Mark Jones writes:>These silent, invisible women, hundreds of millions of them, are a condition of existence of late capitalism, of US imperialism in its exterminist phase of final decay.<
what makes you think that US imperialism is in its phase of "final decay"? It's horrible -- maybe even "exterminist" -- and having some severe economic problems, but it's not going to go away until there's some sort of powerful movement aiming to replace it.
BTW, EP Thompson used the word "exterminist" to refer to the vicious circle of the Cold War rivalry between US and Soviet imperialisms (though I don't think he described the USSR as "imperialist"). You must be describing a different type of exterminism. Very destructive military adventures by imperialist powers against smaller countries (here, Iraq) have happened before. What makes the current one "exterminist"?
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Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 1:58 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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> [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:30058] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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>
> At 05/09/2002 19:29, Louis Proyect wrote:
> >Robert Biel's "The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in
> >North/South Relations" (Zed Books, 2000) is everything that
> Hardt-Negri's
> >"Empire" is not.
>
> This is a wonderful book by Biel and, prompted by my mentor
> Lou Proyect, I
> just spent a day at the British Library going thru it. Great,
> especially,
> on the importance to capitalist accumulation and to the
> wealth enjoyed by
> the big swinging dicks of Wall St and their
> fashionable-parlor-socialist
> acolytes and alleged critics, is the unsung and unpaid
> domestic drudgery of
> Third World Women. As Biel points out, the same people who
> argue in favour
> of the maquiladoras and the entrenchment of wage-slavery in the
> peripheries, as somehow enlightening alternatives to such domestic
> drudgery, are in their own persons and in their engrossment
> of the labour
> of others, beneficiaries of that domestic drudgery, for without the
> immiseration and cruel exploitation of unseen masses of women,
> part-peasant, part-proletarian, hag-ridden by patriarchy and
> ultimately at
> the service of Wall St and its mouthpieces, imperialism could
> not continue
> to exploit the South at all. These silent, invisible women,
> hundreds of
> millions of them, are a condition of existence of late
> capitalism, of US
> imperialism in its exterminist phase of final decay. Those
> who want to
> silence such authentic voices of the oppressed women of the South as
> Vandana Shiva are its servants. Biel provides a rebuttal to
> their craven
> politics in terms which even economists can understand.
>
> However despite its strong points, so well summarised by Lou
> that you don't
> need to buy the it, there are one or two, no, make that four,
> thing wrong
> with Biel's book.
>
> First, his approach to the USSR (his Maoist inflection
> doesn't permit him
> to comprehend either the scale of the human catastrophe
> ongoing in eastern
> Europe, or the implications, positive and negative, of the
> disappearance of
> the USSR for global relations of production and for US hegemony).
>
> 2nd his approach to the nature of contemporary imperialism (he's a
> semi-kautskyite who believes in ultra-imperialism. Now. while
> it is true
> that there exists a baleful solidarity of the thieving North
> against the
> abused South, the idea that the USA is merely one imperial
> power among
> others, a primum inter pares, is absurd. The US is the heart
> of the global
> cancer of capitalism, the primary tumour).
>
> 3rd Biel's approach to the ongoing and apocalyptic eco-crisis, which
> combines man-made climate change, mass extinction and
> poisoning of the
> ecosphere is far too weak (He kind of mentions it, but it is
> hardly central
> to his thinking; but, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be
> interested in
> eco-catastrophe, but eco-catastrophe is sure interested in you).
>
> 4th Biel's political conclusions are tepid, insipid and
> utopian; and here I
> diosagree with Lou's more upbeat judgment.
>
> I'm glad of Lou's review and despite my overall negativity,
> this is a good
> book. Especially good factually (but an archive search of
> marxmail or the
> A-List will bring up a lot better and more recent stuff, for
> free. Where do
> Zed get off charging $25 for a slim paperback?)
>
> Mark Jones
>
