Can we get rid of imperialism?

[eridani]

Imperialism has been a dominant form of social organization for 5000 years. Can we end it? I think that this may well be humanity's final exam, as it may end the world if we don't end it first. There are factors for and against us here. For the sake of the terminally perky, I'll leave the optimism for last.

Empires are all about transferring wealth from the periphery to the center. Roman citizens could not be questioned under torture, but torture was the order of the day for peons in Judea. Lancastershire was to have developed mills; those of India were to be destroyed. At the center of the American empire, we can have all the steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies we feel like having, but "free" markets will be imposed at gunpoint on poor countries.

It is worthy of note that the two countries to escape from European imperialism, Japan and the US, are much better off than those places unable to do so.

Following are some revealing quotes from people at the imperial centers. Ipse dixit.

For in the Romans is an arrogance which no submission or good behaviour can escape. Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of `government'; they create a desolation and call it peace.

--Tacitus ,The Agricola and the Germania, London: Penguin, 1970 pp. 80-81

.. we are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionateshare of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

--Winston Churchill , "The World Crisis", released in the 1920s. Bolded words deleted before original publication


We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality . . . we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.

--George Kennan, US Cold War planner, 1948 NSC-68 document
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-1.htm
--Source: Naval War College Review, Vol. XXVII (May-June, 1975), pp. 51-108. Also in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: > 1950, Volume I.


The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

--Thomas Friedman, "A Manifesto for the Fast World," The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999

And one last comment about what eventually happens to the non-elite within empires. Think of the joke that the Roman Senate became after empire. Can you say "Patriot Act II"? I knew you could.

We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.

--Democratic National Platform, 1900

[eridani]

1. Factors against

1. The sheer weight of history lends a sense of inevitability to the continued existence of this form of social organization. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond points out that wherever there are societies with a production mode favoring food storage, states and empires with specialized ruling and military castes arise. Pile up enough stuff worth stealing, and you either start conquering your neighbors and become an empire, or you become subsumed into one.

2. You can do worse in terms of social organization. When societies without extensive food storage gain in population start butting against each other, the result is commonly genocide. Empires don't want piles of dead bodies; they want slaves and employees. If you want to stay alive, the latter is the preferable alternative. (Of course those unwilling to take on that role might indeed wind up as piles of dead bodies anyway.)

And there are advantages to being plundered by one big thief instead of being nibbled to death by a hundred small fry, particularly if the big thief gives something back in the way of protection and services. Paying taxes and being otherwise ignored was definitely preferred by Chinese peasants over rampaging small-scale warlords. When that order could no longer be maintained, the emperor lost the Will of Heaven. But in happier times they could sing

I till my fields and I eat
I dig my well and I drink
God is far away in heaven
and the emperor is far away in Peking
What have they to do with me?

3. The current empire has a cowed society that has not successfully resisted serious impositions on traditional liberties, and is deeply fear-ridden. For all the unprecedented availability of information through the Internet and other modern means of communication, a majority of people get their information from television, which is mostly subordinate to and a direct tool of the imperial ruling gang. Significant numbers believe that Iraq has a connection to 9-11, that WMD have been found, and much other nonsense that puts them in total isolation from the rest of the world in terms of basic factual information.

4. In addition to information poverty, the dominance of money in politics has turned large numbers of people into spectators who feel unable to defend their interests in a public arena. Add to that the spread of voting technology with internal processes privately owned and completely unaccountable to the public, and you have a situation in which voting data (deviating from 50 years of practice) no longer correlates with polling data. This does not bode well for being able to vote the emperors out.

5. US anti-imperial advocates are split into right and left wings which so far have had no meaningful interactions. It would be great if lefties left their laundry list politics at home, and righties left their homophobic misogynist culture wars at home and just talk to each other for starters. Hasn't happened yet. The house is on fire, and the two political factions most interested in putting it out are still arguing about what color the living room should be painted.

6. The power of religions fundamentalism. The rulers of two nuclear-armed big countries (the US and India) rely intensively on it as part of their power base. The Islamic version has been heavily subsidized by Israel and the US (Hamas and what later became Al Qaeda) as an alternative to secular nationalism. (And why, oh why, do they keep thinking they can control it and avoid blowback, with all the evidence to the contrary?)

Even without encouragement, it is an extremely powerful force on its own, flourishing not necessarily in poverty, but as an alternative for people who have no say in the conditions affecting their lives and whose cultures have been stripmined by international capital. Cultural chauvinism, misogyny, and shaddup-and-do-as-you're-told as an alternative to solidarity, tolerance and consensus.

[eridani]

2. Factors for

1. Human knowledge is cumulative. The moral fervor of anti-slavery abolitionists would have not mattered in the slightest if the material conditions for getting rid of slavery had not existed. Granted that I am just making an educated guess, but I think that the material basis for a reasonably comfortable life is within range for everyone with far less throughput of energy and raw materials. Given what people in Kerala have been able to achieve on $300 per capita per year, and the spread of the simpler living movement among affluent westerners going for more time and less stuff, there has got to be some happy medium between that and our own energy-intensive lives.

2. For all the terrorists, imperial psychopaths, whoremongers and general assholes that our species vomits forth, we are for all that a very resilient bunch, and self-organized civil society keeps popping up under the most horrible conditions. See the landless peasant movement in Brazil, the Argentine factory takeovers, the successful resistance in Bougainville

http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/content/2001-12/11choudry.cfm

the Bloque Social of Columbia,

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=9&ItemID=2104

African successes fighing AIDS by empowering women

http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,512554,00.html

and many others.

3. Two of the largest empires of the 20th century have already given up the practice (mostly peacefully) due to excessive expense. (Oddly, the more smallfry the empire, the less willing the masters to give up already. See the case of France in Algeria and Vietnam.) That the Soviet Union and Britain dropped out of the game relatively smoothly has to be grounds for hope. The possible internal collapse of American society under the weight of imperial expenses should be a really good motivator.

4. Americans aren't particularly good at running an empire, which ought tobe a major incentive to giving it up. One of the big reasons for the constant lying and fearmongering by the current imperial leadership is that their host culture is at heart anti-imperial. American success as an independent country was predicated upon getting out from under European imperialism, and that has resulted in a society one of whose most profitable cultural exports is devoted to making 'empire' a dirty word. Alderaan = Iraq. There are no homegrown Rudyard Kiplings urging us to 'send forth the best ye breed.' The simple pleasures afforded to the pig-ignorant and proud of being a successful bully may yet have a limited shelf life, should they come to realize that what they cheer for is the elimination of any well-paying work for themselves.

5. The existence of the Internet. It is going to be very hard to put this genie back in the bottle, as business organization has come to be so dependent on it. Mobilized world opinion has had a temporary setback in the conquest of Iraq, but globalization from the bottom is still a very powerful organizing force. Hard to tell at this point if the growing numbers of active citizens will turn out to be sufficient to turn things around, but there is grounds for hope.

6. The other major social institution traditionally associated with state-level societies besides imperialism, slavery, has effectively been abolished. Granted it still persists in pockets, but it is regarded with horror rather than the inevitability with which it was regarded less than 150 years ago.

[JaySherman]

3. Bravo! Excellent piece.

Do you publish your writing? If not, you should.

The only point I'd quibble with is that slavely has not yet been abolished. Maybe in name only. But the American economic system as it currently structured, with its low mage service jobs with minimal advancement opportunities constitutes a form of slavery in itself. The difference is the people trapped in this cycle of serfdom are duped into believing they are free.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. A good piece, I agree

but I think you're belittling the plight of people in true slavery to say the American system is still a form of it. People do have the basic freedoms - to marry (OK, gay marriage is an issue here), to have children, recourse to the law. Many people's opportunities are very restricted compared with others, but they're not actually physically restrained, or blackmailed (like illegal immigrants can be) into doing whatever another person says.

[eridani]

6. Haven't published yet

May consider it. You are right that it is hard to distinguish between outright slavery and extreme exploitation as an employee. Employees have gained a lot in bargaining power over the years, though--some more than others. One way or another, it has to end.

[bemildred]

5. Who can say?

A nice summary.

The American "Empire" seems well on it's way out via economic
collapse, and there is no chance at this point (IMHO) that
military means will preserve it, because of the cost, and
the unwillingness of the American polity to support with blood
this sort of effort. That was the lesson of VietNam, and the
ruling class has been struggling to digest it ever since.

Also, military power and economic power cannot be separated, and
the long steady decline in American economic power continues, for
the most part with the unthinking and enthusiastic cooperation of
the ruling class.

The question is what comes next? Nobody knows. There are several
heartening factors, the two I find most important being:

1.) Military colonialism simply does not pay like it used to. The
natives are educated and sophisticated and the methods of resistance
are widely known. Thus the level of consent and cooperation that
the ruling must obtain from the ruled is much higher than it once
was.

2.) The control of knowledge and information on which all ruling
elites rest in much more difficult to maintain in the modern world.
Since the ruling classes are in fact not different from the
rest of us in any important way, it becomes more and more difficult
for them to maintain the distinctions that justify their existence.

It must be said, however, that watching the decline in American
political and economic culture over the last 50 years or so has
been most depressing, and there is no telling how long it will take
to repair that.

[eridani]

7. Agree about the decline

but there is a lot of powerful organized sentiment against it--witness widespread self-organization in the Dean, Kucinich and Clark campaigns.

[bemildred]

8. Self-organized democratic rule is, of course, the most

interesting political question these days, and that has been so
since at least the French Revolution. It is a complicated
issue, and I don't want to go into it much here, but there seems to
be a bootstrap problem with it, things start out with good
intentions, but then rapidly decay into the usual big-shots and
peons situation. I agree that modern technical and social
developments offer some hope of getting past that, but it will
not happen in a flash. Still we do seem better off than in the
ancient days of hydraulic empires, which would grind along for
millienia until they collapsed around the ears of their citizens
from internal decay and ecological catastrophe.

I will say that I am of the opinion that a self-organized democratic
society would just kick the living shit out of other political
organizations, once achieved, for the simple reason of it's much
greater efficiency.