----- Original Message -----
From: "John Lacny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 11:26 PM
Subject: Re: [marxist] NATO war and pipeline
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> It's all about the transportation of massive oil
> resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans,
> and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.
I disagree; this analysis slips into economic determinism. Too often people
confuse a "Marxist" approach with the attempt to find proximate economic
causes for the actions of the state or of imperialist powers.
The problem is that the state in a capitalist society NEEDS to be
"relatively autonomous" from purely "economic" considerations if it is to
fulfill the role it needs to fulfill -- that is, acting as guarantor of
capitalist exploitation in general. The state is not bound by the kind of
precise cost-benefit analysis by which a corporation is bound; if such a
cost-effective guarantor for capitalist exploitation could be found, what
would be the need for the state in the first place? Christian Parenti, in
his book *Lockdown America*, does an excellent job of taking apart
"left-wing" economic determinist analyses of state repression: the US system
isn't building prisons for narrow profit reasons (prison labor is not
terribly profitable to use, and private prisons are a small part of the
prison-industrial complex and far less profitable than other industries --
like the military especially -- that are lavished with state largesse in any
case); rather, state repression is a way to contain the immense
contradictions of the system AS A WHOLE by imprisoning the "surplus
population."
Imperialism operates on similar principles. Yes, on occasion an imperialist
state will act directly on behalf of the direct economic interests of a
specific corporation based in that country, or perhaps on behalf of an
industry based in that country. These instances are extremely rare,
however, and in some cases an imperialist state may even come into conflict
with one of its own corporations in a certain peripheral country! (There
was an example of this, I believe in Honduras, where there was a series of
military coups or even a civil war between competing factions, one of which
was backed by the US-based United Fruit Company and one of which was backed
by the US government. Someone who has more of the facts directly at his/her
fingertips can probably give the specifics -- help!) Somewhat more
commonly, the imperialist state may act to protect the direct economic
interests of its capitalist class as a whole, in a country which offers
particularly lucrative sources of labor, natural resources, etc. But quite
often, the imperialist state may act in ways that seem quite inexplicable
from a purely "economic" point of view, pouring immense resources into
fighting a war or propping up a regime or fixing an election in a country
that is inconsequential from a purely economic point of view.
But especially since the onset of the Cold War, when the United States has
taken on the role of the leading imperialist power and the guarantor of the
imperialist system AS A WHOLE, the POLITICAL importance of even some of the
tiniest and most marginal countries has become critical. Some used to
conjecture that the US was in Vietnam in order to maintain control over
rubber, oil, or some other resource which must be there or secretly buried
there. But it didn't really matter what resources Vietnam had: the point
was that it had the potential to set an EXAMPLE that the US could not let
other countries follow if the imperialist system as a whole were to survive.
That's why they poured immense amounts of blood and treasure into the war
there, much more than any US corporations were likely to make in profits
there at some point in the future. When things really did get too costly,
they merely decided to cut their losses (especially because they already HAD
made something of a negative example of Vietnam: with 2-3 million dead, its
infrastructure smashed and its agriculture on the point of ecological
catastrophe, what country would have wanted to be the second, third, or one
of the many Vietnams?).
Those who tried to explain the US bombing of Serbia as an attempt to grab up
the Trepca mines in Kosovo were kidding themselves. The analysis put forth
here, that it had something to do with Caspian Sea oil, is only marginally
closer to the truth, and it certainly had nothing to do with the possibility
that there might be a pipeline going through the Balkans. Certainly the
Caspian Sea oil is the richest possible resource that US capital would want
to corner in its attempts to grab up as much of Eastern Europe and Central
Asia as possible, but it's not necessarily what's paramount in the minds of
US policy planners. What they're concerned about is the "credibility" of
their system in general, and in this case above all maintaining NATO -- and
more importantly, NATO as a closely-controlled instrument of US objectives,
free from unduly independent maneuvering on the part of the Western
Europeans -- was what was at the top of their agenda. The piece that was
just forwarded also mentions this, but almost as an afterthought, when it
really should be at the center of the analysis.
As for Serbia, and the statement in the article that the mass graves were
never found and that the killings were about what you'd expect in a
counterinsurgency war, I'm inclined to agree, and I think that the ghoulish
stories that are circulating about factories being turned into makeshift
crematoriums (e.g., the kind of stories repeated by Christopher Hitchens in
one of his recent columns in The Nation) are not very credible. Whether or
not they're true shouldn't necessarily affect our analysis of US motives.
All honest people know that the Serbs were carrying out a racist
counterinsurgency war (unfortunately there are a few people, almost always
the kind who look for simplistic economic-determinist analyses, who deny
this fact and attribute to the neo-Chetniks some kind of heroic motives).
But a hundred years ago, the Boers in southern Africa were a bunch of racist
revanchists as well, and that didn't make the actions of the British any
less cynical -- or any less morally objectionable, either.
John Lacny
"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31
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