File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0305, message 22


From: "Jamie Morgan" <jamie-AT-morganj58.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Bush, Blair + for Iraq War
Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:25:13 +0100


Phil.

What is your oppinion of Empire? Personally I found it fundamentally flawed.
It is explicitly non-dialectial, lacking in a viable sense of the
differentiation of system and unable to sustain an ontology to meet its
claims for the possibility of transformation (not to mention providing a
rather empty new form of theory of value).

Doesn't Kautsky's ultra-imperialism include the argument that capitalist
states will not go to war again and wasn't it, to his own embarassment,
published just after the start of WWI?

What would you suggest were the mechanisms by which MNCs and world
powers/states/leaders come to focus on expansion of exploitative
opportunities - since this is the difficult question that seems to underpin
the long term significance of the issues of war and imperialism embedded in
the Iraq crisis? Does it fit with Hardt and Negri's argument that there is
no imperialist power anymore merely a logic of 'police action' disciplining
all participants in international relations?

Best, Jamie

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2003 7:11 PM
Subject: RE: BHA: Bush, Blair + for Iraq War


> Carrol,
>
> I think you are underestimating the degree to which the world's great
powers
> are privately agreed with each other about what is to them the main aim -
to
> open up to the maximum degree all the world's populations to exploitation
by
> the transnational corporations.  This is the content of imperialism in
this
> period, whereas you seem to be reducing inter-state relations to their
form
> (inter-imperialist rivalry).  If that makes me an advocate of
> "ultra-imperialism" then so be it - that is how I see the ontology of
world
> capitalism.  To this extent I think Negri's and Hardt's "Empire" is onto
> something (though I don't think they make any reference to old man
Kautsky's
> ultra-imperialism).
>
> Japan I think is relatively easily included in the schema I have set out
> above.  But I do agree with you that there are lots of unknowns about
China
> and India.
>
> Phil
> >
>
> I think it is possible that rather more is eventually involved than the
> euro or culture. We live in a unipolar world in which bipolar (or
> tripolar) forces are gestating. The "French/German cultural bloc" should
> perhaps be seen as just the first steps towards a French/German/Russian
> political/military/economic entity confronting the u.s. empire. I do not
> believe the day of the nation state or of inter-imperialist rivalry is
> over by any means. Some are I think prematurely announcing that
> Kautsky's "Super-imperialism" has arrived at last. (This may be Blair's
> view.)
>
> (And I don't have the faintest idea where India or China or Japan might
> fit in such a developing rivalry.)
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>
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