Introduction: Rightwing politics now dominate the globe. Broadly speaking, the Right can be divided into a US-centered rightwing bloc and a variety of anti-US rightwing regimes and social forces.
The US-centered rightwing includes absolutist monarchies, like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Jordan; neoliberal electoral regimes and opposition parties in the European Union and Latin America and the military dictatorships of North and Sub-Sahara Africa and Thailand. Finally, there are US-armed and trained terrorists operating in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen – which make up a kind of extra-parliamentary US-centered political force.
Israel is a special case of a rightwing regime, allied with the US, which acts more independently to pursue its own colonial priorities and hegemonic ambitions.
The anti-US rightwing includes capitalist China and Russia; the nationalist, Islamist and secular republics of Iran, Syria and Lebanon; and the armed and civilian Islamist mass movements of the Middle East, East and West Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
Leftwing governments and movements, faced with the competing and conflicting rightwing power centers, find themselves having to operate precariously in the interstices of global politics, attempting to play-off one or the other. These include the center-left regimes and movements in Latin America; anti-capitalist opposition parties and trade unions in the EU; nationalist-democratic movements and trade unions in North and South Africa; nationalist and populist movements in South Asia; and a broad array of academic leftists and intellectuals throughout the globe who have little or no direct impact on the direction of world politics. A number of supposedly ‘Left’ regimes have capitulated to the US-EU bloc, namely Syriza in Greece and the Workers Party of Brazil.
In sum, the major conflicts in the world are found between competing capitalist centers; between rising (China and Russia) and established capitalist blocs (US and EU); between financial centers (US-England) and primary export states (Africa, Asia and Latin America); between dominant Judaic/Christian and emerging Islamist states; and between imperialist states and occupied colonized nations. We will explore the nature of each form of right-wing conflict.
Interesting take. The genuine Left is left out in the current face-off.
James Petras Website
The Two Faces of Capitalism and Left Options
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
The Two Faces of Capitalism and Left Options
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
In the 20th century there were significant, serious and well-developed left alternatives in political economy. They combined social scientific and technical sophistication with adult, political realism and attention to programmatic detail and strategies for implementation. Some of them had a great deal of success, achieved many or most of their aims, and have left lasting legacies on their societies. Others did not turn out so well, and left a pernicious and murderous blot on the history of the left.
ReplyDeleteA lot of what passes for left wing thought today lacks that kind of seriousness. It is the work of dilettantes, kids and crackpots. Scratch the overheated rhetoric for five minutes and you find people who really have no clear ideas about what they are up to, and who couldn't run an ice cream shop much less a society. Sometimes, they claim to have some political vision associated with the vague phrase "anti-capitalism." But most of them couldn't tell you in any cogent way what they mean by "capitalism", and fumble ridiculously when asked to propose some realistic and workable alternative set of institutions with which they would replace the current ones.
This certainly isn't the case for all left thinkers. But the serious people don't write for the hyperventilating lefty rags.
The Trotskyists are serious. That won't help them.
ReplyDeleteLook for a new movement to replace the moribund unions.
Excellent but I think the professor makes U.S. interests out to be too uniform. At one time (like immediately following WWII) he might be right as the U.S. oligarchs aligned.
ReplyDeleteIt's important to realize institutions like the Clinton Foundation allow foreign interference in U.S. elections. Perhaps I'm being naive but the great game has many more players this election cycle. The biggest prize currently in this game is the U.S. Election in 2016 and the pattern says Jeb!
Is it a recent coincidence how the stock market performes in the last year and half of two term presidents?
Why do we little people look at patterns and see randomness?
I'd say foreign influence has played an increasing role since 1980.
"Sometimes, they claim to have some political vision associated with the vague phrase "anti-capitalism." But most of them couldn't tell you in any cogent way what they mean by "capitalism",
ReplyDeleteCorrect this is because what we face is a technocratic problem...
This is like the libertarians who also look at what is going on and are indignant/dis-satisfied and their solution is "less govt" or "no govt" or "more freedom"...
Left people think "replace capitalism with socialism" libertarians think "replace big govt with no govt".... both ideological propositions to repair what are technocratic problems imo... rsp
The question What is x? is usually best approached in the cases of higher levels of abstraction by exploring the uses of the the term "x" in various contexts. This pertains to the factors.
ReplyDeleteI have explained previously what "capitalism" means from the policy perspective in contrast to "socialism," feudalism" and "environmentalism."
From the policy perspective "capitalism" means that ownership is prioritized over people and the environment on the grounds that capital is scarce and growth depends on capital formation. So it must be of the hight policy priority legally and wrt to financial and economic policy.
From the perspective "socialism" means that people come first, especially human rights and civil liberties. The assumption of this POV is that natural persons have the greatest value even though they may not be scarce. In fact, human life is priceless. Workers can rent their time in labor markets, but humans cannot be sold in markets as property.
Again from this perspective "environmentalism" means that the environment ("land" as a factor) comes first on the reasoning that we have only one planet at present and human life is dependent on it. Whereas "feudalism" means prioritizing control of territory in the interest of gaining and maintaining power.
From the systems point of view all relevant factors must be integrated for a system to be functional and context determines the relative priority of factors that is constantly changing in a dynamic, complex, adaptive system that is continually meeting emerging challenges by seizing existing opportunities.
The problem with the left is that they clearly do not understand what happens n an industrialized society. They call what hedge-fund mangers do and what the folks who create high-tech companies "capitalism" even though those activities are totally dissimilar. This is mostly the legacy of Marx who refused to differentiate between industrialism and finance capitalism.
ReplyDeleteI think there should be some sort of test. If a concerned "lefty" wants to comment on the nature of modern economics, he or she must be able to prove that they know the difference between builders and looters. It's a big difference—like knowing the difference between up and down.
Actually, Marx was one of the pioneers in understanding the role of finance capital in capitalism.
ReplyDeleteFinance capital: a tumour on the capitalist system or a fundamental part of it?
From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital
Actually, the guy who really understood the difference between business and industry was Veblen. This explains why his intellectual followers didn't insist on industrial primitivism like the Great Leap Forward. When I read Marx, I see a guy so technologically illiterate that I would be willing to bet serious money he was confused by any technology more complex than a fork. His followers are no better.
ReplyDeletePlayers that follow the rules don't worry me as much as those that don't.
ReplyDeleteEven hedgies can be bought to heel with sufficient regulation and enforcement. it seems a militaristic capitalist, by definition, is unwilling to follow the rules whether he is a looter or builder.
It is the militaristic players that need to be identified since they tend to use the U.S. arsenal of hammers to achieve their goals. If Saudi Arabia is keeping power using US strength directed through the Clinton Foundation, we need to know if that is included in the rules.
The USSR industrialized very quickly owing to the constant pressure that the liberal Western "capitalist" economies were putting in it militarily. Russia went from a backward agricultural country to modern industrial powerhouse capable of balancing the combined power of the West militarily in record time.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that both the USSR and China took advantage of a leap-frog effect, but they advance quickly when they got going, especially considering that they were cut off by the West and had to reserve-engineer and steal industrial and military technological knowledge. But they were able to pull it off in way that was quite remarkable considering where they were coming from and the adversity and opposition they faced.
Everyone wants hammers though it takes a special type of character, I don't fully understand, to use them.
ReplyDeleteThe professor outlines various 'legal' types of external coercion
Sanctions
Encirclement - Annexation
He also includes a list of internal coercion
Fomenting ethic conflicts - legal?
Outright military intervention - last resort?
Financing and organizing ‘regime change’ via coups and street mobs?
His thesis seems to be the battle ground has shifted from between left (socialist/communism) and right (capitalist/military capitalist) to something else. Between right capitalist/ right military capitalist. It seems there is a new Left, more concerned with social issues such as women's rights and sexual freedom rather than economics, that may be driving conflict in Arabia and Africa.
Everything has been said before....
ReplyDeleteThe New Left was a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of educators, agitators and others who sought to implement a broad range of reforms on issues such as gay rights, abortion, gender roles, and drugs,[2] in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist approach to social justice and focused mostly on labor unionization and questions of social class.[3][4] Sections of the New Left rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
There is no homogenous Left today, which is a reason "the Left" hasn't gotten very far in liberal democratic systems. Those on the Left have a problem uniting sufficiently on a program and rallying around it. The Right has been better at falling in line when a view is recognized as dominant. This is not to say that the Right is homogenous either. The GOP and Dems are both chieflyl rightist parities although they both contain some elements traditionally associated with the Left, too.
ReplyDeleteThe New left has become socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
ReplyDeleteThe right has remained socially conservative and fiscally conservative.
Rather than
'military capitalist' or 'capitalist'
perhaps a better descriptor would be 'access capitalist'
Access Capitalist
What determines your success is whether the people who make up the market you're entering — be it a small town, statewide industry, a national market, or an international one — have the demand and purchasing power to fuel the job you want to work or the business you want to start.
http://theweek.com/articles/553704/capitalisms-dirty-little-secret
Carlyle arguably takes to a new level the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower feared might “endanger our liberties or democratic process”. What red-blooded capitalist can truly admire a firm built, to a significant degree, on cronyism; surely, this sort of access capitalism is for ghastly places like Russia, China or Africa, not the land of the free market?
http://www.economist.com/node/1875084