almost in
caricature of the consumption styles and industrialization patterns of
the central capitalist countries.

The tendencies indicated in chapter six developed with increasing
velocity, achieving successes for that style of development (the
"Brazilian miracle" and the type of growth that occurred in Mexico until
1970, are notable examples of the trend). Given conditions in Latin
America, this process, while producing economic growth, urbanization,
and wealth, has redefined without eliminating, or else in certain cases
has aggravated the existential, social, and economic problems of a
majority of the population. This majority has come to be looked upon as
a resource for the accumulation of capital more than as the effective
potential for the creation of a society modeled on its own interests.

Under these conditions, the state and the nation have become separated:
all that is authentically popular, even if lacking the character of
specific class demands, has come under suspicion, is considered
subversive, and encounters a repressive response. In this vein, even
problems which Western capitalist democracies confront and absorb, like
the discussion of income distribution, minority movements (blacks,
Indians, migrants, etc), feminist or youth demands (not to mention the
freedom of syndical and political organization), appear threatening to
the existing order. From the perspective of the dominant classes, the
nation has become increasingly confused with the state, and the latter
in turn has identified its interests with theirs, resulting in the
confusion of the public interest with the defense of the business
enterprise system.

Local dominant groups in Latin America responded to the external
influences on economic growth and to the need to guard against attempts
to transform the prevailing order, with an amalgam between a repressive
state (often under corporate military control) and an entrepreneurial
state. What lends dynamism to this form of state, and what characterizes
its movement, is NOT the bureaucratic aspect it may have assumed in some
countries (Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, among the most characteristic
cases), but rather its ENTREPRENEURIAL aspect, which leads it to ally
itself, in production, with the multinational corporation. Somehow, the
state has become a strategic element, functioning as a hinge that
permits the opening of the portals through which capitalism passes into
industrializing peripheral economies.

A state which expanded the public sector AT THE SAME TIME that it
intensified relations between the latter and the multinational
corporations began to develop with the accords on the "Chileanization"
of copper proposed by the government of Frei. The proposal was uncommon
in the statist tradition of Latin America: the connection with foreign
enterprises would be made through their association, not with the local
bourgeoisie, but with public enterprises created by the state, which come
to function as CORPORATIONS.

The generalization of this model, in Brazil, in Mexico, in Peru, in
Venezuela, for example, transferred the conflicts AMONG ASSOCIATES to a
more directly political sphere. In addition, it married foreign
interests with the local bourgeoisie, and in certain countries, with the
interests of local states insofar as they were direct agents of
production, as occurred in Brazil, in Mexico, and to a lesser extent in
Venezuela. The consequences of this process are enormous and are far
from having been exhausted by historical practice or by analysis. The
character of this state-as-entrepreneur and of the state associated
economically with imperialist forces without being a politically
associated state has lent to the contemporary form of the state a
significance different from that which it had until mid-1950.

What is novel is the expansion of the state's direct productive
investment in capitalistically profitable sectors. While state
investments in these sectors originally came about with resources
obtained through taxes and duties, they subsequently reproduced and
expanded through the PROFITS generated by the state enterprises
(petrochemicals, mining, direct consumer goods, etc.). In countries like
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela, the public sector
contributes more than 50 percent to the annual formation of capital,
with the remainder contributed by private national and foreign
enterprises. Of this total, in a majority of these countries, the STATE
ENTERPRISES (as an individual portion of public expenditure) constitute
more than half of the investment of the public sector. In Brazil, in
1975, this figure exceeded 30 percent of the total investment (public
and private). Also in Brazil, the only two local enterprises which, by
the scope of their action, could hope to qualify as multinationals
(aside from the Iraipu hydroelectric corporation) are state enterprises:
the Vale do Rio Doce and Petrobras. Counted among the largest
enterprises operating in Brazil, in terms of assets and the value of
production or trade (and leaving foreign enterprises aside), are not
the enterprises controlled by local private capital, but rather those
of the state. In 1975, fifty-six of the one hundred largest Brazilian
enterprises were state owned.(7)

THE BUREAUCRACIES AND TRANSNATIONALS

The role of bureaucracies and of technocrats is considerable in
practically all of the industrialized countries of Latin America. In a
penetrating essay on this subject, (8) Guillermo O'Donnell attempts to
show the nature of this form of regime and the conditions under which it
emerges. He points out that regimes of this type established themselves
in the region as the response of local dominant classes to the challenge
presented by the mobilization and popular pressure generated by the
collapse of previous political orders (either populist or traditionally
authoritarian). He adduces further that this collapse occurred when
economic difficulties that followed the import-substitution stage of
industrialization created an inflationary situation and led the economy
into an impasse. Its solution required, aside from stability to ensure
economic predictability, additional capital flows and greater
entrepreneurial centralization in order to proceed along an
oligopolistic route toward the continuation of the process of
accumulation and toward the development of productive forces. O'Donnell
concludes that, for all of these reasons, there exists a relationship of
"mutual indispensibility" between bureaucratic-authoritarian states and
international capital (which needs to penetrate local economies and
which possesses the technological and financial requisites to undertake
the "deepening of development").

The lack of local private investment potential, the political need to
prevent multinational corporations from single-handedly appropriating the
most strategic sectors of the economy and their most dynamic branches,
and even, at times, the nonexistence of international capital flows
to attend to the investment needs of peripheral countries during any
given period (since multinationals act on a global scale, aiming at
maximizing results and not toward the continuity of local development),
has led local states, despite the capitalist ideology they defend, to
expand their functions and thereby to create a national basis from which
to bargain with the multinationals. In this process, neither the
decisions of the state nor the pressure from multinationals exclude
local enterprises from the game. But in practice these local enterprises
continue to lag behind the principal agents of transformation: the
multinationals and the state. By the very force of expansion, new
investment prospects do at times open up for segments of the local
bourgeois sectors. Some of these return to the political-economic
offensive, often allying themselves with the multinational enterprises
in the "antistatist" struggle.

This summary of contemporary development lies within what we perceived
as possible ten years ago. The role of the state and how it supports
itself in industrialized-peripheral countries has become more clear,
however.

If it seems necessary for the state in a dependent-capitalist country
to become bureaucratic if expansion is to be viable, then the risk is
run of relying on economic reductionism, which cannot take account of
historical processes. (9) For example, it may be true that Argentina's
General Ongania had a corporativist political plan, which tended to
bureaucratize the state apparatus and implement repressive policies.
Nonetheless, the Cordobazo -a mass rebellion- together with the force
of the labor movement, Peronism, and the enunciations of guerrilleros
and revolutionaries, prevented Ongania's plan from working.

President Lanusse later proposed a pact with Peronism, which aimed at
preventing an alliance between revolutionary movements and the Peronist
masses, which would have been dangerous to the capitalist order. After
Peron's death, the inability of a government controlled by a mass
bureaucratic party to thwart the revolutionary challenge led to the coup
of General Videla.

Was this coup an implementation of a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime
based on the dynamism of public enterprise? Not necessarily. In the
Argentinian case, social classes and the private economy constitute a
force which until now has escaped the political-corporativist control of
the state (though the labor movement and labor unions contain
corporativist ties). Corporativist projects expire under syndical
pressure and under the economic pressures of export sectors when these
demand free market prices (one of General Videla's first acts was to
remove the commercialization of meat from state control). In the
Argentinian case, in moments of advancing revolutionary pressures, the
state has assumed a repressive-military form, without having produced
until now a stable bureaucratic-authoritarian regime.(10)

In Venezuela and Colombia, especially in the former, the state is
promoting ties between multinational enterprises and the public sector
to strengthen the public sector, but without a bureaucratic-
authoritarian regime. To be sure, it represses the challenge of
"outlaws", as does every dominant order. But it does not exclude party
politics, the representation of interests, and some public freedoms.

These are examples of a pact of domination favorable to big business in
a situation of class conflict in which a formally democratic regime
does not give way to the emergence of more repressive forms of political
organization.

The Argentinian example demonstrates the "open process" of history. A
simple "structural" analysis, demonstrating the contradictions between
social forces and the drawbacks of the process of accumulation with its
cycles and crises is insufficient to explain the concrete course of
political events. Nor does it suffice to point out the affinities and
battles among dominant classes and the plans for political
institutionalization which they support. It is even insufficient to view
the political behavior of ruling classes in terms of reaction to a
popular challenge.

Popular reaction, under the guerrilla form, as we saw in Argentina, was
capable of conditioning and of vetoing but not of transforming the
political structure. There have been no viable alliances capable of
imposing a form of state which could recover not only the aspiration
to sovereignty but the primacy of the popular interest. The incapacity
for hegemony of popular groups adds to the repressive capacity of
dominant classes the fatal ingredient that leads to a policy of advance
and retreat within the iron circle of prevailing structures.

In Brazil and in Peru, the fortification of a formally
bureaucratic-authoritarian order can be seen more clearly. The state in
Brazil does not adopt, as an ideology, the authoritarianism which it
practices. Thus the regime is guided by a duality of principles: the
constitutional order that anticipates, for example, elections; and the
institutional acts that transform the military president into de facto
dictator, as long as the political order is perceived to be threatened,
according to criteria determined by the organs of military security.
Despite these instruments of discretion, the failure to explicitly
recognize the validity of an authoritarian order leads the regime into
the exercise of electoral practices which at times jeopardize
authoritarianism. The government dismantles the very "legal" order it
created, by impeding the rotation in power of the two parties, by
eliminating elected deputies, by going against the "democratic ideal".

In Peru, where the regime is clearly nonparticipatory, the qualifying
phrase "bureaucratic authoritarian" is more immediately applicable:
public enterprise and the state as a bureaucratic organization both
expand while remaining under the control of the military corporation.
Meanwhile, social and economic policy in Peru, while not revolutionary,
is not income-concentrating, in comparison with what occurs when the
multinationals and the private sector of the local economy direct the
process of accumulation. In addition, political control does not assume
traits that are abusive of human rights, as occurs in Chile and in
Brazil or Argentina.

The contradiction between the state as the agent of capitalist
enterprise, and the nation as something that is essentially popular,
follows a movement that is not only different but OPPOSITE, in the
recent history of Peru and Brazil. Though the Peruvian state may be
bureaucratic-authoritarian, its policies are oriented toward the
incorporation of the masses, or at least toward the partial
consideration of peasant and popular interests. These objectives may
have been frustrated and difficult to secure within a policy that
stifled the spontaneity of popular reaction, congealed political
parties, and harbored seeds of military-bureaucratism. However, its
ideology and what it has done to reorganize the socio-economic order
distinguish the Peruvian state from that of the
bureaucratic-authoritarian state of Brazil.

POLITICAL REGIMES AND THE STATE

Political regimes vary, as does the relation of
bureaucratic-authoritarianism to the social bases of the state (viewed
as a pact of domination). Nevertheless, the current form of dependency
and the crucial role performed in it by multinational enterprises and by
the state productive sector are no accident.

It is necessary to draw a distinction between the state, as a basic part
of domination (and not as the expression of a "social contract") which
unites dominant classes in the exercise of domination over the rest of
society, and the variable forms assumed by political REGIMES.

The state expresses a situation of domination, reflects the interests of
dominant classes, and expresses their capacity to impose themselves on
subordinate classes. At the same time this discriminatory relationship
(the domination of one part over the rest) must appear to the national
consciousness to be the expression of a general interest. Consequently,
the state constitutes a relationship of domination incorporating AN
IDEOLOGY that masks the partiality. This process is not a simple
distortion: it must also mirror, in some way, the generality it wishes
to represent. Hence, even the most openly classist and repressive states
use a language and propose policies (generally non-viable) that purport
to reflect the "general interest".

So, the state expresses the imposition of one class or alliance of
classes over others. But while it serves those interests on which it
bases itself, the state proposes measures that lend verisimilitude to
the "generality of interests" which it must assume to exist (people,
equality, nation). In addition to expressing a relationship like this
at this level, the state is also a bureaucratic-regulative organization
and, in the case of modern states, becomes even a productive economic
organization.

To summarize, any state, through bureaucratic and productive
organizations, expresses a relationship of class domination (and
consequently has social bases), assumes an ideology as if in the common
interest, develops and implements policies that respond to the
fundamental pact of domination, but also claims to attend to the
aspirations of dominated groups. Officials of the state (notably in the
judicial sector) have to adopt both an ideology of equality and
generality ("all citizens are equal before the law") and a practice in
which dominant interests impose themselves.

ASSOCIATED-DEPENDENT CAPITALISM

In the industrialized countries of Latin America which we are
considering, the state embodies an alliance between the interests of the
internationalized sector of the bourgeoisie and those of public and
entrepreneurial bureaucracies. The local bourgeoisie links itself to
these sectors.

In part, the state in dependent capitalism generates its own social
base, since its productive function is to assure capital accumulation,
and since in performing this function, it creates a sector of public
entrepreneurs. At times this stratum is called the "state bourgeoisie",
to emphasize that these social agents are not simple bureaucrats nor do
they simply implement the "public good". They function, sociologically,
as the "officeholders of capital". For they support the accumulation of
capital in the state enterprises. Both the accumulation of capital by
public enterprises and the placing of all of the national wealth
(mineral ore, impounded taxes, lands, roadways, etc.) at the disposal of
private capital are fundamental requirements for the advancement of
associated-dependent capitalism.

The state extends a bureaucracy and bases itself on a civil and military
technocracy. The latter carries out the interests that are expressed by
the state. Certainly, an inversion of this relationship can occur. The
actors may occupy prominent positions on the political scene. The
military bureaucracy may predominate in the control of the state. But in
the end, long-term policies must be compatible with the social bases of
the state.

In the realization of policies of accumulation and development, though
the bureaucratic framework may be in the hands of a
technocratic-bureaucracy or a corporative military (together or
separately), the nature of the dominant state relationship develops
through the strengthening of the alliance between the local
entrepreneurial sector, associated with the multinational foreign
enterprises, and the state productive sector.

The same fundamental alliance which constitutes a dependent industrial
capitalist state may organize itself institutionally within a context of
authoritarianism, restricted democracy, or totalitarianism. There is
little credibility in its structural compatibility with substantive
forms of mass-democracy, populism, or even traditional caudillo
(bossist) authoritarianism, since in these regimes the requisite
policies leading to the expansion of industrial dependent capitalism
become difficult to implement, because of the masses' interests in
economic redistribution and political participation.

Not that Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina will NECESSARILY have to
adapt themselves to the Brazilian or Peruvian military-bureaucratic-
authoritarian model. These last two regimes are themselves quite
different, both in the nature of their policies and in the nature of
their respective social bases.

The bureaucratic-authoritarian FORM of a regime like that of Brazil is
not the ONLY one capable of adapting to the "present stage" of capital
accumulation. Economic reductionism in this case would fail to consider
the changes that might occur from government to government (with, we
repeat, the basic state pact maintained).

There are many factors that function as sources of dynamism in history:
(1) circumstantial factors such as explosions of collective protest (the
1974 Brazilian elections provide an example different form the
Cordobazo, because the correlation of forces differs in the two
countries);
(2) struggles within dominant sectors;
(3) the emergence of objective economic challenges (recessions, soaring
inflation, a "new stage" of import substitution in the capital goods
sector, for example);
(4) the ability of the governing group to resolve problems and the
opposition's ability to debate them, and so forth.

Not all changes are always possible, to be sure, nor do political forces
of taking advantage of opportunities for transformation always exist.
But even in bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, and even with the
persistence of the alliance that underlies the state, there is room for
regime-types to vary historically. What is at issue is not just a "mere
change in form". The differences between a torturing autocratic regime
and a "restricted democracy" arise out of the very possibilities for
struggles among classes, and they in turn influence the historical
opportunities of the dependent capitalist-industrial state.

A basic problem exists, posed by the present moment and by Latin
American situations of dependency: the very penetration of
multinationals requires a state that is capable of furnishing the
multinationals with the resources for accumulation. But this process is
contradictory: for this to work, the state must fortify itself and
expand its functions at both the administrative and the economic levels,
in this way increasing its prospects for sovereignty. Faced with the
political challenges of dominated classes to radically reorder society,
this entrepreneurial-regulative state militarizes itself, becoming even
stronger and more autocratic. At this point the relative loosening of
ties between the state and its SOCIAL BASE may occur, which the
economically ruling classes may perceive as a risk of "Bonapartization"
of the state. The spectrum of this perceived risk ranges from the
emergency of a new Peron to a "mythical Peruvianism" that would lead the
armed forces to ally with the people. In the process of exercising
sovereignty and equipping the state with entrepreneurial skills, which
allow both international and local accumulation, the entrepreneurial-
repressive state DISSOCIATES itself from the nation. THIS is the
specific political contradiction in the current form of Latin American
dependent development.

There may have been a redefinition of the "forms of dependency", in
certain Latin American countries there may be "less dependency", and the
state in these countries may be capable of exercising a greater degree
of sovereignty. But for us, what is at issue is the nature of class
conflicts and alliances which the dependency situation encompasses.

As we stated previously, the political struggle revolving around the
state shows what is essential in this form of dependency: the style of
development of the possibility of alternatives depends upon the
resolution of this question of the state. In the Chilean Popular Unity,
in Peru, and in the Popular Assembly of the Torres period in Bolivia,
popular forces or forces with popular intentions momentarily assumed
control of the state. We find, in these cases, ambiguity about what
constitutes the "popular" and unanimity regarding NATIONAL demands.

The fundamental challenge of the present moment in Latin American social
development consists in linking these two aspects of radical political
movements, the popular and the national, and in getting to the bottom
of the opposition between the popular and the proletarian.

What is specific to the Latin American situation of dependency is the
difficulty in conceiving of a political passage to socialism by a
strictly proletarian route, given the structural conditions of
industrial capitalism in the periphery. So, alliances between popular
movements, national-popular demands, and properly working-class
struggles are required to enforce new paths in society.

These questions, however, are not posed today as they were during the
populist period. The advance of mass industrial society, urbanization,
the revolution in communication, even the situations of dependent-
DEVELOPMENT themselves, pose the political question of popular
participation in such a way as to EXCLUDE MANIPULATIVE LINKS WITH
DOMINANT CLASSES THROUGH THE STATE as an option. Such links were the
basis of populism's policy. The internationalization of production and
of the market have advanced, and the state as the stimulus for an
enterprise economy. But, at the same time, for dominated classes, the
paternalism of the traditional Latin American state (in both the
oligarchical and populist versions) has been broken. Although
politically frustrated, the guerrilla movements did serve the function
of disrupting this paternalism and putting an end to manipulative types
of alliance which once tied the people to the state in the name of the
nation.

The practical issues that will permit development of an alternative
type of state involve, first, knowing which course "substantive
democratization" must take to affirm what is essential in the national
and the popular and free from the rancidity of bureaucratizacion and
authoritarianism, and second, knowing how to balance the need for
organization and the vitality of spontaneous mass behaviour. As in any
case of social transformation, such questions go beyond analysis and
anchor themselves in values: they are projected into the future to
assist in the practical escape from a situation that reinforces the
prevailing exploitative order. It is not within the boundaries of this
book to pursue these questions. It is barely within those boundaries to
point out, as we have, that social practice in Latin America has already
begun to deal with these questions (even if in experiences that failed).

Researchers have directed their attention to ideology and corporativist
forms in Latin America.(11) It appears to us that the fusion between
enterprise and the state, both of them based on bureaucracies, and the
role of the armies in Latin American regimes, underscore the
corporativist ties between the state and society.(12) During certain
periods of political life, the relationship between civil society and
the state seems to dispense with the mediation of parties: classes just
appropriate segments of the state apparatus to defend their interests.
Sometimes connections are formed through "bureaucratic rings", which are
organized around high officials (cabinet ministers, generals, etc.) and
which articulate the immediate interests of enterprises, government
bureaus, the press, sometimes unions, repressive groups, and so forth
around some specific policy or issue. In bureaucratic-authoritarian
politics these semiformal structures substitute for an organization that
is more stable and representative of class interests, namely parties.
Particularly when regimes are centralized and positions at the top are
decisive in the articulation of interests (Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Peru),
bureaucratic rings seem to constitute the form of political linkage that
establishes connections between civil society and the state. The linkage
is not very stable, since the key official can be dismissed and the ring
thereby broken.(13)

These formal aspects of the juncture between the state and civil society
should not obscure the characteristics of the state in contemporary
Latin America which we have already pointed out. The state is the
expression of the dynamism of business enterprises and of the classes
that control them as they operate in a context in which bureaucracies
and the regulative and organizational capacities of the state are
expanding.

The basic ideology of the state is fundamentally "developmentalism". In
view of the explicit ends of economic growth and national grandeur, the
exploitation of workers, if not openly defended by the state, is
justified by the argument that the tightening of belts is necessary
"at the moment" so that "in the future" the results of this economy may
be redistributed. We do not endorse studies of Latin American
corporativism that see in it a "profound cultural trend", consonant with
that society's patrimonialist structures. These structures were real in
another and bygone situation, but in the current period of industrial-
financial capitalist development, an insistence on the "necessity" of
the corporative form in Latin American political relations seem to us
an anachronistic and conservative point of view. When corporativist
forms exist, and there are circumstances in which they do, they express
the pact of dominion among classes trying to implant capitalist
development, and the opposition which these attempts encounter in the
political movements of subordinate classes.

Instead of insisting on the immutability of the "cultural dimension" and
historical roots of corporativism, it seems to us that what is important
is an understanding of the essence of contradiction between interests of
people and current style of development, between the state and the
nation. In these relationships of opposition, if any cultural dimension
exists and carries significance, it is what Gramsci called a
relationship of hegemony: the capacity to rule. The effective battle is
not between corporativism and the democratic tradition. It is between
technocratic elitism and a vision of the formative process of a mass
industrial society which can offer what is popular as specifically
national and which succeeds in transforming the demand for a more
developed economy and for a democratic society into a state that
expresses the vitality of truly popular forces, capable of seeking
socialist forms for the social organization of the future.
____________________________
footnotes

(7) It should be made clear that despite the importance of the role of
the state productive sector in the Brazilian economy, foreign
enterprises control between 40 and 50 percent of the large groups,
according to measures of fixed assets, liquid assets, employment,
and invoicing.

(8) O'Donnell, Guillermo, "Reflexiones sobre las tendencias generales
de cambio en el Estado burocratico autoritario" (Buenos Aires,
CEDES, 1975).

(9) We are not referring here to O'Donnell analyses. There exists in
these (especially in "Notas para uma explicacao historico-
comparativa" (Notes for an historic-comparative analysis), mimeo) a
vivid effort to demonstrate that the "mutual indispensibility"
between oligopolistic accumulation and bureaucratic-authoritarian
regimes passes through the sieve of class struggles and through the
accidents of history.

(10) On the contradictions in the recent evolution of the economy and
politics of Argentina, consult O'Donnell text, referred to above.
The alliance between part of the local bourgeoisie and the popular-
worker movement constitutes, for that author, a defensive alliance
whose limits emerge clearly when the cyclical oscillations of the
economy lead agro-exporting sectors to demand corrections in the
economic policies proposed by this alliance.

(11) See Schmitter, Philip, "Still the Century of Corporativism?". in
WORLD POLITICS, 25 (January 1973), and his important book "Interest
Conflict and Political Change in Brazil" (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1971); also Stepan, Alfred, "The State and
Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective", forthcoming from
Princeton University Press. See especially chapters 1 and 2.

(12) See Stepan, Alfred, op. cit., where corporativism is NOT
inappropriately generalized to describe all authoritarian regimes.
See also, in Schmitter's book, cited above, the specifications
made in describing corporative relations between the state and
civil society and among parts of the latter.

(13) See especially, Cardoso, F. H., "A questao do estado no Brasil",
in AUTORITARISMO E DEMOCRATIZACAO (Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra,
1975).

F.H. Cardoso and E. Faletto
(The subheadings were added by Dr. Róbinson Rojas. The text is part of
the POST SCRIPTUM, in Cardoso and Faletto, "Dependency and Development
in Latin America", University of California Press, 1979)
READ MORE - Capitalist Development And The State : Bases And Alternatives (1979)