Having reread Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” as
part of a Yahoo-based reading group on Marxism, the arguments are fresh
in my mind. So much so that when I read Paul Krugman’s August 15, 2008
N.Y. Times op-ed piece “The Great Illusion“, I wondered if he had been
dipping into Lenin himself :
"So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the
Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major
corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad news, I
found myself wondering whether this war is an omen - a sign that the
second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.
"If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to
know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient,
inward-looking national economies - but our great-great grandfathers
lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and
investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
"Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes
described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I. “The
inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea
in bed, the various products of the whole earth … he could at the same
moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural
resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”
"And Keynes’s Londoner 'regarded this state of affairs as normal,
certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement …
The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and
cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion …
appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course
of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was
nearly complete in practice.'
"But then came three decades of war, revolution, political instability,
depression and more war. By the end of World War II, the world was
fragmented economically as well as politically. And it took a couple of
generations to put it back together.
"So, can things fall apart again? Yes, they can."
I was especially struck by the Keynes quote: “The inhabitant of London
could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various
products of the whole earth … he could at the same moment and by the
same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new
enterprises of any quarter of the world.” The similarity with Thomas
Friedman’s “flat world” ideology is striking:
In an interview with YaleGlobal, Friedman was asked how nationalism and
a flat world intersect. He answered:
"That’s a good question. I really tried to develop that idea beyond
Lexus. You know in Lexus I wrote that no two countries would fight a war
so long as they both had McDonald’s. And I was really trying to give an
example of how when a country gets a middle class big enough to sustain
a McDonald’s network, they generally want to focus on economic
development. That is a sort of tipping point, rather than fighting wars.
"In 'Flat World,' I take that theory one step further into what I call
the 'Dell Theory' - you know, Dell Computers. The Dell Theory says that
no two countries that are part of the same global supply chain will ever
fight a war as long as they’re each still part of that supply chain.
Now, the big test case is China and Taiwan. Both are suppliers of the
main parts of computers. If they go to war, don’t try to order a
computer this month because you’ll have a real problem."
In the early 20th century the notion that the growth of international
trusts would reduce tensions between nations that even the left viewed
this development as progressive. Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German
social democracy, basically held the same view as Thomas Friedman. As
long as big corporations were jointly owned by different national
fractions of capital, they would tend to avoid war. As Kautsky put it in
1914, just as WWI was about to break out:
"The subsiding of the Protectionist movement in Britain, the lowering of
tariffs in America; the trend towards disarmament; the rapid decline in
the export of capital from France and Germany in the years immediately
preceding the war; finally, the growing international interweaving
between the various cliques of finance capital-all this has caused me to
consider whether the present imperialist policy cannot be supplanted by
a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the joint
exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in
place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capital. Such a new
phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable. Can it be achieved?
Sufficient premises are still lacking to enable us to answer this question…"
In my introduction to Lenin’s “Imperialism”, I posed the question:
“Whatever happened to World Wars? Did the seeming ability of capitalism
to stave off both worldwide economic depression and world war reflect to
some extent that Kautsky was on to something? Are we living in something
like ‘ultra-imperialism’ today, a point that is made in Hardt-Negri’s
Empire?”
Perhaps this question has been answered partially by growing tensions
between the U.S. and Russia. The left has had a tendency to dismiss the
idea of inter-imperialist wars since the end of WWII. With such a close
affinity between the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, it is impossible to
imagine a new world war. Of course, there was always the Cold War but
that was focused more on conflicts between imperialism and
non-imperialist 3rd world nations that lacked the firepower to recreate
anything like WWI and WWII.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/has-paul-krugman-been-reading-lenin/
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