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Locating the Contemporary Global Crises |
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By Fran Shor |
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"Unless we also clearly understand and combat the connections between empire and unending growth with its attendant 'accumulation by dispossession', we may very well doom ourselves to extinction."
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While the contemporary global crises look different from the ground level, whether in debt-ridden Greece, where the Socialist government attempts to deal with the economic crisis by applying IMF-type solutions resisted in massive numbers by the Greek working class, or in Bangladesh, where a food and environmental crisis add to the extended degradations of neoliberalism, there are certain broad outlines that radiate out from the United States to the rest of the world. Although not alone in the construction of casino capitalism and political neoliberalism, the US and its banking and transnational corporations have been its most aggressive and globally powerful promoters. While one can date the emergence of such casino capitalism and political neoliberalism to the 1970s and 1980s, a longer trajectory of imperial capitalism and empire is also in crisis. Added to this is an even more profound environmental and civilizational crisis that reaches back some 5000 years. In effect, we may have now arrived at an "end-point" in a number of developments that I will attempt to delineate in order to determine the kind and degree of the crises facing the contemporary world. The imperatives of U.S. military and economic imperialism with commitments to sustaining the global garrison of U.S. troops, facilitating the predatory spread of private contractors, and protecting the oil and gas regions of the Middle East and Central Asia portend the imperial presence in these aforementioned regions irrespective of President Obama's articulation of "smart power" or the massive deficits incurred by the United States. While there have been congressional calls for severely reducing the budget for the Pentagon, that budget, submitted and signed by Obama, continued to expand, albeit by a minimal amount, 4%, by previous Bush benchmarks. Even in the face of the 2008 National Intelligence Council's surprising report on "Global Trends 2025" with its projection that "the United States' relative strength - even in the military realm - will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained," there will be an imperial dedication to guarding increasingly scarce energy resources. [1] As Tom Engelhardt points out, such military and economic imperialism will prolong an "Empire-speak" from Washington that, on one hand, "offers official Washington a kind of 'plausible deniability'" and, on the other, persists in preventing "imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image." [2] The contradiction of carrying on imperial wars, with weaponry named after death-dispensing creatures like Predators and Reapers, in the face of what Chalmers Johnson has called an "economic death spiral at the Pentagon" seems overwhelming. From Johnson's perspective the U.S. faces a "double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons." Johnson cites a former civilian manager in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis who wrote in December 2008 that "patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral." Another former senior official in the Department of Defense decried the decades old patterns of faulty and over-budgeted procurement: "Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field." While there may be some modest efforts to reign in the more expensive and outlandish weapons systems, as long as military imperialism persists and with it the military-industrial's Iron Triangle of interests there will be a spiraling of economic death not only at the Pentagon but throughout a debilitated U.S. economy. [3] Attributing the debilitation of the U.S. economy to a mortgage crisis or the collapse of the housing market misses the truly epochal crisis in the world economy and, indeed, in capitalism itself. As economist Michael Hudson contends, "the financial 'wealth creation' game is over. Economies emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-up has run its course. Financial capitalism is in a state of collapse, and marginal palliatives cannot revive it." According to Hudson, among those palliatives is an ironic variant of the IMF strategies imposed on developing nations. "The new twist is a variant on the IMF 'stabilization' plans that lend money to central banks to support their currencies - for long enough to enable local oligarchs and foreign investors to move their savings and investments offshore at a good exchange rate." The continuity between these IMF plans and even the Obama administration's fealty to Wall Street can be seen in the person of Lawrence Summers, now the chief economic advisor to Obama. As further noted by Hudson, "the Obama bank bailout is arranged much like an IMF loan to support the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the Treasury supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial institutions ... Private-sector debt will be moved onto the U.S. Government balance sheet, where "taxpayers" will bear losses." [4] So, here we have another variation of the working poor getting sapped by the economic elite! In fact, one estimate of U.S. federal government support to the elite financial institutions is in the range of $10 trillion dollars, a heist of unimaginable proportions. [5] Given the massive indebtedness of the United States, its reliance of foreign support of that debt by countries like China, which has close to $2 trillion tied up in treasury bills and other investments, a long-term crisis of profitability, overproduction, and offshoring of essential manufacturing, it does not appear that the United States and, perhaps, even the capitalist system can avoid collapse. Certainly, there are Marxist economists and world-systems analysts who are convinced that the collapse is inevitable, albeit it may take several generations to complete. The question becomes whether a dying system can be resuscitated or, if something else can be put in its place. One of the most prominent world systems scholars, Immanuel Wallerstein, puts the long-term crisis of capitalism and the alternatives in the following perspective: Because the system we have known for 500 years is no longer able to guarantee long-term prospects of capital accumulation, we have entered a period of world chaos. Wild (and largely uncontrollable) swings in the economic, political, and military situations are leading to a systemic bifurcation, that is, to a world collective choice about the kind of new system the world will construct over the next fifty years. The new system will not be a capitalist system, but it could be one of two kinds: a different system that is equally or more hierarchical and inequalitarian, or one that is substantially democratic and equalitarian. [6] What Wallerstein overlooks is the possibility that a global crisis of capitalism with its continuous overexploitation and maldistribution of essential resources, such as water, could lead to a planetary catastrophe. [7] While Wallerstein and many of the Marxist critics of capitalism correctly identify the long-term structural crisis of capitalism and offer important insights into the need for more democratic and equalitarian systems, they often fail to realize other critical predicaments that have plagued human societies in the past and persist in even more life-threatening ways today. Among those predicaments are the power trips of civilization and environmental destructiveness. Such power trips can be seen through the sedimentation of power-over in the reign of patriarchal systems and an evolutionary selection for that power-over which contaminates society and social relationships. Certainly, many of those predicaments can also be attributed to a 5000 year history of the intersection of empire and civilization. Anthropologist Kajsa Ekholm Friedman analyzes that intersection and its impact in the Bronze Age as an "imperialist project..., dependent upon trade and ultimately upon war." [8] However, over the long rule of empire and especially within the last 500 years of the global aspirations of various empires, "no state or empire," observes historian Eric Hobsbawm, "has been large, rich, or powerful enough to maintain hegemony over the political world, let alone to establish political and military supremacy over the globe." [9] While war and trade still remain key components of the imperial project today and pretensions for global supremacy persist in the United States, what is just as threatening to the world as we know it is the overexploitation and abuse of environmental resources. Jared Diamond brilliantly reveals how habituated attitudes and values precluded the necessary recognition of environmental degradation which, in turn, led to the collapse of vastly different civilizations, societies, and cultures throughout recorded history. [10] He identifies twelve contemporary environmental challenges which pose grave dangers to the planet and its inhabitants. Among these are the destruction of natural habitats (rainforests, wetlands, etc.); species extinction; soil erosion; depletion of fossil fuels and underground water aquifers; toxic pollution; and climate change, especially attributable to the use of fossil fuels. [11] U.S. economic imperialism has played a direct role in environmental degradation, whether in McDonald's resource destruction of rainforests in Latin America, Coca-Cola's exploitation of underground water aquifers in India, or Union Carbide's toxic pollution in India. Beyond the links between empire and environmental destruction, unless we also clearly understand and combat the connections between empire and unending growth with its attendant "accumulation by dispossession", we may very well doom ourselves to extinction. According to James Gustave Speth, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the macro obsession with growth is also intimately related to our micro habituated ways of living. "Parallel to transcending our growth fetish," Speth argues, "we must move beyond our consumerism and hyperventilating lifestyles ... This reluctance to challenge consumption has been a big mistake, given the mounting environmental and social costs of American "affluenza," extravagance and wastefulness." [12] Of course, there are significant class and ethnic/racial differences in consumerism and lifestyle in the United States. However, even more vast differences and inequities obtain between the U.S. and the developing world. It is those inequities that lead Eduardo Galeano to conclude that "consumer society is a booby trap. Those at the controls feign ignorance, but anybody with eyes in his head can see that the great majority of people necessarily must consume not much, very little, or nothing at all in order to save the bit of nature we have left." [13] Finally, from Vandana Shiva's perspective, "unless worldviews and lifestyles are restructured ecologically, peace and justice will continue to be violated and, ultimately, the very survival of humanity will be threatened." [14] For Shiva and other global agents of resistance, the ecological and peace and justice imperatives require us to act in the here and now. Her vision of "Earth Democracy" with its emphasis on balancing authentic needs with a local ecology provides an essential guidepost to what we all can do to stop the ravaging of the environment and to salvage the planet. As she insists, "Earth Democracy is not just about the next protest or next World Social Forum; it is about what we do in between. It addresses the global in our everyday lives, our everyday realities, and creates change globally by making change locally." [15] The local, national, and transnational struggles and visions of change are further evidence that the imperial project is not only being contested but also being transformed on a daily basis. According to Mark Engler, "The powerful will abandon their strategies of control only when it grows too costly for them to do otherwise. It is the concerted efforts of people coming together in local communities and in movements spanning borders that will raise the costs. Empire becomes unsustainable ... when the people of the world resist." [16] Whether in the rural villages of Brazil or India, the jungles of Mexico or Ecuador, the city squares of Cochabama or Genoa, the streets of Seattle or Soweto, there has been, and continues to be, resistance around the globe to the imperial project. If the ruling elite and many of the citizens of the United States have not yet accepted the fact that the empire is dying and with it the concentric circles of economic, political, environmental, and civilizational crises, the global multitudes have been busy at work, digging its future grave and planting the seeds for another possible world. [17] Fran Shor is Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.
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