>I felt that the debate was silly as to who the bad
>guys were. The U. S. very clearly encouraged right wing nationalist hate
>groups during Tito's time. For the U. S. to try to stop a genocidal fight
>that it helped create and fund is ludicrous. U.S. activists must keep the
>government out of the political affairs of other people. The U. S.
>government clearly means no good.
>Another example is Indonesia. The relationship between the Indonesian
>government and U. S. corporations is why Indonesian folks, esp. trade
>unionists are oppressed.
You said it better than I could, L. This helps to recenter the debate where it
should have been in the first place if we did not give too much attention to the
things that the medias are highlighting. If Indonesia is an sub-imperialist state (I
just made up that term, hoping that it will not create heated controversy), it's not
mainly because of Timor or Papuasia but because it murdered half a million
"communists" in the sixties on the behalf of the USA. But maybe the regime
has changed lately? Has the official visit to Irak any significance?
>Cannot imperialism have Military, Economic, Social,
>Geographical,and Political factors combined? I also fail to understand the
>subtle difference in terminoloy between "FINANCIAL" and "ECONOMIC".
Tom, I can't speak for Tony but normally finance is considered a subcategory
of economics. That's the difference. One frequenfly talk about the non-financial
economy as the real economy. Finance is in a way the formalization of real
economic struggles and can also be a way to channel the general principles
of capitalism (optimization of profit f.ex.) into action in specific cases where the
general principles are not acting directly. But finance has dynamics of its own.
Some marxists also believe that finance capital is opposed to industrial
capital. I don't.
As to other factors than economics in imperialism, they obviously have an
importance. Despite the fact that I'm not an orthodox marxist at all, I still think
that the economic one is the most important and that this has been a striking
characteristic of modern (say, from the conquest of the Americas to the middle
of the XIXth century) european imperialism. Marxists of course subscribe to a
kind of crude economic determinism which makes them often see economic
things as more important than they are (I'm going to be flamed for this gross
oversimplification :-).
Julien
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