Sithsaber wrote:What made you think i was a social democrat?
Well, if you aren't, fill me in. I simply took the sum total of your posting pattern and decided that you are probably a social democrat. It could be a wrong assumption. I also disagree with your argument about military brutality, for reasons that you will see when you read this post.
quetzalcoatl wrote:What is liberalism's 'secret'? Or more generally, why does a certain system evolve successfully and achieve totality (provisional), while others die on the vine or wither at the root?
Liberalism succeeded because of the military power of the nations that ended up propagating it, and because - fatefully - the petty-bourgeoisie in those Allied countries threw their weight behind the haute-bourgeoisie ideology of that time
(liberalism) and did not resist it at that juncture.
Leon Trotsky sheds some light which I will build on here:
Leon Trotsky, 'The Only Road for Germany', Sep 1932 (emphasis added) wrote:Any serious analysis of the political situation must take as its point of departure the mutual relations among the three classes: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (including the peasantry), and the proletariat.
The economically powerful big bourgeoisie, in itself, represents an infintesimal minority of the nation. To enforce its domination, it must ensure a definite mutual relationship with the petty bourgeoisie and, through its mediation, with the proletariat.
To understand the dialectic of the relation among the three classes, we must differentiate three historical stages: [1.] at the dawn of capitalistic development, when the bourgeoisie required revolutionary methods to solve its tasks; [2.] in the period of bloom and maturity of the capitalist regime, when the bourgeoisie endowed its domination with orderly, pacific, conservative, democratic forms; [3.] finally, at the decline of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie is forced to resort to methods of civil war against proletariat to protect its right of exploitation.
The political programs characteristic of these three stages -- JACOBINISM [left wing of petty bourgeois forces in Great French Revolution; in most revolutionary phase, led by Robespierre], reformist DEMOCRACY (social democracy included), and FASCISM -- are basically programs of petty bourgeois currents. This fact alone, more than anything else, shows of what tremendous -- rather, of what decisive -- importance the self-determination of the petty bourgeois masses of the people is for the whole fate of bourgeois society.
Nevertheless, the relationship between the [haute] bourgeoisie and its basic social support, the petty bourgeoisie, does not at all rest upon reciprocal confidence and pacific collaboration. In its mass, the petty bourgeoisie is an exploited and disenfranchised class. It regards the [haute] bourgeoisie with envy and often with hatred. The [haute] bourgeoisie, on the other hand, while utilizing the support of the petty bourgeoisie, distrusts the latter, for it very correctly fears its tendency to break down the barriers set up for it from above.
While they were laying out and clearing the road for bourgeois development,the Jacobins engaged, at every step, in sharp clashes with the bourgeoisie. They served it in intransigent struggle against it. After they had culminated their limited historical role, the Jacobins fell, for the domination of capital was predeterminated.
For a whole series of stages, the bourgeoisie entrenched its power under the form of parliamentary democracy. Even then, not peacefully and not voluntarily. The bourgeoisie was mortally afraid of universal suffrage. But in the last instance, it succeeded, with the aid of a combination of violent measures and concessions, of privations and reforms, in subordinating within the framework of formal democracy not only the petty bourgeoisie but in considerable measure also the proletariat, by means of the new petty bourgeoisie -- the labor aristocracy. [...]
Now, there are many things which may cause a nation to take actions. But the decision-making process is determined by a substantial amount, by the relationship between the three classes in the nation. Fascism placed the petty-bourgeoisie in the driver's seat in various second-tier powers, such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. Places which had no deep legacy of liberalism anyway.
The same pattern also repeated itself in the post-war era in South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and so on, but I digress.However, quite crucially, petty-bourgeoisie control was never able to be enacted in either the UK or USA. Because of this, it meant that the most advanced first-tier nations in the world at that time
remained under haute-bourgeoisie control and would be waging a war against Axis from a position of economic advantage
(the USA's productive capacity was enormous), thus making things a lot more risky and precarious than it would have otherwise been.
To repeat this example using communism, simply unplug 'petty-bourgeoisie' and plug in 'proletariat', and unplug 'Axis' and plug in 'USSR', and unplug 'fascism' and plug in 'communism'.
Liberals have historically been very good at using tepid reforms to manage populations, and so when a rival ideology criticises liberalism, liberals tend to imitate that ideology in some shallow
(non-structurally altering) way, until they have defeated that ideology, and then they cease imitating it. For example, in the USA the "New Deal" was useful in placating people when the competition was fascists and socialists. Now that there is no competitor out there, they can safely do away with it if they want.
Quoting the wiki from the OP:
wiki wrote:According to Wolin, the United States has two main totalizing dynamics:
- The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the Global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination.[4][14][15]
- The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the population to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Thus, neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, thus making it less likely that they will become politically active, and thus helping to maintain the first dynamic.[4][14][16][17]
Which ties into this:
'The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class', Kees van der Pijl, 1984 wrote:Liberalization and state intervention, the two pillars of corporate liberalism, developed hand-in-hand in the period of Atlantic integration, their relative emphasis deriving from the stubbornness of either the original liberalism (as manifested, for instance, in the pre-Suez political economy of Britain) or of state monopolism (as in the case of Gaullism). The American offensives were instrumental in setting free the forces for this transformation, and in activating the fractions of the bourgeoisie involved in its evolution. The short-term cyclical developments, notably in the profit-distribution process, which will allow US to explain the modalities of actual class formation and politics in the central period under review, however, should not obscure the fact that as a whole, the era of Atlantic integration was characterized by a (Fordist) class compromise between capital and labour on the basis of a 'Keynesian' sub-ordination of petty money interests to overall levels of productive investment, and a profit-distribution structure skewed towards productive capital. The New Deal in this respect, too, marked the beginning of an era and set the standard for Europe.
In the course of the 1960s accumulation conditions in the Atlantic area were more or less equalized, blocking the trans-Atlantic escape routes for American productive capital by eliminating the gap between US and European production conditions. As part of the same development, the profit share of bank capital climbed drastically in all countries involved, and rentier incomes revived as well. By the time Richard Nixon cut the dollar from gold in August, 1971 and thus set free an exponential growth of the mass of international liquidity, banks in practically all countries in the area had already been liberated from the Keynesian shackles imposed on them in the 1930s, or were soon to do so. The unimpeded international circulation of capital which had been the aim of the architects of Atlantic integration was finally realized - at the price of the system itself. Thrown into the rapidly widening channels of international credit, the mass of savings centralized by Atlantic bank capital served to facilitate the transfer of key segments of the productive apparatus of the North Atlantic heartland to new zones of implantation in the periphery.
This wave of internationalization, which widened the scope of the present crisis, also destroyed the very structure of Atlantic integration. By breaking the territorial coincidence of mass production and mass consumption, it undermined the capital-labour compromise and the complementarity of circulation relations; by allowing untrammeled competition in the search for new outlets for capital, and in the mobilization of peripheral elites, it destroyed the fundamental unity of purpose which had hitherto constituted the cornerstone of the hegemonial strategy of the Atlantic bourgeoisie.
Which leads to this:
Magnus Ryner, 'An obituary for the Third Way', 27 Apr 2010 (emphasis added) wrote:Contrary to what was predicted at the time, US monetary hegemony survived the end of Bretton Woods. The American Dollar remained pre-eminent as the reserve and vehicle currency of the global financial system, and by abandoning the peg of the dollar to gold, the US actually gained rather than lost policy autonomy in the emergent flexible exchange rate system. Since US banks could accumulate liabilities in the key currency at zero-exchange risk, they augmented their competitive advantage in transnational financial affairs, which resulted in Wall Street becoming, more than ever before, the epicentre of "global" finance. This, in turn, consolidated the capacity of the US to shape the preferences of borrowers and lenders worldwide, imbuing the US with structural power. The US became the only state in an international system characterised by flexible exchange rates that could pursue expansionary macroeconomic policies on a consistent basis without the need of internal adjustment.
NBR, 'Strategic Asia 2012-13', Oct 2012 (emphasis added) wrote:The presence of this new order—which hinged on the military capabilities of the United States—would progressively nurture a new economic order as well, one that began through deepened trading relationships between the United States and its allies but slowly extended to incorporate neutrals and even erstwhile and potential rivals—to the degree that they chose to participate in this order.
In retrospect, then, the structural conditions that permitted the creation and maintenance of this order can be readily discerned. They include the following factors:
- The economic hegemony of the United States globally, which was amplified by the use of the dollar as the international reserve currency, fiscal stability at home, and a highly effective national innovation system that underwrote repeated cycles of transformative growth
- The political willingness within the United States to bear the costs of global leadership as evinced through the bipartisan consensus on protecting American hegemony, which in turn spawned diverse domestic policies oriented toward expanding the nation’s power
- The irreducible military superiority of the United States, encompassing both the nuclear and conventional realms and extending to at least functional mastery over the global commons in the face of serious challenges from the Soviet Union and sometimes lesser states
- The inability of any of the Asian powers to decisively threaten the security of key neighbors in a system-transforming manner, as well as their incapacity to undermine the U.S. ability to defend its regional allies or to impede the United States from either operating freely in the continent or bringing force to bear at any point along the Asian littorals
The concatenation of these variables paved the way for the U.S. victory during the Cold War. In fact, this victory was finally procured because Washington succeeded in enjoying the best of both worlds: it maintained a remarkable degree of military advantage despite Soviet opposition, while at the same time sustaining an open economic system at home and an open trading system abroad, both of which interacted to permit the United States and its close allies to grow at a rate much faster than the autarkic economies of its opponents. The fact that the United States’ allies were able to regenerate their national power so quickly after the devastation of World War II was also a testament to the enlightened elites in these countries: they consciously pursued economic strategies that enabled their nations to make the best of the open economic order that the United States maintained in its interest but which provided collective benefits. The rise of these allies, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually the smaller Southeast Asian “tigers,” undoubtedly portended the relative decline of the United States. But such a decline was judged acceptable because these were friendly states threatened by common enemies, and their revival was judged—correctly—to be essential for the larger success of containment. [6]
Yet the ascendancy of these allies signaled a serious problem that marks all imperial orders, namely, that success produces transformations that can lead to their undoing.
And the undoing later comes:
'The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World-Economy', Minqi Li, 2004 (emphasis added!) wrote:How will the rise of China, and for that matter, the rise of India as well, affect the underlying dynamics of the existing world system itself – the capitalist world-economy? Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the existing world system has entered into a structural crisis. The system has developed to the point that several secular trends have now reached their respective asymptotes, exhausting the system's space of self-adjustment. We are now in an age of great transition, at the end of which the existing historical system should be replaced by one or several other systems (Wallerstein 1995; 1996; 1998; 2003).
In other words, we do not live in "normal" times. In the coming century, instead of expecting more "development," more "modernization," more upward mobility, more of the same pattern of systemic dynamics that we have observed and with which we have become familiarized over the past five or six centuries, it may be more appropriate to expect more bifurcations, more chaos, more transformations and transitions, and more "turns" and "tricks" of the world history.
So there you go. Eventually there will be no more adjustments that can be made, and no more places on the earth that liberals will have not outsourced to, or externalised a war to. At that stage we'll see very interesting things happen, as the system will be challenged again by one or several actors of varying ideologies.
Now, on a slightly random note, I have been thinking about why we have to always go to the past in order to describe how things are now in the present. For example, how did we end up discussing the Second World War and the Cold War in this thread? It's because - perhaps almost subconsciously - we all know that retelling the past is not only an action that talks about what happened in the 'the past'. In fact, it has an effect on the world of 'the present', because how we understand 'the past', shapes our attitude to 'the present', and thus, 'the future', and that understanding happens
in 'the present'.