Plotting Against History: A Review of Henry Heller’s The Cold War and the New Imperialism (Monthly Review Press)
By Simon J Black
Published: 08/07/2007
That long-distance runner of the American Left, Harry Magdoff, once wrote, “As a rule, polite academic scholars prefer not to use the term ‘imperialism’. They find it distasteful and unscientific.” How times have changed. While their manners may not be in question, bourgeois intellectuals no longer shy away from using the ‘I-word’. With the ascendancy of the neo-cons in Washington and their attempted realization of The Project for the New American Century, ‘imperialism’ and ‘empire’ have moved from the margins to the center of academic and public discourse.
On the Left, the actions of the Bush administration have breathed new life into debates around the nature of U.S. imperialism. Yet while scholars such as David Harvey and Michael Mann have theorized the new imperialism, socialists have lacked a detailed historical narrative on which to ground the abstractions of such theory. Not so for the Right. Empire’s fan club has found its historical voice in the imperial apologetics of conservative historian Niall Ferguson. With the publication of The Cold War and the New Imperialism, the Left can thank Henry Heller for returning fire with a critical eye and deadly historical accuracy. Heller has done us the service of providing a much needed (critical) history of the origins of the new imperialism.
Published by Monthly Review, The Cold War and the New Imperialism is an ambitious global history that spans a sixty year period, from 1945 to 2005. In a systematic, yet engaging fashion, Heller covers: the foundation of the US Empire in the post-war settlement; the establishment of the cold war system; decolonization and the emergence of national liberation movements; the upheavals of the 1960s; and the popular revolts and global economic crisis which prompted capital’s neoliberal revolution. In sum, Heller has managed to extract from sixty years of chaotic history the most pertinent developments in politics and economics and relate them to the resurgence of US imperialism in the post-cold war era.
The book is not without its faults. Heller’s somewhat idiosyncratic style – breaking down the general historical narrative into subsections centered on a particular geographic region or political development – has the dual effect of increasing the books accessibility and occasionally interrupting its temporal flow. One can flip to any page in The Cold War and get a detailed mini-history of a particular political-economic conjuncture, post-1945. Yet there is a tendency for such narratives to overlap and succumb to repetition; a small flaw in what is an otherwise solid offering.
A question preoccupying the Left of late, Heller weighs in on the strength of U.S. hegemony. For Heller, the U.S. order “seems not so much to be collapsing as unraveling” with the American economy’s declining competitiveness in relation to emerging markets, the weakening position of the dollar, the accumulation of massive trade deficits, and a misguided and costly military adventure in Iraq. Some theorists of the new imperialism, such as Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, are hesitant to take these developments as indicating a significant decline in US hegemony. As Gindin has recently argued, for American capital the most important development is that U.S. after-tax profits (as a share of GDP) are at their highest since 1929. Furthermore, Gindin questions whether the U.S. trade deficit is a sign of weakness arguing that with other advanced capitalist countries holding large amounts of U.S. dollars in an integrated global economy, a crisis for the dollar is a crisis for all. Gindin writes, “The general concern to support the dollar even as it falls, and avoid a collapse of the US economy, reflects the contradictions of success within the American empire, and that structural interdependency has become a significant foundation of the American empire.” From this perspective, U.S. hegemony is not so much in decline, but possibly in transition, a point Heller may be willing to concede.
Beyond this debate, one thing is for certain: Heller does not see an end to U.S. imperial hubris despite failure in Iraq. Reading The Cold War’s conclusion, I was reminded of a passage from J.M. Coetzee’s allegory of modern empire, Waiting for the Barbarians:
“Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.”
Published in Canadian Dimension September/October 2007 Issue