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Kevin's Reviews > War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
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Kevin's review
bookshelves: critique-imperialism-america, critique-violence, econ-violence, 2-brilliant-intros-101, 1-how-the-world-works, econ-imperialism
Jul 29, 2017
bookshelves: critique-imperialism-america, critique-violence, econ-violence, 2-brilliant-intros-101, 1-how-the-world-works, econ-imperialism
Read 2 times. Last read May 15, 2020 to May 16, 2020.
50 must-read pages, especially for "American patriots".
The Brilliant:
--Read it online .
--I’m upgrading my rating because of this book's usefulness for specific audiences, i.e. soldiers/�support our troops� culture given the author’s military accolades (Major General of the Marine Corps, 2x Medal of Honor, etc.).
--It’s quite something to hear someone so high-ranking debunk the myths of �making the world safe for democracy� by explaining how US foreign policy = poor Americans sent to kill even poorer people abroad to secure greater profits for the richest Americans. Thus, we get chapters “Who Makes the Profits� and “Who Pays the Bills?�.
--As anti-war veteran Michael Prysner (also see ) says, “our enemies are not in the poorest countries on the planet, but right here in the richest one!�. The scum of the earth are revealed to be the merchants of death, which happens to be the wealthiest US capitalist shareholders/bondholders/chicken-hawks.
...Here's the rest of the quote:
The Missing:
--Let us fill in the gaps to this 1935 pamphlet:
1) Capitalism and War:
--Butler reveals astronomical wartime profits, and how top capitalists (industrialists and financiers) all share in the spoils. Thus, his #1 step to “smash this racket� is to take the profit out of war (his other steps were #2: vote for war taken from those who risk their lives, i.e. soldiers, and #3: military limited to self-defense).
--Butler suggests a wartime conscription income for everyone to match that of soldiers: “Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.�
--We need to dig deeper into the byzantine nature of capitalism's contradictions and crises:
i) Money creation:
--Businesses start with debt, where bankers bring anticipated productivity growth from the future into the present in the form of credit-money. The assumption is this credit-money will be used productively to realize that future productivity to pay the banker's interest and the shareholders' dividends, but this can quickly spiral into speculation.
ii) Accumulation by dispossession:
--The Enclosures of the Commons, colonialism and continued privatization ("artificial scarcity" thus dependency on markets) create capitalism's peculiar markets, i.e. labour market and land market at the heart of capitalism (since humans and nature are "fictitious commodities", not produced with an obvious cost of production just to be bought/sold on markets).
iii) Capitalism's peculiar markets:
--Markets for real commodities have long pre-dated "capitalism". Capitalism is the expansion of market relationship (instantaneous buying/selling between self-seeking strangers) to sacred social relations that hold society together, thus capitalism's peculiar markets for labour/land/money featuring fictitious commodities (humans/nature/purchasing power): Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
--These peculiarities, along with the violence that maintain them, are conveniently obscured by mainstream economics' utopic and myopic equilibrium focusing on the brief moment of market exchange (of real commodities)
iv) Capitalist crises and war's "creative destruction":
--The relationship between capitalism and war was a crucial topic during WWI. Capitalism’s logic of endless growth (since economic action is driven by profits, economies-of-scale reduces costs while profits are threatened by competition and saturated markets) requires imperialist expansion.
--Unlike the notion of peaceful commerce, pioneering US sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois connected the imperialist Scramble for Africa to the rivalry that led to WWI in “The African Roots of War� (1915). Lenin (the Russian Revolution had strong anti-WWI sentiments) soon published Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916.
--What is behind capitalism’s boom/bust nature? For the boom's "irrational exuberance", remember how capitalism starts with bankers conjuring credit-money from the future, how tempting it is to cross into speculation? When the bubble bursts, panic flips the optimism into an endless downward spiral of pessimism.
--War is the ultimate reset button for capitalism: it forces capitalism's short-sighted competition to cooperate (at least within a warring nation) without too much concern of proving that socialist planning/cooperation works (because war is meant to destroy rather than fulfill social needs). War is the "creative destruction" wiping away dead capital and replacing it with the insatiable furnace of war markets.
--Thus, it was the greatest global war in human history, WWII, which rescued global capitalism from the endless Great Depression, not the watered-down socialism of the US New Deals, etc.
--Even more crucially for today, WWII's booming factories feeding global destruction were ready for another Great Crash/Great Depression since peacetime consumerism (even the creation of white "middle class" consumerism) could not possibly absorb all the products at a profit compared to the endless appetite of global war! (Ex. the "near-bankrupt aircraft industry": Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation) Thus, the irrationality of capitalist production lobbied for the Cold War arms race/US military industrial complex. It's only a waste of money for social needs; for capitalism, it is essential. So much for the post-war "peace dividend" for the public!
2) Whose Enemies?:
--When Butler says he was a “gangster for capitalism�, US imperialism still on the rise; it was not until WWII, when the other world powers decimated each other as US capitalists profited from selling to both sides, that the empire was fully formed.
--The empire made sure no challenges to capitalism could emerge, in particular the countries fighting to liberate themselves from colonialism:
-Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
--The U.S. Military Industrial Complex needs "enemies": the Red Scare was crucial. Communism, in its attempt for the underclass to seize the state and control capital, was indeed the ultimate threat to capitalists... but any form of self-determination during the 20th century's struggle for decolonization could be deemed a "communist" threat (hence the sprawling list of interventions).
--Western capitalism praised European Fascism for its ability to whip labour into shape (and kill dissent, esp. communists) during capitalist crises; Fascism only become a problem when their expansionism revived WWI's inter-imperialist rivalries. After WWII, the freedom-loving West had no problem reviving WWII fascists and funding similar reactionaries to stamp out decolonization:
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-poetic fire on Colonial brutality returning to Europe as Fascism: Discourse on Colonialism
--In fact, Butler personally experienced Fascism in the US! In the Business Plot, a group of US capitalist elites tried to recruit Butler to perform a fascist coup against FDR: The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR
--The Cold War “arms race� was closer to an arms chase, where the USSR (ravaged by the Nazi invasion, rapid industrialization, and civil war) could not keep up with the US’s Madman strategy risking annihilation (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner) and dollar hegemony (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance).
--After USSR collapsed, the War on Terror found a new "enemy" in the same reactionary forces that the US had weaponized against USSR, pan-Arabism/Arab nationalism/socialism, etc.: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
-.
-Michael Parenti on .
-anti-war veteran .
3) Capitalist Propaganda and Democracy:
--While Butler recognizes the use of propaganda to sell WWI, he seems to think a �free press� is a sufficient counter (provided it had access to the secrecy). However, “freedom� in a capitalist society prioritizes the freedom of capital (one-dollar-one-vote), and the capitalist media has evolved to be the key tool for war propaganda: Chomsky's Prospects for Democracy
--The millions who protested the 2003 invasion of Iraq were able to overcome capitalist media propaganda, only to be ignored as the war continued. �Democracy� is not handed down from above; it must be taken from below.
-Imperialist media's global .
-The sophistication of capitalist propaganda on the educated liberal intelligentsia: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
-Case studies in US corporate media coverage of foreign policy: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
-US .
The Bad:
--My previous lower rating was for readers not indoctrinated by US war propaganda or sitting one-the-fence; this book is a bittersweet admission of guilt by a general to war crimes� For all the talk about the hardship of imperialism’s soldiers, imagine what it is like for the world’s poorest to experience imperialism’s high-tech bombs and chemical weapons...
The Brilliant:
--Read it online .
--I’m upgrading my rating because of this book's usefulness for specific audiences, i.e. soldiers/�support our troops� culture given the author’s military accolades (Major General of the Marine Corps, 2x Medal of Honor, etc.).
--It’s quite something to hear someone so high-ranking debunk the myths of �making the world safe for democracy� by explaining how US foreign policy = poor Americans sent to kill even poorer people abroad to secure greater profits for the richest Americans. Thus, we get chapters “Who Makes the Profits� and “Who Pays the Bills?�.
--As anti-war veteran Michael Prysner (also see ) says, “our enemies are not in the poorest countries on the planet, but right here in the richest one!�. The scum of the earth are revealed to be the merchants of death, which happens to be the wealthiest US capitalist shareholders/bondholders/chicken-hawks.
War is a racket. It always has been.--My favorite quote from Butler came from his speeches:
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
...Here's the rest of the quote:
Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. […] I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. […] During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.
[-Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11 (November, 1935), p. 8; bold emphases added]
The Missing:
--Let us fill in the gaps to this 1935 pamphlet:
1) Capitalism and War:
--Butler reveals astronomical wartime profits, and how top capitalists (industrialists and financiers) all share in the spoils. Thus, his #1 step to “smash this racket� is to take the profit out of war (his other steps were #2: vote for war taken from those who risk their lives, i.e. soldiers, and #3: military limited to self-defense).
--Butler suggests a wartime conscription income for everyone to match that of soldiers: “Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.�
--We need to dig deeper into the byzantine nature of capitalism's contradictions and crises:
i) Money creation:
--Businesses start with debt, where bankers bring anticipated productivity growth from the future into the present in the form of credit-money. The assumption is this credit-money will be used productively to realize that future productivity to pay the banker's interest and the shareholders' dividends, but this can quickly spiral into speculation.
ii) Accumulation by dispossession:
--The Enclosures of the Commons, colonialism and continued privatization ("artificial scarcity" thus dependency on markets) create capitalism's peculiar markets, i.e. labour market and land market at the heart of capitalism (since humans and nature are "fictitious commodities", not produced with an obvious cost of production just to be bought/sold on markets).
iii) Capitalism's peculiar markets:
--Markets for real commodities have long pre-dated "capitalism". Capitalism is the expansion of market relationship (instantaneous buying/selling between self-seeking strangers) to sacred social relations that hold society together, thus capitalism's peculiar markets for labour/land/money featuring fictitious commodities (humans/nature/purchasing power): Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
--These peculiarities, along with the violence that maintain them, are conveniently obscured by mainstream economics' utopic and myopic equilibrium focusing on the brief moment of market exchange (of real commodities)
iv) Capitalist crises and war's "creative destruction":
--The relationship between capitalism and war was a crucial topic during WWI. Capitalism’s logic of endless growth (since economic action is driven by profits, economies-of-scale reduces costs while profits are threatened by competition and saturated markets) requires imperialist expansion.
--Unlike the notion of peaceful commerce, pioneering US sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois connected the imperialist Scramble for Africa to the rivalry that led to WWI in “The African Roots of War� (1915). Lenin (the Russian Revolution had strong anti-WWI sentiments) soon published Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916.
--What is behind capitalism’s boom/bust nature? For the boom's "irrational exuberance", remember how capitalism starts with bankers conjuring credit-money from the future, how tempting it is to cross into speculation? When the bubble bursts, panic flips the optimism into an endless downward spiral of pessimism.
--War is the ultimate reset button for capitalism: it forces capitalism's short-sighted competition to cooperate (at least within a warring nation) without too much concern of proving that socialist planning/cooperation works (because war is meant to destroy rather than fulfill social needs). War is the "creative destruction" wiping away dead capital and replacing it with the insatiable furnace of war markets.
--Thus, it was the greatest global war in human history, WWII, which rescued global capitalism from the endless Great Depression, not the watered-down socialism of the US New Deals, etc.
--Even more crucially for today, WWII's booming factories feeding global destruction were ready for another Great Crash/Great Depression since peacetime consumerism (even the creation of white "middle class" consumerism) could not possibly absorb all the products at a profit compared to the endless appetite of global war! (Ex. the "near-bankrupt aircraft industry": Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation) Thus, the irrationality of capitalist production lobbied for the Cold War arms race/US military industrial complex. It's only a waste of money for social needs; for capitalism, it is essential. So much for the post-war "peace dividend" for the public!
2) Whose Enemies?:
--When Butler says he was a “gangster for capitalism�, US imperialism still on the rise; it was not until WWII, when the other world powers decimated each other as US capitalists profited from selling to both sides, that the empire was fully formed.
--The empire made sure no challenges to capitalism could emerge, in particular the countries fighting to liberate themselves from colonialism:
-Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
--The U.S. Military Industrial Complex needs "enemies": the Red Scare was crucial. Communism, in its attempt for the underclass to seize the state and control capital, was indeed the ultimate threat to capitalists... but any form of self-determination during the 20th century's struggle for decolonization could be deemed a "communist" threat (hence the sprawling list of interventions).
--Western capitalism praised European Fascism for its ability to whip labour into shape (and kill dissent, esp. communists) during capitalist crises; Fascism only become a problem when their expansionism revived WWI's inter-imperialist rivalries. After WWII, the freedom-loving West had no problem reviving WWII fascists and funding similar reactionaries to stamp out decolonization:
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-poetic fire on Colonial brutality returning to Europe as Fascism: Discourse on Colonialism
--In fact, Butler personally experienced Fascism in the US! In the Business Plot, a group of US capitalist elites tried to recruit Butler to perform a fascist coup against FDR: The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR
--The Cold War “arms race� was closer to an arms chase, where the USSR (ravaged by the Nazi invasion, rapid industrialization, and civil war) could not keep up with the US’s Madman strategy risking annihilation (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner) and dollar hegemony (Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance).
--After USSR collapsed, the War on Terror found a new "enemy" in the same reactionary forces that the US had weaponized against USSR, pan-Arabism/Arab nationalism/socialism, etc.: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
-.
-Michael Parenti on .
-anti-war veteran .
3) Capitalist Propaganda and Democracy:
--While Butler recognizes the use of propaganda to sell WWI, he seems to think a �free press� is a sufficient counter (provided it had access to the secrecy). However, “freedom� in a capitalist society prioritizes the freedom of capital (one-dollar-one-vote), and the capitalist media has evolved to be the key tool for war propaganda: Chomsky's Prospects for Democracy
--The millions who protested the 2003 invasion of Iraq were able to overcome capitalist media propaganda, only to be ignored as the war continued. �Democracy� is not handed down from above; it must be taken from below.
-Imperialist media's global .
-The sophistication of capitalist propaganda on the educated liberal intelligentsia: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
-Case studies in US corporate media coverage of foreign policy: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
-US .
The Bad:
--My previous lower rating was for readers not indoctrinated by US war propaganda or sitting one-the-fence; this book is a bittersweet admission of guilt by a general to war crimes� For all the talk about the hardship of imperialism’s soldiers, imagine what it is like for the world’s poorest to experience imperialism’s high-tech bombs and chemical weapons...
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May 16, 2020 01:11PM
It's a shame Butler is so much more popular on the "America First"/"anti-globalist" Right than on the Left. For some cultural reason he's a lot like Spooner, the ancaps' favorite individualist.
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Kevin wrote: "It's a shame Butler is so much more popular on the "America First"/"anti-globalist" Right than on the Left. For some cultural reason he's a lot like Spooner, the ancaps' favorite individualist."Not to rationalize the irrational, but I've wondered how much it has to do with having a government that also administers empire. To be against government social programs like healthcare and pensions seems ridiculous to moderates, but it has a certain unnuanced logic. Ron Paul was actually the first US politician I followed; anti-war was my top priority and the 2 parties had nothing else on this (except Kucinich who by then was being pushed out).
Thanks for your exceptional review and cross-referencing other works of importance. I agree it's a unilateral cost assessment but I think his audience were unashamedly the American people and it would have damaged his arguments in their eyes to consider the opposition. Out of interest, what would $400 be worth a century later? No wonder the US is broke...
Boadicea wrote: "Thanks for your exceptional review and cross-referencing other works of importance. I agree it's a unilateral cost assessment but I think his audience were unashamedly the American people and it wo..."Cheers! I added some new references, in particular for the economics of U.S. imperialism! I'm curious how you mean by "the US is broke". If you simply mean military spending is a waste of money not fulfilling social needs, then I definitely agree. If you are actually worried about the US "debt", esp. the relatively small amount owned by foreign countries (many of which are US satellites, esp. Japan), then I have a whole rant about why this is the opposite of reality (US dollar imperialism being the ultimate free-ride).
As for "unilateral cost assessment" as the initial step to engage domestic audience, I agree this is the most realistic, although I do leave hope that more moral and courageous people are out there and censored by history books :)
Thanks for that, I'm well behind in my knowledge of US dollar hegemony. Regarding my comments regarding the US being 'broke', my understanding is that US debt is at its highest relative to GDP as it has ever been? There are also a number of economic, as well as social, indicators that indicate its reputation of affluence may not be so wellfounded as, say, 20 years ago? However, I'm no economist just an interested layperson looking to learn more!
Boadicea wrote: "Thanks for that, I'm well behind in my knowledge of US dollar hegemony. Regarding my comments regarding the US being 'broke', my understanding is that US debt is at its highest relative to GDP as i..."For sure, it's not surprising Finance is so complex as power hides in abstraction while distracting the public with things like "public debt". Here's my attempt to try and explain this to you and to myself ;)
"Private debt" is a huge concern, because private banks/creditors are middlemen seeking usurious interest and have no social concerns about unpayable loans debt traps (esp. if they are "too big to fail"). This overhead indeed burdens society to pay it off rather than productive investments/demand, harming labour and industry!
"Public debt" is social spending. Now, we both agree US empire is unique given its huge military spending which is terrible socially, and US public spending is definitely not as public as it can be (private bondholder class middlemen), but the reason this is not an economic bankruptcy issue is:
1) Accounting: public debt is private surplus. If you run down public debt, it means less private surplus, and private companies/individuals will be forced to seek credit from and be more indebted to private banks/creditors mentioned above charging outrageous interest/penalties (ex. Clinton running budget surplus to support Wall Street).
2) Ownership: US "public debt" is in its own currency which the US Treasury controls (unlike say Greece, or many countries in the Global South). Foreign ownership of US debt is relatively small (~5% Japan, just a US satellite; ~5% China, export economy linked to US and recycles US dollars to prevent surplus US dollars raising the value of China's currency which would hurt its exports):
3) Geopolitics: US did face an issue as post-WWII Bretton Woods was falling apart in the late 1960's. US spent so much in its genocidal bombings of Korea + Vietnam, and other countries like France were taking their US dollar earnings and exchanging it for US gold supply! So, 1971 Nixon Shock severed this exchange, ending Bretton Woods. Given US's still-empire position, it managed to coerce the US dollar as the international reserve currency. This set up the biggest free-ride in history. In essence, US gives US dollars (which gets swapped for US Treasury bonds, IOUs that US just creates) and in return US receives productive exports, buyouts of foreign companies/assets, military bases around the world, etc. A tribute paid to empire. Reference: Michael Hudson, the top 3 videos are especially useful:
Kevin, thanks for that treatise. I will wend my way through that and acquire significantly more knowledge than I currently have.
A part of why Butler is more known in right wing circles is because conservatives read the text simply as one espousing isolationist rhetoric and not an attack to put it bluntly on capitalism.
Sunny wrote: "A part of why Butler is more known in right wing circles is because conservatives read the text simply as one espousing isolationist rhetoric and not an attack to put it bluntly on capitalism."For sure, we all have extraordinary capacity for rationalizing contradictions:
--The Ron Paul types can spin Smedley Butler’s anti-empire rhetoric by targeting “cǰǰپ�, where it is the “state� that perverts the individual’s human nature to exchange (culminating in “free market� capitalism) into one of war/conquest (military industrial complex).
--They can trace this back to Classical liberalism like Adam Smith, who apparently theorized that British colonialism was a drain of resources for Britain (yes, harming Britain) due to military costs and monopolistic tendencies blocking the progress of free market competition (I’m still working through The Wealth of Nations, 1776).
...Yes, a case can be made for Spanish/Portuguese colonialism's unsustainability as the gold/silver ended up in Britain, and of course British colonialism meant "dark, Satanic mills" for their working class, but the British empire also became the factory (as well as banker) of the world.
...And never mind the capitalist innovation of the joint-stock company in the form of the East India Company in 1599 has been a central engine of really-existing capitalism for its entirety.
…These Right-libertarians are more “utopian� than communists. Capitalism has had centuries of global domination to try and construct their “free market� utopia, whereas communism barely had a century to decolonize during siege.
Another interesting contradiction prevalent on the Right:
i) Respect for meritocratic hierarchy’s chain-of-command/“national pride�, esp. security forces of police/military
ii) “Rebel� against “the state� (what about police/military?): vulgar individualism/ableism “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap�
…While the first is more conservatism and the latter is more Right-libertarianism, most converts waver between to varying degrees. I notice this so much in the martial arts community (physical violence security forces + ableist individualism), where a social media post will be “RESPECT AUTHORITY� and the very next one is against vaccines creating an Orwellian state.
Sunny wrote: "A part of why Butler is more known in right wing circles is because conservatives read the text simply as one espousing isolationist rhetoric and not an attack to put it bluntly on capitalism."And a lot of paleocon/paleo-"libertarian" types aren't noninterventionists at all -- just unilateralists. Witness Tulsi Gabbard, a strong proponent of the GWOT and drone warfare.
Kevin wrote: "Sunny wrote: "A part of why Butler is more known in right wing circles is because conservatives read the text simply as one espousing isolationist rhetoric and not an attack to put it bluntly on ca..."It's a common trope on the paleo Right that empire and "globalism" are undertaken somehow for the good of the foreigners being policed, rather than American capital, and that it's some kind of altruistic or "communist" thing.
Of course I don't really buy the Leninist thesis that a major segment of the American working class is bought off by super-profits, either. Imperialism is a net loss for both foreign and American workers, with the transnational corporations stealing at both ends -- although the Global South is obviously harmed a great deal more. But if patents and trademarks removed as vehicles for rent extraction and corporate enclosure, logistic chains were radically shortened and most production relocalized along Kropotkinian lines, living standards would rise and work hours shorten in both the core and periphery.
Thanks for suggesting this Kevin! After reading Chris Hedges The Greatest Evil is War, this book came as a confirmation that the same arguments are valid a hundred years later.
Cristian wrote: "Thanks for suggesting this Kevin! After reading Chris Hedges The Greatest Evil is War, this book came as a confirmation that the same arguments are valid a hundred years later."Cheers Cristian, it's no coincidence you bring up Hedges' latest book, because (after Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance) Hedges was indeed a big influence for me learning geopolitics:
1) I found Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians an even greater visceral shock than his most well-read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning...
2) American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, a topic that seems underappreciated by the political economy Marxists probably because of intellectual bias (putting on my Graeber hat), where importance is placed on interesting ideas (thus, the neglect for the power of vulgar violence/stupidity).
3) The Death of the Liberal Class: this book help prompt me to switch from history more towards (geo)political economy, in part because I was confused with how Hedges was defining the "liberal class".
4) As I got over the "New Atheist" debate (Hitchens vs Chomsky, both being early influences), I ran out of steam with Hedges after I Don't Believe in Atheists...
Kevin wrote: "Kevin wrote: "Sunny wrote: "A part of why Butler is more known in right wing circles is because conservatives read the text simply as one espousing isolationist rhetoric and not an attack to put it..."Great point on “paleo Right’s� contradictory framing of:
a) American capital (conveniently obscuring its direct origins from WWI/WWII US military industrial complex, or its longer roots in settler colonialism), vs.
b) “globalism�/“cǰǰپ� (wait, isn’t “American capital� just losing to more competitive capitalism?!?)
This reminds me, one foundational point that I tend to disagree (although this lens has its uses) with Michael Hudson on is his reformist take on Industrial Capitalism evolving into Socialism, where:
i) Capitalism’s socialization of production targeting the reduction of the cost of production will eliminate economic rent:
--I see this as a romanticization of Classical political economy (Ricardian socialism? Definitely certain passages of Marx on the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie), thus romanticizing the “economic development� of US/Germany (ex. Hudson’s America's Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914, which starts to sound very much like Ha-Joon Chang’s “development economics�).
--This obscures the vast contradictions of capitalist development, in particular its externalities (imperialism, care-work, environment), artificial scarcity (privatization: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World), commodity fetishism/social dislocation/alienation (vs. participatory economics/economic democracy), etc.
ii) This will be paired with a socialization of finance, where Industrial production is supposed to discipline finance. Apart from this path supposedly being derailed by WWI (ex. Hudson’s Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance), if capitalist production is riddled with contradictions then scaling it up with finance will not save it.
…resulting in Hudson’s take on progressive Industrial Capitalism (evolving into Socialism) vs. regressive Finance Capitalism (Neo-feudalism): Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy
RE: Leninist critiques of imperialism:
--I’ve revisit our discussion on this (that’s a convenience of cataloging book reviews and then discussing in them). Let me synthesize the Leninist critique of “labour aristocracy� with your point on the “cost of empire� (something that even “tankie� Parenti uses to build solidarity in domestic US):
i) “Cost of empire�: Obviously, we leftists believe we can build a world of social needs that will have benefits not just for the most oppressed in the Global South, but also tackle the contradictions in the Global North, i.e. the creeping precarity/addiction/social dislocation/alienation/inequality/spectatorship/vapid consumerism/ecological crisis etc. So this goes to your point on how capitalism limits the social potentials of even the Global North.
ii) “Labour aristocracy�: However, the argument that a buffer (ex. “middle class� consumerism in the Global North) is crucial for social consent, this to me is also obvious. The distinction is this is available because social imagination is constrained. When your leftist social imagination is simply not mainstream, then this compromise and accompanying justification of global exploitation (well, clearly “we� in the Global North are more “industrious� and “civilized�, that’s why “we� are rich) becomes normalized as the only option. I remember so vividly the conversations I have where people compare countries and talk about “we�, forgetting that our country is divided by classes (which is foundational to your argument, to transcend divide-and-rule competition of nationalist working classes).
IMO the labor aristocracy -- the "middle class," in American usage -- is something that only exists in the context of the wider impoverishment inflicted on Western societies as a whole through various forms of rent extraction, subsidized waste, enshittification, etc. Absent imperialism and domestic exploitation, the middle class would likely have a comparable standard of living -- but without either the economic precarity or the waste -- and the lower third would be far better off. The total cost of maintaining a labor aristocracy or middle class is still less than the net total extracted from the domestic population of the Core.
Kevin wrote: "IMO the labor aristocracy -- the "middle class," in American usage -- is something that only exists in the context of the wider impoverishment inflicted on Western societies as a whole through vari..."...I'm curious how Zak Cope frames this in Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism.
--I'm definitely with you in believing in socialism (i.e. society targeting social needs and structurally promoting participatory decision-making) unleashing creative potential.
--Indeed, "Absent imperialism", I believe Global South/Soviet socialism would have had much more space to experiment with ideals rather than focus so much on rapid industrialization and centralization.
--The Global North's "middle class" was entirely built on war-time socialization mimicking the USSR.
...Had the socialization been targeting social needs directly rather than war production/GDP, Keynes' 15-hour work week would seem reasonable, and imagine what our community/ecological relations would be like with that free time not driven by cancerous profit.
--But with this missed opportunity and climate/ecological degradation, our material conditions are weakened. And, in the real world, we cannot imagine away reactionary violence.
"The Global North's "middle class" was entirely built on war-time socialization mimicking the USSR." That's interesting, can you please point me towards readings on this subject?
Kevin wrote: "Kevin wrote: "IMO the labor aristocracy -- the "middle class," in American usage -- is something that only exists in the context of the wider impoverishment inflicted on Western societies as a whol..."I think I mostly agree on all these points
Elan wrote: "should be required reading!"Imperialism is such a farce.
“Support Our Troops!�, yet censor the most decorated soldier’s critique on foreign policy.
As Chomsky says:
[...] the point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.
aa wrote: ""The Global North's "middle class" was entirely built on war-time socialization mimicking the USSR." That's interesting, can you please point me towards readings on this subject?"If we break my statement down:
1) Global North war-time socializing mimicking the USSR:
--I’m assuming this is the more contentious half, which is mostly inspired by Varoufakis’s latest: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
…Varoufakis (inspired by John Kenneth Galbraith’s (JKG) description of the technostructure), considers how the Second Industrial Revolution (electromagnetism) required such massive credit to fund megafirms (Edison/Westinghouse/Ford) that mega-banks were created.
…With the 1929 Great Crash/Great Depression, the state stepped in with the New Deal. More crucially was the planning for WWII, which is where the US really mimicked USSR central planning (who had to mobilize against Nazi invasion). Despite many US corporations remaining private, the state controlled production and JKG was key in the “Office of Price Administration� which controlled war-time prices/inflation. Varoufakis breaks it down as follows:
i) Driver became state-guaranteed sales; post-war, full employment was key, and demand was sought through advertising and global US surplus recycling by rebuilding Western Europe/Japan
ii) Freedom from competition through fixed prices
iii) State-funded research-and-development and educated workforce
iv) Capitalists reverse Great Crash stigma, now seen as patriotic heroes in the war effort
2) Global North “middle class� was entirely built on war-time socialization:
--There’s so much literature on this half. One unorthodox approach that I found particularly illuminating was coming from the perspective of waste: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
…Now, this book is limited the more-visible “municipal waste� (as opposed to the much-larger “industrial waste�), which we can take as a proxy for consumerism.
…I particularly love how this book stretches back in settler colonialism, with the US Civil War being a major war-time transformation. Of course, WWI and esp. WWII were still the most transformative in building middle class consumerism.
Technofeudalism sounds like an interesting (and terrifying) book, thanks for explaining! I'm familiar with the American "middle class" coming about due to WW2 and the New Deal, though I was less so with the USSR model. I'll check out that book, thanks!
aa wrote: "Technofeudalism sounds like an interesting (and terrifying) book, thanks for explaining! I'm familiar with the American "middle class" coming about due to WW2 and the New Deal, though I was less ..."
My reference to Varoufakis� comparison was more meant to provocatively dispute the notion that the Global North’s “middle class� was some natural gift of “free market� capitalism, rather than a precise comparison.
…While Varoufakis does try to make a more economic comparison, the context of the West’s war-time economy matched fascism more than the USSR, so I would think that would be a closer comparison:
i) USSR was mostly an agrarian peripheral state going through rapid industrialization, and because of this (along with the West’s embargos) was separated from global capitalism’s Great Depression.
ii) Fascism (esp. Germany) was already industrialized and responding to the Great Depression, like the West’s war economy.
Iii) Perhaps a comparison with the USSR should be less about the top-down control economy, and more about the bottom-up socialist demands. I.e. all the social services that USSR was leading on, which the Western public started mobilizing for after being socialized from war (soldiers dying together, women and minorities filling in for white men in the workplace).
