The following is excerpted from an article in the Christian
Science Monitor. In an era where Marx and Lenin were declared irrelevant a few
years ago, it is interesting to see how even mainstream commentators are
grappling with the debates and concepts today.
Readers are encouraged to go to the original site of the CSM
for more information. We can find lots of useful information in the mainstream
press if we read with a critical eye....
Published in the Christian Science Monitor: "Lenin and
Globalization", CSM Lenin and globalization or Yes Virginia, there is such a
thing as imperialist rivalry and war
Lenin and globalization Benjamin Schwarz Page: OPINION,
Page 9 As delegates to the World Trade Organization celebrated, and
protesters vilified the global economy, both groups could have used a
history lesson. For better or worse, today's international market didn't
simply emerge. It was deliberately constructed. Understanding this
illuminates both the challenges posed by the world economy and the threats to
it. Too many economists and business leaders neglect historian E.H.
Carr's maxim: "The science of economics presupposes a given political order
and cannot be properly studied in isolation from politics." Though
they correctly emphasize the unprecedented economic growth the global
economy has engendered, they fail to emphasize America's equally
unprecedented power, which made growth possible. Several years ago a
Pentagon planning document asserted that America's greatest post- World War
II achievement is the creation of a "market-oriented zone of peace and
prosperity encompassing two-thirds of the globe." To appreciate this
achievement, it's helpful to recall the once-famous debate between V.I. Lenin
and Karl Kautsky. Lenin held that any international capitalist order was
inherently temporary because the political order among competing states on
which he believed it would be based would shift over time. Whereas Lenin
argued that international capitalism could not transcend the Hobbesian
reality of international politics, Kautsky maintained that capitalists were
much too rational to destroy themselves in internecine conflicts. An
international class of enlightened capitalists, recognizing that
international political and military competition would upset the orderly
processes of world finance and trade, would instead seek peace and free
trade. But Lenin and Kautsky were talking past each other. Kautsky believed
the common interest of an international capitalist class
determined international relations, whereas in Lenin's analysis
international relations were driven by competition among states. Lenin argued
that there was an irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism and
the anarchic international system; Kautsky didn't recognize the division
in the first place. US foreign policy has been based in essence on a
hybrid of Lenin's and Kautsky's analyses. It has aimed at the unified
international capitalist community Kautsky envisioned. But the US effort to
build and sustain that community is determined by a worldview not far from
Lenin's. To Washington, today's global economy hasn't been maintained by the
common interests of an international economic elite, but by US
preponderance. So, the Pentagon asserts that the global market requires the
"stability" that only American "leadership" can provide. Ultimately, of
course, Lenin and US policymakers diverge. While Lenin recognized that any
given international order was inherently impermanent, America's foreign
policy strategists have hoped to keep that reality of international
relations permanently at bay. Since World War II, the US has created a new
kind of international politics among the advanced capitalist states.
Whereas these states had formerly sought to protect their national
economies from outside influences and to enhance their national power in
relation to their rivals, they would now seek security as members of
the US-dominated alliance system and their economic growth as
participants in the US-secured world economy, adjusting their national
economics as dictated by world market tendencies. But at the close of the
20th century, global capitalism's contradictions are becoming apparent, as
the international economy's very success begets potentially lethal
challenges to it. Just as "war made the state," so the world market's
unprecedented autonomy, power, and pervasiveness is precisely the sort of
challenge that could provoke the expansion of the state's capabilities and
prestige (which, of course, raises the specter of totalitarianism). In short,
as the global economy goes from strength to strength, the state must subdue
it or be destroyed by it. Even more important, it is precisely because
capitalism has reached its highest stage that the state may have a chance
against it. As the global economy has become more interdependent, it has
become more fragile. For instance, the emergent technology industries are the
most powerful engines of world economic growth, but they require a level
of specialization and a breadth of markets possible only in an
integrated world market. This web of global trade, production, and finance
is tenuous - its strands remain anchored in states, entities that under
normal circumstances are unmoved by appeals to comparative advantage and
global economic efficiency. In still another way, the global economy has
perhaps sown the seeds of its own destruction. The problem with the
US-created global economy is that it has been all too successful. Through
trade, foreign investment, and the spread of technology and managerial
expertise, economic power has diffused from the US to new centers of growth.
With a shift in the international distribution of economic strength, the Pax
America will inevitably be undermined. If the assumption of power politics,
upon which America's post-1945 foreign policy is based, proves correct, then,
as US preponderance weakens, the normal conditions of international
relations will reemerge. Independent and jealous states jockeying for power
and position will of necessity shred the web of the integrated
global economy. Capitalism - at least the advanced state of
capitalism represented by the global economy - may collapse as the political
order that nurtured it crumbles. Although the empire he built is in ruins
and his revolution discredited, Lenin may yet have the last
laugh. Benjamin Schwarz is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for The
Atlantic Monthly. (c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing
Society
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