Bill, I think Harris got the Marxism thing right. But I'm not so sure about Chomsky - he's been pretty consistent since before the immiseration thing got expanded. Take a look at this blast from the past. I quite enjoyed parts of it - he's a very acute observer
monkeyfist.com
His bete noir has always been repression. He sees it under every bed and, lets face it, there's plenty of it around. He's totally consistent - he's against everybody's repression.
It all came back to me when I read that article. He regarded the cold war as totally illegitimate. It was a cooperative venture between the Soviet and US managerial classes as they supported each other....
Oh, here's another one, not Chomsky. I hadn't thought of Bookchin in a long while. It's in the footnotes
riothero.com
The attempt to describe Marx's immiseration theory in international terms instead of national (as Marx did) is sheer subterfuge. In the first place, this theoretical legerdemain simply tries to sidestep the question of why immiseration has not occurred within the industrial strongholds of capitalism, the only areas which form a technologically adequate point of departure for a classless society . If we are to pin our hopes on the colonial world as "the proletariat," this position conceals a very real danger: genocide. America and her recent ally Russia have all the technical means to bomb the underdeveloped world into submission. A threat lurks on the historical horizon--the development of the United States into a truly fascist imperium of the nazi type. It is sheer rubbish to say that this country is a "paper tiger." It is a thermonuclear tiger and the American ruling class, lacking any cultural restraints, is capable of being even more vicious than the German.
I don't subscribe to the sentiments in the last couple of sentences. But he's right in that it's irresponsible of revolutionary movements to place the poorest of the poor in direct opposition to the developed world. From a marxist point of view, they should be getting on with capitalist development, not participating in utopian fantasies.
I think Harris is right about one of the intellectual sources of the large sentiment in Europe and N America which sees the US as the source of all that's wrong. Troll the Marxist websites and the anti-war sites and you find indeed much about US motive being that of enrichment through pauperization of the 3rd world.
I think much of the rest of source of the particular version of anti-american expression from Europe and N America actually is Chomsky. He's been travelling the world publishing and speaking to young people for almost 40 years.
But it's Chomsky-lite because although Chomsky is extremely critical of the US, he's also equally critical of everyone else.
Difficulty with his message, as far as the problems of 3rd world people are concerned, is that it doesn't get to their immediate problems in a form that's really related to the sorts of things that developed countries could do which would be truly helpful - eg cancelling subsidies and tariffs. A million folk on the Champs Elysee or the Mall protesting EU and US subsidies to agriculture would do far more good than demonstrating against WTO.
As far as ME is concerned, I've always thought the real source of the anger is US support of the crappy regimes there. Every player there, including the regimes themselves, have taken advantage of that.
I'm still thinking about this stuff.
I'll write to John later. |
