Tag Archives: imperialism

Thomas Palley On The Intellectual No-Fly Zone

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Thomas Palley has a new blog post Flirting With Armageddon: The US And Ukraine discussing how the US government is escalating the situation in Ukraine and that warns that it may end badly. An important part of his post is ponting out the existence of an edict of silence.

First, the liberal blob has promulgated an edict of silence against those who challenge its explanation of the war and the case for US participation. The edict applies to conservatives who argue “it’s not our war”, and to independent critics who argue the war has been “made in the USA” via a thirty-year slow-motion attack on Russia conducted through eastward expansion of NATO and regime change subversion in the republics of the former Soviet Union.

Matt Taibbi has used the phrase intellectual no-fly zone to describe this.

Anyone who criticises will be brought down. Supposed left-wing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” vote for more funds for the military industrial complex. The left in the West has always been soft on imperialism and with this the process seems complete. Even supposedly left-wing governments of Sweden and Norway have joined NATO.

There’s a serious problem with the left in the West.

Matt Taibbi quotes Noam Chomsky:

… I reached out to Chomsky this weekend and asked him what in particular it is about the Ukraine conflict that’s brought out such an aggressive response.

“Putting aside the dangers, which are all too real,” he says, the unusually intense response is “part of something much worse: the general atmosphere of irrationality engendered by the whole Ukraine affair. It ranges from the nutcases like Fukuyama assuring us that there’s no threat of nuclear war if we escalate (and the official policy that is not much different), to the ‘left’ shouting slogans about how we have to defend Ukraine and punish Russia no matter what, and any voice that breaks unanimity has to be stilled, maybe crushed.”

Thomas Palley On NATO Expansionism And The Russian Invasion Of Ukraine

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Thomas Palley has written some fine stuff on the NATO/Russia/Ukraine. He had predicted a Russian invasion while at the same time identifying NATO expansionism as the root cause of the crisis, a totally rare combination!

In his latest blog post Ukraine: What Will Be Done And What Should Be Done? he is straight and accurate:

The inevitable has happened. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It was inevitable because the US and its NATO partners had backed Russia into a corner from which it could only escape by military means.

In effect, Russia confronted a future in which the US would increasingly tighten the noose around its neck by further eastward expansion of NATO, combined with military upgrading by the US of its Eastern European NATO proxies.

Accompanying that militarization was the prospect of a ramped-up propaganda war in which western media fanned the flames of public animus against Russia. Side-by-side, US government financed entities (such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the German Marshall Fund) would seek to influence European and Russian politics with the goal of regime change.

At this stage, there are two questions. What will be done? And what should be done?

Thomas Palley had predicted all this in two previous posts:

  1. A Crisis Made In The USA: Why Russia Will Likely Invade Ukraine, written Jan 16th,
  2. American Exceptionalism And The Liberal Menace: The US And Ukraine, written Feb 13th.

In Brazil, Lula’s Worker Party had initially blamed NATO expansionism but soon withdrew the statement. It’s not easy saying such things. And the sort of culture also discourages independent thought. Hence it’s important to denounce NATO expansionism if you really are anti-imperialist.

Paul Krugman On “Economic Nationalism”

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Paul Krugman has a new article titled Wonking Out: Economic Nationalism, Biden-Style, in which he defends Biden’s economic policy which is a deviation from laissez-faire, in particular free trade.

The article has reference to a 250-page report by the White House titled Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, And Fostering Broad-Based Growth,

The United States’ balance of payment and international investment position is unsustainable and it needs to do something to reverse it. Weakness in international trade and offshoring have led to a lot of economic destruction which was exploited by Donald J. Trump. But the Democratic Party—led by Paul Krugman on economics—attacked Trump for deviating from free trade. But now that they are in power, they have learned a bit from their mistakes and economic realism has also taken over. Even during the Democratic Party primary election, the candidates all agreed that something has to be done on international trade and proposed policies to address it.

Elizabeth Warren, for example had a post on Medium titled A Plan For Economic Patriotism.

It’s a shame that the Democratic Party which has voters consisting of more educated people had to copy or at least follow Donald Trump.

Why is manufacturing important? Because (a) manufacturing is important to exports (b) rise in production leads to faster rise in productivity compared to other things. (c) a process of success leads to higher competitiveness of firms—not just price competitiveness but also non-price competitiveness.

The Biden administration has also not rolled back the tariffs imposed on China by Trump.

Instead, Paul Krugman has this spin:

In any case, however, we seem to be entering a new era of worries about the role of the United States in the world economy, this time driven by fears of China. And we’re hearing new calls for industrial policy. I have to admit that I’m not entirely persuaded by these calls. But the rationales for government action are a lot smarter this time around than they were in the 1980s — and, of course, immensely smarter than the economic nationalism of the Trump era, which they superficially resemble.

and:

As you might guess, then, a lot of the Biden-Harris report focuses on national security concerns. National security has always been recognized as a legitimate reason to deviate from free trade. It’s even enshrined in international agreements. Donald Trump gave the national security argument a bad name by abusing it. (Seriously, is America threatened by Canadian aluminum?) But you don’t have to be a Trumpist to worry about our dependence on Chinese rare earths.

Donald Trump is a shady person and so it’s ironic that the Democratic Party was behind. Paul Krugman in fact even spent the last 5 years or so denying that US trade is a problem. Now he is making it look like Biden and Co. are doing something original.

Many people present the recent changes as some kind of break from neoliberalism. In a sense it is but that way of presenting is misleading: finally the US policy makers are furthering US interests, which could be at the expense of the rest of the world. The United States needs policies to promote net exports—to make its international investment position sustainable—but there are various ways of doing it, such as moving to a system away from free trade or even expanding domestic demand to the point of full employment which won’t restrict total imports, and hence isn’t beggar-thy-neighbour and which is good for the whole world.

But it’s a bit like recent changes in fiscal policy: once the US is out of the woods, leaders and the academia will again go back to same old policies. So Krugman’s piece has a lot of praise for free trade which allows him to argue in the future that free trade is good. Another reason is while US deviates from free trade, politicians and pundits can continue to impose free trade on other countries. Finally the aim is to promote policies which are beneficial to oligarchies and oligarchs. Whatever works! Just like “liquidity trap” is used to argue that fiscal expansion can be done now but that neoclassical economics works otherwise, “national security” concern is used now in case of trade.

In summary, the United States needs policies to make net exports rise faster over imports, which Post-Keynesians have argued earlier than anyone, but the Democratic Party has only learned it by losing. They will try to spin this, impose more free trade on the world, while taking protectionist measures and running industrial policy themselves and create a narrative which makes it easier for them to go back to their old ideology.

Glenn Greenwald On Corporations’ Use Of Wokeism To Prettify Imperialism

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Glenn Greenwald has a new article at Substack explaining how corporations wear costumes of social justice to prettify imperialism.

The sarcasm in the article is wonderful:

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

…

Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves …

You have to appreciate the genius of the propaganda. It helps people pretend that they stand for right causes.

Link

Review Of African Political Economy Issue On Samir Amin

Historically advanced countries have developed at the expense of poor countries. It doesn’t have to be that way, and that offers some optimism, but it is crucial to recognise this to make an alternative world without imperialism.

The latest issue of Review of African Political Economy has a special on Samir Amin who developed the dependency theory. For Amin, the international aspect of political economy is central to the subject, not something which needs to be added in the end as a sort of technicality.

In a laissez-faire world, there is no convergence in the fortunes of economies but polarisation. Anyone who is left-leaning in political ideology and is looking for other reasons while ignoring this to explain the world is fooling themselves.

Dependency theory is quite consistent with Post-Keynesian theory. There is an explicit framework of how this happens and that framework is Kaldorian growth theory.

A new world would work to make countries economically independent and reduce the role of the hegemon, the United States in world affairs. It would work in practice by a plan like Keynes’ plan involving significant transfers from the rich to the poor.

A lot of people simply claim that countries just need to copy the Scandinavian model. It’s true that those countries have some things better than the US, but it’s not like everything is great. For example their economic orthodoxies weren’t better than Washington wisdom after the economic and financial crisis which started in 2007. Also, in recently these countries voted against removing intellectual property protections for rich countries for vaccines. When the Scandinavian countries’ governments are themselves part of imperialism, that should raise doubts about the model. More importantly, international constraints put a barrier on trying to become like these countries minus their imperialism.

Articles free to read till March end. The title is the link.

Another Thomas Palley Critique Of Neochartalism

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The new issue of Review Of Keynesian Economics (ROKE) is out. Thomas Palley has another critique of Neochartalism or “Modern Modern Theory”, tilted What’s Wrong With Modern Money Theory: Macro And Political Economic Restraints On Deficit-Financed Fiscal Policy. 

I don’t agree with many things but it’s worth a read, as has his other critiques been. From a political economy perspective, the problem of the world is the the liberal international economic order which exists and is totalising. This imperialism needs to be overthrown and new order needs to be established. This is completely missed by the neochartalists because they tend to think that as long as a country’s currency is truly floating, fiscal policy can do the trick. Dismissing the constraints brought from international trade, this way.

Globalists need to be defeated.

Neochartalists also do all sorts of verbal gymnastics in throttling any debate about increase in tax rates. In fact Warren Mosler argues for removal of most taxes. Oh wow! How did us mortals miss such a simple solution to the problem of the world!

Basically neochartalists blur the distinction between two separate issues:

  1. Tax rates needn’t rise to increase domestic demand and output.
  2. Tax rates ought to rise for a fair distribution of the national income.

One can believe both (1) and (2) consistently as typically economies run at less than full employment. Neochartalists however use (1) to throttle the debate on (2).

But if you discuss these issues with them, they concede this but yet the next time seem to argue like before. Another way to see this is that they have no proposals to raise taxes even though they have all sorts of proposals everywhere.

Thomas Palley warns us against this hilarity. He says:

More generally, it is pure semantics whether taxes raise money to finance government spending, or taxes destroy money in order to create the space for reissue of money to finance spending. Taxation and spending occur simultaneously, and taxes are an intrinsic part of the system and cannot be done away with. Even when the economy is far from the full employment/inflation target, taxes are needed to finance the vast bulk of spending. Money-financed budget deficits provide some space at the margin for temporary additional spending, which eventually either has to be cut or be financed by some combination of taxes and borrowing when the economy’s constraints bite.26

…

  1. If the economy is away from steady state, and the inflation rate and the money–GDP ratio are both rising, then there will be additional temporary financial space along the traverse to the steady state.

Fiscal policy is hugely important and mainstream economists underplay the role of fiscal policy even after so much fiscal policy came to the rescue in this new lockdown crisis. But the problems are much deeper. Imperialism has to be defeated. A new international economic order with planned trade instead of free trade, together with coordination of policies (including fiscal policy) needs to be established. Without the imperial power of either the United States or other international institutions. But something democratic at the international level. Nor is neochartalists’ claims about the importance of fiscal policy original as there’s a tradition of Post-Keynesian economics stressing the importance.

Glenn Greenwald Twitter Thread On Identity Politics As A Cover For Imperialism And Neoliberalism

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Glenn Greenwald has an excellent Twitter thread on how the “centrists” use identity politics as a cover:

He writes:

Contempt for it on the merits aside, one has to acknowledge the propagandistic genius of exploiting harmless-to-power identity politics as the feel-good cover for perpetuating and even strengthening the neoliberal order and further entrenching corporate and imperial power.

See the full Twitter thread and also a recent post, Identity Politics As A Neoliberal Alternative To A Left, where I mentioned him.

Mainstream bourgeois economics which is what occupies a hegemonic position in the academic world today is often criticized for being “unreal”, for proceeding on the basis of assumptions that obviously do not correspond to reality. This criticism however, though valid, does not capture its real intent, which is to serve as a means of camouflaging imperialism. The theoretical content of mainstream bourgeois economics is to advance a set of propositions about the functioning of capitalism which deny any need for, and hence any role of, imperialism in capitalist development. Since imperialism has in fact been a crucial element in the functioning of capitalism, these propositions, needless to say, are “unreal”; but simply underscoring their “unreal” character is not enough. This “unreal” character serves a purpose; and this fact must not be missed.

Prabhat Patnaik, Economics And Imperialism

Alexander Zevin On Citations Needed

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There’s a new episode, of the Citations Needed podcast titled Episode 98: The Refined Sociopathy of The Economist and featuring Alexander Zevin on his book Liberalism At Large—The World According To The Economist.

The episode is about The Economist and also about the word “liberalism”.

From the transcript:

Alexander Zevin: One of the things that book tries to do is to bring the history of imperialism into the history of liberalism, and usually they’re not spoken about together. In fact, in many histories of liberalism you’ll get the impression that liberals were anti-imperialists, they were against the empire, but The Economist, and what I argue is the dominant strand of liberalism, isn’t. It’s consistently pro-imperial from the 1850s at the time of the Crimean War, and the Opium War in China, and the Indian mutiny, and many other conflicts all the way through to the present.

picture by Alexander Zevin

Excellent discussion of the connection of liberalism and imperialism.

Link

Jason Hickel Features Again On Citations Needed

The latest episode of the podcast Citations Needed features Jason Hickel again who together with the hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson explain how the mainstream narrative hides the correct story about success and failure of nations by spreading the wrong idea that corruption is the main factor.

Jason Hickel: So, of course I teach on global economics and, and one of the questions I like to ask my students at the beginning of term is something along the lines of, okay, so we have this massive inequality between global north and global south, rich countries and poor countries, why do you think poor countries are so poor? And I would say, you know, 80 and 90 percent of the students will put their hands up and say they believe it’s because of corruption, you know, because the global south has corrupts leaders. But the problem with that story is it erases, you know, the history of colonization, the history of structural adjustments, the history of unfair trade arrangements. And so it’s a very de-politicized way of thinking about the drivers of impoverishment because the focus is solely on the nation states as opposed to the relationships between nation states and geopolitical regions of the world. And that’s really what I want to draw attention to.

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