Super Imperialism. The Economic Strategy of American Empire. Third Edition

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And it’s a problem that I have a book coming out on this, a series of my lectures in China dealing with this, that will be available in about three months. Lenin developed Bukharin's theories of imperialism and his own arguments formed the core of his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. He wrote that Kautsky's theory supposed "the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them". He gives examples of disparities in the international economy and discusses how they would develop even under a system of ultra-imperialism. He asks under the prevailing system "what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?" [8] Recent positions on the idea of ultraimperialism [ edit ] I mean Julian Assange is an example of America’s commitment to intellectual freedom and to personal freedom. And the assassination teams that it has been sending out to Ecuador. other Latin American countries recently are more examples of this.

But this is just a marketing strategy to me. I mean, there’s something that you’ve spoken about written about in Super Imperialism and in recent talks that I think lurks behind what both the Trump and Biden administrations call “great power competition.”Absentee creditor” is not termed by Hudson, but I think it summarizes US’s pivotal role in setting the conditions for WWII. US entered WWI as an associate (worried about Allies not paying war debts) rather than a full ally, diverting from the historical pattern of allies subsiding war costs for loyalty (ex. Louis XVI subsidizing US’s war of independence). Today, we’re going to talk about an issue that Michael Hudson has been writing about for decades, and something that you’re never really going to hear from other economists, especially mainstream neoliberal economists, and that’s what he calls super imperialism. So obviously, if you want low-cost housing, you want to prevent the financialization of real estate. And that I can assure you is one of the central problems that China is dealing with right now. And the argument for that was all laid out by Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, and Marx, and Thorstein Veblen, and other people in the 19th century.

Karl Kautsky, " Der Imperialismus," Die Neue Zeit, 11 September 1914; 32 (1914), Vol. 2, p.908–922. Well my book Super Imperialism is all about how the IMF was created as an arm of US foreign policy. And it still is an arm. So the US realizes that the economy has been transformed in the last 40 years, since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, when Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no alternative.” Of course, there were many alternatives. I was actually gonna say earlier, it’s just funny to me that, in the US, economic experts, the so-called “experts,” are people like Larry Summers, the big privatizers, who have destroyed entire economies – in the case of the former Soviet Union, to subordinate Russia’s economy to US capital. And you have kind of two types that command the Democratic Party. You have these boomers who grew up hiding under their desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and were indoctrinated on anti-communism, then they went through the trauma of the ’60s, and saw McGovern lose, and moved to the center. And so they see Putin as a revival of the KGB and the evil Soviet Union that forced them under their desks in elementary school.

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I don’t know if you saw Jodi Dean has a new book, and her argument is that we’re seeing a kind of, not necessarily a new economic transformation, but a shift into what you could just call neo-feudalism. And that is actually a totally different system, a different mode of production; it’s no longer even really capitalism. The Great Reset is just their vision for techno-neo-feudalism. And that will be our means of, “Well, you can’t pay, well, why don’t you sell off some more of your infrastructure? Why don’t you sell off more of your oil or mineral resources to us?” But, obviously, there are many successful billionaires in China, many successful entrepreneurs, but these are largely industrial entrepreneurs who have actually created something. So basically the World Economic Forum and other kind of neoliberal institutions have been pushing this Great Reset idea. There was a video that kind of went viral that was later taken down where there were 10 visions for our future in 2030, and the first one was that, “You will own nothing, but you will be happy.” And another point of it was that, like everything will be delivered via drone. China’s economy is incompatible with the main premises of the global economic system embodied today in the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and a long list of other free trade agreements. These pacts assume economies that are primarily market based with the role of the state circumscribed and micro-economic decisions largely left to private interests operating under a rule of law. This system never anticipated an economy like China’s in which state-owned enterprises account for one-third of production; the fusion of the civilian economy with the strategic-military economy is a government necessity; five year economic plans guide investment to targeted sectors; an eternally dominant political party names the CEOs of a third or more of major corporations and has established party cells in every significant company; the value of the currency is managed, corporate and personal data are minutely collected by the government to be used for economic and political control; and international trade is subject to being weaponized at any moment for strategic ends.

But I think there is something else behind this fight against China and especially Russia. The Democratic leadership seems to have an almost emotional, passionate antagonism towards Russia that can’t be explained on objective grounds. But it’s obviously there. And the policy that Gates is promoting in agriculture, instead of replenishing the soil is poisoning it. So if you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be in charge of taking over American agricultural land, you wouldn’t want him to have any role in that whatsoever.So even the Financial Times is saying what you just said about the German politics in the Green Party. The major German papers are – I mean, I’ve had numerous interviews with the Christian Democratic Party newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and other groups there. I think what’s a little bit more confounding – I mean, this is a little bit of a diversion, and it’s really my last question; I hope we can get into some Patreon questions, and Ben, if you have anything else – it’s a little bit more confounding, as you know, that there has been this trans-atlantic alliance that the US has marketed, but now it is threatening sanctions on the most powerful economy of Europe, Germany, for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Which ironically, is what pushed Argentina to ally with Russia, more closely with Russia – traditionally they have not been very close allies – and now Russia is providing the Sputnik V vaccine as one of the main vaccines for Argentina.So, according to the US Department of State, this conference was more about free trade than an international monetary system. The monetary system was to ensure that high tariff barriers, competitive currency devaluations, discriminatory trading blocs and the like did not occur. Collapse of the Bretton Woods system Now what Prestowitz calls state-owned enterprises used to be called public utilities in the United States. And in Europe, most public utilities were government owned, like the National Health System.