Barkley wrote: >... There are deep ethnic conflicts with wrongs committed on both sides [of the Kosova/o conflict]. Outside powers of various sorts have gotten involved in various ways and in some cases exacerbated things, including some parties in the US and Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. This most recent war effort by the US and NATO is simply unacceptable and causing far more death and destruction than anything it is accomplishing. But I am more willing to blame it on misguided incompetence than on some grand imperial scheme to dismember socialist Serbia. What has been imperialistic has been the manner in which it has been conducted and the assumption of the right to conduct it in violation of international agreements and law.< Is there anyone on pen-l who sees Serbia as "socialist"? in what sense? what do they mean by "socialism" and in what sense does Serbia fit this definition? More substantially, I think that it's useful to bring up Vlad. Lenin's concept of (capitalist) Imperialism not as a policy of a national government (which is the way Kautsky and many others have seen it) but as a type of socioeconomic system that arises from capitalism's globalization drive. Frankly, I don't think that the idea of imperialism-as-policy (Barkley's usage above) should be flushed down the toilet of history; Kautsky wasn't wrong to point as much as superficial in his analysis. Rather, I wish there were two separate words for Imperialism-as-socioeconomic-system and imperialism-as-policy. Call them large-I and small-i imperialisms. It's pretty clear that the US/NATO war against Serbia is small-i imperialistic, as Barkley says. And such policies can be (and often are) incompetent; consider the history of the US war against Vietnam. But what about capitalist Imperialism? To me, it's a type of system that has a logic of its own that goes beyond the intentions and actions of Clinton, Blair, Alnotsobright, etc. This logic creates changes in the object conditions that these nabobs face, problems that they feel that they must deal with as Leaders of the West, since they must preserve peace and profitability for their main clients, legitimating and reproducting their social system over time. Here, a recent article in the (US-based) NATION magazine by Zizek (sp?) was suggestive. The article wasn't as as good as one single point that wasn't really developed (though it did show up as a subheadline): globalization created the mess in the Balkans and will create similar messes in the future, so that in a weird and indirect sense, Clinton created Milosevic. Capitalist Imperialism involves, as old Karlos pointed out, a constant drive for capitals to expand like crazy, not only in competition with each other but also as a way to deal with fractious workforces. It tends to "batter down all Chinese walls," a phrase which takes on new meaning in light of recent events. But what it meant to Marx and Engels (in the MANIFESTO) was capitalism's tendency to expand like crazy, swallowing up, destroying, and/or subordinating the various noncapitalist social organizations that people have set up around the world (unless the resistance is too strong). For most of the last century, capitalist Imperialism involved competing capitalist nation-states and/or the threat of a noncapitalist industrial and military system (the USSR and USSR-type countries). But in recent decades, there's been a slow (and sometimes rapid) shift away from competing nation-state-based capitalisms or Cold War Imperialism to the creation of a generalized and globalized capitalism, spearheaded by the US, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. The new kind of capitalist Imperialism seems more akin to that described by Marx and Engels than to the competition of national capitals described by Lenin, Bukarin, etc. (A "national capital" involves a government/business alliance promoting the wealth of a nation (especially its richest people) using tariffs and other trade restrictions, like the US before 1945 or so plus Japan, Inc., South Korea, Inc., etc.) The problem -- for Clinton, Blair, etc. -- is that the globalization drive (as exemplified by the tearing apart of the old Yugoslavia into Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, etc., by Reagan, the IMF, Germany, etc.) destroys the old _status quo_, disrupting any kind of societal equilibrium that may have kept the peace. (A lot of Karl Polanyi's reputation arises from his emphasis on this point.) Lots of businesspeople from the rich countries expect to profit from new profit opportunities in the (what are now termed) "emerging markets" while they are comforted by the imposition of free-market orthodoxy, often linked to superficial (and thus nonthreatening) democracy. But the destruction of the old _status quo_ can unleash the worst kinds of conflicts, as with the ethnic hatreds of the old Yugoslavia or the religious nonsense of the Ayatollah Khomeni. At the same time, the spread of the new economic system and the "we're better than you" attitude of the New Men of Power who come from the outside stirs up nationalist resentment and resistance. So, in a weird and indirect way, Clinton (the spokesmodel for Imperialism) helped to create Milosevic (the ethnic chauvinist who mouths anti-imperialist slogans). Milosevic uses "anti-imperialist" slogans, but it should be stressed that (as far as I can see), he's not opposed to Imperialism as much as he wants a better role for his country in that system: he seems to like the old model of capitalist Imperialism as involving competing national capitals, with his country as one of those national capitals, rather than opposing capitalist Imperialism as a system. His opposition seems much more akin to that of the Mussolini before and during World War II (i.e., the seeking of a bigger piece of the world pie for Italy, at the expense of its neighbors) than to that of the Zapatistas. comments? criticisms? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground troops make things worse. US/NATO out of Serbia!
