The name is Feuilleton Jones. It’s of French origin. Like New Orleans. Like Le Roi. It’s of black origin, like Jenkins and Jefferson. Yeah, my mama named me funny. Leastwise I don’t look funny. What’s your excuse? Don’t talk about my mama.
The name is Feuilleton Jones. It’s of French origin. Like New Orleans. Like Le Roi. It’s of black origin, like Jenkins and Jefferson. Yeah, my mama named me funny. Leastwise I don’t look funny. What’s your excuse? Don’t talk about my mama.
May 19, 2003
Of Frantic Empires and Terror War, or, Barbarians and Budget Cuts
A shorter version of this article appeared in Wildcat 66, Barbaren und Haushaltskürzungen: Eine Reise durch die Welt des Emmanuel Todd.
Après L’Empire: Essai sur la décomposition du système américain (Gallimard, 2002).
L’Illusion économique: Essai sur la stagnation des sociétés développées (Gallimard, 1998).
INTRODUCTION
Both of these works are imbued with a passion for human progress and a striking and sincere optimism, but After Empire was simply a shock: it was full of insights into American society I would never have expected to find in any book by a foreigner, in particular insights relating to the race question, which inspires respect and indicates a sensitivity and depth of knowledge worth investigating further.
The Economic Illusion communicates the theoretical underpinnings of Todd’s more journalistic focus in After Empire. Throughout this review, I treat them as one argument, disrespecting the author’s craft and exposition, perhaps in service of a fuller critical understanding. [1]
Who is Todd?
Though brilliant, Todd is somewhat cracked. Eccentric or idiosyncratic are words that also come to mind, but despite that I recommend taking him quite seriously: these books contain much of interest to Marxist revolutionaries of the sort who understand that the liberation of the working class is its own task, that this is a global task in which it must explode the totalitarian pseudouniversalism of capital’s inverted world, instantiating a material human community in place of the lived ideology, the realized illusion, the material community of capital. From his media presence in leftish European publications, [2] as a representative of a non-antiAmerican “critical left,” [3] one might also infer that Todd is communicating the ideas of certain French government circles.
He is a general social scientist, well versed in several fields, although he calls himself an anthropologist and often refers to demography, and that is the basic perspective from which he delivers the most powerful ideas in this kooky, insightful, frustrating and occasionally infuriating look at the crisis of capitalist accumulation, the nonreproduction of the working class, and the desperate flailings of US imperialism.
Against Empire
Because he is an antiMarxist ListoKeynesian, a sort of stereotypical French “big government” technocrat interested in saving capital from itself, Todd doesn’t use phrases like “capitalist accumulation” or “the nonreproduction of the working class,” let alone the transition to the real domination of capital, the unproletarianizable no-longer-peasants throughout large parts of the Third World, [4] the transition to full-fledged capitalism in the former Second World, [5] the general historical barrier to capital—but that’s what he’s talking about throughout these two books. His approach is certainly superior to most of what passes for general analysis of world politics, like what one might find in the current-events section of your local Barnes & Noble.
Todd cuts through a lot of current leftist bullshit by declaring that the United States has been an empire since the end of WWII—he doesn’t go back before that war (except when he wants to make a policy proposal), perhaps because the fast-crumbling institutional framework we live in today was only formalized then, although many of the essential economic and political relationships were in place after WWI. Meanwhile, the empire is in crisis. “[The USA] has become objectively predatory.... Is this a sign of strength or weakness?” [6] His answer is the latter, but he wants to flesh out this preliminary response in a manner more coherent than, for instance, the US left—which generally thinks that the US empire is a threat we have to ward off before it becomes a reality—has so far been able. (This is not to say that Todd himself has no “democratic illusions”: he says at one point early in After Empire that the goal of the United States is “no longer” to defend and spread democracy, but to control global resources. [7] )
So, how to explain the “bizarre comportment of the United States” and, with it, “the disarray of the planet”? [8] He starts with ruling-class angst as expressed in books like Kissinger’s Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Great Powers, and the shining exemplar of the worried-warmonger genre, Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard. The USA has done three things in lieu of licking its wounds: it has failed to permanently solve any geopolitical problems, among which Palestine leaps to mind, both to have an excuse for intervention and in continuation of the old British balance-of-power statecraft [9] ; it has fixated its muscle-flexing on tiny countries with little or no comparable military power [10] ; and it has developed high-tech weapons systems, the better to execute the “mad dog,” “rogue superpower” diplomacy elaborated in the mid-90s. [11] It seems to me like US capital has adopted a heavily-modified Brzezinski program. [12]
It has also adapted blowback to its own purposes, a new “strategy of tension,” [13] by raising the threat of terrorism to the status of an omnipresent evil “force” not unlike Satan and his minions in the spiritual battle fundamentalist Christians see in world and quotidian events. This story justifies aggression, obviously, but Todd’s critique of scare tactics is just muckraking: Todd’s very first “deep” explanation for the crisis of the US empire is the declining relative economic power of the United States as a result of higher and higher educational levels of more and more people throughout the world. He never says so explicitly, but one can infer that he thinks this is also a cause of the deformity and weakness of the US economy—whereas one may say, correctly, that newer plant in the countries devastated after WWII and thus heightened industrial competition, combined with the Vietnam war deficit and the 1973 oil shock, pushed US capital over the edge into “postindustrial society,” one can also miss this, labor power, obviously an integral factor in that story: this is the first, welcome, “autonomist” twist in Todd’s thinking, and while he is idealist in his presentation, he immediately focuses our sights on the working class, the object of the statistics, the globalization debates, the wars, the elections, the ideologies: it has the world arrayed against it, but the first thing out of Todd’s mouth is “You’ve still managed to attain higher literacy.”
Todd’s take on “globalization,” the financial manifestation of US economic weakness, will be somewhat familiar: “The debate over globalization is partially disconnected from reality because one accepts all too often the representation of symmetrical exchange and finance, in which no nation occupies any particular place.... [One ignores] the specific role of the most important countries in the new organization of the economic world.” [14] Like many Marxists, he sees “free exchange” as the ideology of declining powers interested in looting other countries’ more profitable means of production, labor power, raw materials and general resources, i.e., he sees it as the ideology of imperialism. But accompanying US industrial decay is the relatively increased power of the other great powers: Russia, France, Germany, and Japan. Iraq may add a little nuance to Todd’s assertion that the US must respect their positions in negotiations, but the Bush Administration still had to have recourse to bribery, threats, and the UN. I withhold final judgment on this issue, but the struggle over the terms lifting Iraq’s sanctions will tell us precisely what the balance of power is. It seems that the US, in a Wolfowitzian spirit of charity, will seek to jubilee Iraq’s “odious debt” to France and Russia, [15] appropriate their oil concessions, [16] and is already rejoicing in the dollar’s recession-induced slide, reducing European trading strength, conveniently retaliating for French and German resistance to the war. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, meanwhile, has expressed interest in rearmament, partially because of the Iraq war. [17]
So Todd knows that there is no such thing as fair trade in a world of combined and uneven development, as the Trotskyists say, which is why the openly “asymmetrical trading strategy” [18] of mercantile states like Germany, Japan, and South Korea (and even China, but it’s a somewhat different story) can’t last forever, and they are increasingly under threat from the US, geostrategically and economically, as with the Bush steel tariffs and the Iraq attack.
Economic Anthropology?
But we’re getting too far into details. The framework is key. For all his discussion of economics, politics, and geostrategy, Todd sees these questions against, not an economic background, but the economic and political questions are cast in terms of anthropology and the demographic structures it entails. The only other such work I know of is Marvin Harris’s America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture (1981), [19] which does much the same work, examining the tertiary sector, the blocked reproduction of the working class and the world in general, the declining cultural level in the USA, and the general brutalization of society; Todd seeks not only to explain the foreign-policy posture of the United States, but to discover the anthropological reason for the existence or not of a social unit capable of raising and enforcing claims on behalf of a collective: he is looking for nothing less than the subject of history, because “the emergence of collective claims has not been sociologically or historically explained [sic]”! [20]
There are three levels to society in Todd’s mind: one is the cultural subconscious. I learned to think about it like this: “What meaning does the structure, for instance, the stratification, of society convey?” Quite literally, the stratification of social powers. It’s a directly lived message from society, a real ideology, but not of words, which come later. The second level is the anthropological unconscious, a “negative,” regulatory force. As for the third level, consciousness, it’s conspicuous in its absence throughout Todd’s work. The meaning the absence conveys is that there is no social consciousness worthy of the name, for reasons that Todd gets into later, as well as those we remember from the old days of the German ideology. “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” [21] Consciousness doesn’t battle phrases, rake muck or debunk myths, but is the result of human activity in ordering and acting in the world, changing nature and human nature. “Social action” today, i.e., whatever anarchic state-based capitalist commodity production needs to do, is unconscious from the only possible perspective, the perspective of the future, the perspective of la communauté humaine: “If no human community exists, collective action is by definition impossible.” [22]
In The Economic Illusion, Todd graphically lays out his basic anthropological framework: It has to do with family types. The Anglo-Saxon countries share the “absolute nuclear family,” and the USA is the most extreme, “hysterical” instantiation of it, which has implications for broader social relations, including the missing subject.
|
Absolute Nuclear, “liberal” |
England, Australia, New Zealand, anglophone Canada, USA |
|
Mixed Souche / Egalitarian Nuclear |
France (Parisian basin), Italy (north and south), Portugal, Central Spain, Poland, the Netherlands |
|
Souche (authoritarian, inegalitarian) [23] |
Germany, Japan (endogamous), Korea, Sweden, E. Asia, Ireland, E. Scotland, Basque country, Catalonia, N. Portugal, Venice, Bohemia, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland, France ex-Paris, Quebec, Israel (endogamous), Jews generally |
|
Communitarian (authoritarian, egalitarian) |
Slavic countries incl. Russia (exogamous), China, India, E. Europe, Finland, Central Italy, Tuscany (exogamous), Arab world (endogamous) |
All of these family types, however different they appear to be, are “merely” variations on several generations of decay of primitive communism; they are variations on the degraded patrilineal and patriarchal gens, [24] which decay is organized in the communitarian family type into household communities [25] ; in the souche and egalitarian-nuclear family type, those household communities have turned into something like extended families. [26] The egalitarian nuclear family is probably intermediate between the souche and AngloSaxon types. This is clearly an ancient process, lumpier even than capitalist development, and it is beyond the ability of a layman like myself to do more than record what others have deciphered in this palimpsest of anthroethnological developments, but one of the most important for us is the way commodity production and trade in the ancient Greek and Roman world had already overturned the matrilineal kinship forms, the gens, and the postgens family types to arrive at something like a modern monogamous patriarchal family. Something similar also had to have happened in Egypt and the other “original” empires, because it takes a lot, anthropologically speaking, to end up not only with a class society, but with a slave society and a king who commissions public works projects.
It was the decay of the Roman empire and the invasion of the Germans that “wiped the slate clean” in Europe, so to speak, reinstituting barbarian gentile forms to begin the cycle of “civilization” all over again, and it is the traces of this development that Todd is describing here.
The only exception to the “variation,” I think, is the AngloSaxon anthropology, which—because of the traumatic and extreme nature of England’s bourgeois revolution, the early, thorough, and persistent violence, and the age of England’s bourgeois economy—seems to be qualitatively different, all trace of the ancient communities to be radically extinguished.
The thing about this liberal anthropology, the anglophone countries, is that they prepare the kids for autonomy and social liberty: they’re thrown out of the house around 18, whether to college, boarding school, the labor market, whatever, to go seek their fortune, with always uncertain results. [27] But most of the world remains souche or communitarian. It’s the fraternal, intersibling relations that predict the duration and persistence of the social unit, whatever it is, capable of collective action. It’s no surprise that it’s the less-disintegration-prone anthropologies that have economically surpassed the United States, though we have yet to put the whole story together, and they have their own problems: the souche anthropology economies entered into their own demographic crisis: a crisis of underpopulation. [28] Todd isn’t particularly clear about it, but the demographic crisis of the souche family is related to sole inheritance, parental favoritism, and to what I perceive as a generally higher investment per child. [29]
“Underpopulation crisis??? What about Eurosclerosis?” The rigid welfare state?” The anthropologically unconscious values get inverted on the way up to the social subconscious: the authoritarian anthropology correlates with an egalitarian ideology à la liberté, égalité, fraternité, and a paternalistic, mercantilist state capitalism—which is reasonable, considering that in the mark or the feudal village everyone has their place, and there is no right without its duty—while the egalitarian anthropology correlates with the corrosive and inegalitarian I’ma-get-mine-so-I’ma-take-yours ideology, which reaches its apotheosis in free-trade capitalism and Thatcher / Reagan ultraliberalism.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Tiers-Monde
Like I mentioned, the first thing Todd proposes to explain the relative decline of the USA is increased intelligence: the world proletariat has continued to learn how to read. He sees a cultural and a tendential democratic [30] revolution where most Marxists, including myself, saw only the dark ages:
Between 1980 and 2000, the literacy rate of individuals 15 years old and up, that is, the proportion of the adult population that knows how to read, has passed from 40 to 67 percent in Rwanda, from 33 to 64 percent in Nigeria, from 27 to 47 percent in Ivory Coast, from 40 to 63 percent in Algeria, from 77 to 85 percent in South Africa, from 80 to 93 percent in Zimbabwe, from 85 to 92 percent in Colombia. Even in Afghanistan, the literacy rate has increased by 18 points to 47 percent in the same period. In India it has progressed from 41 to 56 percent, in Pakistan from 28 to 43 percent, in Indonesia from 69 to 87, in the Philippines from 89 to 99 percent. In Iran the proportion of individuals who have learned how to read and write grew from 51 percent in 1980, the era of the Khomeiniist revolution, to 77 percent in 2000. In China the literacy rate, already 66 percent in 1980, today is 85 percent.
[A]ll the poor countries appear to be engaged in a process of general cultural development, even the late-bloomers like Mali, where the literacy rate had hardly passed 14 percent in 1980 to 40 percent in 2000, or Niger, with a more modest progress, from 8 to 16 percent. This percentage is quite weak, but if one considers only the youth, 15 to 24 years old, Niger has attained 22 percent, and Mali 65 percent.
This process is not complete; the levels of cultural development remain very diverse. But one can foresee a universally literate planet in the not-too-distant future. If one takes account of the principle of acceleration, we can consider that for the young generation, universal literacy for the planet will be realized by 2030. With the invention of writing at about 3,000 BCE, it will have taken about 5,000 years for humanity to integrally realize the revolution linked to writing. [31]
How is it possible for Third World labor power to have continued to valorize itself under the tutelage of the AngloSaxon imperialist free-trade regime we know as the United States? It’s a question for debate. Todd doesn’t try to figure it out cause and effect–wise either, but he does say that this labor power development preceded whatever exploitation it has been an object of:
When they learn how to read, write, and count, people almost naturally take control of their material environment. In Asia and Latin America today, like in Europe between the seventeenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the economic takeoff is an almost automatic consequence of educational development. In the context of free exchange and financial globalization, economic growth is chained, deformed, but it exists. Americans, Europeans, and Japanese must be conscious of the fact that the relocation of their factories to the lower-paid zones would not have been possible without Brazilian, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, or Indonesian education progress.
The workers of the old Third World, whose wages drag down those in America, Europe, and Japan, know how to read, write, and count, and that is why they are exploitable. [32]
I guess even the most retrograde form of capital was progressive for some regions over the past two decades.
But “learning how to read and write—without forgetting elementary calculation, which accompanies them—is only one aspect, one step in the mental revolution which will end by extending itself across the planet.” [33] The other one is working-class control over its own physical nature and reproduction: “the demographic revolution,” in which “people, or more exactly, women who know how to read and write, begin to control their fertility.” [34] We know that in the advanced capitalist countries, birth control is all too often an adaptation to the economic impossibility of physical reproduction, a corollary of the crisis, [35] but the situation is different elsewhere. In the Third World, birth control is one of the first steps people take toward controlling their material conditions, the part of the natural world that is the human body, liberated from ignorance, religious superstition, communal coercion and the like.
Having said that, that is not Todd’s point of view. Like the middle class he criticizes later, he thinks in Malthusian terms of limited natural resources and “persistent underdevelopment” because of overpopulation, i.e., he sees the birth control revolution as important, not because it’s an expression of proletarian self-mastery, but because it’s a successful adaptation to capitalist scarcity.
But capital proceeds by way of contradiction and crisis. The development of labor power and the penetration of capital into the underdeveloped regions was hardly a smooth sail. The dozens of civil wars and coups-d’état in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are subjects in their own right, as is the recent history of the old Eastern bloc, but a broad historical view reveals their common context, and Todd sees it in Yugoslavia:
Thanks to demographic analysis, we can thus discern in the space defined by the old Yugoslavia and Albania two crises of shifting transition. The first spread during the years 1930–1955, and carried the “Christian” population, Croats and Serbs principally, to demographic and mental modernity, through the Communist crisis. The second, between 1965–2000, led most of the Islamic-converted population to the same modernity. But, by what it would be well to consider an accident of history, the late mental revolution of the Muslim space interfered with the collapse of Communism, which should have represented for the Serbs and the Croats a kind of Phase II, a way out of the crisis of modernization. All these people are intermingled and one must admit that the escape from Communism, which in itself was not a simple technical problem, was transformed by the crisis of transition in the Muslim population into a fatal nightmare. [36]
Todd doesn’t realize it, but here he has stumbled across the crisis of transition, not to “modernity,” but to real capitalism. He continues with Brzezinski’s power vacuum:
It’s a pity all the more that a simple examination of the map of the world would reveal the existence of a long zone of interaction, not between Christians and Islam but between Communism and Islam, going from Yugoslavia to Central Asia. The accidental conjunction of the Communist reflux and the Islamic transition, of a completion and of a beginning of modern mentality, was a frequent occurrence in the 1990s, which should have merited a general sociological examination. The confrontations in the Caucasus and those, shorter, in Central Asia, have a number of points in common with those of Yugoslavia. It remains the case that the superposition of these two crises of transition has only been able to produce an aggravated transition, in any case defining a structural and permanent state of conflict between populations. [37]
The same wave of “modernization” that brought increased literacy and decreased birthrates also brought a unified global market, [38] the oil shocks, the Third World debt crisis, IMF structural adjustments, communal slaughters, and the velvet-gloved iron fist of humanitarian intervention, which, when coupled with the threat of universal terrorism, provides a nice cover for US imperialism.
The Trilateral CommissionAgainst this backdrop of continued though ambivalent improvement in the Third World, Todd draws a bleak picture of the US and the rest of the advanced capitalist world.
Industry and TradeOne and only one economic variable will tell us, in the years to come, whether one must represent the future of the United States in terms of dynamism or decline. It does not have to do with the rate of growth of GDP, global or per capita, the significance of which becomes more and more problematic in an economy with a hypertrophied tertiary sector which hasn’t produced the industrial goods of which it has need. The commercial balance will tell us America’s destiny. [39]
This is highly debatable. The US has unparalleled monetary power as the printer of the world’s reserve currency, and an apparently bottomless pit of global “goodwill” as the largest consumer market, from which it must daily draw almost $2B of foreign investment to finance its trade deficit. Todd is aware of what he calls the “structural demand deficit,” [40] i.e., overproduction, the deflationary global economic environment—isn’t it possible, considering this situation, in which industrial innovation causes bubbles instead of booms, that in face of its now-irreversible industrial decline the US rape-loot-and-pillage strategy is more robust than that of its mercantilist competitors? The United States, with its we-own-the-bank debt levels, at all levels, remains the best game in town.
And the world bourgeoisie seems to agree, at least when coup d’etat-ed by the CIA or blackmailed with trade sanctions or invaded by the US Army: Trade barriers fell at a very quick pace from 1960 to 1984.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Todd lays out the rotten industrial picture by focusing mainly on current account issues. [41] “If we relate the American commercial deficit, not to total GNP, including agriculture and services, but only to industrial goods, we arrive at the stupefying result that the United States depends, for 10 percent of its industrial consumption, on goods whose importation is not covered by exports of the national product. This industrial deficit, again, had barely reached 5 percent in 1995.” [42] So, US capital cannot even pay for its producer goods, big stuff like cranes, metalworks, ships, high-tech-fabrication equipment, with its exports. International economic (primarily manufacturing) competitiveness: “The speed with which the American industrial deficit has appeared is one of the more interesting aspects of the process under way. At the beginning of the depression in 1929, 44.5 percent of world industrial production was found in the United States, against 11.6 percent in Germany, 9.3 percent in Great Britain, 7 percent in France, 4.6 percent in the USSR, 3.2 percent in Italy, and 2.4 percent in Japan. Seventy years later the US industrial product is a bit inferior to that of the EU and hardly higher than that of Japan.” [43] You can’t take the totalizing power and cultural presence of the corporations to the bank: “This fall in economic power is not compensated for by the activity of American multinationals. Since 1998, the profits repatriated to the United States are less than those that foreign firms located in the US repatriate to their respective countries.” [44]
How is this possible? “What is this economy in which financial services, insurance and real estate have progressed 10 times faster than industry between 1994 and 2000, to attain a production in ‘value’ equal to 123 percent that of industry?” [45] Todd doesn’t quite get into the nitty-gritty of the economic developments he groups under the heading of industrial decline, but the basic story is that in the crisis of profitability that hit world capital in an obvious manner in the 70s, “a situation in which the real economy was producing…a sharply reduced aggregate surplus with respect to its total capital stock,” it became a challenge for other capitalist interests like
lenders and speculators—rentier interests more generally—[to] make a killing, given the dependence of their returns on successful profit-making in the real economy[.] In the face of the stagnating economic pie throughout the 1980s, lenders and speculators were offered only limited options by a real economy that was cutting back on capital investment. They were obliged to rely for their best profit-making opportunities on the more or less forceful redistribution of income and wealth by political means. This was achieved most strikingly through direct action by the state, though also via class struggle at the level of the firm, as well as by means of the plundering of the corporations themselves. [46]
This is the attack on PATCO, tax “reform,” supply-side economics, Cold War II, and the downsizing wave that swept the country, destroying whole cities, regions, and countless lives with its mergers and acquisitions, breakups and firesales of capital assets. It also exacerbated the crisis of profitability it was meant to ameliorate. The period 1980–85 is important for both Brenner and Todd: Todd thinks it was the last chance for US industrial capital to save itself, which I’ll explain below, but Brenner explains why it wasn’t possible: “The obverse side of the Carter-Volcker-Reagan lurch toward finance was thus...the increasing desolation of the manufacturing sector under the impact of the same high real interest rates, elevated dollar, and semi-recession that was proving so favorable to rentiers.” [47]
Todd, to his detriment, has no insight into this state-waged class struggle, nor does he deal with values in the Marxist sense, but he does know that neoclassical “economic theory does not explain the retraction of American industrial activity, the transformation of the United States into a space specializing in consumption and dependent on the outside world for its provisions.” [48]
[It] insists on the necessity that each country specialize in production of goods and services for which it is most suited. It speculates to infinity on the automatic character of market adjustments: of grand and magnificent equilibria establishing themselves between production and consumption, between imports and exports, by the intermediary of the fluctuations in the value of national currencies. This scholastic economics perceives, describes, and invents an perfectly symmetrical ideal model, in which each nation occupies an equivalent place and works for the common good…. This [representation of equal exchange] constitutes, along with music and films, one of the major cultural exports of the United States. Its degree of adaptation to reality is like Hollywood’s: weak. [49]
Free Exchange and Underconsumption
The truth of the matter is that “globalization is not organized by a principle of symmetry but of asymmetry. The world, more and more, produces, while America consumes. No equilibrium between imports and exports has established itself in the United States. The autonomous and overproductive nation of the immediate postwar period has become the heart of a system in which its job is to consume more than to produce.” [50]
Free trade is the embodiment of this asymmetry, which has taken different forms in bourgeois economic history: colonialism and old-school imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the “good imperialism” of the postwar period, the Thatcher / Reagan–style ultraliberalism in the 70s and 80s, and “globalization” in the 1990s.
Free trade doesn’t even increase trade. “The pulling down of trade barriers in the greater part of the Western world is accompanied by a fall in the rate of growth of the world economy and a strong growth in internal inequality in each society…. The annual rate of growth in the OECD countries fell to 5.2 percent in the period 1961-69, to 3.9 percent in 1970-79, to 2.6 percent in 1980-89, and to 2.1 percent in 1990-96.” [51] For 1995–2002, OECD growth was only 1.3 percent. [52]
“It is not the principle of free exchange which leads to development of commerce, but the internal dynamism of the national economies which leads to increased exports and imports.” [53] Free trade has actually decreased growth in international exports, which is probably just as much a reflection of constricted demand in a crisis period as free trade itself: From 1846–47 to 1865–68, exports grew 5 percent. From 1865–68 to 1896–97, they grew 2 percent. From 1896–97 to 1914 they grew again at 5 percent. [54] In 1960–84, imports as a proportion of aggregate OECD GDP increased from 11.9 percent to 19.1 percent. By 1994, though, the same number fell a bit, to 18.4 percent. [55] Exports as a percentage of OECD GDP went from 12.3 percent in 1960 to 19 percent in 1984; this number also fell to 18.4% in 1994. [56]
The Third World got some cars, but even the global rate of individual car ownership has fallen since 1970, which might be good for the environment, but not so good as a sign of growth. Todd doesn’t describe the economic devastation of large parts of the Third World, the ruthlessness of the IMF dictates, the social disintegration of semiproletarianization, but he knows that “the planet has not profited, globally, from the misfortune of the developed world. Nothing at all justifies the assuaging assertions of the neo–Third Worldists of the right,” people like “Erik Izraelewicz—one of the chief editors of Le Monde—, an extreme but sociologically central example of militant free exchangism, condescending to the French poor and falsely solidarizing himself with the Third World,” and, I would add, people like Thomas Friedman, the New York Times editorialist and author of such paeans to free trade as The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
The final result of all this, in Todd’s view, is a structural demand deficit, i.e., underconsumption:
[Free exchange] tends to introduce into each country income variations that characterize the planet in its entirety. Above all, international competition has favored a stagnation of the aggregate wage and a growth, or rather an explosion, of profits. The compression of labor wages induced by free exchange reactivates the traditional dilemma of capitalism, of which we observe today a planetary resurgence: crushed wages do not permit the absorption of a growing production. This banal phenomenon has been studied by Malthus and by Keynes in England, by the majority of socialist economists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it remains perfectly understood by unorthodox economists in the United States. [57]
“The opening of the [trade] borders, in societies obsessed by exports, leads to an expansion of a regressive mental system: a permanent and profound aspiration to reduce costs and expenses, which enters into resonance with the Malthusian demographic ambiance of the epoch.” [58] “Free exchange, when pushed to its ultimate consequences, suppresses the possibility of macroeconomic regulation.... It creates the objective conditions of a return of an archaic capitalism, and economic universe in which wages progress less quickly than productivity. Ravi Batra, nonconformist American economist, has systematically shown for most developed countries, the decoupling of wages, and thus of consumption, from productivity that result from free exchange. But, at the end of the road growth in productivity itself must fall, adjusting itself miserably to the tendential slowing of demand.” [59]
In this context, growth becomes an impossibility, and mere survival of firms becomes key. [60] This is why all the speculative money flows to the sector with any hope at all of expansion, blowing price all out of proportion with values.
The paradox is that the US remains the center of the world economy only because it is a continually dependable source of demand, only because of the current account deficit the rest of the world allows it to run.
How has this imbalance lasted for so long? Aren’t there any other sources of potential demand? What about China? It has received a lot of attention recently, because in 2002 it became the largest recipient of foreign direct investment. It is possible that China will be a major source of demand at some point in the future, but Todd thinks that, for now, “Chinese demand is a phantasm that permits the avoidance of the reality of the compression of global demand. It is, among other things, more postulated than observed. Chinese development is not the effect of a growing interior demand; it is led by an exterior demand...that of the United States, whose commercial deficit remains the most important factor of consumption dynamism on a global level.” [61] While private investors come momentarily to their senses from time to time, and lower their holdings in US assets, foreign governments pick up the slack in order to keep the game going: From the week of May 5–11, 2003:
Very recently dollar weakness has intensified. And, over the last week, the dollar has broken to new multi-year lows against the euro, Swiss franc, the Australian and Canadian dollars, and a whole host of Latin American currencies. Recently released figures from US Treasury confirm that private capital flows, as opposed to the official sector, are generating this weakness; the data demonstrates an increasing propensity by private investors abroad to sell dollar assets including U.S. equities…. Large net Treasury buying from Japan ($5.58bn) and China ($1.80bn) is consistent with our belief that the official sectors of both countries are still accumulating mountainous reserves which they have been using to prevent any natural rebalancing process from taking place in the US external account. [62]
Steven Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, makes a similar point about China developments and development in his weekly dispatches on the fundamental disequilibrium of the “US-centric global economy”: 77 percent of China’s growth in 2002 was a result of growth in exports; in 2002 there was a 22 percent increase in imports as well, but not as a result of internal consumer demand, but as a result of demand for producer goods, the better to export with:
[P]urchases of foreign-made equipment have accounted for fully 55% of the growth in total Chinese imports since 1997; chemicals make up another 20% of the total growth in imports over the past five years, whereas purchases of foreign-produced fuels and related products account for another 13%. That means fully 88% of the cumulative growth in Chinese imports over the 1997–2002 interval can be tied either to capital formation or to the fuel or feedstocks of the industrial supply chain… [T]here’s far more to China’s spectacular success than a self-contained domestic demand story.
Yes, import growth doesn’t occur without domestic demand. And many believe that China’s strong growth in imports validates the notion that the Chinese economy now rests on an increasingly solid base of domestic demand. That may be technically correct. But it’s a domestic demand that, in my view, is largely focused on the supply side of the Chinese growth equation—namely the ramp-up in new capacity and infrastructure, in conjunction with the vigor of industrial production from existing capacity. China’s import story also goes hand in hand with the dramatic emergence of an externally focused outsourcing production platform that is an obvious and important by-product of a massive surge of foreign direct investment (FDI)…. China’s FDI surge and its supply-oriented growth of imports go hand in hand—both critical ingredients in the establishment of the world’s newest manufacturing platform. [63]
So we are dealing with a worldwide crunch in demand, a worldwide tendency toward overproduction, accompanied by a tendency to deflation, the cost of which has been taken out of the hides of the working class for three decades now. Todd thinks all this can be chalked up to free trade: this “tendency to stagnation of global demand resulting from free exchange and the compression of salaries [explains] the regular fall in the rate of growth of the global economy, and of more and more frequent recessions.... [I]t is precisely the stagnation of demand on a global level that permits the United States to justify its role as regulator and predator of the ‘globalized’ economy, to assume and the revindicate the function of a Keynesian planetary state. In a restrained and depressed world economy, the propensity of the United States to consume more than it produces ends up being considered a benefit for the whole planet.” [64]
There’s an uncommon level of complexity to Todd’s otherwise rather prosaic take on slowing demand and underconsumption: he associates it to past technological progress.
From the point of view of the entrepreneur, global demand dissociates itself into two components, interior demand and exterior demand... Free exchange creates an economic universe in which the entrepreneur no longer has a sentiment to contribute, by the salaries he distributes, to the formation of a global demand at the national level. The salaries, whose aggregate at the global level is only an inaccessible abstraction, constitute from here on out a mere cost of production, and his interest is in lowering it as much as possible. Such a logical configuration creates the ideal conditions for a systematic slowing of global demand, on the basis of past gains in productivity engendered by technological progress. The context of exchange “outside the country” brings capitalism back to a primitive, pre-Keynesian stage: that of a system in which the actors no longer conceive the notion of global demand, and are totally dominated by the play of microeconomic forces. [65]
But it was ever thus—those “microeconomic forces” are the anarchy of capitalist production. What passes for conscious social action and planning, i.e., the disaster that is reequilibration, [66] lays the foundation for a boom, which then masks this anarchy in the rising tide; but it immediately begins to repeat the cycle: the buildup of fictitious capital as a result of technological progress in the new boom, which will eventually require another afterparty cleanup. His understanding of this is limited to a sort of backhanded criticism of Say’s law, [67] to say that Say’s law doesn’t apply to technologically dynamic economies because production just outstrips waged demand [68] (which is trivially true because “the consumption of the workers…is in no way in itself a satisfactory consumption for the capitalists” [69] ), but still, for Todd, demand has to be raised somehow when production increases. This is a recognition of capital’s problem of overproductivity, but from behind the rose-colored glasses of fiscal policy supports, market-making state expenditures. We still don’t know where free exchange comes from, and one might be forgiven for thinking it’s “just” an ideology.
Fictitious Capital
In any case, now we have a situation in which the United States seems to be soaking up the world’s excess production, having dutifully sacrificed itself on the altar of overproduction: the current account situation is basically one in which the rest of the world goes long the US dollar and short its own goods:
Contrary to what some archGaullists in France think, the monetary reserve role of the dollar does not guarantee the United States a purchasing power independent of the performance of its economy in exports.
But the fact remains [a quarter-century after the emergence of the commercial deficit], as we enter the third millennium, in spite of a commercial deficit never before seen in history, in the absence of a high interest rate, and in spite of a relatively higher rate of inflation than Europe or Japan, the dollar has remained strong for a long time. Because money from all over the world flows into the United States. Above all, companies, banks, institutional investors, private investors buy dollars to maintain its parity at a high level. These dollars do not serve in the context of buying consumer goods but to realize, in the United States, direct investments or to acquire values—Treasury bonds, private debt, stock.
This is the movement of financial capital that insures equilibrium of the American balance of payments: year after year...the movement of capital to the United States permits the purchase of goods sold from all over the world. If one takes account of the fact that the majority of goods sold outside a country are destined for consumption, corresponding to an indefinitely renewable demand in the short term, whereas financial capital invested in the United States corresponds mostly to investments in the middle or long term, one must recognize that there is something paradoxical, not to say structurally unstable, in this mechanism. [70]
But why the flow of money when the US is in such bad industrial shape? When foreign dollar-holders know they will never be able to liquidate those holdings into real commodity wealth made in the USA?
The dominant interpretation...affirms that money goes to be invested in the United States because the American economy is more dynamic, that it accepts risk better and proves itself more profitable... Why not? “Physical,” technological and industrial nonproductivity of an economy like the United States does not in itself indicate that its level of financial profitability is weak. To imagine, in an economy, during a substantial but limited period, the coexistence of a high level of profit of enterprise and underdevelopment of useless sectors does not pose any problem in principle. Financial activity could suffice in itself, disengaged from operational profit in the sphere of real production; but, one has seen the financial part surpass that of industry in American economic life. [71]
The reason is because the US capital markets serve as a store of value, and not as investments capable of returning an enterprise-level margin of profit. These are security-seeking hoards of money, which is why debt is such a large component of foreign investment. “Contrary to what modern neoliberal ideology suggests, true financial history evokes the pre-eminence of security imperative in the choice of the United States as the zone of placement.” [72]
So, trade-deficit dollars from around the world flow back to the United States, alongside commodities in shipping containers, seeking to preserve their value.
But why is there so much money sloshing around in the first place? [73]
Let’s adopt for a moment the point of view of the privileged, force ourselves to be myopic, interesting ourselves in their concerns, that is to say, the destiny of their profits.
The heightening of the rate of profit increases the income of the superior classes, but these revenues in no way constitute a physical reality. The mass of profits is an abstract financial aggregate, a pile of monetary signs that the owners can never use up in their own consumption. They can multiply their personnel expenses, redistribute a part of this captured income toward the base of society, by the purchase of services. This mechanism is already quite important in the United States, where the development of services is no longer a modern tertiary sector, but a return to the old mismanagement of the aristocratic societies of the past. The nobles, then wealthy, nourished long strings of dependents, employed in domestic or military tasks. The new plutocracy is attached to the services of lawyers, accountants, private security guards. The best analysts of this mechanism of redistribution remain without doubt the first English economists, like Smith, who had before their eyes, at the end of the eighteenth century, a redistribution of wealth toward the base by the massive employment of servants: “A man enriches himself by employing a multitude of workers: he impoverishes himself with a multitude of petty servants.”
But the financial masses extracted today are quite considerable. One has seen above the prodigious expansion of the fraction of American national revenue captured by the richest 20 percent, or even the richest 5 percent. To a lesser degree, this phenomenon is characteristic of all the economically globalized countries of the world. What to do with the unemployed revenue, how to conserve it? Indeed, if we pass from the fears to the hopes of the rich, how to make it grow, to reproduce and enlarge it?
Financial placement is a necessity; better, the existence of a protected and secure place for the crystallization of profits is an ontological need for capitalism. There is the state, borrower, whose role was perfectly perceived by Marx: public revenue quite early on became an instrument of financial security for the bourgeoisie. And since then there is the stock market... In the context of a world capitalism returning for some years to a savage state, the leading country of financialization, the central state of the new economic system, has a sort of competitive advantage in absorbing, with the goal of conserving and securing, the slowed world profit. [74]
Todd is fully aware of the fact that “the augmentation of the stock-market capitalization...does not represent in reality any sort of inflation of wealth. The extraction of profit inflated by revenues which will be invested in the stock market, in which there are rarely any ‘goods’ to buy, produce a heightening of their nominal value.” [75] He is also aware that these nominal values must disappear from time to time:
The activities of Enron were, from this point of view, archetypal, because they had to do with extracting profit from an intermediary operation, not directly productive; economic theory assures us that this activity ‘optimizes’ the adjustment between production and consumption. Like one dared to say before the virtual era, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In the case of Enron, it has become clear that there was nothing to eat, or at least nothing real in any case. But the Enron phenomenon has existed and contributed, for some years, to the guidance of the real economy toward nonproductivity, as it happened, toward an energetic deficit. [76]
In other words, “it is the movement of this paper which orders the organization of the ‘real economy,’ up to a point, and not the other way around.” [77]
The US economy is in decline because of industrial competition from relatively better equipped countries with newer high-tech plant than the US after WWII. US economic dominance after WWII was a result also of its monetary power; its monetary power has allowed it to avoid the immediate consequences of its industrial decline. Because it was such a “consumer society” after the war, world economies remain dependent on it as an export market. This means they also depend on the current account deficit that the United States has built up over the years: that is their export fund, and other governments will even defend it, as they are doing today. [78] Meanwhile, the dollars that sit in foreign reserves must be put into motion, lest they lose whatever value they retain. So they flow back into US government and corporate debt, saving for and staving off a rainy day that must not ever come.
Todd agrees with all this: an asymmetrical trading situation, the US as the most important consumer, the engine of global demand, the monetary features of its very specific form of imperialism, looting and the exchange, however “fair,” of unequal values, [79] free trade as the self-serving ideology of the speculative and unproductive economy, and he even knows something about fictitious capital and its manifestation in the form of huge amounts of money that have to be invested somewhere… He just doesn’t know how to explain it. He thinks it’s all just an awful policy mistake. Its lawfulness escapes him, and his concept of fictitious capital goes only so far: he does not see it as a necessary product of the business cycle and those very increasing intellectual abilities of labor power that he praises so highly in another connection. Quite simply, he just doesn’t understand the contradiction of capital, as a system in which precisely the most excellent qualities of humanity are alienated from it and turned against it in the motion of autonomous exchange value.
Whereas he wants wages to rise in tandem with productivity, that is precisely what’s impossible: improvements in productivity devalorize older fixed capital, and thereby create fictitious capital, which undermines profitability and the reproduction of the whole bourgeois world; and, meanwhile, increased labor productivity, during the business cycle, undermines its own value by making its own reproduction relatively cheaper. All things equal, real wages fall faster the faster productivity rises, and it can get even worse in the real world: the current deflation-trending economy is a textbook example: “As the Federal Reserve comes closer to deploying unconventional measures to combat the risk of deflation…. Greenspan’s acknowledgement that ‘substantial further disinflation’ constituted ‘an unwelcome development’ marks an implicit recognition that high (reported) labour productivity is not supporting profit margins, but rather feeding through into nonfinancial corporate product price deflation which is offsetting the benefits of unit labour cost deflation.” [80] In other words, improvements in productivity are lowering prices and thus profits in the real economy even faster than those same improvements are decreasing the cost of labor power! That’s where a good capitalist has to draw the line.
Pain and Circuses
Which brings us to the human form of these dynamics.
During the 100 years that followed the decisive victory over Carthage, in the course of the second Punic War, Rome extended itself rapidly throughout the Orient and made itself master of the whole Mediterranean basin. From then on it disposed over unlimited resources in land, in money, in slaves. It prevailed in the whole sphere of monetary resources and could import agricultural and manufactured goods en masse. The peasants and artisans of Italy lost their utility in this Mediterranean economy globalized by the political domination of Rome. Society polarized into an opposing pair of economically useless plebians and a predatory plutocracy.... The middle class imploded, a process that entailed the disappearance of the republic and the establishment of the empire, conforming to Aristotle’s analysis of the importance that the intermediate social categories present for the stability of a political system.
Because one could not eliminate the restive but geographically central plebians, one had to feed them and distract them, at the cost of the empire, with bread and circuses. [81]
Immediately following his discussion of the falling rate of growth in the OECD countries as a result of free exchange policies, Todd identifies another manifestation of the primary contradiction of capitalism, but of course, not as such: he spies the human form of fictitious capital, the growth of nonproductive labor that the postwar boom and growth itself entailed precisely because of the then-strong Keynesian regime of demand management:
The continual elevation of productivity imposed, of course, a redeployment of productive forces. The permanent enlargement of demand permitted [sic!] in the postwar years an easy diversion of the active population from the primary sector toward secondary and tertiary sectors. In the context of a high socially acceptable wage, the movement of labor power to zones of high from zones of stagnating productivity worked naturally. The progression of wages in new and dynamic branches permitted the emergence of new careers, new activities corresponding to one’s level of education.
The fundamental context of the redeployment of productive forces and the enlargement of consumption was the nation. In a society strongly conscious of its unity, of the solidarity of its economic actors, of the fact that the producer is also a consumer, firms did not consider the lowering of wages to be a priority. [82]
In other words, during the postwar boom, firms didn’t have to downsize, and could offer regular wage improvements. But this boom also expelled labor from the production process, out of productive employment into the secondary and tertiary sectors, which grew and produced new careers and “activities.” Todd clearly doesn’t understand the link between the phenomena he examines, which is the primary source of frustration in these otherwise hallucinogenically insightful works. Which “permits” his nostalgia for Keynesianism. Todd doesn’t see how capital can only absorb so much living labor power until book values and real values get out of whack, the rate of profit in production declines, funds start leaving production for speculation, and something has to give: whether that’s capital or labor depends on the balance of class forces, and in this case, i.e., the current world situation and the thirty-year crisis, it’s labor. The cost is assessed in diminished terms of reproduction of both body and mind, both qualitatively and quantitatively. If capital can’t use you, what difference does it make whether you went to college or not? Whether you starve in the street or know how to read? [83] “[T]he benefits per unit of investment start to drop off. At this point—that of diminishing returns—collapse is not only inevitable: it actually becomes economical.” [84]
The expulsion of labor power from production continued through the 1980s and 1990s, the time frame for most of Todd’s demographics discussion. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explore the economic history of this period—that’s a bit of convenient omission for him, because a close look at it would collapse his perspective on solutions.
Brenner summarized things well: manufacturing, the key area of productive employment, along with mining, transportation, and primary industries, has been in trouble financially for a long time, but the Plaza Accord regime, for Todd the “asphyxiation of the souche economies,” in place in 1985–95, saw a revival of exports from the United States and a short-lived industrial revival as well, in spite of employing a smaller and smaller proportion of the workforce (manufacturing employed about 15 percent of the workforce in 1990 and 12 percent in 2000). [85] But while manufacturing was debt-heavy from the early ’80s till the early ’90s, its profits have always been both important and high, making up about half of those of the nonfinancial sector. [86] “Manufacturing profitability was in fact the source of the parallel recovery of pre-tax profitability in the private economy as a whole [in 1985–95].” [87] These nonfinancial corporations continued to grow into the 1990s, by paying down a lot of the debt they took on in the 1980s (they increased it about 10 percent a year in 1980–90), and began to have a positive impact on the economic scene in the 1990s after the recession. Shortly thereafter, the Clinton Administration sabotaged this growth in service of financial interests:
Had the economy been left to its own devices, the expansion of the 1990s would have gathered force from 1993–94. But the Fed could not tolerate such economic dynamism, especially because “the economy was still picking up steam and full employment was generally thought to be achieved or to be imminent”—even though the employment rate was barely under 6 per cent! Between February 1994 and February 1995, the Fed engaged upon an ‘aggressive path of tightening monetary conditions,’ raising interest rates by a full 3 percentage points. This step interrupted the...cyclical upturn for a full year.... [88]
Just as it was getting into a good financial position, paying down its debt, increasing its growth, having a positive, though somewhat lagged impact on the broader economic scene, manufacturing had to be put in check, lest it “cause inflation,” i.e., throw off the speculators by decreasing the value of their paper, i.e., destroy fictitious values. The Plaza Accord regime also fell in 1995, and the dollar began to rise, putting a damper on exports, helping Japan and Germany to regain their footing, lest their troubles also impede the valorization of financial claims.
Whereas Todd says “between 1970 and 1990, Japan, with the aid of Germany, had partially destroyed American industry,” [89] and whereas it was the huge military-spending federal deficits that pulled the rest of the world out of recession in the early 80s, and whereas it was the rest of the world that was forced to pay for the economic revival in the United States from 1985–95 with the weak dollar, it was now the US manufacturing sector that would pay to bail out Japan and Germany, lest their worsening recessions cause one in the US just as it was getting out of the last one. Todd says: “[T]he Japanese and German economies, structurally overproductive, asymmetrical in their conception of international commerce, could not do without a growing exterior demand.” [90]
This decision of Japan, Germany, and the United States to “switch places” as Brenner puts it, was a political-economic one in the fullest meaning of that term, made at the highest levels of the world ruling class and their governments, in spite of particular national economic fundamentals, in spite of the “national context” Todd focuses on throughout his work, in spite of the fact that
by the middle of the 1990s, US corporations had significantly improved their condition compared to a decade previously largely by means of extended and brutal processes of rationalization and redistribution. Manufacturers had, over a decade and a half, engaged in wave after wave of shakeout, scrapping masses of outdated and redundant plant and equipment and ejecting tens of thousands of employees, achieving in the process substantial improvements in productiveness. They had...amplified their profits at the expense of workers by means of a decade-long freeze on the growth of real wages, and at the expense of their overseas rivals via a decade-long devaluation of the dollar [1985–95]. [91]
It’s not free trade that “causes” underconsumption and the structural demand deficit, but capitalism itself, in accord with its inherent deflationist tendency, can’t help but create such intermittent crises. Keynesianism retreats a couple decades behind the facts here. In a world crisis of overproduction the social wage—actual money prices for labor as well as infrastructure and the pool of tax revenue that goes toward things like education, pensions, healthcare, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc.—must be raided in order for capital to realize profits where there really are none, throwing Keynesianism of the New Deal sort out the window, replacing it with military Keynesianism in the ’80s, stock-market Keynesianism under the Reverse Plaza Accord regime from 1995 to 2000 (the wealth effect boosting US consumption and driving global production), what one might as well call “reverse Keynesianism”—privatization and looting of everything and anything with a tax revenue stream from the ’80s to the present—and real-estate Keynesianism (the wealth effect again) in the ’00s. Todd doesn’t see the lawfulness of the transition in government methods of “redistribution,” but he’s right to identify the prima facie phenomenon of underconsumption.
The fact remains that, while the US economic revival took place largely at the expense of its leading rivals, that it had to do so was ultimately at the cost of the US economy itself. The US recovery of the early ’90s was thus itself limited by the ever slower growth of world demand, and in particular the related intensification of international competition in manufacturing, which placed intense downward pressure on prices throughout the world economy. [92]
A Strangely Energetic Kind of Collapse [93]
It’s shoving for a nice, oceanview deck chair on the Titanic. This is capital’s zero-sum game in the current crisis period. It is a negative-sum game for labor, in which it is ejected from productive employment, sloughed off toward more nonproductive jobs than ever (the “great American jobs machine” [94] ), for which Malthusian social policies are offered, “tough choices to be made,” triage at all levels of society, crushed real wages, credit cards, official dedesegregation, the economic impossibility of having and raising children, overcapacity prisons, the growing rings of subproletarian slums in Rio and Mexico City, displaced peasants, “jobs-skills mismatch,” broken iron rice bowls, Islamism, paramilitary policing, Calcutta call centers, 50 Cent and oil war.
In that light, the peak of formal education in the United States, the height of the intellectual reproduction of the working class, was hit in 1970. [95] Things have stagnated or declined on the US education front since then, the ability to learn verbally just barely predominating among the US working class: the largest slice of the US population retains a literacy level sufficient to function, adapt, and learn, in modern society. But its second largest population slice is not able to adapt, i.e., learn new skills. Sweden, a souche country, has the highest proportion of national population functioning at a superior literacy level, the level above “able to learn.” So far as numeracy goes, the largest slice of the US population, like with literacy, can both function and adapt. The second largest, by a very small margin, is not able to learn new numerical competencies. The country with the world’s largest superior numeracy is again Sweden, but more Swedes are just able to learn and adapt than are functioning at a superior level of numeracy.
Todd thinks the USA had a chance to avoid the current disaster in working-class reproduction as late as 1980–85, because that time period was characterized by the highest-ever concentration of young people with real educational and employment opportunities, i.e., real upward mobility. [96] But it was not to be. After 1985 incomes for young people fell dramatically, and not only in the United States, [97] but also in Europe: “It is around that date [1995] that French society became aware of a phenomenon which touched a good part of the West: the relative impoverishment of the young generation. INSEE revealed in September 1996 that the living standards of youth less than 25 had fallen, between 1989 and 1994, by more than 15 percent.” [98] In Europe the crisis also took the form of underpopulation—a simple decrease in the number of young people. And of course real wages in general declined in the US, ticking up oh so slightly near the end of the 1990s boom.
This is the situation in which Newt Gingrich or Edison Schools begin to think that maybe computer technology can compensate for human intelligence, or supplement human intelligence sufficiently to continue to valorize capital. Todd thinks that’s the “optimistic” take on the possibilities, but something similar happened in England: in the 1700s it was undergoing a technological revolution and far-reaching work reorganization, marked by high labor flexibility and mobility. “The example of England shows that certain technologies can have the effect of valorizing work [sic (I think he meant capital!)] independent of the level of formation of the population.” [99] The “pessimistic” possibility is that the declining rate and quality of formation will weaken technology development because, after all, “the power of an industrial system doesn’t, in the last instance, or in the long term, depend on the stock of machinery, the accumulation of capital, but on the level of formation of the active population and on the concentration of education in the scientific and technical sector.” [100] So, like, what’s happening?
From HAL 2000 to Gordon Gekko
The most scientific diplomas ever were granted in 1985–86. Europe surpassed the issuance of such diplomas in the USA in 1989, [101] although the proportion of science diplomas relative to all diplomas began to fall in 1985. German science degrees jumped in 1989, possibly as a result of reunification. Throughout this critical period, France held a steady upward curve, Italy was virtually flat, and the UK was up till 1984, after which it began a very slightly graded descent. [102]
The lower rate of science education in the United States is a simple reflection of the declining interest of young workers and everyone else in knowing and controlling nature for purposes useful to human beings, [103] so it’s no surprise that “the acceleration of the European rhythm of production of engineers and scientists coincides with the lowering of the American capacity for formation.” [104]
Once upon a time, people had nightmares of scientists and technocrats running the world all too efficiently, the discipline of the bean-counters and rocket scientists, imposed by computers—raw material worked up into steel, concrete, and numerous twentieth-century dystopias—now finance is the peak of power, and we can never forget that Kenneth Lay was praised to the skies for his successful swindling: the rapacious chief executive, the lumpencapitalist on the hunt, trading, buying and selling, extracting income for himself, caring absolutely nothing for management, let alone management of anything remotely like “society,” if he hasn’t already armed himself with Beckerite nostrums about individuals and rational choice.
Striving Junior Emperors, False Universals and the Church of HakeemThe disinvestment and malign neglect accompanying the decline of employment in productive industries had and continues to have societywide ramifications, not the least of which is a broad reorientation toward immediate gratification and consumption—a generally extractive attitude, “selfishness,” immediate particularist interests predominating. I think this mood consolidated itself in the early 1980s, though it was certainly in the making throughout the ’70s, with the disintegration of more than a few left groups into cults and gangs (from the NCLC to the Newmanites, from SDS to the Black Panthers), the proliferation of religious cults themselves (from the Premies to the Jesus freaks to TM and the rise of Protestant fundamentalism), the “left hegemony” of the Marxist-Leninists, [105] the new black power of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, the pseudoscientific fringe of the human potential movement (from est to Scientology to ESP), resurgent scientific racism of the Herrnsteins and Jensens, [106] televangelists, prosperity teaching, multilevel marketing, the incipient backlash against feminism, postmodernism, identity politics. This is a culture of adaptation to stagnation. [107]
Then why is it so dynamic?
There are so many anodynes around—such as the constant outpouring of new technological toys—and the media is brilliantly adept at drowning the country in the kind of spectacles that keep our minds focused on the trivial and the sensational: O. J. Simpson’s trial, Princess Di’s death, Bill Clinton’s sex life, and the CNN-style infotainment that one media rebel, David Barsamian, rightly refers to as ‘nuzak.’… [I]n an odd way, the heart of our decline is, paradoxically enough, the vitality of this culture itself. American energy is quite palpable; it’s the first thing foreign visitors notice, and often admire. There is always a busyness in the air: a new film, a new scandal, a new idea to toss around (for a week), and of course, the ever-fluctuating fortunes of the Dow. [108]
There’s Britney Spears and talk shows; self-help books and Freeflow Dollar; reality TV and T.D. Jakes; Palestinian Christian faith healers and cars that go boom; Silicon Valley hucksters and San Fernando Valley porn; East Indian Reaganites and Indian casinos; H.G. Wells, Orson Welles and Roswell; and they share a lingua franca: English.
“The retraction of the relative economic power of the United States since the war is accompanied by a substantial demographic augmentation, an effect of the speed acquired by a younger population, of a less diminished fertility than in Europe and in Japan, and the revival of immigration. Add the diffusion of the English language, and this demographic weight contributes to explaining the extraordinary ideological expansion of contemporary America.” [109]
Since the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the US has opened its doors far and wide: Economically, the “return” of inequality, or, as Todd puts it elsewhere, the introduction into the advanced capitalist world of inequalities obtaining among nations in world at large, means globalization and currency flows to the United States, but socially it means increased immigration to the advanced capitalist world and the United States in particular. A friend said “You can go to America, get your citizenship, and be an American. You can’t do that in Europe.”
The Choice of Israel
Which brings us to the most interesting section of After Empire: Todd’s discussion of universalism.
First of all, inequality in the USA has reached a level inconceivable in Europe—inconceivable primarily because of the regulatory role of the European souche anthropology. When they get laid off, French workers blow up factories, acidify rivers and call a general strike; Japanese workers hold CEOs hostage for severance; and Germans write multivolume tomes. Americans blame themselves, pray on it, and move to the Sunbelt.
This ideological system rooted in liberal anthropology combines universalism and differentialism into a totality. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get rich, if you Dare to Be Great. We’re all equal before God, so don’t you judge me, but you have an equal right to your opinion, and yet…
Todd elaborates the schema I set forth far above, to specify that the “equal” treatment of siblings in the AngloSaxon anthropology is actually more an indifference, one that sounds eerily familiar: “English culture is thus characterized by a certain indefinition of the values of equality and inequality… If we remember that the anthropological model associated, a priori, anthropological structure to ideological perception, we can effectively identify in the traditional English family an indefinition corresponding to that of the ideological sphere: the brothers are different, neither equal nor unequal.” [110] But in real history, e.g., the middle ages, the English proved themselves to be sensitive to and protective of cultural difference in the case of the wars with the French and the struggles with the Scots. [111] In the real history of capitalism, the English tended to respect local customs, to establish puppet regimes, let the colonials have their ways. Live and let live, but get to the plantation on time.
This ambivalence is resolved in real history only in the United States, “a country of immigrants,” all already obviously different. “The tension between differentialism and universalism render the relations of Anglo-Saxons to the other, to foreigners, always interesting and specific: unstable.” [112] Todd’s hypothesis is that intersibling relations are the basis of social relations, so how do these immigrants relate to one another after they are Americanized?
Never mind. In the real history, first there were the English, the Indians, and the blacks, in which mix the unstable compound was crystallized into a specific pattern, apparently for all capitalist time. In Fortress New England, pre–witch trials America, it was often enough conceivable that Indians might not be wholly evil, that they might be helpful in adaptation to the wilderness. But was the English purpose to adapt to the wilderness or to build the New Jerusalem? To become half-breeds or to stand fast as pure shining beacons on the hill? In real history, this basic tension in AngloSaxon relations to the other was revealed in two competing self-perceptions: Was New England to be a New Israel or a New Canaan? [113] Canaan was already populated, and in real history, the ancient Hebrews lived generations among them, together, even sharing gods, which is why both the ancient prophets and the English Israelites railed against Baal [114] ; the New Israel, on the other hand, needs a Joshua to utterly destroy the Gibeonites, Makkedites, Libnahites, Lachishites, Eglonites, Hebronites, Debirites, Amalekites, and some Canaanites, too, just to keep it real. There was uncertainty in these early days, the other was undefined. But as with all commodities, especially labor power, capital discovers the mediating third, in the objects themselves at hand: “Certain foreigners were perceived as alike, equal, others as different, inferior. Similarity and difference, equality and inferiority, were born together by polarization. The rejection of the Indians and the blacks permitted treating Irish, Germans, Jews and Italian immigrants alike.” [115] Differentialism and universalism are united, functioning complementarily in practice via racism, a constitutive structure and sine qua non of American society.
Todd agrees with the Race Traitors: “The history of the USA can be read as an essay on the theme of a fluctuation of the limit, with a continual enlargement of the central group, from independence to 1965, after which a tendential contraction from 1965 to our time.” [116] The Hart-Celler Act brought “Third World peoples,” Asians and Caribbeans, to the United States. What could possibly be the content of a tendential contraction since then?
It has to do with the American blacks mostly, and the reinforcement of the limit of the central social group, standing firm, precisely by its expansion. “The Americans learned to integrate all the Europeans, after some notable hesitations over the status of the Irish, Italians, and Jews[,] the category ‘white’ has permitted formalizing this partial enlargement. Between 1950 and 1965, new expansion: Asians and native Indians were redefined as Americans…, a phenomenon which can be measured by their entry into the general American marriage market.” [117]
“If one wants to understand the growth and ultimate power, unfortunately, temporary, of universalism in the America of 1950 to 1965, the most authentically imperialist, one must make the economy a factor secondary to: the competition of the Soviet empire.” [118] One may disagree with that, because Southern economic development, and therefore US capital more broadly, was impeded by the drag of the Jim Crow regime on labor power development among both blacks and whites. [119] In any case, the black use of the double-V sign during and after WWII signified that they understood the contradiction in their fighting for democracy overseas while being denied it at home. The civil rights struggle is the form by which they addressed this, making the US constitution an ideal to be achieved and by which to measure the present, testing its claims to universality and equality. This rhetorical strategy informed the civil rights struggle, and combined with the antiwar movement of the 60s—from “no Vietcong ever called me nigger” to “I ain’t no senator’s son”—exploded the New Deal coalition and much else in American society. But as the later history of the fight against legal segregation reveals, it did not destroy the caste system.
As regards the school system, the most widely shared formative experience among Americans, and the primary site of working-class formation, not only was the Brown decision toothless, but it was fought every step along the way, viciously; desegregation was devolved to the states throughout the 1960s, and they generally didn’t even begin to try to enforce it till the 1970s, when the economic crisis had hit in full force, calling the white working class into action in defense of its particularist interests as suburban citizens, “middle class” taxpayers, etc. [120]
US society again “found its natural equilibrium, and thus reduced the perimeter of inclusion to ‘its’ universal.” [121]
Zion Train Is Coming Our Way [122]
The increased immigration after Hart-Celler has actually tended to reinforce this particular caste system, [123] as did the “successful” integration of the last European immigrant group, the Jews, by strengthening their identification with Israel. [124] The state of 1948 also had to choose between Canaan or Israel, and we know which path it chose. The exclusion of the Arabs there resonates with the exclusion of Indians and blacks here:In the United States, the ideological fixation on the Hebrew state is not limited to the Jewish community. The hypothesis of a general recoil of universalism permits one to understand this fixation… [T]he solidity of the link between America and Israel is new… The choice of Israel is the most visible manifestation of the recoil of American universalism, of a growth in the power of differentialism that expresses itself as much on an exterior level, by the rejection of the Arabs, as it does on the interior level, by the difficulties of integrating Mexicans or the persistent segregation of the blacks. [125]
I guess the most emblematic moments of this ideological configuration would be the Brownsville–Ocean Hill teacher’s strike, the reaction of some Jewish organizations to SNCC’s support for the Palestinians, and, in the second-time-farce category, Jesse Jackson’s troubles in Hymietown.
I would not have chosen marriage as a barometer of universalism, [126] but it certainly makes part of the case. Whereas Jews, the last integrated European immigrants, have attained a mixed marriage rate of 50 percent, and Asians one of 30 percent, in 2000, black men married outside their race at a rate of 2.3 percent if they were over 55 and at 11 percent if they are 15 to 24. “Black / white intermarriage is slightly more frequent in categories having received higher education.” [127] Black women hardly marry outside their race at all: “The augmentation for black women is almost insignificant, which suggests the persistence of a fundamental racial taboo: the women of the dominated group must not be married by the men of the dominant group.” [128] Actually it’s even lower than that, because in 1999 the Statistical Abstract decided that it would exclude Hispanic blacks and whites from these numbers, which lowered the rate of intermarriage among black women by 0.7 points, [129] which Todd suggests is made up mostly of Puerto Rican women.
The infant mortality rate makes Todd’s case as well, being “a crucial indicator because it reveals the real situation of the most fragile individuals in a society or a particular sector of a society.” [130] It is usually higher among blacks than whites, i.e., more than twice as high, but the shocking thing is that it actually grew among blacks between 1997 and 1999, from 14.2 per thousand to 14.6 per thousand. It’s 5.8 per thousand among white Americans.
One also sees the recoil of universalism in the slowly congealing third racial category of “Hispanics,” Latin Americans generally, but mostly really Mexicans. Todd thinks they are somewhat filling the place emptied by the genocide of the Native Americans, but that their position hasn’t solidified in the “American mental system.” Maybe they will be excluded from the central social group, but perhaps not, especially as entire stretches of California and Texas are now mostly Mexican.
These immigration developments describe one part, the “big The System stuff” part, of the evolution of the racist character of American society. I distinctly remember hearing people begin to talk differently about the homeless, criminals, and of course, “welfare queens” and the like: back then in the early ’80s, I chalked it up to racism, but it was larger of course; it was a whole reorientation away from the social and toward the private, toward self-aggrandizement in one’s bullshit career and denial of the existence of concerns broader than it. In everyday life one can see the culture of stagnation in the Dinesh D’Souzas, Clarence Thomases, Nation magazines, Generations X and especially Y, George Bushes, MTVs, Fox networks, Dennis Kuciniches, Jacques Chiracs, public school systems, and Gerhard Schröders—and it doesn’t even matter that there was no golden age. One sees it in the narrowing of discussion of possibility, the narrowed horizon of the potential real in “civil society”: “This zero-thought is content to throw up the inevitability of this or that which occurs. In the United States it claims the ineluctability of ultraliberalism. In France, that of a single currency and free exchange…. The central and unifying trait of zero-thought is a glorification of impotence, an active celebration of passivity.” [131] Ce qui apparaît est bon, ce qui est bon apparaît. [132] Yet and still Todd quotes Marx to the effect that this zero-thought, the thought of the ruling class, as expressed by the middle class, is also the thought of the working class. “There is no society,” thus “there is no alternative.” [133]
See, Todd is nostalgic for the trente glorieuses, the postwar boom, for bringing progress throughout the world, and especially for increasing the cultural level worldwide, but he regrets that the educational and economic progress took place within a class society, stratifying that same society and producing a “new cultural class”: “a superior stratum of the population, comprising about 20 percent. This stratum is diverse[, made up of] professors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, and some capitalists. It is welded together by its educational level, which defines its cultural style and lifestyle. Access to books, museums, trips, foreign countries.” [134] These are clearly the yuppies, the consumer class, the loft-livers, [135] the Malthusian middle class, that came to world cultural power in the early ’80s, Big Chill style; Todd would say they hit France in the late ’80s. Todd, in his idealism, thinks that they are a “cultural mass that has never existed at the height of society, whose capacity for domination is infinitely more real than that of capital.” [136] But this “stratum in which homogeneity is reinforced by simple anthropological mechanisms,” this stratum whose good intentions—“defense of moral values, hostility to the death penalty, refusal of racism, liberty of expression” [137] —pave the way for precisely those things, this stratum whose intellectual “center of gravity [is] the newsmagazines, L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Point, L’Evénement du Jeudi,” and one might add The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, magazines which, “despite an initial ideological difference, certainly at their origin on the left or the right, have today become the same thing,” this stratum made up of “elites of the right and left who are in accord in blocking any reorientation of economic policy that might lead to a reduction of inequality,” precisely in those countries in which it is theoretically possible to legislate social improvements, this stratum that is more and more directly defined “by their objective characteristics more than by their subjective self-perception” [138] —if this direct ascription by objective social position of opinion, knowledge, perceived boundaries of (no) possibility, leisure activity, etc.—if this is not capital itself as lived and expressed in “culture,” capital’s material human community, then the Beastie Boys are still cool.
Dissolving Society Zero
Whose obsession with Tibet is emblematic of the vague Third Worldist inclination of the left of this middle class. Its origin in “the emergence of new professions, new activities corresponding to their level of formation,” not only imbues it with zero-thought, but postmodern postideology corresponding to the collapse of the social body: “The postideological society is horizontally stratified, it is a world in which the superior, middle and inferior social categories no longer communicate.” [139] As the anticommunism of the short American century allowed the false universal of constitutional egalitarianism to flourish, so the collapse of society as such allows a false “difference” to flourish; the left of this middle class, “having a choice between two solidarities, opts for the group which is objectively more distant” [140] ; in France “in the cultivated classes, the combination of an egalitarian unconscious and an inegalitarian subconsciousness leads them to feel themselves in solidarity with the immigrants and detached from workers of an older French origin” [141] ; in the United States we have progressives and anarchists running amok saving the rainforests, indigenous peoples, brewing fair-trade coffee, whales, immigrant hotel workers, sweatshop workers in the Philippines—that is, doing everything but trying to understand the working class as a whole, even in one country, let alone tracing its outlines as a global totality, getting a handle on the recomposition of the past several decades.
This is almost why Todd so hates the New Left, the New Philosophers, the postmodernists. Almost: he hates them primarily for being anti–nation state. [142] He thinks it started in France in May ’68, with the inegalitarian-minded leftists’ rejection of the French Communist Party, which to Todd meant a rejection also of the masses and thus the breakthrough of an antipopular leftism. [143]
But this is the ideology of atomization during the reign of the American empire, rooted in an anthropology prone to disintegration and tolerant of extreme inequality. It’s just been pushed to the limit:
Wanting or accepting free exchange is wanting or accepting inequality. That is the inegalitarian ideological conversion of American society, rising from its new cultural stratification, which has led to the choice and persistence of trade [liberalization]. Free-exchangism is only one of the means, with the race of high incomes and the reduction of tax progressivity, by which American society has realized its new inegalitarian ideal. That is why inegalitarianism does not express itself only through free exchange, or even only through economic phenomena: the years 1963–70 constituted a turning point in the ideological history of American society. The assimiliationist egalitarian ideal exhausted itself, and the multiculturalist revindication commenced, insisting on the unsurpassable character of ethnic differences. Beyond the Melting Pot, by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which launched this theme with a comparison of Irish, Jews, Italians, blacks, and Puerto Ricans in New York, appeared in 1963. The cultural offensive against the ideal of equality preceded the affirmation of absolute free exchange.” [144]
The US has never needed special pleading for inequality, though—just inequality among whites.
Which brings us to his most glaring blindspot, a direct result of his statism: Todd’s inattention to the right. However sensitive Todd appears to be to such delicate American questions as race, in knowing how to look for them in the demographics, he doesn’t really grasp their political significance. In the United States this right, borne to power on the wave of the white backlash, has passed laws building the most reactionary state in the advanced capitalist world, slashed the constitution to shreds, done not a single thing for the unemployment victims of the recession(s), scissored a few more remaining threads in the safety net, and imposed a police state in a couple of months, and they don’t give a good goddamn about the celebration of difference. One can assume Todd’s opposition to these people, but when one reads things like “it is clear that in France the attacks against the people preceded and determined [right] populism, preceded and determined the emergence of a regressive pseudonationalism,” [145] you have to wonder what his non-pseudonationalism would look like. “I know, it seems like a paradox, but the victory of Le Pen is a perverse victory for egalitarianism. The French don’t accept it when their incomes decline or they become unemployed. Citizens of a Protestant country react wholly differently. They blame themselves. French feel mistreated and rebel. There is a revolutionary element that is very dangerous at the moment.” [146] Given that he considers Le Pen to be a perverted expression of class struggle [147] —like race riots and lynch mobs, too, I guess—it’s all too easy to imagine him saying that the “antipopular leftism” or “secular humanism” of the left of the US middle class, not the capitalist crisis, structural racism, and knee-jerk defense of parochial interests, entailed the rise of the Southern strategy, Reagan Democrats, Buchanan supporters, “new civil rights movement,” etc. While they represent the desperation of a certain segment of the working class, Todd insists that he is seeking to identify the social unit that will be able to raise claims on behalf of the human community, and this “particular” expression of class struggle destroys the class as such. We still don’t know what’s not to like on the right, and when it comes to power, it’s got enough nation-state for everybody… “To move to the worst case, can we discount the possibility of a suicidal ‘white night’ nuclear crusade led by born-again Christian ayatollahs hellbent on reasserting U.S. global military and economic hegemony? The nuclear stalemate rests entirely on the assumption that neither side wants to see the world annihilated. While the majority of born-again Christians certainly accepts this covenant with the future, can we ignore the fact that the idea of a military-messianic apocalypse lies at the very base of the Judeo-Christian tradition?” [148]
Oh well. “Such is the recent paradox of American history in that of the developed world. A strong relative regression in the economic domain accompanied by a massive augmentation in the demographic domain. But we attain here, by comparison, the precise nature of the American evolution: an extensive growth, in quantity more than in quality. That is the emergence of a new type of power: an America that more and more doesn’t have the power to draw the world into the future, but which forbids the planet to forget its existence.” [149]
And who can forget Michael Jackson, Jordan, Milken?
The Crisis Is Global
The preceding 20 pages have been to show that the social crises of the predominant souche (and perhaps communitarian) and liberal anthropologies are as intertwined as the Japanese, German, and American economies: Filtered through the various cultural-anthropological regulatory systems of the advanced capitalist sectors is the same crisis expressed qualitatively in the countries with liberal anthropology and inegalitarian ideology—declining education and employment opportunities, nonreproduction of the working class at any given cultural level—and quantitatively in countries with authoritarian anthropology and egalitarian ideology—declining numbers, physical nonreproduction of the working class. The Third World, in my opinion, continued to develop merely because it had so much further to go. Todd has stumbled upon the reality of capitalist decadence, without recognizing it.
Reflections on the Obligatory “Solutions” ChapterThe world bourgeoisie has no program. [150] A friend said “about the only thing they can agree on is to attack the working class.” With Maastricht and the euro, the primary project of European zero-thought, “it is for nothing that one has made the French population, and, as a side effect, the German population suffer, because it is evident that in the middle term the depression of interior French demand has accentuated the crisis of the German economy.” [151] That was 1998. In the meantime, “the longer the global slowdown persists, the greater the risk that the world’s largest and third-largest economies, the US and Germany, will follow Japan, the second-largest, into deflation.” [152] Marvin Harris quoted George Gilder, early Reaganite ideologist and now-broke technofuturist bubble booster [153] : “Gilder writes: ‘The first principle is that in order to move up, the poor must not only work, they must work harder than the classes above them.’ Hard-nosed capitalist roader and woolly-brained entropy freak meet each other on common ground here, each proposing to change society by offering people less rather than more for helping to solve America’s cultural crisis.” [154]
Todd holds out no hope for any movement based in the working class. “Marx was wrong about revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, because he didn’t know anthropology.” [155] According to Todd, Marx made the mistake of conflating England’s industrial revolution and immiseration and France’s revolutionary tradition into a single idealized model of the revolutionary possibilities of the world working class. [156] But seeing as how Todd spends most of these two books showing the integration of the world’s economies and outlining the impact of the crisis common to all of them, this argument seems a bit weak. What’s more persuasive is the sad fact that neither the slow grind of the working class nor the more drastic impoverishment of the youth have led to substantial revolutionary sentiment in the United States, but generally to reaction or apathy grounded in sometimes shocking ignorance. [157] It is also a fact that, historically, class struggle has been most acute during times of “rising expectations,” new or increasing skill levels, broader employment opportunities and upward mobility—i.e., successful valorization of capital, or the wide-scale introduction of new technology, as with the industrial revolution. Todd doesn’t think the right has much of a future either, but only because the aging of the souche family economies prevents a fascist solution to the social disintegration he sees as inevitable, when free trade finally pushes its way into the EU and Japan. [158]
For all of his anthropological researches—in which one might have thought he would have discovered that “the emergence of collective claims” has indeed “been historically explained” by the history of the emergence of social classes, which destroyed the primitive communities and their historical descendants to arrive at the nation-state system of the early modern era, which is now ruled by the US empire—things are really fairly simple for Todd. “The people and the nation are essentially the same thing,” [159] and “the agency of change is the nation.” [160] The state is the collective claim of the nation, conceived in familiar terms of ethnicity, culture and language, [161] and if the masses could throw the zero-thought bums out, and hire some new ones who had read the General Theory, things could be like they used to be… Maybe not in the trente glorieuses, but at least in those lovely two decades of unparalleled freedom between ’68 and ’88. [162] “What we need is thus a good European left that regulates the market and is anticapitalist in a reasonable way, which also understands that the foundation of its existence is the defense of the underprivileged. One will now talk of the identity problem and nationalism. But one should not confuse the Le Pen voters with nationalists.” [163] In Europe, this left would reimpose protectionism, perhaps of the sort recently put on the agenda in response to the US steel tariffs, but far-reaching enough to be considered a revolution in the way business is conducted. [164] It would also demolish Maastrichtian Europe, chunking the euro. [165] By far the most titillating recommendation Todd makes for such a left taking power in the United States is one recently discussed among the US ruling class, e.g., Ben Bernanke’s 2002 speech [166] proclaiming the Fed’s willingness to use “unconventional policy measures” to combat deflation: a catastrophic inflation sufficient to monetize the US foreign debt, but also laying the foundation for a fresh start in world trade by regional blocs, now freed of the parasitic demands of that mass of fictitious capital, able to develop, presumably peaceably, into a new era of universal literacy and global prosperity—la communauté humaine. [167]
It’s so nice! But Todd convicts himself by inadvertently reminding us why this didn’t work before: “The question of global demand was resolved essentially at the opening of WWII, in theory by Keynes, and in practice, unfortunately, by Hitler, who, in a couple of years, succeeded in totally eliminating unemployment by a politics of great [public] works.” [168] The “collective claim” to well-being of what is basically a national working class, cannot be enforced by that class’s “own” nation-state, let alone its “own” nation-state in the grip of its “own” desperate bourgeoisie, using that very state to repress the working class, siphon off revenues, impose taxes, and generally debilitate the living conditions and future prosperity of that national section of the world working class—it is precisely the working class’s ensnarement in the national context that has caused so much trouble—obviously in real history, and more immediately for Todd’s attempt to identify the “subject of history.” Nationalism of the sort Todd represents and promotes is actually quite dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than the zero-thinkers themselves, and he could easily end up an apologist for the most backward currents in politics.
Conclusion
Todd has put the world into his work, but after all is said and done, it’s not the world we want. Todd’s efforts to identify the subject of history he finds so sorely lacking take him up, or back, to the nation-state of the ’30s, wracked, like the nation-state of today, by a competitive world economy in which deflation threatens and overcapacity reigns, also in which, as opposed to today, competitive devaluation of currencies was the primary means of coping with the crisis. Todd wants the state without the war, the inflation without the impoverishment, Keynes without Hitler and Schacht, the labor movement without the working class, class cooperation without the coercion of the fasces, the national socialists, the no-strike pledges, the Stalins, McCarthys and Hoovers. However much Todd may want to turn back the clock, the bourgeois nation-state has no more to offer the proletariat, the last remaining ancient “tribe”—a social unit that has nothing more to sell than its labor power and ability to reproduce—than the Roman Empire had to offer the plebs, and sometimes even less; the bourgeois nation-state was the death of the gens, the household communities, the tribes and the obschina no less than the Roman Empire was finally overrun, not by the plebs, but by the Germanic gentiles: “It was not, however, their specific national qualities which rejuvenated Europe, but simply—their barbarism, their gentile constitution.” [169] There are no hordes coming from the northeast this time to rejuvenate the empire. The barbarians invade from the inside out today, and we must work toward their defeat, and for the victory of our tribe, regardless of anthropological extraction, language, ethnic constitution, to consolidate the authentic communauté humaine, defiantly rejecting the rule of oikonomia in our global household, and making Morgan right:
Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence, and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career in which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes. [170]
May 19, 2003
[1] Throughout this review, I use my own translations of everything, including the titles, so blame the American first if something is screwy.
[2] See, for example, Le Monde and Die Tageszeitung.
[3] Mark Hunter, Columbia Review of Journalism, March/April 2003. “Emmanuel Todd, author of a highly regarded book on American power called Après l’empire…remembers when American teenagers reached puberty two years before French kids, and stood a head taller. Europe had yet to recover from World War II, and the U.S. was the main force between Soviet tanks and the Eiffel Tower. Now the challenges facing the French are social, not military, and they see themselves as fitter than the merely fatter Americans. ‘We had a feeling of inferiority,’ says Todd. ‘But now, it’s the opposite. To be European today no longer means being underdeveloped.’ In many ways it means being ahead of the U.S. (as Boeing discovered in its competition with Airbus). It’s been hard for American media to get a grip on this shift, partly because a big part of the story is in soft details. Thus The Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial pages denounce Brussels as a bureaucratic anti-business nightmare—but Brussels also contains bright people from the fifteen richest countries in Europe, plus Asia Minor, North Africa, India, and mainland Asia, come to get their piece of the world’s biggest market. Their pooled energy didn’t exist a decade ago, and it is radiating into capitals like Paris. Emmanuel Todd says that if Russia or Turkey had to choose between loyalty to the U.S. and the EU, they would pick Europe in a second, because their economies are far more dependent on the Europeans.”
[4] Forgive the nomenclature, but it’s easier than saying “underdeveloped regions,” and in spite of the fact that there is one world and that several Third World countries, especially in Asia, have developed thriving economies, everyone will no doubt realize that I mean most of Africa, most of Asia, even within countries with strong economies, and most of Latin America.
[5] The former Eastern bloc, Russia’s former sphere of influence.
[6] AE, p. 26.
[7] AE, p. 31.
[8] AE, p. 26.
[9] Or, rather, imbalance of power: “To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep the tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), p. 40.
[10] Brzezinski describes these countries most broadly as the “black hole,” pp. 88–122, i.e., countries along the southern and western perimeter of the old USSR; as the countries fall into somewhat different categories in his analysis, they are described, not quite interchangeably, as inhabiting a “power vacuum,” p. 123, the “Eurasian Balkans,” pp. 123–150, and the “global zone of percolating violence,” p. 53.
[11] “Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially 'out of control' can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the mind of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.” Strategic Advisory Group, Essentials of Post–Cold War Deterrence (1995).
[12] In Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski insisted that the American empire must, of course, be maintained via military “insertion” into the “black hole,” but that the way to do it was to make Japan, p. 185, and a united Franco-German Europe, p. 71, full partners in its world endeavors, while China should be its Far Eastern regional vassal, p. 193—but alas, not. “The manner in which the United States has reacted to European reservations regarding Iraq has created the impression that some U.S. leaders confuse NATO with the Warsaw Pact. Even worse, the glee in Washington over European division regarding the U.S. position has nurtured the European penchant for conspiracy theories. Not only is the United States suspected of welcoming European disunity; some Europeans are beginning to believe that the United States, largely under the influence of those policymakers most eager for war, is actually planning a grand strategic realignment. The Atlantic alliance would be replaced by a coalition of non-European states, such as Russia, India and Israel, each with special hostility toward various parts of the Muslim world.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Why Unity Is Essential,” Washington Post, February 19, 2003, p. A29.
[13] “The name given to the collusion between parts of the Italian state, fascist terrorists and provocateurs in the 1970s,” Vittorio Longi, “Italy’s strategy of tension,” The Guardian, Friday, July 27, 2001. See Gianfranco Sanguinetti, On Terrorism and the State: The Theory and Practice of Terrorism Divulged for the First Time (B.M. Chronos, 1982; Del Terrorismo e Dello Stato, 1979): “Any secret service can invent ‘revolutionary’ initials for itself and undertake a certain number of outrages, which the press will give good publicity to, and after which, it will be easy to form a small group of naïve militants, that it will direct with the utmost ease…. From then on, the parallel services of the State find that they have, at their disposal, a perfectly efficient organism to do as they please with, composed of naïve or fanatical militants, which asks for nothing other than to be directed. The original little terrorist group, born of the mirages of its militants about the possibilities of realising an effective strategical offensive, changes strategists and becomes nothing other than a defensive appendage of the State…,” p. 58. Sounds a lot like Al Qaeda, except for the revolutionary initials.
[14] AE, p. 25.
[15] Catherine Belton, “Debate Rages on Reconstructing Iraq,” Moscow Times, Monday, April 14, 2003, p. 1: “Iraq is estimated to owe between $62 billion and $120 billion to international creditors, and up to a further $300 billion to Kuwait and other Middle Eastern states as reparations for the 1991 Gulf War. It owes about $8 billion each to France and Russia, and $4.3 billion to Germany.”
[16] David Sands, “France, Germany, Protect Iraq Ties,” Washington Times, February 20, 2003: “French, Russian and Chinese oil concessions, with an estimated top value of $38 billion, are the biggest interests in play.” US Secretary of State Colin Powell recently told Russian President Vladimir Putin that “any contracts signed between oil companies and the former government of Saddam Hussein should be respected so long as they complied with the UN sanctions regime,” Andrew Jack, Stefan Wagstyl, and Mark Turner, “Optimism on Postwar Accord With US on Iraq,” Financial Times, May 16, 2003, p. 3, but we know how many times Powell’s word has been broken by others in the Bush administration.
[17] Jefferson Morley, “Japan Talks Rearmament to Meet North Korea Threat,” Washington Post, Wednesday, May 7, 2003: “The Mainichi Daily reports that the country’s pacifist tradition now faces political challenge from within its ruling party. ‘Senior Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians have compiled a draft for a revised Constitution to fully arm Japan, but their hawkish ambition faces opposition from younger legislators and even some bigwigs within the party. “Japan should possess an army, navy, air force and other forces,” the draft proposes in a total transformation from the current Constitution that bans arming the nation.’ North Korea isn’t the only reason for the calls for rearmament. ‘The international turmoil caused by the Iraqi war’ is also a factor, the Mainichi Daily reported. One option under discussion: building a missile defense system that could intercept North Korea’s Nodong missile, the paper reports.’ ”
[18] “It is not certain that Germany and Japan can indefinitely utilize asymmetrical economic exchange to protect the unskilled part of their active population,” i.e., protect the welfare state. This theme will be further developed. EI, p. 176.
[19] Later republished as Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life (1987).
[20] AE, p. 47.
[21] The German Ideology, § 4, “The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History: Social Being and