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from 11 july 2004 blue vol III, #12 |
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by William Bowles
Neo-con or just plain ol' imperialism unleashed? What is a neo-con and what are the objectives of the so-called neo-conservative agenda? Most importantly, do their policies represent a radical departure from previous US strategy and if so, how and why? There is no simple answer to this question as it is intimately connected to the vast changes that have taken place since the collapse of the Soviet 'empire' in 1990. Indeed, one could say that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that 'unleashed' the 'neo-cons' on the world, for without a counterbalance to the US, forces long held in check by real politik, were freed from the constraints of détente and the (relative) balance of power achieved in the post-WWII period. Based on the assumption that, through its overwhelming military superiority [and facilitated by the IT revolution], the 'neo-con' agenda seeks to do what the US has always tried to do and that is impose the 'free market' on the entire world and in doing so, take control of the resources and markets needed to feed the insatiable appetite of the US economy and its investors. It's the methods and the strategy used that singles out the 'neo-con's' philosophy from those who previously had to deal with a different world. A world where the use of force and the threat of the use of force, was more proscribed. Underpinning the entire project is energy - that, with its junior 'partner' the UK, since the end of WWII the US has controlled OPEC, notwithstanding. Without control of oil through the dollar, and through the dollar, the world's economy, the US would be unable bankroll its vast deficit, now over $7 trillion. The urgency of the project is made all the more important because of a number of additional elements: climate change and the fact that energy sources appear to have 'peaked', at least as far as the needs of the US economy is concerned. Moreover, the contradictions that have always been inherent in the capitalist mode of production, have reasserted themselves with renewed vigour as the effects of automation (quantum leaps in the efficiency of production, coupled to the export of manufacturing to cheap labour markets) and increasing reliance on financial speculation as a source of profit have combined to produce a crisis, a crisis of global proportions. Vast amounts of over-valued dollars are sloshing about, many of them held overseas by equally fragile economies, especially Japans's. The entire system, balanced on a knife-edge has very little room for manouver. It is only by continuous expansion into new markets, that permits the capitalist system to continue. To stop is impossible, it's like a runaway train. The forces that drive it, are only 'understood' in the narrow mathematical sense, all else is driven by specific interests that try to control processes that they barely comprehend. The important factor is what sectors of the economy dominate at any given moment in history? Since the end of WWII the US has had an essentially war-based economy with enormous investment - through subsidies by the state into the IT/weapons sector - which has itself propelled the IT revolution. The problem with weapons investment is that it's all inputs and no outputs as far as building an economy that can support an entire culture. It's like pouring money down the drain. As rich as the US is, without any outputs, such as teachers, hospitals or whatever, sooner or later the state is going go bankrupt, or have to change its ways. Or go to war. The 'neo-con' clique, entrenched in key sectors of government represents the vested interests of oil/energy, electronics/IT, weapons, influential segments of the media and communications sector (with its connection to weapons through cross-ownership of the IT industry) and elements of the banking and financial sector. To this heady mix we have to add the loose cannon of Israeli imperialism with its commensurate connection back into weapons and oil, via the vast arms subsidies the US gives Israel because of its strategic position as a wedge driven deep into the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. A conspiracy of the powerful The following names are those most closely associated with the label 'neo-conservative', along with many others not listed here whose connections extend into the more 'traditional' networks of power that run America.
- Israel Shamir, The Wise Raven is Dead Currently, the most virulent and ideologically driven sector of the power elite has dominance but as recent events demonstrate, they by no means have hegemonic control and, as their Middle East strategy demonstrates, they have been forced to shift the 'burden' of empire building to Israel, even if it is a temporary measure. In part this has been determined by the fact that the military strategy promulgated by Rumsfeld and co is more wishful thinking than realism and secondly, by the cost of the enterprise. Rumsfeld's fantasy of conquering the world with robots reveals a fundamental lack of understanding not only of the role of technology in waging war, but perhaps just as importantly, blinded by their supremacist racist ideology, they simply do not understand. After all, it's not so long ago that the same people were pinning their hopes on defeating the Viet Minh through the overwhelming force of Western technology. The myopia of the neo-con ideologues, has proved their undoing as the rapidly unravelling situation in Iraq demonstrates and this may well prove their undoing. But, and this is the important issue, the overall objective of US imperialism will not alter, merely its tactics. We may well have to wait until the next US election to see which faction gains the ascendency. In the meantime, the realities of a bankrupt economy may well determine the direction US imperialism takes. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the more extreme and desperate elements of the US elite may well 'take the plunge' and expand the 'war on terror' in a direct alliance with Israel. The attack on the US mission in the occupied territories today (15/10/03) or something similar, may well be our 21st century Sarejevo. Indeed, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that today's attack was a deliberate provocation by Israel designed to drag the US more directly into the conflict. top The New Imperialism or picking up where they left off? A previous essay ('Queen Victoria in Drag', on the website http://www.williambowles.info/) prompted some further thoughts on our present predicament and foremost was the reality that the 20th century consisted almost entirely of a war between two ideologies - capitalism and socialism. And although the examples, the Soviet Union, China and so forth were not exactly what many socialists of the 19th and the 20th centuries had in mind, there is no escaping the fact that the ideas inherent in all the attempts at building an alternative to capitalism captured the imaginations of much of the world and laid the basis for all the liberation movements that were to follow and, had a profound effect on capitalism. A book I read last year, Marx's Revenge by the economist Mechnad Desai, proposed that the Bolshevik Revolution 'postponed' the development of capitalism by forestalling what we now call globalisation, a process, he contends that was well underway until the Bolshevik Revolution came along and rudely interrupted it. To justify this analysis he delves deeply into Marx, Hegel, Adam Smith as well as 20th century economists such as Keynes, Schumpeter and Hayek. Desai proposes that the process of globalisation that was already well underway in the 19th century underpinned Marx's ideas about the necessary pre-conditions for a socialist society and that with end of the Soviet Union, capitalism was free once more, to pick up where it left off before the Bolshevik Revolution. And it follows therefore, that if Marx's analysis was correct, the period we are now in continues the process that will eventually lead to the triumph of socialism but this time it will be global in scope rather than in isolated and importantly, poor (underdeveloped) countries. For Marx pointed out that for socialism to flourish, it needed a developed economic base that included an educated population able to take on the job of building a viable alternative to the anarchy of capitalism. Of course hindsight almost always gives us 20/20 vision. So was Marx right and does the present 'resurgence' of imperialism vindicate his life's work or, is capitalism the best thing since sliced bread? The issue is complex and for those not conversant with economics, not easy to unravel but the attempt has to be made to present the issues to my readers as best as I can without going too deeply into such things as:
- The New Imperialism by David Harvey p.204. (Also, see my review on the website http://www.williambowles.info/) Hence finding new markets is the raison d'etre of capitalism and it is to this end that capitalism expands across the world, sweeping all other forms of production away until, in theory at least, it has no place left to expand into. It is at this point that Marx contended that the necessary pre-conditions for a transition to a socialist economy would be in place. This process reveals itself to us as 'boom and bust' and historically speaking, a major war roughly every 25 years or so to consume all that capital, take out the competition and open up new markets. Ever since the Crash of '29 and under the impact of socialist competition, efforts have been made to regulate capitalist economies, that until the Reagan/Thatcher years used the theories of Keynes that utilised state intervention to 'guide' investment and to use the state to invest directly, especially in those areas critical to development but not necessarily profitable (in the short term) for the capitalists eg telecommunications, transport and energy. But even under so-called neo-liberalism the state has no compunction about intervening to prop up ailing sections of a capitalist economy either through subsidies, grants, tax breaks and so forth. Moreover, capitalism doesn't operate in a vacuum, there are always opposing forces that to a lesser or greater degree attempt to exert some control over the anarchy of capitalist production whether it's the state itself, the organised working class or even supra-national bodies like the UN or the EU. But since the end of the Cold War, the major capitalist powers have seen fit to try and return things back to the 'good old days' before the advent of socialism (or at least socialist ideas) which means essentially the ethos (and morality or lack of) of 19th century imperialism. So for example, what used to be called gunboat diplomacy is now called pre-emptive war masked by a lot of rubbish about preserving civilisation, humanitarianism, the war on terror, failed states... One might add (somewhat flippantly I admit) that everything else is bullshit, 'democracy', 'human rights' etc, for as history shows, capitalism in its most extreme forms such as Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa dispensed with such niceties as universal suffrage, free speech, (the right to assemble) and so on. And anyway, the 'right to vote' wasn't given to us by capitalism, we had to fight for it. Indeed, I might also add that no one or country can give you freedom, it's something you have to take and it's something that starts first and foremost in your mind. And, as we have seen, under the pretext of the 'war on terror' taking away the rights we have fought so hard to attain is not confined to such extreme forms of capitalism such as Fascism. If Marx was indeed correct in his analysis, one could argue that for socialists, all we need do is 'sit back' and wait for capitalism to expand into every available nook and cranny until such time as we can step in as it were and take over. However, firstly the world doesn't work this way not only because people tend to resist being screwed over but perhaps just as importantly, unrestrained capitalist 'development' has proved to be extremely destructive, not only materially but just as importantly, spiritually. And it should be clear to most thinking people that capitalism has an unhealthy propensity for starting wars when everything else fails, no matter what kinds of propaganda it puts out about 'human nature' in order to justify its predations. The other objection to the 'sit and wait' approach is that capitalism doesn't have a plan of any kind, it is driven by the immediate needs of those who own and control capital. Serendipity rules. The question that confronts us right now however, is why in this new period of unrestrained capitalism, there is no coherent opposition to its predations and what are the chances of one developing, especially as the 'new' imperialism without any realistic alternative to offer from a fragmented Left, has a free hand? In part, this is the legacy of the Cold War and a century of anti-communism, so in this sense the real failure of socialism as it was practiced in the 20th century was to create a defeatist attitude amongst the former Left as well as dividing the Left into sectarian blocs, each claiming to be 'real' socialists or Marxists. Following the failure of 20th century socialisms the only real opposition to the 'new' imperialism has come from the 'anti-globalism' movement, the environmental or Green movement and now in a most negative form, the rise of fundamentalist Islam that in any case has not shown itself to be anti-capitalist, merely anti-Western, a backwards-looking movement that would seek to recreate some non-existent nirvana from the ancient past. Moreover, the anti-globalism movement, aside from calling itself anti-capitalist, appears not to have any kind of real alternative to offer. The Greens, whilst correctly reflecting the real concerns of millions of people over the environmental crisis that confronts us, has no real economic alternative to offer except vague concepts about 'sustainability' and so forth. By itself then, the issue of the environment is not sufficient, what we need is a holistic alternative that takes into account all the key elements, the economy, democracy and human rights, the environment and of course a viable political structure that can embrace all these elements. Is such a programme possible? I contend that it is but I think that it requires us to return to basics such as, what kind of socialist economy, what form or forms of democracy? And assuming such a programme could be developed, should it be based on the nation state or perhaps grow out of formations such as the European Union? And how should such a programme relate to the poor countries of the world that those of us in the rich world regardless of our economic status, rely on so heavily for our advantage? These and many other questions should be at the top of our agenda as we ponder the disaster unfolding in the Middle East and the failure of social democracy to confront the 'new' imperialism. What is certain, at least in the UK, is that the Labour Party (including its so-called Left) is a spent force and will never again be trusted by those who are genuinely on the left. With local and European elections due here this Thursday, the sad reality is that for a Lefty, the only party worth voting for is the Greens. The experience in Germany of the Red/Green coalition doesn't bode well for such an alliance here in the UK even if there were a 'left' social democratic party to ally with. So the agenda is clear, we need to return to our roots in the light of our experiences of the 20th century and reformulate the socialist project. Marx did much of the work for us, we need to reinterpret his deep understandings of capitalist development and apply it to the new conditions. To do anything else is to renounce the sacrifices and the heritage of our brothers and sisters of the past century.
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In the seventies I worked in electronic publishing (SouthScan), radio production (WBAI FM), television (South Africa Now) and ultimately on to Africa. During this period I [became] involve[d] with the African National Congress and later SWAPO in Namibia and work in Central America, again using computers as tools of communication and change.
For the past ten years I’ve been working in Johannesburg, South Africa, firstly for the ANC where I set up the Election Information Unit for the 1994 democratic elections. I then directed the development of the first digital multi-media centre in Africa in COSATU’s headquarters, the Centre for Democratic Communications.
But writing, which has always been a passion and a talent I was fortunate to possess, led me back into the world of words, although I continued to work in the world of information technology but with the focus less on the technology than on the skills needed to harness it in the transformation of society. I lectured and developed courses at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism at Wits University in the online environment as well workshops on the role of IT in the transformation of government for the School of Public Development Management. Amongst the last projects I completed in South Africa were three scripts for television, for a young, black-owned film production company, Fuzebox Productions on Freedom Day, Youth Day and the National Anthem, Nkosi Sikilel i’Africa for the SA government.
But after 27 years abroad, I find myself back in the city of my birth, London, and where I spent the first 30 years of my life, contemplating my future and the direction I would like my life to take. Since coming back to London I have been involved in a number of projects including developing the brief and business plan for city-based broad band wireless network with the focus on marketing/distribution of digitally based cultural products and home and office based connectivity (still on-going) and spending a lot of time writing, both fiction (one novel completed and a second in the works) and current affairs essays.
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