The Intellectual Origins of America Bashing
JoseSoplar
By Lee Harris
PolicyReview.org | December 6, 2002
A specter haunts the world, and that specter is America. This is not the
America discoverable in the pages of a world atlas, but a mythical America that
is the target of the new form of anti-Americanism that Salman Rushdie, writing
in the Guardian (February 6, 2002), says “is presently taking the world by
storm” and that forms the subject of a Washington Post essay by Martin Kettle
significantly entitled “U.S. Bashing: It’s All The Rage In Europe”
(January 7, 2002). It is an America that Anatol Lieven assures us, in a recent
article in the London Review of Books, is nothing less than “a menace to
itself and to mankind” and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized as
the world’s major terrorist state.
But above all it is the America that is responsible for the evils of the rest
of the world. As Darius Fo, the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature,
put it in a notorious post-September 11 email subsequently quoted in the New
York Times (September 22, 2001): “The great speculators [of American
capitalism] wallow in an economy that every years kills tens of millions of
people with poverty [in the Third World] — so what is 20,000 dead in New
York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre [of 9-11], this violence is
the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane
exploitation.”
It is this sort of America that is at the hub of Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt’s revision of Marxism in their intellectually influential book Empire
(Harvard University Press, 2000) — a reinterpretation of historical
materialism in which the global capitalist system will be overthrown not by
those who have helped to create it, namely, the working class, but rather by a
polyglot global social force vaguely referred to as “the multitude” — the
alleged victims of this system.
America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its
goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It
repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference
between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American
action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic
exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is
wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is
really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable
enormity.
This is the specter that is haunting the world today. Indeed, one may even go
so far as to argue that this America is the fundamental organizing principle of
the left as it exists today: To be against America is to be on the right side
of history; to be for it is to be on the wrong side.
But let’s pause to ask a question whose answer the America-bashers appear to
assume they know: What is the right side of history at this point in history?
The concept of a right side of history is derived from Marxism, and it is
founded on the belief that there is a forward advance toward a socialist future
that can be resisted, but not ultimately defeated. But does anyone believe this
anymore? Does anyone take seriously the claim that the present state of affairs
will be set aside and a wholly new order of things implemented in its place,
and that such a transformation of the world will happen as a matter of course?
And, finally, if in fact there are those who believe such a thing, what is the
status of this belief? Is it a realistic assessment of the objective conditions
of the present world order, or is it merely wishful thinking?
Marx’s Political Realism
The importance of these questions should be obvious to anyone familiar with the
thought of Marx. Marx’s uniqueness as a thinker of the left is his absolute
commitment to the principles of political realism. This is the view that any
political energy that is put into what is clearly a hopeless cause is a waste.
Utopianism is not only impractical; it is an obstacle to obtaining
socialism’s true objective, since it diverts badly needed resources away from
the pursuit of viable goals, wasting them instead on the pursuit of political
fantasies.
The concept of fantasy as a political category assumed its central place in
Marxist thought in The Communist Manifesto, where Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels used it as the distinguishing mark of their own brand of socialism: It
was this that condemned all previous forms of socialism to the realm of vague
dreams and good intentions, and which gave Marxism the claim to be a
“scientific” form of socialism.
Marx’s use of the term “scientific” in this text has often been
criticized. But, in his defense, it should be remembered that the German
Wissenschaft describes a far wider category than the English “science.” It
means what we know as opposed to what we merely opine, or feel, or imagine; the
objective as opposed to the subjective; realistic thinking as opposed to
impractical daydreaming. And it is in this last sense that Marx and Engels use
it: For the opposite of the scientific is none other than the utopian.
This is the basis of Marx’s condemnation of all forms of utopian socialism,
the essence of which is the enormous gap between the “fantastic pictures of
future society” the utopian socialist dreams of achieving, on one hand, and
any realistic assessment of the objective conditions of the actual social order
on the other.
This concept of fantasy as “fantastic pictures” inside the head of
impractical daydreamers is a classic theme of German Romantic literature and is
perhaps most closely identified with the characters of E.T.A. Hoffman’s
stories, such as Kapellmeister Kreisler. The fantasist, in this literature, is
a character type: He lives in his own dream world and can manage only the most
tenuous relationship to the real world around him. But, unlike the character
type of the absent-minded professor, the Romantic fantasist is not content to
putter around in his own world. Instead, he is forever insisting that his world
is the real one, and in the process of doing this, he reduces the real world
around him, and the people in it, to an elaborate stage setting for the
enactment of his own private fantasies.
Marx and Engels’s wholesale condemnation of all previous socialism as utopian
fantasy is the fundamental innovation of their own work. It is the basis of
their claim to be taken seriously, not merely by Hoffmanesque daydreamers, but
by men of practical judgment and shrewd common sense. To fail to make this
distinction, or to fail to stay on the right side of this distinction once it
has been made, is to cease to be a Marxist and to fall back into mere
Träumerei.
This demarcation line arose because Marx believed that he had grasped something
that no previous utopian socialist had even suspected. He believed that he had
shown that socialism was inevitable and that it would come about through
certain ironclad laws of history — laws that Marx believed were revealed
through the study of the very nature of capitalism. Socialism, in short, would
not come about because a handful of daydreamers had wished for it, or because
pious moralists had urged it, but because the unavoidable breakdown of the
capitalist system would force the turn to socialism upon those societies that,
prior to this breakdown, had been organized along capitalist lines.
Schematically the scenario went something like this:
• The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
• The workers would therefore be “immiserized”; they would become poorer
as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
• The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist
system — their poverty, not their ideals.
What is interesting here is that, once you accept the initial premise about the
falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow realistically. Now, this
does not mean that it follows necessarily or according to an ironclad
scientific law; but it certainly conveys what any reasonable person would take
as the most probable outcome of a hypothetical failure of capitalism.
For Marx it is absolutely essential that revolutionary activities be
justifiable on realistic premises. If they cannot be, then they are actions
that cannot possibly have a real political objective — and therefore, their
only value can be the private emotional or spiritual satisfaction of the people
carrying out this pseudo-political action.
So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding, there is
an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become much poorer over
time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an increase of poverty, but a
conviction on the part of the workers that their material circumstances would
only get worse, and not better — and this would require genuine misery.
This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary
Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread misery, then it also
produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is getting better off
through capitalism, who will dream of struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine
misery on the part of the workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole
apparatus of the capitalist state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the
capitalist class could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of
the state apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was
absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly liquidated itself,
and it is utopian to think that any ever will. Therefore, in order to achieve
the goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete revolution would do; and
this means, in point of fact, a full-fledged civil war not just within one
society, but across the globe. Without this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism
would remain completely in control of the social order and all socialist
schemes would be reduced to pipe dreams.
The immiserization thesis, therefore, is critical to Marx, for without it there
would be no objective conditions in response to which workers might be driven
to overthrow the capitalist system. If the workers were becoming better off
with time, then why jump into an utterly untested and highly speculative
economic scheme? Especially when even socialists themselves were bitterly
divided over what such a scheme would be like in actual practice. Indeed, Marx
never committed himself to offering a single suggestion about how socialism
would actually function in the real world.
Immiserization Goes Global
By the twentieth century the immiserization thesis was already beginning to
look shaky. Empirical evidence, drawn either by impressionistic observation or
systematic statistical studies, began to suggest that there was something wrong
with the classical version of the thesis, and an attempt was made to save it by
redefining immiserization to mean not an absolute increase in misery, but
merely a relative one. This gloss allowed a vast increase in empirical
plausibility, since it accepted the fact that the workers were indeed getting
better off under the capitalist system but went on to argue that they were not
getting better off at the same rate as the capitalists.
The problem with this revision lay not in its economic premises, but its
political ones. Could one realistically believe that workers would overthrow an
economic system that was continually improving their own lot, simply because
that of the capitalist class was improving at a marginally better rate?
Certainly, the workers might envy the capitalists; but such emotions simply
could not supply the gigantic impetus required to overthrow a structure as
massive as the capitalist system. Before the workers of a capitalist society
could unite, they had to feel that they had literally nothing to lose —
nothing to lose but their proverbial chains. For if they had homes and cars and
boats and rvs to lose as well, then it became quite another matter.
In short, the relative immiserization thesis was simply not the stuff that
drives people to the barricades. At most it could fuel the gradualist reforms
of the evolutionary ideal of socialism — a position identified with Eduard
Bernstein.
The post-World War II period demolished the last traces of the classical
immiserization thesis. Workers in the most advanced capitalist countries were
prosperous by any standard imaginable, either absolute or relative; and what is
even more important, they felt themselves to be well off, and believed that the
future would only make them and their children even better off than they had
been in the past. This was a deadly blow to the immiserization thesis and hence
to Marxism. For the failure of the immiserization thesis is in fact the failure
of classical Marxism. If there is no misery, there is no revolution; and if
there is no revolution, there is no socialism. Q.E.D. Socialism goes back once
more to being merely a utopian fantasy.
Yet those who still claim to derive their heritage from Marx are mostly
unwilling to acknowledge that their political aims are merely utopian, not
scientific. How is that possible?
There might be several reasons advanced for this, but certainly one of them is
Paul Baran. A Polish born American economist and a Marxist, Baran is the author
of The Political Economy of Growth (Monthly Review Press, 1957). In it, for the
first time in Marxist literature, Baran propounded a causal connection between
the prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries and the impoverishment of
the Third World. It was no longer the case, as it was for Marx, that poverty
— as well as idiocy — was the natural condition of man living in an
agricultural mode of production. Rather, poverty had been introduced into the
Third World by the capitalist system. The colonies no longer served the purpose
of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now the positive victims of
capitalism.
What needs to be stressed here is that, prior to Baran, no Marxist had ever
suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the rest of the
world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this momentous fact, but
neither had any of their followers. Yet this omission was certainly not due to
Marx’s lack of knowledge about, or interest in, the question of European
colonies. In his writing on India, Marx shows himself under no illusions
concerning the brutal and mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware of
the “misery and degradation” effected by the impact of British industry’s
“devastating effects” on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be
a dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the unavoidable
precondition of India’s progress and advance — an example of the
“creative destruction” that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence of
capitalist dynamics. Or, as Marx put it in On Colonialism: “[T]he English
bourgeoisie . . . will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social
condition of the mass of the [Indian] people . . . but . . . what they will not
fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both” the emancipation
and the mending of this social condition.
The radical nature of Baran’s reformulation of Marxist doctrine is obscured
by an understandable tendency to confuse Baran’s theory with Lenin’s
earlier theory of imperialism. In fact, the two have nothing in common.
Lenin’s theory had evolved in order to explain the continuing survival of
capitalism into the early twentieth century, and hence the delay of the coming
of socialism. In Lenin’s view, imperialism is not the cause of Third World
immiserization, but rather a stopgap means of postponing immiserization in the
capitalist countries themselves. It is the capitalist countries’ way of
keeping their own work force relatively prosperous — and hence politically
placid — by selling surplus goods into captive colonial markets. It is not a
way of exploiting, much less impoverishing, these colonies. It was rather a way
“to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and . . . to . . . strengthen
opportunism,” as Lenin put it in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(International Publishers, 1933).
This gives us the proper perspective from which to judge the revolutionary
quality of Baran’s reformulation. For, in essence, what Baran has done is to
globalize the traditional doctrine of immiserization so that, instead of
applying to the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, it now came to
apply to the entire population of those countries that have not achieved
advanced capitalism: It was the rest of the world that was being impoverished
by capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.
Baran’s global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was taken up
by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate intellectual
foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein’s monumental study The Modern
World-System (Academic Press, 1974), which was essentially a fleshing out in
greater historical and statistical detail of Baran’s thesis. Hence, for the
sake of convenience, I will call the global immiserization thesis the
Baran-Wallerstein revision.
America As “Root Cause”
That i now would like to consider is not the thesis itself, but the role that
this thesis played in bolstering and revitalizing late twentieth-century
Marxism. For it is here that we find the intellectual origins of the
international phenomenon of America-bashing. If there is any element of genuine
seriousness in this movement — if, indeed, it aspires to be an objective and
realistic assessment of the relationship of America to the rest of the world
— then that element of seriousness is to be found in the global
immiserization thesis: America has gotten rich by making other countries poor.
Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Chomsky, have focused on
what is seen as American military aggression against the rest of the world, for
this aggression is understood as having its “root cause” in America’s
systematic exploitation of the remainder of the human race. If American
exploitation did not create misery, it would not need to use military force. It
is the global immiserization thesis that makes the use of force an
indispensable tool of American foreign policy and that is responsible,
according to this view, for turning America into a terrorist state. This
explains the absolute centrality of the global immiserization thesis in the
creation of the specter of America now haunting so much of our world.
The Baran-Wallerstein revision of the classical immiserization thesis into its
global context was far better adapted to fix what was wrong in Marxist theory
than the revisionist notion of relative immiserization discussed above. For, as
we have seen, what was needed was real misery, and not merely comparative
misery, since without such misery there would be no breakdown of capitalism: no
civil war, no revolution, no socialism. And who can doubt that great real
misery exists in the Third World?
In addition to providing a new and previously untapped source of misery, the
Baran-Wallerstein revision provided several other benefits. For example, there
was no longer any difficulty in accepting the astonishingly high level of
prosperity achieved by the work force of the advanced capitalist countries —
indeed, it was now even possible to arraign the workers of these countries
alongside of the capitalists for whom they labored — or, rather, more
precisely, with whom they collaborated in order to exploit both the material
resources and the cheap labor of the Third World. In the new configuration,
both the workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the
oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less advanced
countries that became the oppressed — including, curiously enough, even the
rulers of these countries, who often, to the untutored eye, seemed remarkably
like oppressors themselves.
With this demystification of the capitalist working class came an end to even a
feigned enthusiasm among Marxists for solidarity with the hopelessly
middle-class aspirations of the American blue-collar work force. The
Baran-Wallerstein revision offered an exotic new object of sympathy — namely,
the comfortably distant and abstract Third World victims of the capitalist
world system.
Perhaps most important, the Baran-Wallerstein revision also neatly solved the
most pressing dilemma that worker prosperity in advanced capitalist countries
bequeathed to classical Marxism: the absolute lack of revolutionary spirit
among these workers — the very workers, it must be remembered, who were
originally cast in the critical role of world revolutionaries. In the new
theoretical configuration, this problem no longer mattered simply because the
workers of the capitalist countries no longer mattered.
Hence the appeal of the global immiserization thesis: The Baran-Wallerstein
revision neatly obviates all the most outstanding objections to the classical
Marxist theory. This leaves two questions unanswered: Is it true? And even if
it is true, does it save Marxism?
Whether the immiserization thesis is true or not is simply too complex a topic
to deal with here. Indeed, for the sake of the present argument, I am willing
to assume that it is absolutely true — truer than anything has ever been true
before. For what I want to concentrate on is the question of whether the
Baran-Wallerstein revision is consistent with Marxism’s claim to represent a
realistic political agenda as opposed to a mere utopian fantasy. And the short
answer is that, no matter how true the global immiserization thesis might be,
it does not save the Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxism from being condemned
as utopian fantasy — and condemned not by my standards or yours, but by those
of Marx and Engels.
This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the context
of a class war within a society — an actual civil war between different
classes of one and the same society, and not between different nations on
different continents. This makes an enormous difference, for it is not at all
unreasonable to think that a revolutionary movement could succeed, by means of
a violent and bloody civil war, in gaining the monopoly of force within a
capitalist society, and thus be able to dictate terms to the routed
capitalists, if any survived.
But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most advanced
capitalist societies have a monopoly of force — and brutally effective force
— at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to think that the
exploited Third World countries could possibly be able to alter the world order
by even a hair, provided the advanced capitalist societies were intent on not
being altered.
What could they do to us?
9-11 Calling
The answer to this question, according to many of those who accept the global
immiserization thesis, came on 9-11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps America’s most
celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, expressed this idea in
the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first time, the world had witnessed the
oppressed finally striking a blow against the oppressor — a politically
immature blow, perhaps, comparable to the taking of the Bastille by the
Parisian mob in its furious disregard of all laws of humanity, but still an act
equally world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary
era.
This judgment can make sense only in the context of the Baran-Wallerstein
thesis. For if 9-11 was in fact a realistic blow against the advanced
capitalist countries — or even just the most advanced — then here was an
escape from the utopian deadlock of the global immiserization thesis. Here was
a way that the overthrow of world capitalism could be made a viable historical
outcome once again, and not merely the fantastic delusions of a sect. This
explains the otherwise baffling valorization of 9-11 on the part of the left
— by which I mean the enormous world-historical significance that they have
been prepared to attribute to al Qaeda’s act of terror.
But was 9-11 truly world-historical in the precise sense required to sustain
the Baran-Wallerstein revision? For 9-11 to be world-historical in this sense,
it would have to contain within it the seeds of a gigantic shift in the order
of things: something on the scale of the decline and collapse of capitalist
America and with it the final realization of the socialist realm.
But this investment of world-historical significance to 9-11 is simply wishful
thinking on the part of the left. It is an effort to transform the demented
acts of a group of fantasists into the vanguard of the world revolution.
Because if there is to be a world revolution at all there has to be a vanguard
of that revolution, an agent whose actions are such as to represent a threat to
the capacity of the capitalist system simply to survive. This means that it is
not enough to injure it; it is not enough to wound or madden it; it is not
enough to rouse it to rage — the agent must kill it, too. He must be capable
of overthrowing the hegemonic power at the center of the capitalist world
system.
But this is absolutely implausible. Any realistic assessment of any possible
scenario will inevitably conclude that nothing that al Qaeda can do can cause
the collapse of America and the capitalist system. The worse eventuality in the
long run would be that America would be forced to break its hallowed ideal of
universal tolerance, in order to make an exception of those who fit the racial
profiling of an al Qaeda terrorist. It is ridiculous to think that if al Qaeda
continued to attack us such measures would not be taken. They would be forced
upon the government by the people (and anyone who thinks that the supposed
cultural hegemony of the left might stop this populist fury is deluded).
In other words, the only effect on America of a continuation of September
11-style attacks would be an increasingly repressive state apparatus
domestically and a populist home front demand for increasingly severe
retaliation against those nations supporting or hiding terrorists. But neither
one of these reactions would seriously undermine the strength of the United
States — indeed, it is quite evident that further attacks would continue to
unite the overwhelming majority of the American population, creating an
irresistible “general will” to eradicate terrorism by any means necessary,
including the most brutal and ruthless.
But this condition, let us recall, is precisely the opposite of the objective
political conditions that, according to Marx, must be present in order for
capitalism to be overthrown. For classical Marxism demands, quite
realistically, a state that is literally being torn apart by internal
dissension. Revolution, in short, requires a full-fledged civil war within the
capitalist social order itself, since nothing short of this can possibly
achieve the goal that the revolution is seeking. Hence, 9-11-style attacks that
serve only to strengthen the already considerable solidarity between classes in
the United States are, from the perspective of classical Marxism, fatally
flawed. For such attacks not only fail to further any revolutionary aims; they
actually make the revolution less probable. A society of 300 million
individuals whose bumper stickers say “United We Stand” is not a breeding
ground for revolutionary activity. Nor is it a society that can be easily
intimidated into mending its ways, even if we make the assumption that its ways
need mending.
But if the result of 9-11 was to strengthen the political unity of the United
States, then 9-11 was definitely not world-historical. The unspeakable human
horror of 9-11 should not blind us to the ghastly triviality of the motive and
the inevitable nullity of the aftermath.
The Temptation of Fantasy Ideology
The baran-wallerstein revision of Marxism does provide a new global
reformulation of the immiserization thesis. But the locus of this misery, the
Third World, does not and cannot provide an adequate objective foundation for a
revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system. Rather, this foundation
can be provided only by a majority of the workers in the advanced capitalist
countries themselves; but, as we have seen, the effect of 9-11 on the working
class of the United States was not one conducive to the overthrow and demise of
capitalism. On the contrary, nowhere was the desire to retaliate against the
terrorists more powerfully visceral than among the working class of the United
States. The overwhelming majority of its members instantly responded with
collective and spontaneous expression of solidarity with other Americans and
expressions of outrage against those who had planned and carried out the
attack, as well as those who attempted to palliate it.
For those who are persuaded by the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, 9-11 represents a
classic temptation. It is the temptation that every fantasy ideology offers to
those who become caught up in it — the temptation to replace serious thought
and analysis, fidelity to the facts and scrupulous objectivity, with the worst
kind of wishful thinking. The attempt to cast 9-11 as a second taking of the
Bastille simply overlooks what is most critical about both of these events,
namely, that the Bastille was a symbol of oppression to the masses of French
men and women who first overthrew it and then tore it down, brick by brick. And
while it is true that the Bastille had become the stuff of fantasy, thanks to
the pre-1789 “horrors of the Bastille” literature, it was still a fantasy
that worked potently on the minds of the Parisian mob and hence provided the
objective p
Jose Soplar
"We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts
and those who harbor them." President Bush, September 11, 2001.