Jonathan Nitzan wrote:
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Louis Proyect wrote on PEN-L:Basically, I believe that they overstate the level of autonomy in the oil and arms sector. In the crudest expression of this sort of things, you get Oliver Stone's "explanation" of the assassination of JFK and the supposed origins of the Vietnam war in cowboy capitalism based in Texas around the same sectors.
Of course, Nitzan and his partner are much more sophisticated.
In general terms, I would not look to any sector of the US bourgeoisie as being more bellicose than any other. For example, it might be tempting to conclude that a war against Iraq is not in the interests of Wall Street because the Dow-Jones has taken a nose dive in light of investor uncertainties. This is not really how the ruling class makes decisions.
I believe that Lenin characterized the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. To assume that Chase Manhattan Bank, Goldman-Sachs, Equitable Life Insurance Company et al are being under-represented in the war council would be a mistake. As New Left scholars took great pains to point out during the Vietnam war, there is an invisible government that remains in power no matter who gets elected president. Outfits like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the State Department, etc. are staffed by the same figures no matter who gets elected. They are indispensable factors in the decision whether to go to war or not.
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CONSPIRACY THEORY
Thank you Bill for your thoughts. We’d like to respond at some length given the many issues involved.
CONSPIRACY?
Ours is anything but conspiracy theory, for reasons which we elaborate below. But before we get to these reasons, perhaps it is worth clarifying the concepts.
- Conspiracy is a deliberate plot by some human beings to act behind the backs of other human beings in order to achieve their goals. In this sense, history, including that of capitalism, is replete with conspiracies which are often very successful; sometimes they even end up changing the very course of history. For this reason, any theory of history needs to have some theory of conspiracy. That much is obvious.
- “Conspiracy theory,” however, is used derogatorily to suggest a hypothesis which is either unsubstantiated, or worse still, irrefutable. Oliver Stone’s and the Military Industrial Complex are conspiracy theories in the former sense. They haven't been proven. Supply and demand is a conspiracy theory in the latter sense; it talks about mysterious forces which no one can observe and which conspire to rule our lives through an “invisible hand.” This theory cannot be refuted let alone proven, ever. (Incidentally, unlike the conspiracy theory of supply and demand, Rockefeller’s conspiracy to impose this theory on the North American academia is a well known fact.)
- Some theories change their status over time. When Copernicus wrote on the Sun and Earth, his theory was conspiratorial in both senses. Kepler’s was conspiracy theory initially; with the development of the telescope it became scientific and was eventually proven correct for its time. Newton's claim that bodies are attracted to one another and that their attraction could be quantified, was certainly conspiratorial. Einstein's notion of time/space was initially considered conspiratorial, even scandalous, but eventually proven twice as accurate than Newton's. In 1956, Shigeto Tsuru argued that the U.S. accumulation needed military spending, and that if accumulation were to continue growing at its present pace, in ten year time the resulting level of military expenditures could not be justified without war. He also estimated what the level of military spending would need to be. That was pretty speculative and certainly conspiratorial. As it turns out, though, ten years later the U.S. was deeply entangled in Vietnam, with military spending roughly the size predicted by Tsuru. Clearly a feat by the standards of the social sciences.
So just to clear the waters, ours is anything but a “conspiracy theory.” It deals with conspiracy among other things, sure. But so should any theory of capitalist history. The key point is that we deal with facts, and we make refutable propositions. They may be wrong, but the onus is on the critique to show how.NOW WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY SAY?
In fact, we donut claim that oil and armament corporations are “autonomous”; that they are more or less “bellicose” than other firms; or that they are the “reason” why Bush is going to war. Far from it.Our book is an attempt to integrate, theoretically and empirically, the qualitative power history of 20th century capitalism and the quantitative history of differential accumulation. In Chapter 2 we argue that differential accumulation – that is, the relative growth of dominant capital groups – tends to follows two basic “regimes” which we call breadth and depth. The breadth regime emphasizes growth, proletarianization, and most importantly corporate merger. The depth regime is based on stagflation and conflict. Historically, dominant capital in the United States, Israel, and other countries which we looked at, oscillated between these two regimes.
Each regime, if successful, works to boosts differential accumulation for dominant capital broadly (If it fails, which happens occasionally, differential accumulation goes into reverse). In other words, each regimes works to redistribute income from labour and small capital in favour of larger firms. But each regime does so in a different way – one through corporate mergers, the other through stagflation. And each regime is led by a dominant subgroup that usually benefits the most in terms of its differential accumulation.
Thus, during the 1970s and 1980s, differential accumulation was dominated by depth, and was led by the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition. The later coalition was accumulating faster than other big firms, but big firms in general benefited relative to both small firms and labour. These are the facts, at least in the United States and Israel. The main “mechanism” of this depth accumulation was stagflation, and the main “driver” of this stagflation was conflict in the Middle East. These relationships are factual. Was the depth regime “premeditated”? In some ways yes, in others no. The armament and oil companies certainly supported the militarization of the Middle East and higher oil prices – although they probably didn't know where this would lead them anymore than one could have anticipated the result of the Vietnam war or those of the coming war in Iraq. Did big companies in general support U.S. policy in the Middle East? Its hard to be conclusive. But not harder than when we come to decide which firms supported the war in Vietnam and to what extent. In fact, its not at all clear how far you can go with such questions and what is their significance. What we can say for sure is that they benefited differentially from the resulting inflation. These are facts.
For various reasons, which we elaborate in Ch. 5 (http://www.zopyra.com/~rael/PoliticalEconomyOfIsrael.pdf ) as well as elsewhere in the book, the late 1990s brought a shift. The main emphasis changed from depth to breadth; that is from stagflation to corporate amalgamation. The new regime was lead by high tech firms and those engaged in mergers (including incidentally some of the oil and weapon companies). We called this the Mergerdollar-Technodollar Coalition. This coalition benefited the most, but dominant capital as a whole continued to accumulate differentially relative to smaller firms and relative to workers. Again, these are the facts. Was this shift deliberate? Conspiratorial? Hard to say. But it certainly won the support of large corporations and most of their parent governments for much of the 1990s. Indeed, they even manufactured a novel ideology, known as the “new economy,” and soon enough began to believe in it – until the 2001 crash smartened them up. .
CAPITALISM SANS ACCUMULATION?
Capitalism is not about conquest, it is not about oil, it is not about economic growth, it is not about U.S. hegemony. It is about profit, and more specifically in our view, about differential profit. Is this the only way to explain capitalism? Of course not. But it is a pretty robust way. It has helped us understand U.S. inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, Russia's capitalization in the 1990s, The great U-turns in South Africa and Israel, energy conflicts in the Middle East, and more.So far, most of the discussion in the left about the war is embarrassingly statist if not ethnic. The North vs. the South. The U.S. vs. Europe. The West vs. the Islamic Fundamentalists. The Bush Administration vs. the rest of us. Are these the reasons why we suddenly moved from “global villagism” to “imperialism”? And if so, where does Marxist analysis of accumulation fit in? If the current bellicosity so obviously is in the interest of Wall Street, why hasn't anyone say so a couple of years ago? (What exactly is Wall Street, by the way?) What is the interest of the “bourgeoisie”? Who is exactly that bourgeoisie – my convenient store, or Exxon? What's the point of talking of “finance” when no one knows exactly what it means? Does it mean GE which makes half its profit from credit operations? Does it mean Soros who is invested in everything? Does it mean Royal//Dutch Shell whose profits are determined almost entirely by the price of oil?
Our own explanation of the current shift from global integration and “peace dividends” back to conflict and “war profits” is based on an analysis of the long term logic of accumulation. Its anything but a conspiracy theory. It has been proven correct in the past and could be refuted in the future. To say that the U.S. government is ruled by an “invisible” Wall Street government comes hell or high water, and that whatever happens in the world its always in the interest of the “capitalist system” sounds sensible. But, in fact, it is unfounded factually and irrefutable theoretically, the very hallmarks of conspiracy theory.
Jonathan and Shimshon
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Jonathan Nitzan
Political Science, York University
4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, M3J-1P3, Canada
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
voice (416) 736-2100, ext. 88822; fax (416) 736-5686Shimshon Bichler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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