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Q: Imperialism is something that you have written on
very recently with your book, The New Imperialism. This
leads me to a pretty important and timely question: why Iraq
and why now?
A: Geopolitially, this is a critical region of the global
economy and the US has been involved there since 1945, if not
before. And the US involvement in that region has escalated
very strongly since 1945. I think we should recognize that
what Bush has done in the region is not off trajectory of the
general pattern of American involvement. Before Bush, we had
several thousand, maybe ten thousand troops in the Gulf
region. We were already bombing parts of Iraq. There was
already a huge sort of engagement in the region, and the only
question is why did Bush decide to escalate it into active
occupation of the territory? I think it had a lot to do with
the particular vision of the neo-conservatives, that somehow
the U.S. could get control of this region through a political
and military process in Iraq.
Now, why they felt the need for that control has a long
history and I think it has a lot to do with the control of oil
supplies, but not simply for the U.S. That is the spigot for
the global economy. The US has always wanted to have a strong
presence so that it can not only control its own oil reserves
and oil flows but also the oil flows of the whole global
economy.
Q: One of the categories you’ve developed explicitly in
your last two books is the idea of “accumulation by
dispossession.” What is it, and how does it fit into this
whole discussion of Iraq, and even beyond?
A: Accumulation by dispossession is about plundering, robbing
other people of their rights. When we start to look at what
has happened to the global economy
for the past thirty years, a lot of that has been going on all
over the place. In some instances, it is taking away peoples
rights to dispose of their own resources, so you will find
that there is resistance to that in the Middle East. Then for
instance, one of the big issues behind the Zapatista movement
was the control of resources.
One of the big issues in Bolivia right now is the control of
natural resources. Capitalism is very much about taking away
the rights people have over their natural resources. But it is
not only natural resources when we are talking about
dispossession. If you look at what is happening to people’s
pension funds, it is the taking away of rights. And you take a
look at the world andsome people are getting extremely rich
right now. How are they getting rich? Are they getting rich
because they are contributing to a global economy in
productive ways or are they getting rich because they are
taking away other people’s rights? If you look at the history
of things such as Enron and you see that a lot of wealth is
being accumulated in the world right now by dispossessing
others of their rights and their wealth and it could be
natural resources as in Iraq, or in Bolivia or Chiapas, or it
could be rights which have been accumulated through pension
funds and so on. You could look at something like eminent
domain in this country right now, something that is now being
used to take away people’s property so the developers of
Wal-Mart can build a new store or a shopping mall. A whole
pattern is emerging, and it seems to me that it is important
to look so we can understand the dynamics of the accumulation
of capital that are occuring right now.
Q: In what way can accumulation by dispossession be
explanatory in American foreign policy? Is this the logic that
is driving foreign policy decisions?
A: I don’t think it’s the explanatory variable, it is a
key one which you have to look at again and again and again.
For instance, the U.S. does have security concerns of some
kind. The U.S. is concerned for a good reason, and in some
instances it is about political movements which are occurring
in various parts of the world, and therefore it will try to
engage in pre-emptive politics, which it did in the invasion
of Afghanistan. It seems to me that the invasion of
Afghanistan was a very different story from the Iraq invasion.
It was not simply that there were no good targets in
Afghanistan; there was nothing really there in Afghanistan
that we really wanted, except that the U.S. now has a very
considerable geo-political presence in the whole region, not
only in Afghanistan, but also Uzbekistan. It is trying to sort
of spread its military power throughout this entire region
because this is the key to ythe political region. Therefore,
the US a has a legitimate interest in the stability of the
region, but at the same time it is illegitimate because it is
also about the taking away of oil assets from the people of
the region.
Q: So is this what is new about the “New Imperialism”?
The old Imperialism, as you said, was about the relationship
of power and dominion. Is this what is new?
A: There are two things—in a funny kind of way, some of this
is a reversion of certain events that happened at the end of
the 19th century when there was a lot of accumulation by
dispossession by the British Empire: taking away resources,
destroying Indians’ indigenous industries and supplanting
them, that sort of thing. So we look at our current situation,
and it is sort of a repetition of what happened in the 19th
century. The big distinction is that, apart from Iraq, it has
generally not involved colonial occupation. It uses the power
of the economy, the power of international institutions, such
as the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund. It uses
the power of economic leverage, and in some instances will use
covert power to put in power someone who is very convivial for
the Unites States to live with: a dictator like Pinochet in
Chile, or,before that, the Shah of Iran. The United States has
worked that way through the colonial kind of problem, rather
than going through direct occupation as the British, the
French and the other imperial regimes did during the end of
the 19th century.
Q: How do you think this whole problem with the New
Imperialism is linked with globalization?
A: I think they are intimately related, but I also think that
they are interrelated to the neo-liberalization which has been
going on, that is neo-liberalization being about institutional
reforms that are pro-market and pro-privatization, and against
state interventions into welfare and so on. Neo-liberalization
has involved in a very distinct kind of imperial project,
which is rather different from the imperial project that
existed in the 1950's and 1960's where the United States was
essentially a super-imperialist power. And now it is involving
itself in the spread of market ideology as being crucial to
the sustenance of capitalism, of course that is now in
dangerof undermining the US positionality in the global
economy, because where the market moving to? It is moving to
China and it is moving to India. There is a great
proliferation, once you unleash market forces, that we are not
in the position to totally control, which is what I think the
U.S. is finding out.
Q: You know, Jagdish Baghwati recently published a book,
In Defense of Globalization, where he argues that free
market globalization has been a success in freeing people from
poverty, political and social forms of domination, and even
opening up a new kind of cosmopolitanism. How does your
critical view of globalization respond to such claims?
A: I’ll respond in two ways, there is a lot of controversy
over the kind of data you look at and how you prove that. For
instance if you ask the question of how many people were in
poverty in 1980 and how many people there are in poverty
today, you might say, there are fewer people in poverty now
than there was back then. But when you look at the economic
performance, of say China and India, and you look at the
aggregate data, it looks like the world is better off. If you
start to look at social inequality however, you start to see
in many instances, that neo-liberalization has increased
social inequality, even at the same time that it has lifted
some of the people at the bottom out of poverty. If you look
at the concentration of wealth, at the very top bracket of
society, you will see immense concentrations of wealth at the
very top 0.1% of the population.
At this point the question is: who is neo-liberalization
really benefiting? And if you look at concentrations of
political and economic power, it has largely benefited a very
very small elite. And we have to start looking at that. For
instance, the New York Times had this interesting data
a couple of months ago. How rich, on average, are the richest
200 (or 400) families in the United States? I think the data
showed that back in 1980, they had
 something
like $680 million. In constant dollars it is something like
$2.8 billion. They have quadrupled their wealth in the last
twenty years and this is a familiar story not just in the U.S
but also globally. In Mexico, after neo-liberalization, you
see the same thing. You see the same think happening in China
and in India. When Thomas Friedman talks about a flat world,
he is saying you do not have to come to America to be a
billionaire; you can be a billionaire in Bangalore now. You do
not have to migrate to America, but the social inequality in
India is increasing dramatically.
Q: And this is what you talk about, in your book A
Brief History of Neoliberalism, as the “restoration of
class power.” How is this playing itself out here (in the
U.S.)? Is it simply that social inequality is increasing? You
have that and you have a certain amount of indifference among
the population to this rising social inequality.
A: In this country of course, we have to be careful when we
ask questions about, ‘Who controls the media? Who controls the
general climate of opinion?’ And again, if we compare the
situation with 30 years ago, and we look at levels of
concentration of power in the media, and so on, I think you
will see that the ability to express discontent, the kind of
ideology of the time, is much more narrowly circumscribed now
through these concentrations of economic and political power.
If we look at the way the Republican Party has become a
vehicle for special interest groups to accumulate more and
more capital, and it is sort of scandalous, you see it day by
day. New deals are cut in Congress, which somehow or other,
give $20 billion d to the health insurance industry or
something of that kind, these sorts of things are going on.
What we have is a political situation where the possibility of
expression of political anger tends to get increasingly
blocked. This, I think is a very interesting parallel. I
jokingly say sometimes that I think China is Karl Rove’s
dream. He would like it to be exactly like China, where the
capacity to express political opposition in class terms China
is blocked by the Communist Party, by the language and the
discursive sort of structures. I think we are seeing something
similar in this country, where the possibility to really
express fierce opposition, in class terms to this immense
concentration of wealth is essentially more and more blocked
by all of these ideological barriers and also by the
concentration of power in the media.
Q: Tell me about the ideological dimension of all this,
because the ideological thought process is more complicated.
You talk about the institutions, the concentration of wealth.
But what is neo-liberalism, broadly speaking? And how does
that relate not only to the economy but also to ideology and
culture?
A: The strength of the neo-liberal ideology, on a popular
level, is its emphasis individual liberty, freedom and
personal responsibility. Those have all been very important
aspects, of what you might call ‘American Ideology’ since the
very inception of what the U.S. has been about. What
neo-liberalism did was to take the demand for that which was
clearly there in the 1950's and the 1960's and say “We can
satisfy this demand, but we are gonna do this a certain way,
we are gonna do it through the market, and you can only
achieve those goals through the market. We are gonna do it in
such a way that you have to forget about the issues of social
justice.” It seems to me that the movements of the 1960's were
about combining individual liberty and social justice. What
neo-liberalism did was say “we’ll give you the individual
liberty, you forget the social justice.” For that reason it
has been very powerful in the United States as an
ideology,because it can appeal to this long tradition of
individual liberty and freedom.
You can see this in Bush’s rhetoric even before 9/11, although
it has escalated since. . How many times did he use the words
‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’ in his second inaugural address? It is
to that ideological tradition which I think everyone in the US
subscribes to some degree, including myself. The only
interesting question is, how do we conceptualize individual
liberty and freedom in relationship to social obligations? In
relationship to social justice? In relationship to real
possibilities for everybody to participate in this system?
That is a question you cannot ask if you say the only vehicle
for which you may realize your dreams of individual liberty
and freedom is through the market and through privatization of
everything, and through a legal apparatus which is heavily
reliant on individual personal rights.
Q: And this rhetoric of individualism is also a crucial
key in neoliberalism.
A: Yes, absolutely. I am very impressed with someone like
Thomas Friedman, who is a great ideologist and neo-liberalist,
yet in the wake of the Katrina hurricane disaster complained
bitterly that there were no social solidarities around. You
cannot help thinking: well, you spent most of your time
destroying all of that, and now you are turning around and
saying, here is a situation where we needed this. It is so
fascinating to watch the way in which people cannot square
these things. Even a conservative columnist like David Brooks
says the same sort of thing. He will say we need more social
solidarity. Well, you cannot have that and emphasize that
everything has to be negotiated through the market.
Q: In terms of what is to be done, the classic question,
you have intellectuals, you have activists, you have unions,
all different sectors of society that could be mobilized in a
critical way against neo-liberal discourse, neo-liberal
institutions. How do they all fit together as far as critical
opposition movement against neo-liberalism?
A: Here you come back to the geography of it. It depends a lot
on where you are, and of course what we are seeing in Latin
America is a lot of movement towards the left. It is different
in Chile than in Brazil, which is different from Venezuela and
different from Argentina or Bolivia, but never the less, there
is sort of a movement of some kind or other that is anti
neo-liberal. And the interesting question now is can they make
their anti-neo-liberalization stick and how are they going to
make it stick? I think you are going to get a very different
answer in Chile than you are going to get in Bolivia. It seems
to me we are moving to a situation of considerable
experimentation with how to do this. Locally, inside the U.S.
we will find this.
I was part of, or very close to, one of the first living wage
movements in Baltimore back in the early 90's. They now have
become quite wide spread through many jurisdictions of the
United States and I think there is a push going on at the
grassroots level that says you cannot have people employed at
something that is below a living wage. Therefore we have to
pay very close attention to that locally, and I think that
local movements are likely to push more and more into the
national consciousness. I think what we have to look at are
these movements and these possibilities that exist in
different places for political action. In something like the
living wage movement, you have one set of possibilities, and
in Bolivia, you have something else going on. To me, it is a
fragmented opposition right now, moving in very different
diverse ways. But it is a very exciting movement, because I we
do not know, clearly, what the alternative might look like. I
do not think we have a blueprint for it, which is probably a
good idea, but we are moving towards something through this
oppositional kind of structure.
Q: When you mentioned the living wage movement, it
reminded me of something that goes back to Marx. That there is
probably within these movements a discourse about wages, about
inequality, about distribution. Marx’s idea was that there has
to be a critical discourse about production process, which
even the most radical of us tend to stay away from, maybe
because there are no alternatives on the table. Lacking that
discussion, how far can we get?
A: Well you have to start somewhere. One of my favorite
passages from Marx is “The realm of freedom begins where the
realm of necessity is left behind,” and he gives this rather
long rhetoric about freedom. Then at the end of it he says,
“Therefore, limiting the length of the working day, is a
crucial demand.” So you go from a kind of revolutionary
rhetoric to an almost reformist, kind of practical demand
right now. And I think the difference between a reformist and
a revolutionary is not necessarily that you do radical things
all the time, but it is that at a given moment, you may all do
the same thing, i.e. demand living wage, but you do it with a
different objective, and that is as a long-term transition. A
transformation, which is what you may have in mind, and I
think that Marx was very well aware that if people are working
18-20 hours a day, 7 days a week, they are not going to be
very revolutionary in their consciousness. They are going to
be so damn tired, that they are not going to have time for
anything, and therefore, creating spaces and possibilities for
people to think of other possibilities is a precursor to a
more general transformation. That is one of things that I
certainly found out in the living wage campaign in Baltimore.
People working two jobs, working 80 hours a week, and they do
not have time to organize, they hardly have time to have a
life, let alone be active in community organizations, and
active as political organizers. It is very difficult to do
that when you are in that situation.
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