The Bombing of Iraq:
                    A Trans-class Reading of the New World Order

by Steve Martinot

The Problem of Intelligibility

The central problem of the bombing of Iraq is its unintelligibility. It is not unintelligible as a war. All war, in some sense, is unintelligible; one group is placed in an arbitrary confrontation with others whom they don't know, so that each side will try to kill because it is, itself, being fired upon. But the bombing of Iraq was not a war; it was a one-sided technological massacre, launched from a protective, anti-septic distance. Neither will nationalism lend it intelligibility; the pilots dropped their bombs as part of an obedience procedure, and nationalist feelings emerged as an effect rather than a source. For the TV viewers, it essentially had the consumerist character of a technological trade fair. It is unintelligible as abstract destruction. Cities and towns in Iraq were razed, though the enemy was occupying Kuwait. All urban water purification and sewage disposal systems in Iraq were destroyed, as was 95% of Iraq's electric power; medical care became, and remains, practically nonexistent. In short, it was the destruction of a social infrastructure. The Red Crescent estimates 125,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, 60% of whom were children. Since the bombing, 200,000 children have died from disease and malnutrition.[1] When US troops entered Kuwait and Iraq, after 6 weeks of the most intensive bombing in history, they used plows mounted on tanks to simply bury the Iraqi trenches, turning them into mass graves for both dead and living soldiers, even those attempting to surrender. The fault was laid on Hussein's shoulders, yet he remained in power, his military sufficiently intact to suppress Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings. And economic sanctions against Iraq have continued, as if to punish its people for having been assaulted. Abstract destruction is an aporia. In some strange fashion, Hussein had not been the reason for this bombing, while the civilian population was -- which Bush tacitly affirmed by proclaiming the New World Order not at the founding of his alliance, but at the moment of bombing Baghdad.

All historical events inherit a reserve of standard explanations for their component moments. But in this case, those available seem inoperative. Bush argued that the bombing was to liberate Kuwait; but the emir is no less a dictator than Hussein, and no principle has been suggested by which to prefer one dictator over another. National sovereignty has not been an issue for the US; it has violated national sovereignty wherever it desires (Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua), and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which procedes unchecked, is quite acceptable. The bombing was not to liberate the Iraqi people from Hussein; not only does one not liberate people by killing them, but in decimating Iraq's infrastructure, the US has weakened that people, and thus strengthened Hussein. Control of oil production and distribution is always a factor in the Middle East; yet, no conflict between industrial states or oil corporations was resolved by killing a half millions civilians.

Economic interest provides no explanation. The US has become the world's leading debtor nation; yet it found it prefereable to spend inordinate sums to kill hundreds of thousands of people, without stabilizing political relations in the Middle East, rather than follow more peaceful endeavors, at less cost, that would create more positive political realignments.[2] Marxism similarly fails. It would understand these events as the hallmark of a declining empire; yet its industrial competitors and enemies also joined the "alliance," and acceeded to the assault. Furthermore, in Marxist terms, a capitalist power would be self-destructive to the extent it destroyed the very means of production (labor) it had sought to conquer and colonize; yet that is what the US did. And beyond that, Iraq was not even ideologically at odds with the US.

Immanuel Wallerstein might say that the bombing of Iraq represented a restructuring of global alliances within the capitalist world-system in the face of a current economic downturn -- a rehegemonizing moment. But the US was already the only superpower. For John Stockwell, the US is the Praetorian Guard for the multinational corporations, and to the extent it has become an economy of military production (a military-industrial complex), war is its most profound necessity. But in this case, why did the Guard need an alliance? and against what?

The Attack Sequence

Let us recontextualize it. The bombing of Iraq follows in a sequence of similar events: viz. the invasions of Grenada and Panama. Common to all three is the following: 1) overwhelming US military force was deployed against a small third world country; 2) military action was favored over negotiations, diplomacy (including "gunboat diplomacy") having been obviated or abused (rendered humiliating) by the US; 3) ideology was not a factor (even in the case of Grenada, since it occurred suddenly, without prior ideological build-up or dispute); 4) all three were self-righteous attacks upon peoples who posed no threat to the US, undertaken against the name of a demonized individual (Bernard Coard, Noriega, and Hussein); 5) all three seriously disrupted the assaulted country's social infrastructure.

If we read these attacks genealogically as signifiers, what meanings (as power relationships) do they reveal? I will briefly describe this "attack sequence" (an expression that already implies extension into an indefinite future), and then recontextualize it within a global theoretic.

Grenada. Grenada was a small Caribbean island of some 110,000 inhabitants. The US excuse for invading was the safety of some American medical students, though the murder of a socialist revolutionary (Bishop) by his former comrades, and the (Russian) construction of a military airfield, were also given as reasons. All these reasons were either false or absurd. The students were later reported to have been in no danger (except inadvertantly from the invasion); the airfield, built by a British company, was for tourist traffic; and the US does not bemoan the loss of socialist revolutionaries. In principle, the invasion could have established a staging base for invasion of Nicaragua (though in practical terms that would have meant reinforcing the airfield).[3] Thus, the invasion was only a massive military maneuver producing extreme social dislocation in a non-military country smaller than Boulder, Colorado -- an exercise more characteristic of a Lennie (in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) than of an Ahab (Moby Dick). In addition to its fraudulence, it violated international and regional treaty agreements; and media control and information censorship were administratively instituted. The invasion was presented as exotic.

Panama. In Panama, it was the rationale that was exotic. A full-scale assault, causing massive civilian death and destruction, was launched to arrest a foreign national (and president) on his own soil for violating US law. That is, the laws governing one nation (the US) were extended to include individuals not belonging to that nation. In a move without precedent, and not without contradiction, the citizens of Panama were subjected to two separate judicial systems, their own and another's. But to double a legal system dissolves legal precision, the idea of jurisdiction, the necessary boundedness without which law becomes impossible, or impermissibly arbitrary (i.e. lawless). Not even Manifest Destiny is a precedent. That imposed a US framework on Latin American sovereignty; the Panama invasion absorbed sovereignty into a US framework. The first left national boundaries intact, though hierarchically dominated; the second dissolves the concept of nation. Noriega's arrest fractured both nation and law, substituting a different transnational juridicality.

In structure, the Panama invasion is analogous to Grenada: 1) the invasion's rationale was contrived (Panama cannot be subject to US law); 2) the invasion violated the UN charter (US allegations against Noriega are covered under the jurisdiction of the World Court); 3) there was media control imposed which restricted information on the invasion's destructiveness, and shifted political focus to a valorization of its legalist pretensions; and 4) the unconscionable power deployed left a nation in chaos and several thousand civilians dead.

Iraq. The bombing of Iraq enormously explands each of these characteristics. First, it was fraudulent. Hussein's army was not the military threat the US pretended. Both it and the Iraqi economy had been drastically weakened by the Iran-Iraq war. Kuwait, which had heavily financed Iraq during that war, afterwards adopted policies inimical to Iraq's interests.[4] The US claimed neutrality when Iraq approached it concerning Kuwait, tacitly inviting Iraq to do what it felt best. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, in building its international alliance, rejecting the most obvious diplomatic solutions, making it appear as if Iraq were diplomatically intractable, and unilaterally planned its technological assault, the US comported itself as if its original claim to neutrality were an enormous "sting" operation.

Second, by building its alliance against Iraq through the UN, the US subverted that international body's basic principles; it was transformed from a peace-keeping organization into an international war-powers framework. The alliance, and its authorization through UN Security Council resolutions, were bought by means of grants, loans, and debt relief to Security Council members. It was a massive legalistic maneuver, in which the UN's jurisdiction for resolution of conflict was reconstituted as a juridical structure of intervention -- and in the case of Iraq, for the decimation of a culture. If the invasion of Panama replaced nationhood with a transnational juridicality, the bombing of Iraq transformed an arena for international negotiations into a global executive.

Third, there was massive censorship. Not only was the substance of opposition and debate on the issue suppressed, but information concerning the bombing's effect on Iraq was (and still is) so blacked out that the media had to practically invent a war to report on, using Tel Aviv scenes and missile duels. Its nature as a technological, one-sided assault was masked and replaced by the presentation of technology. And fourth, its ferocity, from its anti-septic high-tech distance, unintelligibly executed untold numbers of people, and decimated Iraq's social infrastructure.

In sum, this "attack sequence" represents a new military style for the US: massive, technologized assault for small political (non-economic) goals, performed openly yet hidden behind suppression of political issues through censorship and mendacious rationales, and accompanied by a certain transnational juridical structuring. The targets have included former friends, and evinced an indifference to social system, suggesting that the real goals lie elsewhere than in ideological issues. The disparity between means and ends introduces elements that go beyond any traditional notion of hegemony, whether the imperialist, the Marxist, or the Wallersteinian (capitalist) world-system.[5]

Reading the Text of Kuwait/Iraq

A closer look at Kuwait will suggest the nature of this transgression of tradition, and perhaps explain the US desire for a military presence in the Persian Gulf.

Kuwait's situation is unique. It controls the world's richest oil reserves, yet it earns greater revenue from industrial investments in the non-Arab world than it does from oil exports. As opposed to all other oil producing countries, lower oil prices bring Kuwait higher earnings, because industrial revenues tend to vary inversely with the price of oil. Kuwait acheived this position by becoming a banker of petrodollars. Petrodollars are US dollars spent or invested on oil and oil production outside the US. There is a continual oil-related outflow of dollars because the US is a large importer of oil, and US corporations are the main developers of oil production in the world.

Dollar outflow is a problem because it has been consistently greater than dollars returned through foreign investment and purchase of US goods (balance of payments). A dollar surplus in world money markets depresses the dollar's value. A large drop in the dollar's value internationally produces domestic (US) inflation, curtailed investment, and instability in the US debt structure. Before the Vietnam War, the value of the dollar was maintained internationally by the US gold reserve in Fort Knox. That is, dollars held by foreign banks could be redeemed for gold. Eventually, the gold reserve was depleted by military spending (foreign bases, the Cold War, and the enormous expenditures on the Vietnam war itself), creating an unsupportable balance of payments deficit, and forcing the US to abandon the gold standard (1973). The dollar's resulting loss of value was an important factor in causing a number of multinational corporations (MNCs) to turn against the war. By absorbing petrodollar surpluses, and investing them, Kuwait has helped to stabilize the value of the dollar internationally -- which is greatly in the interest of these MNCs.

Of course, the sale of US Treasury bonds overseas (particularly in the Middle East) has been the usual method for reabsorbing international dollar surpluses. But there's a political risk; a large holder of T-bonds has certain political leverage, exercised by threatening to dump the bonds and depress their value on the market. (Perhaps the massacre of Iraqis was in part to disaffect others from such an idea.) The US could forestall this by maintaining a high interest rate; but this obviated the use of lower interest rates to counteract a domestic economic downturn. Since the bombing of Iraq, the Federal Reserve Bank has seen fit to drastically lower interest rates, suggesting that perhaps the bombing did have something to do with freeing the US from foreign bond-holder leverage.

But petrodollar value could also be stabilized if a reserve commodity could be found to replace gold. And petroleum indeed suggests itself as a feasible substitute. While not as stable in value, nor as storable as gold, its necessity to all levels of industrial production gives it special status. Backing petrodollars with oil would require a financial entity that owned large oil reserves, accumulated petrodollars, and was willing to act as an investment banker, rather than an industrial entrepreneur (i.e. trade in the currency rather than the commodity). The banks of the al-Sabah family (the ruling family of Kuwait), created such an entity in the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), the financial arm of the Kuwaiti government. The KIO now underwrites investments throughout the world, using petrodollars, which it backs with Kuwait's huge oil reserves.[6] As a structural link between oil and the petrodollar, Kuwait has become essential to both US and MNC financial stability; that is, one could view Kuwaiti oilfields as having become a substitute for, or an international version of, Fort Knox. This would explain US concern with Kuwaiti oil shipments during the Iran-Iraq war, as well as the importance of reinstalling the al-Sabah family, the signatory link between that oil and the dollar (at least, temporarily) in Kuwait.

It would also explain US desire for a military presence in the Persian Gulf. Given Middle East instability, neither the US nor the multinational corporations would want to leave this new Fort Knox in others' hands. But geo-political control of these oil reserves would necessitate control of the land containing that oil itself. This would involve not only a military presence, but an obviation of prior claims (inhabitants, ownership) from that land as well. Thus, a regional military enclave would require a certain erasure of the region's social infrastructure. For this, there is an historical precedent: to settle the US west, during the 1870s, the buffalo on the great plains were slaughtered in order to starve the indigenous peoples, and thus leave the land free of former inhabitants. But, in the present case, the goal is not settlement, colonization, or the direct appropriation of wealth; rather, it is the establishment of a form of transnational corporate stability. In this respect, cost-effectiveness of the bombing operation was irrelevant.[7]

Theorizing the Multinationals

If this is the case, then it has taken some long-range planning; and indeed, theorization of these issues goes back to 1973-1976. An extensive literature has emerged on the growth, role, and political organization of the multinational corporations, much of it associated with the Trilateral Commission, which was founded in 1973, the year the US abandoned the gold standard.[8] Iconically, this moment is already connected to the bombing of Iraq; the "New World Order" that Bush proclaimed at the moment of bombing Baghdad was already a symbolic focus for these early trilateralist analysts. In 1975, Thierry de Montbrial, a member of the Trilateral Commission, wrote an article entitled "For a New World Economic Order," in which he argues that, internationally, "monetary stability is a prerequisite for economic stability."[9] In a significant way, this Trilateral (MNC) theorizing will provide a context for the attack sequence.

The Trilateral Commission was organized by Chase Manhattan Bank, the oil and computer industries, and other multinationals from Europe and Japan, to develop a strategy. At the time, the US was militarily stalemated in Vietnam -- both by the nature of guerrilla warfare, and by the force of worldwide anti-war sentiment, which permeated the US Army itself. It was evident that the old military strategy against national liberation revolution no longer worked; a new strategy was needed to preserve the "empire." In 1973, the monetary crisis led Xerox, Singer, and IBM to pressure the US government to disengage itself from Vietnam.

If, at the beginning, the Trilateral Commission did not see itself as a provisional government for the MNCs, it at least had such a notion in mind. It already recognized that the MNCs could centralize and computerize the world market for goods and finances. Manipulation of distribution (loans, imports, exports) would theoretically suffice to influence or determine the local politics of specific countries. In addition, for the MNCs, an "international assembly line" was possible; separate countries would host only specific operations in an extensive international chain. Such an assembly line would be quite beyond the control of any national economy (euphemized as "interdependence"). But transnational economy of this sort (if "international" means between nations, "transnational" means transcending nations) would necessitate some regulation or coordination of corporate entities, beyond the ambit of single nation states. For two decades, MNC theorists have explored the issue of governance with respect to first, a stable currency; second, the prevention of "trade wars;" and third, the absorption of nation states into the production process as economic factors themselves.

National Sovereignty in Question

Let us look at these issues first, as a transnational political question, and second, as an economic policy question -- and through them, return to the attack sequence. The first question is the relationship between the MNC subsidiaries and national governments -- which has put the issue of national sovereignty in question. In 1971, Raymond Vernon wrote an article whose title, "Sovereignty at Bay," has almost become a slogan for many MNC theoreticians; for them, it signified an approaching obsolescence for nationhood. (Drucker, p.18, and Bergsten, 1977) In MNC strategy, the political power sought through manipulation of imports and exports should require little more than an open market. For this reason, there has been a general attempt to establish Free Trade Zones. The "open market" is also the central demand made by the US on the ex-soviet bloc countries (and, in fact, the question of changed social system or form of ownership has remained secondary, though not unimportant).[10] Free trade has long been a mode of domination by manufacturing economies (it was used throughout the 19th century). But the fluidity provided by multinational operation calls sovereignty in question on a more fundamental level. Verticle integration (the international assembly line) gives MNCs the ability to shift production internationally, and thus determine employment levels in any country. It is also relatively secure from threats of nationalization or expropriation. If each MNC subsidiary enterprise constitutes a specific stage of an extended, dispersed process, it remains relatively meaningless to the host nation's economy and development. (Hood, p.143) In fact, it provides economic benefit only to the extent that country preserves its inclusion in the international process, beyond its dependency on external input and output, and on other enterprises in other countries. (Vernon, 1985, p.55)

In short, the economic becomes a terrain on which nation states must compete with MNCs for political control of national territory, and on which the nation state is on the defensive. If the host country turns to GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) or UNCTAD (UN Commission on Trade and Development), it is only turning to transnational bodies. The nation state essentially undergoes reduction to the status of an economic entity or adjunct of the MNC enterprise. (Solomon, 1984, p.155) Thus, sovereignty becomes fundamentally problematic; the nation and its state against each other across the hiatus between the politico-cultural and the economic.

Interestingly, Vernon disclaims any intention to raise the question of sovereignty this way, taking (ideological) issue with the other theoreticians. (Vernon, 1991) Vernon's concern was the structure by which host governments become semi-managerial or partnership participants in MNC subsidiaries. (Vernon, 1985, p.61) But if such a debate exists, concerning the economic domination or absorption of nations, it suggests a more profound conflict of direction among the MNCs. For instance, there is the question of whether GATT and UNCTAD should function as arenas for price negotiations between sovereign nations and MNCs, or as the first steps toward an MNC goverance procedure that will also dissolve sovereignty. (Hernes) In general, the European Community, the Free Trade zones, EPZs, etc. are arenas in which the globalization of economic rule is evolving.[11]

If the evolution of MNC governance becomes constitutive of a new transnational "ruling class," one could also say that nation states, as economic factors with an eroding stake in their national economies, become "proletarian" with respect to the MNCs; that is, they have nothing to offer but their labor and subordination. In effect, transnational coordination (governance) of the MNCs would mark a global restructuring that could be called "globalized (pseudo-) class relations."

The practical modes of enforcing this "class" relation have been strategized and tested. Most common-place is the tactic of "economic sanctions," used against Iraq, Yogoslavia, and (half-heartedly) South Africa, and including embargoes, loan restrictions, divestment, pricing discrimination, and financial starvation. For instance, in Nicaragua, from the beginning (1979), the Sandinistas could procure no funds through any major international financial establishment. After the election of Chomorro, in 1990, the World Bank continued to impose conditions for loans already promised at the time of the election, viz. that Nicaragua dismantle its diversified agriculture, and return to a single-crop economy (cotton). (We might note that the Reagan administration's crusade against Nicaragua also contains a juridical component. The US swept aside the World Court as a possible recourse to its aggression; and it established the principle that defense by a smaller nation against was to be considered aggression in turn. In this sense, we can add Nicaragua to the "attack sequence.")

In short, the central thematic of transnational economic strategy is civilian duress and suffering. Indeed, in the mid-70s, various investigations were undertaken by Trilateral and CIA theoreticians on the use of famine as a weapon.[12] A shortcoming of that idea was that national liberation movements (the prime concern at the end of the Vietnam War) occurred in agrarian areas, and were peasant based. Those who live close to the land grow their own food and cannot be starved by such methods, without mass uprooting of the peasant population (as in Vietnam and Guatemala). However, we have seen the development of long-term, unexplainable famines, intractable to the utmost of international "assistence:" Biafra, Ethiopia, Somalia, Bangladesh, Nicaragua. In a world united by advanced commerce and transportation, such "pockets" of starvation must necessarily involve an element of abandonment, or obstacle.[13]

The USSR is perhaps the new strategy's crowning acheivement. A post-detente project to destabilize the USSR was openly (re)proclaimed by the Reagan administration in 1981. Massive economic pressure was exerted through trade and pricing policies and military coercion, such as innovative weapons systems, the adoption of first strike strategies, harassment such as the KAL 007, etc., forcing the USSR to divert economic resources to defense. Though bureaucratically unwieldy, the USSR nevertheless had great economic reserves; yet, it could not withstand the pressure.[14] In effect, no area is immune. The destabilization of the USSR occurred with no more fanfare than did that of Nicaragua, though the cost benefit to military industry through deficit spending, and military-industrial profit, was much greater.

Hypernational Soveriegnty -- currency and cooperation

The second major issue for the MNCs is their own economic and monetary policy. At the transnational level, currency is the terrain of coherence and sovereignty, as language and boundaries are at the national. Contrarily, the traditional international currency is the dollar, a national currency, tying transnational economic stability to that of the US debt structure. The US debt structure is vulnerable from two sides: a dollar glut and debt default. For instance, if OPEC raises its prices, as it did in the 1970s, liquid funds accumulate in the Middle East (a "current account surplus"), flooding money markets and producing inflation. On the other hand, if a number of debtor nations should default to the US, whether in a concerted or coincidental manner, it could bring the US economy to a halt. A central question addressed early by Trilateralism was how to obviate this dual vulnerability -- how to bank the surpluses, and cover the deficits.

Various solutions for currency stability have been tried: dollar convertibility (the dollar itself as currency reserve), SDRs (Special Drawing Rights) at the World Bank, GATT, UNCTAD, the European Currency Unit (a European Community monetary unit), etc. (Drucker) All are attempts to evolve a transnational currency free from the vicissitudes of national economics. Each attempt has inherited an economic or political unbalance it would need to have already transcended. For instance, if the European Community, thru its ECU, finds its way to escaping dependency on the dollar, it will engender a form of transnational competition, with possible trade wars, whose central issue will be the problem of a stable international currency.

On the the question of US creditor vulnerability, the US has already acted -- in a fairly precipitate manner. During the Reagan administration, the decision was made to greatly increase the debt (through military spending, sale of bonds, etc.), and become a debtor nation. (Bergsten, 1986) This had three effects. First, it reaffirmed US military hegemony by extending the arms race, expanding military development, and "stressing the Soviet economy." (Nye, 1990) Second, it freed the US from the threat of default. Foreign default could be passing through to US creditors -- a move relatively free from reprisal for the world's only superpower. Third, it increased US leverage internationally. As the world's largest debtor, the US gains what Joseph Nye calls "the power of the debtor." As Nye puts it, "if you owe a bank $10 thousand, the bank has power over you; if you owe a bank $10 million, you have power over the bank." (Nye,1990,p.31) That is, the debt becomes a form of blackmail over creditors, through the threat of selective default. It is like an inverted protection racket; and again, there is scant recourse against the only superpower. In short, by becoming a debtor nation, the US has forged a new weapon for itself.

For trilateralists, this unilateral move by the US has been a problem; and a number of polemics have addressed the question of unilaterality in an interdependent world. Hegemony among powers is what they are trying to transcend.[15] Such a debate among MNC theoreticians, however, reveals a certain internal contradiction among the transnationals. And the dispute has extended to how monetary policy is to be made. The US hegemonists think that monetary organizations involving transnational finance (GATT, IMF, OEDC, etc.) function well for pricing and market operations, but not with respect to macroeconomic policy, which involves political (state) structure. The cooperativists think that macroeconomic policy is beyond the political jurisdiction of nation states. For instance, Davignon (a Trilateralist) claims that though European market unity is a simple idea, its details are too complicated to be left to political negotiations. (Bergsten, 1986) Instead, the MNCs themselves must work it out, relying on the several governments to engender popular support in those countries. In a word, for the trilateralists, national government becomes an adjunct to the MNCs, to their developing transnational "sovereignty."[16] That is, national cooperation is the condition for MNC rule, while for the unilateralists, an MNC structure is the condition for US hegemony.

One could surmise that the bombing of Iraq advanced the unilateralist cause to the extent the US used it to transform the UN into a hegemonic body for itself. It is perhaps of significance that, in the wake of the bombing, trilateral cooperativists remained essentially silent, while the unilateralists offered accolades.

Transnational Ruling Class Politics

However, this dispute is essentially secondary to a fundamental aspect of global politics. To the extent the MNCs represent both an obsolescence and a transformation of nationhood, a "global class" structure can be conceptualized. Both developed (imperial) and developing (colonized) nations become comparable elements in a transnational economy, members of a transnational "class." As "proletarian" loci in a global production process, each nation-state integrates ownership and labor, supervisory and administrative staff, raw material and local investment conduits; that is, it is an entire class structure, for which policy is made elsewhere. This "elsewhere" is a conformation of semi-coordinated and still semi-competitive economic entities: the MNCs as a "ruling class." But it is a ruling class that is, because "globalized," out of direct political relationship to these nation-states. As non-national entities, the MNCs form a body controlling real means of production within nations through alien juridical means of international distribution, and controlling alien means of distribution within nations through real juridical control of international production.[17]

And this ephemerality creates a certain political problem for the MNCs. A politics cannot exist unless it can be made visible in some fashion, or manifest to the people to be effected by it. The concretization of a politics' content is the function of political organization. As a global class, the MNCs face a "realization problem." MNC politics, as a politics, requires a mediation, a mode of expression. In progressively freeing themselves from any particular national territory, the MNCs attenuate their connection to state structures through which to manifest their policies. A mode of transnational governance, as a juridical structure, would provide an alternate mediation. And the character of this alternative has been an implicit concern in all MNC theoretics. In the meanwhile, they must operate through whatever existing political structures there are. At the moment, the US, as the strongest military power, would be the obvious candidate to play the role of making their politics visible. Though it is possible that the evolution of transnational governance has been hindered by US unilaterality, or self-arrogated hegemony, it is possible that the MNCs have called the US to a not dissimilar role. In either case, the attack sequence can be read as revealing the US as a mediation between MNC policy and its political concretization, a central dimension of which is the construction of a transnational juridical structure.

In that sense, the US has become a version of what John Stockwell has called the "Praetorian Guard."[18] Stockwell sees the Praetorian Guard as being the elite shock troops of the oligarchical MNCs, maintaining order among both allies and "third world" nations (and working classes) alike. The picture drawn here goes beyond that; the US also seems to be playing the role of legislator, Attorney General, executioner of political policy, as well as enforcer in a globalized structure. If we use the notions of class in describing this structure, it is only as an analogy, since a literal notion of class would not pertain to nations constituting a "globalized" trans-class, each of which containing its own class structure. But the analogy will perhaps be helpful in understanding the stratification of the global economy in whose interstice the US would operate as Praetorian Guard.

This structure differs markedly from the world-system described by Wallerstein. This is not the place for the careful critique that Wallerstein deserves, but a few notes are perhaps warranted.[19] For Wallerstein, production of whatever sort must be understood as capitalist to the extent it participates in the world capitalist market; and all forms of labor exploitation (slavery, serfdom, wage labor, and even socialized production) are only different forms of structuring and coercing labor within that global market. Labor disparities are not such that they cannot be mapped according to different structures, divisions of labor, and developments in production units. States function to influence or maintain certain forms of labor exploitation, and preserve certain hegemonic interests within its national boundaries. Thus, there is one global market, with a multiplicity of state structures. Profit maximization remains the driving force for reapportionment and rehegemonization of this global system; and global profitability obeys a three-level economic cycle: (1) a long-term (systemic) rise and fall, in the course of which capitalism exhausts its possibilities; (2) an intermediate (expansion and recession) cycle; and (3) short term (minor or local) fluctuations. Forms of governance (such as colonialism, or MNC hegemony), and alliances (e.g. the Cold War blocs) are but tactical moments for profit maximization within these overarching cycles.

In light of the foregoing discussion, Wallerstein's appears to be too traditional a view, over-relying on classical notions of enterprise and nation. Wallerstein preserves the Marxian notion that no productive form disappears until it has consummated itself. His tri-level extension of capital cyclicity suggests a rough adaptation of Dow Theory to the capitalist world-system. His few passing references to trilateral theory suggest he does not take into account the restructuring of the global market implied by an international assembly line, nor the non-national centralization of international trade and finances the MNCs make possible. Wallerstein would suggest that, in bombing Iraq, the US was following its hegemonic interests in unilateral competition with Europe and Japan. He projects an evolving post-Cold War rearrangement or realliance of the major industrial powers into Atlantic (Paris-Bonn-Moscow) and Pacific (Washington-Tokyo-Beijing) blocs. But in a world of national alliances, grounded in traditional forms of competitiveness, the heavy shift by the US economy to military production (tending toward a "one-crop" economy) would be self-defeating, or non-competitive. His view would also imply that the US became a debtor nation not by decision, but by default. On the other hand, in a Praetorian Guard framework, a military economy makes perfect "career-oriented" sense.[20] And the bombing of Iraq relates more to a notion of Praetorian Guard, than to one of cost effectiveness.

An Historical Contextualization

Having contextualized the attack sequence within MNC theorezation, and arriving at a concept of transformed trans-class relations, two questions need to be addressed: the first is whether there is historical justification for the concept of transformed, or constructed class relation, even if trans-class or globalized; and the second is whether it makes sense in terms of domestic US developments.

"Historical justification" would mean a certain historical precedent in terms of which the issue in question is given more than hypothetical possibility -- that authorizes the terms of the hypothesis beyond itself. And if the issue is a transformation of class relations, perhpas the first place to turn should be Marxism, which has been the predominant discourse about colonial domination and class opposition. But Marxism no longer seems to offer the historicization needed. The MNC politics in question are nothing less than a constructed supercession or transcendence of class relations by a structure only analogous to class, which escapes the Marxist concept precisely because it is a construction. For Marx, social structure produces social consciousness; here, consciousness becomes determining, building its social existence through a use of power that in important ways countermand the ethos of the social structure from which it emerged.[21]

Marxism has shown itself to be a powerful social critique (against capitalist exploitation); but this power perhaps works against it as soon as its limitations have been surpassed.[22] We might mention three aspects of this here. First, Marxism's project centers the idea that description and articulation of the reality of class exploitation will be sufficient for class consciousness to become an organizable political force. However, historically, political fractures and fissures beset the working class, which marked different choices of self-awareness under similar economic conditions, posing a theoretical problem for Marxism: viz. how to give the working class a being it was already thought to have.[23] Theoretically, class consciousness is a material force because emergent from class being, while historically, class being seems to emerge from class consciousness. That is, class consciousness becomes the ground for a description of exploitation; or, in other words, economic class is engendered by political relations at the same time that economic power emerges as a concomitant of class hierarchy. But to the extent political relations are discursive and ideologically constructed, Marxism loses its materialist foundation to discursive being -- the base-superstructure dichotomy becomes non-dialectical because engendered by incommensurable positivities. The strength of Marxist insistence on the priority of class leads it to subordinate ethnic and cultural being, and reduce the multiplicity of oppressions upon which capitalism had arisen (gender-based divisions of labor, race and ethnos-based stratification of working populations, the urban-rural hierarchy that produced the first proletarianizations of peasants in 16th century England)[24] -- chauvinist exclusions that mark the birth place of the working class, conditioning class being itseslf. This also explains Marxist messianism; the divisions and sectarianisms that reveal advocacy of working class interest to be in reality its constitution, the construction of class being.

Second, on the material or concrete plane, oligopoly has superseded the quantitative Marxian categories which ground the class struggle. In the market operation of oligopoly (from which the MNCs emerged), the law of supply and demand fails. When market demand falls, prices rise to maintain a constant profit profile; or when stock prices fall, prices rise to restore them through an improved profit profile. In other words, within certain limits, oligopolist corporate operation can commandeer the market. But if price structure becomes independent, then the link between value and price is broken, and surplus value becomes an arbitrary (or ideological) designation; exploitation, periodic crisis, the falling rate of profit, and the tendency of rates of exploitation to increase cease to have material meaning; they become derived moments of an oppositional discourse.

What supplants them is a consumerism (oligopoly's concomitant) that both ignores and valorizes price. That is, consumerism valorizes price by depending on wage levels sufficiently above subsistence to support consumerist behavior, yet ignores it through a highly extended credit system (a parasitism on the future). Both are made possible through high technologization and control of third world resources (cheap labor and raw materials, an extended market, and a high rate of profit). Not only is exploitation de-quantified, but the metropolitan working class is dis-qualified through its participation in the exploitation of third world nations. Proletarian internationalism is not only reduced to the ideological level that ignorws this equivocal participation, it marks an actual deletion of the colonial experience as being a cultural ground for anti-colonial politics. In effect, the Marxian theoretic of class tacitly participates in real forms of oppression. Against the rhetoric of a free market posed by oligopolist destruction of cultures and social infrastructures, the articulation of exploitation no longer makes oppositional sense.[25]

Third, Marxism's very humanism becomes a blinder; in fact, it is in terms of Marxian humanism that the bombing of Iraq is unintelligible. One of Marxism's central tenets is that the capitalist class cannot live without the working class it has brought into existence to work for it. Marxism was an ideology of hope for the exploited not only in its revolutionary ethos but in the notion that capitalism's continued existence necessarily guaranteed the survival of a working class. Rebellion was possible; it didn't jeopardize everything. But as soon as the ruling class shows itself willing to decimate or destroy the working classes (as in El Salvador, Guatemala and Iraq), as soon as capitalism makes class death (beyond mass death) one of its technical, and technological products (a commodification of its political rule), it escapes Marxist intelligibility.[26]

The Transformations of Class Relations

This restructured political economy can perhaps be historicized at the very point where Marxism first confronted the necessity of reanalysis, an earlier transformation of class relations. This first instance can be marked by the date 1945, as a nodal point. Let us look at this earlier instance briefly.

Certainly, the 19th century, the period of primary industrialization, consolidation of modern nationhood and birth of industrial unionism, constitutes the "classical period" of capitalism and working class struggle. Though internationalism was ideologically invoked (because capital had international scope), class politics (which is what class relations are) resided on a national terrain. Marxist revolutionary program has never transcended its original orientation to power on a national level. Similarly, capitalist counterrevolution (against the Russian, German, and Hungarian Revolution) were to re-establish national bourgeoisies. Even the domino theory gives primacy to national boundaries.

After the Second World War, opposition to capitalist rule became internationalized, a shift from industrial class struggle to national liberation revolution. The primary moment of this shift was the fact that the US was the only industrial country to emerge unscathed from the war. It thus inherited hegemony over the world's former empires. Three things followed from this. First, imperialist rivalry came to a (temporary) halt. Colonial areas no longer needed to be defended from competitors. Local (comprador) self-government became a more cost-effective structure for colonial governance than direct administration, controllable through investment, trade, and military treaties.[27] Second, the increased profit from third world economic exploitation was then used to raise metropolitan wage and salary levels, support governmental social welfare programs, and generally buy social peace. In particular, capital acceeded to union practices while legislatively confining them to the economic sphere; and working class militancy was held in check through consumerism and Cold War anti-communism. In other words, exploitation of the industrial working class to support colonial administration was transformed into exploitation of colonial classes to support administration of industrial workers.

Third, to consolidate its hegemony, the US faced two political necessities: 1) defeat of anti-colonial movements seeking economic as well as political autonomy and democracy; and 2) obstruction of Third World industrialization and economic diversification. That is, it sought to maintain Third World nations in a "proletarianized" situation, having nothing to sell but their labor and resources. Thus, though exploitation of third world working classes by the industrial metropole was rendered indirect, the relations between these nations came to embody a form of internationalized class relation ("internationalized" because it occurs between nations, rather than "globalized" as transcending and encompassing nations). The immediate effect was national liberation revolution.[28]

One concomitant of internationalizing class relations was that traditional working class organization in the industrial countries became increasingly ineffective. Unions were embraced to the extent that they accepted an apolitical economic role; they were then outflanked by industry's internationalized fluidity (runaway shops, EPZs, etc.). Rank and file trade union movements revealed that trade union militancy had to "liberate" itself from union bureaucracy in order to carry on trade union struggle. Efforts to organize a third party, or labor party, could offer no real grasp of foreign policy (colonialist) issues without becoming either ideologically alienated (through national liberation solidarity) or conservative (through its absence). While imperialist relations spawned a new nationalist rhetoric ideologizing the US empire, internationalist working class opposition found itself isolated and marginalized, precisely at the "point of production". Nevertheless, the internationalism of class politics -- the formation of East Europe as a "socialist camp," the Chinese Revolution, the national liberation revolutions of Algeria, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Chile, Vietnam, etc. -- consumed political thinking in the metropole. Yet, the rejuvenation of Marxist ideas during the 60s found itself stymied, only able to proclaim solidarity with national liberation movements, without a means of direct participation. Revolutionary class consciousness remained beyond reach, to be eventually housed in university humanities programs. Nothing reveals this better than the May '68 strike in France; 17 million workers struck, making it the largest general strike in history; yet it produced no significant transformation in political relationships.

Another concomitant, however, is that movements of a liberational character (civil rights, black power, women's liberation, chicano and Native American consciousness and community) gained ascendency in the US, overshadowing the politics of class struggle. For them, the internationalization of oppositional struggle as a real political basis.[29]

A transformation of class relations does not occur for nothing. In both instances (1945 and 1973), counter-revolutionary force was failing, and the dominant power found itself losing its struggle. The transformations occurred in order to outflank revolutionary force with a superseding form of dominance. In the first case, prior to the Second World War, capitalism had already lost its advantage. The Russian Revolution had focused opposition, even if only through a mythology or self-deception. The Depression confronted capitalism with both its own economic weakness, and the necessity to confront mass industrial unions led by radicals. After the war, powerful Communist movements emerged from anti-Nazi resistence. It is possible that the first steps toward transforming the imperialist modus operandi involving post-war hegemony and the atom bomb were opportunistic -- a way to buy time. Nevertheless, the Cold War provided an ideal rhetoric and animus for internationalization, and super-profits provided the means.

In the second case, after the Vietnam War, imperialism again found itself failing. If it was imminently able to balance power with a consolidated Soviet bloc, it was not able to suppress national liberation revolutions. Protracted conflict, the variability in modes of popular struggle (very different in Vietnam, China, Cuba, Algeria, or Angola), outflanked repressive strategies; indeed, popular creativity neutralized professional armies. Neither positional warfare nor nuclear weaponry were non-self-defeating -- in part, because hegemony required that the US preserve what it was hegemonic over, as well as take account of world-wide revulsion to certain forms of suppression in the wake of the Nazi experience and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the list of anti-colonial victories lengthened, and national liberation ideology reverberated inside the US (minority community self-identification as internal colonies; the anti-war movement,etc.), counter-revolutionary force became more socially and economically injurious to the US.[30] This is the situation the MNCs sought to circumvent in 1973, with the founding of the Trilateral Commission.

The idea that "ruling class" structures and forms of domination can be programmatically changed is far from insignificant. If the categories of surplus value, profit, and organic composition of capital no longer ground the political relationship between the ruling class and the productive forces, the Marxist reliance on "objective reality" is no longer tenable. But if consciousness becomes a determining factor in this way, then neither is the Wallersteinian notion that a global market ultimately capitalizes all production, nor the trilateral notion itself that centralization and computerization of the world markets would necessarily defend its empire. There are discourses whose articulation constitute their claims to hegemony, and which, at the same time, constitute existential political positions between which no non-arbitrary priority can be given. If to change class relations means to change their content, then all arenas of political activity, thought, and conflict become transmuted as well. This also implies that no one is trapped in the system; the "ruling class" bears responsibility for its injustices, as do the acquiescent for their acquiescence. If the "subject" of history can change the historical circumstances that define it, then it renders itself the only socio-economic force to which it is itself subject.

Inside the Praetorian Guard

In the US itself, certain issues relevant to a Praetorian Guard role have become critical; in particular, a focus on military production, and the transformation from creditor to debtor nation. These have a logic concerning political structure, and representation far beyond themselves, which I will outline.

Originally, military spending (for the most part legitimized by the Cold War) was an important part of a Keynesian strategy whereby that government intervenes as an artificial consumer to increase aggregate demand and mitigate economic fluctuation. There are political "side effects" to this, because its artificiality extends beyond strategy. Military spending is the purchase of something of a political (discursive) nature. The government cannot merely purchase military goods and services; it must create (and constantly recreate) a political demand, a military rationale. Thus, possible war, and public support for it, must be generated to support the expenditure of public funds. It is consumption as aporia: military spending produces a state artifically at (potential or undeclared) war, in order to establish economic tranquillity.

Second, state security requires the government to maintain control over all military material; that is, it cannot merely remain a consumer. It must also become the supplier that meets this demand. It transforms itself into an entire complex economic (military-industrial) process, a "market" in itself coordinating supply and demand, a vertically integrated, though politically invented, economic process. In a sense, it puts an end to its role as government, since governing political affairs becomes ancillary to its self-referential economic performance.

Third, when non-military (multinational) industry moves to areas of lower labor cost, military production remains behind, becoming predominant by default. At present, approximately 50% of the US economy is associated with either military production, or the maintainance of military agencies. Originally a buttress, the military becomes the essence of the economy -- an economy in need of invented political rationale. In effect, the system (economy) that produced multinational corporations has been reduced by them to their military department.

But in a transnational system of dominance, traditional war is no longer relevant. War between nations is not of interest to the MNCs, any more than a factory owner is interested in fistfights among his workers. Of importance now is a country's compliance to supra-national policy, which implies maintaining an open market through which internal politics can be influenced. It is untraditional, racialized or nationalist civil war, that seems to have a new bearing or political significance, as in Lebanon and Yugoslavia (the fact that "nationalist civil war" is not an oxymoron is part of the obsolescence of nationhood). The principle effect of these dragged out, wholly destructive conflicts is social demoralization, the crushing of any sense of social coherence or cultural autonomy, as was seen in Nicaragua. The destruction of the Iraqi social infrastructure and the US's neutral stance toward Hussein's suppression of the Kurd and Shi'ite uprisings marked by further civilian death and destabilization, furthre exemplify this principle. In the absence of cultural autonomy, an area becomes nothing but a market -- to be tantalized and deprived into conformity; a process in which the US is engaged not as a state, but as an agent.

What domestic political ramifications emerge from this? Expansion of the national debt is one -- an aspect of US international power for which the size of the debt has become in principle immaterial.[31] the question this raises, of course, is what purpose is served by the wholesale destruction of social welfare programs, and the rollback of union contracts, characteristic of the Reagan era? If the deficit is of benefit, why could the government not stretch it a little further, and maintain these programs, and hence the internal peace they enhance. But the social welfare programs belong to a former mode of class relations. They have not been dismantled as much as they have been transplanted. A reduction of health, education, insurance, and welfare programs has only occurred in civilian society; within the military, the opposite has happened. The military now offers what is being refused civilians. That is, the welfare programs signify an actual social restructuring -- the Praetorian Guard structures itself for its global role.

Such a transformation could occur only if the ethos of political representation had already become obsolete, an empty rhetoric. Prior to the bombing of Baghdad, the polls indicated a majority in opposition to military action, supporting sanctions or negotiations instead. Nevertheless, Congress voted war powers, and wholly acquiesced in support, as the bombardment began. Popular sentiment had been ignored, and Congress reduced to a rubber stamp.

This reduction of representation is reflected by the polls themselves. First, if the polls do not represent popular sentiment to its political representatives, then they must be addressed to the public itself. The polls then function as conduits of opinion to the people, rather than to the government, to inform the public who it is. Second, the opinion reflected is already emptied of content, because the poll only represents degrees of agreement or disagreement with a preestablished proposition, leaving out a person's thinking that had led to the opinion expressed. Whether valid or not, truthful or not, invented or not, ceases to matter in its form as raw data. Third, the polls address a passive mass of opinion, pretend that the passive mass is active, and by presenting it as a mass of opinion, render it more passive than ever. In effect, they create opinion by transforming opinion into a quantized, manufactured majority. The polls remove people from the scene of politics by substituting themselves for politics and political thinking, for political representation itself. As such, the polls constitute a form of disrepresentation. Even those supporting the bombing of Iraq were disrepresented. They were presented with a war they did not call, and did not get to call. All they could do was shift their opinions to coincide with an accomplished fact, with those who had acted without them, and see themselves reflected in the polls. Rather than the government representing them, they were the one's who represented the government.

The media blackout carried this negative ethos to a higher level. Representation can exist only if the people represented are politically aware and knowledgeable, only if they have, or are, something to be represented. Not only have the people been called upon to do the representing, but they are not told of what. The war was to be accepted on faith. The gap that opens between the social and the political when this happens leaves representation a dead issue.

Ultimately, disrepresentation creates a society that acts in contradiction to itself; people go to the election booth to obtain a piece of their own being, and pay for it by becoming a representation of the system whose symbol is that election booth. Elections become a form of consumerism, a dimension of atomization, a de-culturation. Since economic relations have been shifted elsewhere, and one cannot vote for or against the economic role the government has become, the election has been emptied of meaning. In becoming an economic entity, in ceasing to be political representation, the government ends only representing the military, while exercising managerial functions over the non-military, over civilian life.

In short, the economic structure of the US blocks access to politics, which is now internationalized; and the political structure of the US blocks access to economic force, which has been globalized. Political power no longer has to make economic sense; it is economics that is distorted to make political sense. All (potential) popular political power (whether of a labor movement, or any other) has been displaced: on the one hand, to the extent workers seek to confront political power, they will be met with economic control that is elsewhere; and on the other, to the extent they seek to confront economic control, they will find themselves confronting political power that is similarly elsewhere. Workers' growing inability to defend their unions, to carry on concerted struggles, exemplifies this as a form of annihilation, a common bond between the air traffic controllers of the US and the people of Iraq.

There is an Achilles heel to this Praetorian Guard, and that is the fact that the US is a multicultural society. But the socio-politics of that question are vast, and will require a subsequent essay.

Endnotes

1 - The Jourdanian Press Agency, and the Red Crescent (the Islamic counterpart to the Red Cross), both estimated in March, 1991, immediately after the bombing, that at least 125,000 civilians were killed. The US has estimated 150,000 Iraqi troops were killed. UNICEF, WHO, and the Red Cross all issued reports in April and May, 1991, warning that the lives of millions of Iraqis, mostly children, were in immediate jeapordy from famine, epidemic, and collapse of the social infrastructure. The report on child mortality in the subsequent year is from a documentary film, released in March, 1992 ("A Just War?", dir. and prod. by Maj Wechselmann and Stefan Hedqvist, 1992).

2 - The most general estimate of the cost of the war is $100 billion, including funds used to build the alliance, such as the $7 billion in Egyptian debt forgiven for their allegiance, and another $7 billion in foreign aid to the Societ Union. (SF Chronicle, 4/26/91) The money spent building the alliance against Iraq, either directly or through cancelling debts, added to the military expense of the assault, would have been more than enough to pay off Iraq's (Iranian) war debt, and buy Iraqi compliance with western policy.

3 - Conversion of the airfield to military strength was begun, but rendered unnecessary for use against Nicaragua by blockade, financial starvation, and Contra military terror against Nicaragua directly. 

4 - Basically, Kuwait lowered oil prices, against OPEC decision, and with certain US complicity, demanding immediate payment of the debt (made impossible for Iraq by lowered oil prices). It also engaged in drilling diagonally under the border into Iraqi oil fields, using American assistence and technology.

Hussein's main role (as a strong man in the region) had been as a buffer in the Middle East balance of power. On this point, see Ahmad Chalabi (a London banker); Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1991.

For documentation and analysis of this entire process, see The Gulf War Reader; Mikah Sifry and Chris Cerf, eds. (New York: Random House, 1991).

5 - Central to Wallerstein's notion of "world-system" is a world capitalist market, which is indifferent to social structure. Wallerstein describes a three-tiered structure which operates as a stable power hierarchies, in which a middle stratum mediates between dominating and dominated groups. This middle stratum participates in exploitation of the bottom level, but is also exploited by the top. Examples of this structure include the role of the middle class in capitalist society, the participation of the metropolitan industrial working class in imperialist exploitation of third world nations, and the operation of semi- industrialized nations between the "core" industrial nations and the underdeveloped ("peripheral") third world countries. Though Wallerstein broadens and enriches the notion of class with respect to different systems, and in terms of national or geo-political particularities, his sense of how capitalism operates as a world system remains fairly traditional.

Wallerstein, Immanuel; The Capitalist World Economy (1979), and The Politics of World-economy (1984) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press). 

6 - Peter Dale Scott, SF Chronicle, 1/2/91, p. C1.

7 - The two major descriptive works on the multinationals, and the Trilateral Commission, are: Holly Sklar (ed); Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management; South End Press, Boston, 1980; and Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller; Global Reach: the Power of the Multinational Corporations; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974.

8 - I will mention a few works in this literature as a way of indicating certain authors and discursive terrains.

Bergsten, C. Fred; Conditions for Partnership; with Etienne Davignon, and Isamu Miyazaki (New York: Trilat. Comm.,1986); Managing International Economic Interdependence (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1977); Toward an New International Economic Order (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1975); and The Future of International Economic Order (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1973).

Drucker, Peter; Toward the Next Economics (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1981).

Hernes, Helga; Multinational Corporations (Detroit: Gale Research, 1977).

Hood, Neil, and Stephen Young; The Economics of Multinational Enterprises (London: Longman, 1979).

Nye, Joseph; Bound to Lead (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1990); and Lessons from the Gulf War; Washington Quarterly, vol 15(1): 57-74, Winter 1992.

Solomon, Lewis D.; Multinational Corporations and the Emerging World Order (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1984).

Spero, Joan Edelman; The Politics of International Economic Relations (New York: St. Martin's, 1990).

Vernon, Raymond; Exploring the Global Economy (Univ. Press of Amer., 1985); and Sovereignty at Bay: 20 years later; in Millenium-Journal, Summer 1991, vol 20(2):191-195.

Ushiba, Nobuhiko; with Graham Allison, and Thierry de Montbrial; Sharing International Responsibilities Among Trilateral Countries (New York: Trilateral Commission, 1983).

References to these works will be given in parentheses in the text. 

9 - Foreign Affairs, vol 54(1), Oct. 1975. Montbrial was a French economic theorist for the Trilateral Commission, one of its charter members.

10 - In this regard, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin is clearly preferable to the MNCs -- the stock market varies equally with either career -- though each represents a different program for social organization in Russia. The important item they agree on, which has endeared both of them, is opening the Russian market.

11 - A conocmitant point was made by the Soviet theoretician, Buzuev, within a classical Soviet view of imperialism. During the Cold War, the US provided military assistance to other countries, and using its self-arrogated status as guardian against the Soviet menace to abrogate others' sovereignty, tied them to certain technologies. With the end of the cold war, a different replacement policy was needed; at the same time the MNCs have made such an approach possible with respect to developed nations as well. The MNCs have simply generalized a situation the US created in playing all capitalist nations against the Soviet bloc. See Buzuev; The Transnational Corporations and Militarism; trans. Jane Sayer (Moscow, Progress Publ.,1985) p. 203.

The strategy of the multinational corporations, embodied in the Trilateral Commission, is suggested in many articles of the mid-70s. See, for instance, Peter Drucker; "The Multinational Corporations in World Politics;" Foreign Affairs, vol 53(1), Oct. 1974. C. Fred Bergsten; "The Threat from the Third World;" Foreign Policy, no. 11, Sum. 1973. Raymond Vernon; "Does Society Also Profit?" Foreign Policy, no. 13, Win. 1974. Vernon claims, in fact, that one benefit of the multinational corporations as a phenomenon is precisely the "undermining of the nation state system." Somehow, this does not contradict the notion of sovereignty for him. 

12 - Emma Rothschild; "Food Politics," in Foreign Affairs, vol 54(2), Jan. 1976. She makes particular reference to a CIA study, published by the Office of Political Research, "The Potential of Trends in World Population, Food Production, and Climate;" OPR 401, Aug. 1974.

13 - This includes cultural and intellectual starvation. The domestic concomitant of centralization and computerization of the world markets has been media control and manufactured consent. In the US, about 85% of all newspapers, mass audience magazines, radio and TV stations, are now owned by 14 corporations. (cf. Noam Chomsky; The Manufacture of Consent; South End Press.)

14 - Sean Gervasi; "The Destabilization of the Soviet Union," in Covert Action, no. 35 (Fall, 1990). Joseph Nye, a MNC theoretician, gloats over the same fact. (Nye, 1990)

15 - There is an equalization process inherent in MNC growth. The larger the corporation, the more it balances its operation between home and other host countries. This diminishes the economic weight of the industrial nation, and increases that of the developing nations as a whole -- what trilateral theoreticians call a balancing of relative "benefit" to these countries. (Spero, 1990) Thus, the MNCs, which emerge from the very hierarchy between developed and undeveloped countries, operate to level that hierarchy. (Bergsten, 1986) For Bergsten, this signifies that the real power in the contemporary world lies elsewhere than in particular nations. 

16 - Taylor points out that as the MNCs get larger, they cease to view the world as an environment of objects whose aggregate they can control, but rather as a population of organizations (nations, corporations, state-owned emterprises, unions, blocs, cultures, etc.) to effect. This is what he calls the "structural contingency model"; the MNCs measure themselves not by their efficiency in production, but in their effectiveness in interacting with this population of organizations, or reorganizing it in conformity to MNC interests. That is, profit maximization is no longer of primary concern. See Taylor, Michael, and Nigel Thrift; The Multinational Corporations and the Restructuring of the World Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1986).

17 - One could almost postulate that this ephemerality is a factor in the rise of religious fundamentalism over the last 15 years. People throughout the world now confront forces that act from a great ontological distance, remaining invisible and presenting themselves only through proxies, a configuration characteristic of religious divinity.

18 - John Stockwell; The Praetorian Guard (Boston: South End, 1991).

19 - For a general overview of Wallerstein's thinking, see references given in note 5 above; also see World-Systems Analysis (with Terence Hopkins, Robert Bach, Chistopher Chase-Dunn, and Ramkrishna Mukherjee) (Beverly Hills: Sage Publ., 1982), a general presentation of Wallerstein's methodology and outlook; and Geopolitics and Geoculture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). 

20 - William Ebenstein; The Nazi State (New York, 1943), has presented an interesting description of the permanent war economy. It three central characteristics are: 1) the economy is directed toward striking power; 2) It is netierh capitalist nor socialist, since the over-riding interest is neither profit nor social welfare, but the power and sanctity of the state; and 3) any sacrifice or people or wealth, or the destruction of others, will be committed to preserve the state and increase its striking power. Though the Nazi economy had been distorted by Nazi policies, and differed from the US in itsfinancing from contemporary corporate operation, Ebenstein's description does not depend on that as much as on certain centralized paradigmatic political decisions.

21 - Marx, Karl; The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon; trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (N.Y.: International Publ, 1985). Ebenstein (op.cit) points out that for the permanent war economy, economic sacrifice, the destruction of welfare, and the ignoring of cost effectiveness, are all concomitants.

22 - There has, of course, been extensive debate on contemporary Marxism, and attempts to redefine its categories to fit modern conditions -- more than can be given adequate attention here. The spectrum runs from Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, an attempt to rearticulate monopoly economic process, through Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, centering on consumerism, to E.P. Thompson's cultural Marxism. One could add certain literary critical analysists: Frederic Jameson, and Raymond Williams, who have attempted to plumb the secret changes in focus and structure of capitalism through its literature (a project not dissimilar to my own in these pages). 

23 - See Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985).

24 - Marx, Karl; Capital, Vol I, Chaps. 27-31; trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Chas. Kerr, 1921).

25 - Marx posited a notion of "fictitious capital," referring to profit gained from security speculation. With consumerism, the notion of the fictitious extends itself beyond the securities market to all markets; consumerism is the ideological requirement that people buy fictitiously, based on the false (or fictitious) wages of debt (plastic money). To the extent the rhetoric of a free market remains unopposed because the rhetoric of exploitation has ceased to make explanatory sense, then oligopoly has also captured the arena of oppositional language. Marx, Karl; Capital, Vol. III, Chap. 25; trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Chas. Kerr, 1921).

26 - It is this that Marxism is unable to explain about the Nazis; assembly line death does not compute within the Marxist frame. Once death for ideological, rather than economic, sake becomes itself a commodity, it unhinges the central ethos of the Marxian politics.

27 - This political process involved the use of the Cold War, and the 'threat" of the Red menace, to induce countries to sign economic military treaties of US authorship, without the use of force among "allies." Arevallo, Juan Jose; The Shark and the Sardines; trans. June Cobb and Raul Osequeda (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961). 

28 - This was the way Lin Piao, and the Chinese Communist theoreticians, were to theorize it in 1969. It is worth noting that in general, in the third world, traditional class struggle played a divisive role, not as a struggle itself, but as an idea toward which there could only be contradictory approaches. Most third world Marxists attributed this to their countrtry's "underdeveloped" status. But neither working class parties that called for internal class struggle, nor third world (comprador) bourgeoisie that courted leadership by calling for unity and an abatement of the class struggle, addressed the real relations of power. Only the parties of armed struggle, with radically internationalized economic and political programs, touched the essence of the situation, and they generally succeeded only when they espoused neither of the other class positions.

29 - It is significant that, in the US, a new form of anti- racist struggle first appeared right after the Korean War; many of the early black activists in the civil rights movement, from its beginnings in the mid-50s, were Korean War veterans; for instance, Robert Williams in Monroe, N.C. (See Williams; Negroes With Guns, (Marzani and Munsell: New York, 1963)), and the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana.

It is generally acknowledged that radicalism in the US failed to understand what the internationalization of exploitation meant, though it acted in response to it. The anti-war movement suffered because white activists could not see past their own mono-culturalist hegemony, and understand that the forms of struggle carried on by the third world communities had a different identification with Vietnam than they did. Ultimately, the fact that the New Left ideology of the 60s tacitly viewed class iself as a cultural and ideological phenomenon went unrecognized. Now, there is a similar misunderstanding of Marxism and National Liberation (witness its defeat by ineptitude in East Europe, for instance, and the wearing down of the Salvadorean struggle). 

30 - It is to the confluence of all these factors that the US refers when it complains that in Vietnam it fought with "one hand tied behind its back;" that hand was tied by very real political forces.

31 - The debt also functions as a form of tax by the MNCs upon the American people. A certain percentage of the bonds that now constitute US debt are held by the multinational corporations. The interest accruing to them is paid out of internal revenue, and thus is tax passed through to these bond holders (the MNCs). Thus, the debt participates in their becoming a supragovernmental entity.