[In this installment of his exploration of India’s role in geopolitics, the author provides extraordinary historical background into India’s political landscape and the interfacing of gender and neoliberalism in the pressures India faces to become a “masculine” player on in a globalist world. It should also be noted that Stan Goff is the author of Sex And War1, a powerful analysis of the role of gender in world conflict—CB]
INDIA TAKES THE STAGE - Part III
by
Stan Goff
FTW Military/Veterans Affairs Editor
The Rise of the Indian Right
August 14th 2006, 2:21 pm [PST] - While David Harvey
2 has emphasized motive in neoliberalism, the “restoration of ruling class power” and “accumulation through dispossession,” Peter Gowan
3 has emphasized method. In
The Global Gamble, he explains that the attack on Keynesian economics was not simply an attack on metropolitan working class gains and the imposition of debt peonage on the under-developed South. It also entailed the abolition of Keynesian repression on the financial pole of global capital -- faulted by Keynesians, accurately to a large extent, for the speculative swelter that catalyzed the Great Depression.
The “liberation” of finance capital, in conjunction with “globalization,” changed the character of both “finance capital” and “imperialism” as defined by Hilferding
4 and Lenin. They were not national, but international. They were not a Darwinian struggle between metropolitan capitals, but a collaborative venture between them to exploit the South. And they were not the merger of banks with industrial capital, but an international, technologically-networked lava flow of “hot money” that is, purely speculative investment.
This gave neoliberalism its grotesquely parasitic character. It also established the system’s general immunity to political intervention by any except the one dominant state, hence “global hot money”, notes Indian economist, Prabhat Patnaik…
…restricts the scope for demand management by the nation-state, undermining Keynesianism directly. Financial interests within any country, as Keynes and Kalecki argued, tend to be hostile to demand management; when finance is international, this hostility acquires a spontaneous effectiveness. Any effort by the state to expand economic activity makes speculators apprehensive about inflation, exchange rate depreciation and, more generally, of political radicalism and finance flows out of the country; this precipitates actual depreciation and inflation, forcing the state to curtail activity so that speculators feel comfortable. State intervention presupposes a "control area" of the state, over which its writ can run; globalization of finance tends to undermine this control area.
If, from Mitterrand to Schröder, a host of left-wing governments in the advanced capitalist countries (elected on the promise that they would increase employment) have failed to do so, the reason lies in this objective constraint on state intervention rather than, necessarily, in bad faith or betrayal. It also explains the decline of all ideologies of social change, from social democracy to Keynesianism to third world nationalism, even to old communism (which lost its immunity to capital flights): since all of them see the nation-state as the agency of intervention, globalization of finance, by restricting the state's capacity to intervene, has undermined their coherence.
What Harvey does emphasize in his description of modern imperialism is that the non-dominant states are subordinate to finance capital, but that finance capital is still secured by the state, and specifically by military power. Accumulation by dispossession is not possible without it.
“Capitalist imperialism,” note Panitch and Ginden (
Global Capitalism and American Empire), “needs to be understood through an extension of the theory of the capitalist state, rather than derived directly from the theory of economic stages or crises.” Finance capital is not independent any more than a cheap loan shark is. It requires muscle. Hot money has become a weapon of American statecraft. Dollar hegemony gives the ability to wield hot money as a political weapon to one state.
Lenin’s claim that his imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism was standpoint exceptionalism. “Far from being the highest stage of capitalism, what these theorists were observing was (as is now obvious) a relatively early phase of capitalism.” (Panitch & Ginden)
The (mostly) indirect rule of 21st Century American imperialism, using its creditor status against peripheral nations
and its debtor status against the metropoles, is a unique phenomenon in history. It can only be grasped in its complexity. Metropolitan states are exploited through the Treasury standard for loans the US will never pay back to finance American military profligacy—for the same reason Willie Sutton said he robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.” Peripheral and semi-peripheral nations are subordinated through structural adjustment programs (SAPs), in part to drain value from them, but not wholly for that reason. Imperialism has an economic dimension, but it also has its political dimension, the dimension of power characterizing the whole relationship between actors.
The task for SAPs is to establish the economic conditions in which such a society can become self-functioning [self policing in the international order]. There must be just enough local accumulation to permit the South to maintain some non-statist institutions or social forces which can enable it to manage its own poverty… it might be possible to address the problem of ‘governance’ by recognizing and ‘validating’ the coping strategies which people have developed to resist social degradation, and then by calling the organizations behind these strategies ‘NGOs’ [non-governmental organizations] and constituents of ‘civil society’, and using them to run society in a low-cost way without the risks of post-neo-colonial direct rule. (Biel, p. 245)
This gives us good reason to examine the role of NGOs not as service agencies, but as co-optation strategies, particularly any NGO with the sanction in any country of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), whose actions are closely coordinated through the US Embassy with its Economics Sections and its CIA station chief. This is a dimension within the local political scene in the periphery that belies the notion of sovereignty on close examination, while superficially giving US intervention a benevolent face.
