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Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
A Heroic Refusal to
Succomb to Pessism
On
Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
By STEVEN SHERMAN
The Decline of American Power may strike some
readers as odd. Only two chapters deal directly with the question
of the strength of American power, and neither of those produces
many facts about its ostensible decline. Other chapters address
such topics as the durability of racism, the relationship of
the Islamic world to the Western world, the role intellectuals
should play, and strategies for the left. The framework these
topics are embedded in is not so much the decline of the US as
the decline of the 'modern world system', said to have been born
five hundred years ago with the rapid expansion of European colonialism.
That is because this is a new book from sociologist Immanuel
Wallerstein, who pioneered the analysis of the modern world system
thirty years ago.
According to Wallerstein, the proper
way to understand capitalism was not to study it on a country-by-country
basis, as was widespread at the time (he also rejects the notion,
popular lately, that one should understand 'globalization' as
something new and dramatically different about the last ten years).
Instead, capitalism was an international project from its outset
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, one defined by a 'core'
(of wealthy states), a 'periphery' (of impoverished states),
and a 'semi-periphery' (wealthier than the periphery but subservient
to the core). Most of what has changed in the last five hundred
years is a result of the expansion of the system to include the
entire world. In the decade following his publication of The
Modern World System, Wallerstein's work was attacked from a number
of perspectives. Marxists said that Wallerstein's theorization
of class struggle was inadequate. Others said he lacked clarity
about the dynamics of states. Or that his schema failed to capture
the various nuances that characterized the entrance of different
parts of the world into the capitalist world system and their
resistance to it.
For the most part, Wallerstein has not
bothered to address his critics in much detail. The project
of writing a history of the world system that fully incorporates
these perspectives is left to his followers. Instead, he has
tried to call attention to what he clearly believes is a central
point, and one which for the most part his critics ignored:
that the world system, having expanded to include the entire
globe, is now at its terminus. Influenced by chaos theory, Wallerstein
argues that we are at a bifurcation point, where individual actions
can have considerable impact. We may produce a world better
or worse than the waning modern world system, but we will surely
produce something different. Perhaps as a result of his belief
in the potentialities of the moment, Wallerstein has focused
more and more on cultural questions, the role of the intellectuals,
and strategies of the left. In the new book, the context framing
these questions is the decline of American power.
The claim that US power is declining
flies in the face of conventional wisdom. After all, the Soviet
Union has collapsed, Japan appears to have faded as an economic
threat, and if the US wants to invade Iraq, even if the whole
world disagrees, it invades Iraq. The far left agrees with the
New York Times: the US is the lone superpower (Tariq Ali recently
commented in Counterpunch that perhaps our grandchildren will
witness its decline). Nevertheless, Wallerstein begs to differ.
In his highly original view, the Soviet Union actually propped
up American power during its heyday, its 'hegemony' (1945-1970).
It did this in several ways. First, its military power scared
Western Europe into the US camp. Secondly, the standoff with
the Soviets relieved the pressure on the US to offer aid to all
the allies following World War II. Finally, the Soviets entered
into a de facto agreement to police both its own empire and control
its supporters worldwide, facilitating a stable world order.
The one place where this system broke down was in East Asia,
where first the Chinese and then the Vietnamese successfully
resisted advice from Moscow to cool things down. The US wound
up bogged down in a colonial war in Vietnam. Furthermore, expenditures
on this war led to a loss of control of the world money supply.
This coincided with both a worldwide revolt against the timidity
of the established left (the 'world revolution of 1968' against
dominant communists, nationalists, and social democrats) and
the narrowing of the economic gap by Germany and Japan. Thus,
for Wallerstein, the foundations of US hegemony were shattered
by the early seventies, and the period since then has basically
been one of slow decline.
Two events punctuate this period.
First, the demise of the Soviet Empire eliminated a key prop
of the US world order, facilitating direct challenges to this
order, epitomized by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and a drift away
from the US by Europe. Secondly, there were the attacks of September
11. These attacks greatly strengthened the hand of the militaristic
hawks in the US. The hawks had always been present, arguing
that US losses in China, Vietnam, etc could have been prevented
with a sufficiently massive show of force. But they had long
been held at bay by liberal internationalists, who prioritized
the alliance with Europe. With the US population terrified and
disoriented, the hawks seized on the moment after September 11
to demonstrate that US decline could be reversed by a dramatic
show of force. Hence the invasion of Iraq, which Wallerstein
attributes much more to the need to demonstrate US power than
to the need to control oil. Wallerstein is confident that the
hawks strategy will result in the acceleration of US decline
rather than its reversal, which he regards as impossible. Among
other things, this strategy is facilitating the creation of an
alliance between France, Germany and Russia, the geopolitical
alignment dreaded at the end of WWII by US strategists. Meanwhile
the Japanese build the world's largest computer, "(embodying)
the oldest story in the history of hegemonic powers. The dominant
power concentrates (to its detriment) on the military; the candidate
for successor concentrates on the economy" (actually the
Japanese computer is devoted to analyzing climatic change, which
isn't exactly the economy, but the point holds). Later in the
book he argues that the ability of capitalists to appropriate
so much of the wealth of enterprises based in the US (celebrated
in US media as 'reformed', 'streamlined' etc) will be a weakness
in the next period compared to Japanese or European corporations.
As noted earlier, for Wallerstein the
decline of the US is embedded in the larger trend of the demise
of the capitalist system. His grounds for the latter claim are
threefold. Three 'secular trends' (extremely long term) are
squeezing the ability of capitalists to accumulate profits.
First, wages have been drifting upward. Capital's traditional
recourse is to pull workers from the rural world; they can be
recompensed very inexpensively for a generation, after which
they begin to form unions, and capital begins to drift elsewhere.
But now the deruralization of the world is almost complete.
Secondly, taxes have moved upward, squeezing profits. Third,
capital's traditional practice of externalizing costs-by simply
dumping its garbage into every stream and strip-mining every
mountain-is encountering ecological limits. There are no more
streams and rivers to pollute without serious consequence. The
impact of these trends is compounded by the crisis of the state;
basically, people no longer believe the claim that things are
slowly getting better through political initiatives oriented
towards the state.
All of these claims undoubtedly sound
odd to most readers. Haven't we been experiencing a period of
thorough reaction, in which wages and taxes have been driven
down, and environmental regulation weakened? Wallerstein, however,
insists on focusing on the very long term. Although the last
couple of decades have been ones in which reactionary forces
have seized on the crisis of the left and the collapse of the
center, they have not been able to push wages, taxes, or environmental
regulation back to anything like what they were a century ago.
When the left regains its footing (and Wallerstein has little
doubt it will), it will begin from a higher point than where
it was, say, ninety years ago. This does not, however, mean
that the march to world socialism will quickly resume. Instead,
it means that the current structures of the world, the capitalist
world system, can no longer function adequately. Thus there
will be an intense struggle over what new sort of world will
emerge. The new world may be substantially better in important
respects than the one we live in now; or it may not. Agency-what
we do or don't do-becomes exceedingly important at such times.
Throughout the rest of the book, he brings
this analysis to bear on a wide range of topics. Even when he
is on familiar territory, his writing is studded with intriguing
ideas. For example, Wallerstein argues that political Islam
is the product of the demise of the nation-state as a compelling
locus of change, and the neoliberal weakening of state-based
forms of social integration. This is a familiar point made by
most serious academic writers on this topic, as is noting the
exacerbation of tensions between the Arab Islamic world and the
West as a result of Israel and oil. More intriguing is his comment
that "Another element that adds to choosing Islam as the
demon is the fact that most of the core of the Islamic world
was never truly colonized. In an important sense, the West feels
somewhat confident in dealing with ex-colonies. After all, they
had conquered these areas once militarily and governed them,
and think they know their weaknesses. The noncolonized or only
semicolonized zones retain an aura of mystery and therefore of
danger." But perhaps even more intriguing is his effort
to find his political bearings in this context-"the real
problem is that in the secularist and the fundamentalist camps
in all parts of the world there are persons on both sides of
what I anticipate will be the great politico-social struggle
of the coming fifty years. I think myself that posing the issue
as one of secularism versus fundamentalism is distracting us
in a very major way from clarity of vision". No glib lectures
about the reactionary quality of religion; since Wallerstein
identifies liberalism as the dominant ideology of the capitalist
world, the question of the terrain on which to oppose it becomes
more complicated.
Wallerstein devotes two chapters to grappling
with left strategy. He has little sympathy for any efforts to
revive Leninism. First, Leninism's failure as a theory was too
great. The vision of expanding the 'socialist bloc' state-by-state
altogether failed to anticipate that the socialist bloc would
shrink to an inconsequential size. This despite the 'scientific'
claims of its analysts. Secondly, Leninism had a threefold failure
of vision-it was excessively focused on the state; relatedly,
it abandoned any focus on the international; and in response
to the arguments of liberalism, trumpeted the importance of equality
over liberty. "This was entirely the wrong answer. The
correct answer is that there is no way whatsoever to separate
liberty from equality. No one can be 'free' to choose, if his
or her choices are constrained by an unequal position. And no
one can be 'equal' if he or she does not have the degree of freedom
that others have, that is, does not enjoy the same political
rights and the same degree of participation in real decisions."
Wallerstein also bemoans the current state of the left, which
he describes as uncertain, timid, and mildly depressed. While
he welcomes the sense of uncertainty, which he considers more
in touch with reality than 'scientific' proclamations about the
direction of the class struggle, he believes the timid and depressed
quality of the left is uncalled for.
So what does he suggest? Wallerstein
identifies seven elements:
(1) Expand the spirit of Porto Allegre
(i.e. The World Social Forum) by combining intellectual clarity,
militant action, and demands for long term change;
(2) Use defensive electoral strategies,
essentially taking for granted the two coalition nature of contemporary
elections worldwide and supporting the more left-leaning side
(he applauds the American slogan 'the Rainbow Coalition', i.e.
bringing a variety of racial and social movement categories together
under one umbrella and the French slogan 'A plural left' i.e.
bringing together a variety of old and new left tendencies);
but (3) vigorously criticize it once
in power (what he calls pushing democratization unceasingly);
(4) Make the liberal center fulfill its
promises (i.e. resist corporate bailouts on the grounds that
free markets mean some capitalists will fail);
(5) Make antiracism the defining measure
of democracy;
(6) Move toward decommodification; and
(7) always remember we are living in
an age of transition.
The most novel of these ideas is his
proposal for 'decommodification', which relates to his vision
of a world beyond capitalism, a world composed of mid-size non-profit
enterprises. Wallerstein notes that the present trend is quite
the opposite, commodifying processes that were once thought outside
the purview of the market (health care, education, etc). But,
he argues, since the finest universities and hospitals operate
as non-profit institutions, why not demand this as a general
practice? Why not transform steel mills and other failing industries
into non-profits? "This does not mean they should be 'nationalized'-for
the most part, simply another version of commodification. It
means we should create structures, operating in the market, whose
objective is performance and survival rather than profit."
Profit would not be a category on their balance sheet; instead,
they would either turn over extra funds to the state or reinvest
them. Transforming them into non-profits would address one
of the classic weaknesses of traditional state socialism-its
difficulty in upgrading technology. This has not been a problem
with existing non-profit universities and hospitals. The transformation
of industries into non-profits is also a demand that is simultaneously
feasible in the short term (because particular failing industries
can be immediately targeted) and thoroughly anti-capitalist.
This is a particularly novel idea since most talk of anti-capitalism
oscillates between the traditional vision of state socialism
and utopian visions of myriad localized communities.
This is an exceptionally rich book, and
one could write a very long review if the goal was to take issue
with all the propositions and ideas floated in it. Here it would
probably be more useful to suggest some questions that might
push the analysis further along. First, there is a tension between
Wallerstein's confidence that US decline is inevitable and his
argument that we are entering a phase in which the old rules
are suspended. If the old rules are suspended, why would the
US decline in the same way as earlier capitalist powers? Might
the US drive to construct a global empire (in the conventional
sense of this world) be one of the possible futures he refers
to, of the more unequal sort? Secondly, there is a certain unwillingness
to unmoor his analysis from the world of states, bureaucratic
organizations, and conventional politics, despite his own declarations
that this world is coming undone. Transnational and diasporic
communities, direct action and localized knowledge all play only
a small role in his analysis. Third, in his world of nonprofit
enterprises, how would decisions about how to allocate resources
among the enterprises be made? What exactly would 'the market'
these nonprofit firms are embedded in look like? When a university
upgrades its technology systems, it does not become more efficient
in the sense of being able to educate more students faster (usually
such upgrades simply enhance the communicating power of existing
students, professors, and researchers). But this is the impact
of technology upgrades at steel mills or shoe factories. Wouldn't
this force the nonprofit institutions into fierce competition
which they all cannot possibly survive (a familiar left complaint
about today's private market economy)? Why has gender disappeared
from his analysis? Although other works make clear that he believes
the ideology of gender is a crucial structure of the modern world,
does he believe it is inconsequential to efforts to map the transition,
or even to understand the demise of the US? Again, because this
text bristles with so many ideas, this list of questions could
be almost indefinitely expanded. What should be emphasized in
conclusion is the refusal of Wallerstein to adapt the sanguine
know-it-all pessimism popular on the left and instead to set
his sites on broad questions of historical transition and strategy.
In the present context, this refusal is positively heroic.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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