Pressure Under Fire

Perhaps the hardest part of this blogging is coming up with clever titles. And now I have the added pressure of appearing "brilliant"! (just kidding extra dry with a splash, thanks)
Americans everywhere wishing they had stock in peanut butter companies as that product disappears from the shelves in Houston and Galveston supermarkets. Hey, what's wrong with making a little money off misery, right? Bottled water is up fifty points! And look at how on top of the situation old GW Bush is, all he needs is a practice run and he's right up to speed. I expect an invasion of Iran would go much smoother than this Iraq (remember that place our young people are fighting ,Katie Couric? ) debacle now that a few of the bugs have been worked out.

Seriously now. A truly brilliant essay by Giovanni Arrighi in the Mar/Apr. New Left Review takes a "reality based approach"to, as opposed to the delusional neo-con vision of ,"The Project for a New American Century" www.newamericancentury.org. (Some of you might remember Henry Luce's "The American Century") Titled Hegemony Unravelling Arrighi argues that "we may be seeing the terminal crisis of US hegemony", and this is before the horrible out of control spin the war in Iraq has now taken. Unintended consequenses of this disastrous policy include but are not limited to : extension of the" Viet Nam Syndrome" ( the superpower got it's ass handed to it again?) strenghtening of Irans position(oops), a trajectory in which US hegemony is eclipsed by China (East Asian holdings of US treasuries total more than 1.1 TRILLION dollars) and the related loss of the "global oil spigot, and thus over the global economy.
All and all a huge 'well done' to the Bush team!

The big question then becomes : Why would the greatest capitalist power in world history need to develop a military apparatus of unparralleled and unprecedented destructiveness? Why bomb them when we could just let them shop their way into our "sphere of influence"? To answer this ,Arrighi looks to the work of David Harvey ( The New Imperialism) and his description of capitalist imperialism consisting of an often contradictory (dialectical) fusion of the territorial logic of power ( in which the command over territory and resources constitutes the basis of the pusuit of power ie. bombs ) and the capitalist logic of power where command over economic power does the same. Bear with me. Over accumulation of capital is the critical, essential crisis of capitalism and Harvey tells us resolution lies in the "spatial fix" or the production of space in which to expand. Good Morning Viet Nam, Iraq, etc..

Another Big question: Is "over-extension" inevitable as hegemonic states attempt to maintain their position in relation to endless capital accumulation ? Or, if the US cannot manage the global economy what form of state or states can? Here we use Gramsci's definition : hegemony as the ADDITIONAL power that accrues to a dominant group by virtue of it's capacity to lead society in a direction that not only serves the dominant groups interests but is also PERCIEVED (we are going to talk more about Spectacle) by subordinate groups as serving a more general interest.

Big Problems for US: These" spatial fixes" involve interregional volatility ( Shumpeters "creative destruction") such as the de-industrialization of the American heartland. What Marx called "the annihilation of space through time" ( what was he smoking way back then?) Anyway, guess where capital is rebuilding that infrastructure, where is it creating that fix ? Exactly, China.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, bombing our way to Empire is not going so good, hence the CONTRADICTION between hegemony and unrestrained capital flows. It aint light reading, but it is fascinating.