As far as I know, reinterpretations of Hobson and JS Mill (in other words, any theory about imperialism which is not Marxist, i.e. which does not say that imperialism is a bad thing) were already occurring in the 1990s, they are just becoming more prominent now, as I predicted in the 1990s (i.e. that the discourse which conceptualised the world economy in terms of globalisation was a passing phase; as far as I know, the concept of globalisation already existed in 1980-81, but it did not become a popular fashion until the mid-1990s). Likewise, I would predict that the debate about protectionism will hot up again as well, even although there is now still a lot of talk about "free trade", the neoliberal project is not yet defeated by economic reality. But you are most probably correct in saying that notions such as "liberal imperialism", or the liberal interpretation of imperialism dates from 1999 or so.
My "suction pump" metaphor may in fact not be appropriate in another way, namely it discounts how the US economy is to a large extent self-sufficient, i.e. can produce its own requirements. But the point is rather that the foreign commodities that the US economy does rely on, such as oil, are rather critical for the functioning of the US economy and for the cost structure of production in the US. Surveying the trend in Marxist thought in the post WW2 epoch, the perceptive Italian Marxist Sebastian Timpenaro commented on the tendency of Marxist thinkers to seek to assimilate the latest ideological fashions of the elites to Marxist theory (to show either that Marxism had answered those questions already, or could incorporate those theoretical trends), but often with the opposite effect to the one intended, namely the assimilation of Marxist and radical concepts, suitably deformed, into the ruling ideology, a sort of "ideological capture" or co-optation resulting from theoretical opportunism. Perhaps this is also inescapable to an extent, insofar as one does not theorise and research in an ideological vacuum, but in an environment where different schools of thought compete for intellectual hegemony, i.e. the politics of knowledge. There is also a sense in which we engage on PEN-L in a certain amount of "punditism". It is here that I think Althusser's concept of a "theoretical problematic" is still useful, namely it suggests that your background theory should tell you what to problematise, it creates an object of inquiry, that it poses certain questions for investigation and a method for how to do that; but also that the whole issue of what the questions are, what is to be problematised, is itself an intellectually contested terrain subject to power and authority, and that it is easy to suffer "intellectual capture" in the sense of surreptitously being seduced into working on a problematic alien to your own theoretical framework. The ease with which new ideas are plagiarised and popularised in a different context for which they are intended never ceases to amaze me, and of course the internet facilitates that process. Quite possibly this is more true today than ever before, also because universities are losing more and more of their intellectual autonomy, because they are being stacked with right-wing administrators, are more directly controlled by government as a sensitive political area, and are becoming more and more the hand-maiden of big business, so that research must be policy-oriented or commercially relevant, and the "problematic" is established external to the academic theorist himself, i.e. there is "free inquiry" within boundaries set by somebody else, who may not even be a professional academic. Regards J. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:56 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Clyde Prestowitz on the meaning of neoconservatism > Jurriaan: >It never ceases to amaze me how many leftists often consider "imperialism" > an outdated concept (they would rather talk about a "globalised world" in > which we are all politically powerless beyond protesting at international > forums) whereas conservatives and liberals freely admit the existence of > imperialism.< > > it's only recently, i.e., the last 2 years or so, that conservatives (and some liberals) started talking about imperialism. > Jim > >
