Mark Phillips: The American Question

I argued yesterday that both parties are capitalist parties, advocating competing strategies for dominating the working class. Democrats, favoring corporatism, dominated during the period of rapid economic growth from WWII to Vietnam. Republicans, favoring old-fashioned slash-and-burn class struggle, have dominated during the so-called "crisis of profitability" which began at the end of the Vietnam era and became urgent around 1978.

It's interesting that on the surface of things, the foreign policy strategies which prevailed during these two periods appear to be flipped. Let me explain.

During the period of the postwar boom in which the Democratic Party dominated domestically, American foreign policy was driven by alliances with reactionary, often pre-Capitalist ruling classes throughout the Third World. Whereas, in the period of Republican Party ascendency at home, U.S. foreign policy strategy abandoned the pre-Capitalist Third World oligarchs, allying instead with local bourgeoisies which implemented parliamentary political systems. It appears that domestic and foreign policy strategies were inverted. When liberal Democrats ruled at home, American foreign policy allied with extreme reactionaries abroad. When conservative Republicans ruled at home, our foreign policy has been to ally with liberal democratic elements abroad.

One reason this seeming paradox intrigues and amuses me is that it contradicts in a rather obvious way the vulgar Marxist analysis of Imperialism which prevailed among the far left during the '70s. I grew up politically hearing over and over again that Imperialism allied with vicious dictatorial regimes because it was in Imperialism's "economic self-interest" to do so. For the unfettered extraction of raw materials, I suppose. All of which was daft nonsense. Imperialism never particularly extracted significant quantities of raw materials from the Third World. Before the '80s Imperialism really didn't have much economic involvement with the Third World at all. Alliances with Third World pre-Capitalist dictatorial oligarchies such as the Latin American latifundists were in fact directly contrary to Imperialist economic self-interest, which lies in free trade, the penetration of market relationships into the countrysides, the breakup of latifundia and other pre-Capitalist economic survivals, the free movement of capital internationally, and so on. Imperialism's postwar alliance with Third World dictatorship directly contradicts Imperialism's own economic self interest. As if thumbing its nose at our vulgarizers, Imperialism did it anyway.

Why? Because the dictators promised to eradicate local Communisms. Imperialism was willing to sacrifice its economic interests because the dominant Imperialist strategists felt that their Cold War political interests were more urgent.

Naturally there was a struggle, or maybe it would be better to say, a contest, between competing strategies. How many times did capitalism's leading think tanks develop ambitious plans for democratization, land reform, free trade, specifically as a means of undercutting the popular appeal of Soviet "socialism" among the masses of Third World poor? Lots: it came up every few years. Within the foreign policy apparatus of the state and within the various regional and ideological sectors of the capitalist class the debate was continual. During the Cold War the foreign policy reactionaries were able to dominate by arguing that the conflict with the reds outweighed other concerns. After the Cold War, consensus shifted toward liberalization. There are still American reactionaries who would prefer the good old alliances with mass-murdering generals. The capitalist mainstream has shifted against them now that the context has changed.

For Marxism, there's no economic determination of political strategies except in the broadest sense that economies create the classes which come into conflict, their relative weights and dynamics, and so on.

Imperialism did not remove the Taliban government of Afghanistan in order to make an oil pipeline possible. Its reasons were political: a step in its counteroffensive against the Islamic Revolution.