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In Which Ignatius Does Not Understand “Hegemony”
Writing from Dubai David Ignatius pens a small piece on the alleged loss of the global standing of the United States. It is the usual claptrap of some Saudis and Republicans blaming Obama for not killing enough of their perceived enemies.
Interestingly there are three headlines to that piece. On the Washington Post opinion page it is:
Erosion of U.S. power
Allies have harsh words for the White House.
On the article subpage it is:
U.S. allies are restless
The browser window headline and the URL to the piece contain this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-is-america-losing-to-the-axis-of-weevils/2013/12/13/…
Are “restless allies” a sign of “erosion of [U.S.] power”? Does that make sense? And what the hell are weevils???
But that Ignatius and his headline writers can not decide and label what his piece is really about is not the issue here. That comes in the last paragraph which compares the demise of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev with the United States:
Returning to Gorbachev, the paradox is that, although he was right in trying to change an outmoded, overburdened system, he didn’t foresee the consequences. He thought he could pull on a few stray threads without unraveling the sweater. The analogy is unfair, in that Soviet power was malign whereas U.S. hegemony has generally been positive. But a common theme is that repositioning a superpower is a tricky business.
Mr. Ignatius obviously does not know the definition of “hegemony:
noun, plural he·gem·o·nies.
1.
leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over others, as in a confederation.
2.
leadership; predominance.
3.
(especially among smaller nations) aggression or expansionism by large nations in an effort to achieve world domination.
The world is not a confederation and the U.S. is not in any agreed upon leadership of the world. But the third definition fits: Hegemony and striving for it by a large nation is aggression. And the claim that U.S. hegemonic aggression has “generally been positive” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in itself.
For whom has U.S.hegemony “generally been positive”? For all those people killed in Vietnam? For Iraqis? For the next of kin of those “mistakenly” killed 14 Yemenis and those 22 wounded by U.S. drones and missiles while on their way to a wedding?
The U.S. position is in decline because people like Mr. Ignatius are incapable to see the U.S. aggressive hegemonic aspirations as what they are and like most people outside the United States do see them. Ignatius would likely respond that he is well traveled and knows the world. But small talking with some billionaire oil-sheiks dictators who’s position depend on U.S. military power will certainly not give the correct impression.
“an unprecedented portion of the former third world world has uplifted economically under American hegemony, or as you prattle on, despite it.”
“Uplifted” is the tell here, Knut. The most American of all words, redolent of the maniacal ruthlessness of narrow minded evangelicalism. Like a Chainsaw Massacre carried out by bikers with crosses dangling from their necks. Or Nurse..what was her name?..Hatchet? from One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest, doing good sadistically.
The problem is that, under American hegemony, living standards around the Third World have not risen but declined. Money incomes may have increased, it’s debatable, but for hundreds of millions of peasants and tribal communities subsisting off the lands, the past few decades have been a holocaust.
It was one signalled by US policy in Latin America where it put on a ‘clinic’ for kleptocrats: paramilitaries and death squads, trained at or inspired by Fort Benning, roamed the continent with a simple two fold mission. To kill anyone resisting, to kill anyone who looked like a resister, to kill off selected villages in their entirety pour encourager les autres and to drive the survivors into the nearest towns where they could choose whether to work for the thugs who had just stolen their land or move on to the cities or the Nord to assist in God’s own work of lowering wages.
Its a pattern repeated around the world, the primitive accumulation of capital 2.0, and the United States led the way.
Where have living standards risen? Are the displaced Chinese peasants assembling I-phones in high rise barracks, on call 24/7, paid peanuts and terrorised by corporate cops, doing better than they were?
Are the Bangla Desh weavers, rushed into the capitalist economy from their delta villages, having fun? Are the hundreds of millions who have turned Africa’s towns into an archipelago of slum cities, where life expectancy is in the early twenties and the main industry is rag picking and garbage dump mining, access to healthcare is unknown and dollar a day men are a wealthy elite, are they doing well, grateful that capitalism came their way, and released them from the idiocy of village life?
And what about the Chilean Trade Unionists, the Argentinian socialists and others who disappeared, or were dropped into the south Atlantic from helicopters, whose children were torn the womb, before their mothers were tortured to death- all of these, it cannot be denied, crimes carried out by agents of US capitalism, with the complete complicity of the US government- have they benefited from US hegemony.
But to be fair, Donkeytale, some have undoubtedly prospered. And not just the tyrants, such as Mubarak or the various “kings” and emirs who have picked their people’s pockets while the US stood on guard. And not just the Russian oligarchs and mafioso who gratefully accepted the gift from the IMF economists of the accumulated and consolidated collective wealth of the people of the Soviet Union. Besides these wealthy elites every pimp, slave trafficker, contract killer, union busting thug and criminal on the planet has only himself to blame if he has not taken advantage of the reign of unalloyed evil and unmitigated greed which has been from Guatemala to The Phillipines US hegemony.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 14 2013 13:53 utc | 14
The argument has been made, and there is some truth in it, that the ability of the Capitalists to concede better conditions and wages to working class movements in the Metropolitan centres of the Empire was directly related to the super exploitation of the colonies and the peripheries of empire. Posted by: bevin | Dec 15, 2013 6:55:16 PM | 48
Of course, that’s obvious, but what you never grasped was the basic truth behind the wonderful Law of the Long-Term Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. Having practiced with this for a couple of years, I can now explain it in basic, non-quantitative, common-sense terms, without Marx’s ridiculously arbitrary ‘Tables of Reproduction’, on which many Marxist scholars, econometricians and mathematicians have wasted many hundreds or thousands of hours. The simple explanation derives directly from the fact that human labour – that is to say, fresh human labour, live humans employed in this particular enterprise, whatever it may be, not ‘congealed’ human labour stored in the form of machines made in some previous enterprise and bought by the new one – is the sole source of profit, since (all this being in a hypothetical, perfectly competitive market, of course), the fresh human labour is the only thing which is not paid for at its full value. The new capitalist (let us say he makes hairbrushes) buys his hairbrush-making machines from other capitalists at their full value. The previous capitalist, who made the hairbrush-making machines, has already extracted the full profit associated with making them, so the new capitalist pays for them exactly the value of the contribution they make to his enterprise, neither more nor less. However, he pays considerably less for the fresh labour he employs, than its full value. For simplicity, let us assume a general state of productivity such that four hours’ worth of average labour suffices to provide all the commodities and services the labourer needs for his own reproduction of himself from one day to the next: food, clothing, shelter, transport, etc. So his employer pays him enough money to buy this four hours’ worth of necessities, but extracts in return a full eight hours of labour, if not more. Thus, the employer receives twice as much labour as he pays for, and makes a profit of 100% on his wage bill. But this is his sole source of profit. Now, as time goes by, hairbrush-makers compete with one another in various ways, one of which is to try to reduce the unit cost of their hairbrushes, and this they do by buying more and more sophisticated hairbrush-making machines. In the short term, the one with the most sophisticated machines can produce his hairbrushes most cheaply, and undercut the others, but when they all catch up, the whole hairbush-making industry is using the more sophisticated machines, is more highly automated, and is employing less labour, therefore generating less profit. At the limit, industries become completely automated, employ no labour or next to none, and thus generate no profit or next to none. And this is what is happening.
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Dec 16 2013 9:47 utc | 51
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