System of the World (2)

One thing that I have been doing as of late is chatting with people who have a longer perspective on what is (or has been) normal in the scope of politics in the past 50 years. While I have memories of Nixon and enjoyed the economic clown car of Reganomics, there is still lacking an intuition about how things are now relative to how bad things have gotten in the past.

So when I asked my neighbor for a little perspective on the current situation, he suggested that I look over a book called "The Decline of American Power", by Immanuel Wallerstein.

The basic idea(s) seem to be that Capitalism as a world system developed in the 16th century is in a state of pathological decline. The most significant causes of this are based on the growing inability to derive profit from a venture caused by:

• The slow increase of global wages. There are few remaining rural areas of accessible populations to exploit.
• Taxes have moved upward (relative to the 19th century).
• 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.

As the current 900 pound gorilla of the Capitalist universe, the US stands in the center of this mess. The rise of American International military and economic power began with the decline of the British Empire and peaked with the resolution of WW II and the Yalta Agreements between the former Soviet Union and the US. I am not doing justice to the arguments presented in the book, There is a reasonable review of the presented arguments here in case you are interested.

A long paragraph presents the argument quite well:

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.

According to Wallerstein, the role of the government since 1968 has been (in part) to convince the rest of the world that noting has changed and we are not in a state of decline. So what has changed? The current administration has modified the rules of the game. Not content to exercise the typical gluttony of executive power and profit (why be shy, yes?), they have drank the cool aid of "Unilateral Machismo". This is expressed by both the obvious disregard for world opinion in deciding unilateral military actions, and the obvious disregard for public opinion as treasure is moved out of the operating government into the pockets of their associates.

I am not such a strong believer in the book has an acceptable answer to the question about world change. There are quite a few sloppy arguments and things that I am not all that satisfied with. The thesis is an extremely powerful tool in poking at some if the questions I have.

Nice quote:

Imperial(ism) is a delegitimatizing term, even if hawks think it is clever to affirm it.