Almost any allusion to class is likely to elicit a negative response from academics. Years ago, in a discussion with Harold Isaacs, a faculty member at MIT, I suggested that much of what we define as “ethnic” is really representative of a common class experience, so that in many respects, urban working-class ethnic groups manifest, along with distinctly different traits, many similar ones because of their being similarly situated in the class structure. Having arrived at this hypothesis after years of work in ethnic studies, I thought it was worthy of further consideration. But Isaacs was not happy to hear it. “Well, if you want to fall back on a Marxist viewpoint, you can,” he said. His response puzzled me. Like any red-blooded American social scientist, I was at that time blithely ignorant of what Marxists might be saying about ethnicity or most other subjects. Yet the mere idea that class should be taken into account was enough for him to equate my suggestion with Marxism. To be sure, there is nothing inherently wrong in having one’s views thought of as Marxist. What is wrong is the habit of immediately rejecting an idea as deficient or dogmatic because it has been labeled “Marxist.”
To support their view that class struggle is passé, the left anti-class theorists repeatedly assert that there is not going to be a workers’ revolution in the United States in the foreseeable future. (I heard this sentiment expressed at three different panels during what purported to be a “Gramsci conference” at Amherst, Massachusetts, in April 1987.) Even if we agree with this prognosis, we still might wonder how it becomes grounds for rejecting class analysis and seeing class struggle as of no import. The feminist revolution that was going to transform our entire patriarchal society has thus far not materialized, yet no progressive person takes this to mean that sexism is a chimera or that gender-related struggles are of no great moment. That workers in the United States are not throwing up barricades does not mean class conflict is a myth. In present-day society, such struggle permeates almost all workplace activities. Management constantly wages class war using court injunctions, anti-labor laws, lobbying, tax cuts for the superrich, police repression, union busting, contract violations, sweatshops, dishonest clocking of time, forced and unpaid overtime, safety violations, speedups, harassment and firing of resistant workers, cutbacks in wages and benefits, layoffs, plant closings, outsourcing to cheaper labor markets, and pilfering pension funds.
Workers fight back—when they can—with union organizing, strikes, slowdowns and other job actions, boycotts, public demonstrations, legal appeals, electoral struggle, coordinated absenteeism, and workplace sabotage. “The class struggle is never absent, right down to an argument over whether a worker has spent too long in the lavatory, or whether they have the right to go the lavatory if they wish.”17
Class power may not be the only factor, but it is an important one in setting the political agenda, selecting leaders, determining public budgets, silencing dissenters, and funding scientific research. Class is a major determinant in how people gain access to higher education, how health care is distributed, how the environment is (mis)treated, how the elderly try to survive, how women and people of color are dealt with, and how religion, news, entertainment, art, and sports are marketed.
Left anti-class theorists like the hyper-theorizing Chantal Mouffe define the working class as composed only of industrial proletarians. This definition excludes farm workers, service workers, and white-collar employees. It enables the anti-class theorists to see the working class as on the way out, declining in numbers and importance. When I once observed that the Nicaraguan Revolution was a “working-class victory,” Mouffe vehemently objected, stating that the Nicaraguan Revolution was “a popular uprising.” But who is the populace? Was the Sandinista victory carried out by a leisure class? By a small professional class? In Nicaragua and other countries, a popular uprising and a working-class uprising are much the same thing.
A grasp of class reality vastly superior to Chantal Mouffe’s was evidenced by George Rohal, a supermarket manager in Weirton, West Virginia, and the son of a steelworker. Rohal commented, “All classes are really working classes. Very few people sit back and just collect income. Anyone drawing any type of salary or a weekly paycheck is a working-class person.”18 This might not be true of the very top corporate CEOs, whose huge salaries are well complemented by enormous investment earnings and whose wealth and organizational command positions give them an inescapable identity with the owning class, yet Rohal’s comment contains a core insight. Having never read the anti-class theorists and mainstream social scientists, he is able to see that class is a relationship to ownership and not just a demographic characteristic.
By the 1980s “the retreat from class” became something of a stampede, most notably in countries like France and the United States. For those who sought to be au courant, class oppression and class struggle now seemed terribly passé. During the seventies and eighties, the anti-class theorists set sail for seemingly more inviting ports, announcing that the future belonged to the Greens, the feminists, the gays, the political culturalists—or even the free market and the ideological right. Few people wanted to associate with a loser, and class struggle seemed like a loser.
Various “left” theorists devoted yet more time to Marxist bashing. Anyone who still thought that class was of primary importance was labeled a diehard Marxist, guilty of “economism”19 and “reductionism” and unable to keep up with the “post-Marxist,” “post-structuralist,” “post-industrialist,” “postmodernist,” and even “post-capitalist” times.
Explaining why, like so many other French intellectuals, she shifted away from Marxism and from studying working-class history, Michelle Perrot remarked: “After the war, the working class was highly visible; we believed that it was the vanguard. To do working-class history was one way of being an intellectual.”20 A revealing admission by Perrot. She did not side with the working class because of the inherent question of economic justice, but because “the working class was highly visible,” and an identity with the class was largely a means to another end, that of being a certified intellectual. And now, when the working class is perceived as “declining in importance,” the anti-class theorists move on to matters more deserving of their attention, announcing the advent of a post-something-or-other era, and marketing a new line of threadbare ideas. The intellectual life resembles the fashion industry in more ways than one.
Rather than treating class, race, culture, and gender as mutually exclusive and competitive concepts, we need to see how they interact, often with compound effect. The resurgence of racism is not proof that class realities are thereby less important. Indeed just the opposite. Racial and ethnic divisions are often incited as a way of retarding class consciousness and unity.
Consider the way the left anti-class theorists have misused Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist Party leader and intellectual of the 1920s. Gramsci made much of the fact that cultural hegemony was one of the ways the bourgeoisie maintained itself and buttressed state power. In emphasizing the importance of cultural hegemony, he did not mean to downplay the significance or centrality of class. Quite the contrary, he was showing how culture was a force instrumental to class struggle. Gramsci would have been appalled at those theorists who try to use his work as a weapon against Marxism, since he himself was a Marxist-Leninist.
When Marxists and other social critics argue that the class dimension is of primary importance, they are being neither reductionist nor “economistic,” for they continue to recognize the multifaceted nature of social phenomena. That all human activity has a material base does not mean that all human activity is reduced to material motives but that it is all anchored within the overall structure of politico-economic power.
While all things cannot and should not be reduced to class, class does penetrate so much of our social experience. An economically dominant class is able to hold sway over other social institutions and cultural forces in society—albeit not in all matters for all time. The capitalist class is dominant but not omnipote
nt. One of the prime conditions of that class’s hegemony is the ability to mute and blur class awareness. In this they have plenty of allies across the political spectrum.
NOTES
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, 1937), 33.
2. See Victor Perlo’s columns in People’s Weekly World, 31 May 1997, and 1 August 1998; and Paul Lawrence, “Capitalism is Organized Crime,” The People, September/October 2003.
3. For the classic statement on capitalism, see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, available in various editions; see also Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (International Publishers, 1970).
4. New York Times, 17 October 2006.
5. Brady quoted in Lewis Lapham, “Notebook,” Harper’s 26 April 1995.
6. John Locke, Treatise of Civil Government (Appelton-Century-Croft, 1937), 82.
7. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 309, 311.
8. See Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson, 2007), chapter 4.
9. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (International Publishers, 1971), 238.
10. Michael Walzer, “Civil Disobedience and Corporate Authority,” in Philip Green and Sanford Levinson (eds.), Power and Community (Pantheon, 1969), 226.
11. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (Harcourt Brace and World, 1962), 317.
12. E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men (University of California Press, 1960), 13–59.
13. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; also Edward Greer, “Antonio Gramsci and ‘Legal Hegemony’,” in David Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law (Pantheon, 1982), 306.
14. Stanley Aronowitz, “Alan Sokal’s ‘Transgression,’” Dissent, Winter 1997.
15. New York Times, 18 May 1996; and also Aronowitz, “Alan Sokal’s Transgression.”
16. Ronald Aronson, After Marxism (Guilford Press, 1994).
17. John Downing, The Media Machine (London: Pluto Press, 1980), p. 18.
18. New York Times, April 24, 1978.
19. “Economism” was originally a term used by Lenin to criticize those who thought that the class struggle was entirely encapsulated in the trade union movement. It is now used by anti-Leninists and anti-Marxists to criticize those who see economic factors as of prime importance.
20. “New Subjects, New Social Commitments: An Interview with Michelle Perrot,” Radical History Review 37, 1987, 27.
VII.
DOING THE WORLD
29 IMPERIALISM FOR BEGINNERS
Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire communities. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, or political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become “commonwealths,” and colonies become “territories” or “dominions” (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, “commonwealths” too). Imperialist military interventions become matters of “national defense,” “national security,” and maintaining “stability” in one or another region. Here I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.
By “imperialism” I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.
The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. Some 800 years ago, Ireland became the first colony of what later became known as the British Empire. A part of Ireland still remains under British occupation. Other early Caucasian victims included the Eastern Europeans. The people Emperor Charlemagne worked to death in his mines in the early part of the ninth century were Slavs. So frequent and prolonged was the enslavement of Eastern Europeans that “Slav” became synonymous with servitude. The word “slave” derives from “Slav.” Eastern Europe was an early source of raw materials, cheap labor, and capital accumulation, having become wholly dependent upon Western manufactures by the seventeenth century.
A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps.
The preponderant thrust of the European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed against Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the nineteenth century, they saw the Third World as not only a source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the twentieth century, the industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology, investments, and loans.
Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant view is that it does not exist. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United States. One may speak of “Soviet imperialism” or “nineteenth-century British imperialism” but not of U.S. imperialism. A graduate student in political science at most universities in this country would not be granted the opportunity to research U.S. imperialism, on the grounds that such an undertaking would be ideologically driven and therefore not scholarly. While many people throughout the world charge the United States with being an imperialist power, in this country persons who talk of U.S. imperialism are usually judged to be mouthing “leftist” or “hate-America” blather.
Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it invests in other countries, penetrates cultural and political life, and integrates the overseas economies into an international system of profit accumulation.
Given its expansionist nature, corporate capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that “chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . It creates a world after its own image.”1 Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages give way to desolate shanty towns, and autonomous regions are forcibly wedded to centralized autocracies and international markets.
Consider one of a thousand such instances. Some years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented lives. They hunted and fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their community was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the hardwood for quick profits. Declared “business zones,” their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas. Driven from their homesteads, the inhabitants were transformed into disfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages—when fortunate enough to find employment.
North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with cheaper labor markets. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84 percent from 1985 to 1990, the most dramatic increase being in cheap-labor countries, mostly in Asia.
Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate-profit rates in the
Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries and have continued to rise dramatically. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. transnationals, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global “free market” and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe.
Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, the former Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen other countries. Such “multiple sourcing” enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against each other.
Some writers question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most Western capital is invested in Western nations, not in the Third World (but with higher growth rates in the Third World in recent years). If corporations lost all their Third World investments, they argue, many of them could still survive on their European and North American markets. In response, one should note that even in the unlikely event that capitalism could survive without imperialism—it shows no inclination to do so. It manifests no desire to discard its enormously profitable Third World enterprises. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for investor survival but it seems to be an inherent tendency and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperial relations may not be the only way to pursue profits, but they are a most lucrative way.
Contrary Notions Page 24