Mil-Observer

Harvey doesn’t make a simplistic equation ‘US=imperialism’. His book is a detailed exploration of the ‘capitalist and territorial logics of power’, i.e. accumulation by dispossesion (global but US-led) and the neo-con project. I agree that attempts by the US elite to maintain global dominance have disadvantaged most ordinary Americans - Chalmers Johnson writes well on this - and now that more Americans are waking up to this, perhaps we will see some positive political change in that country.

Hegemony is indeed underpinned by a conservative common sense. However, Gramsci also theorized that a counter-hegemony could be fashioned by working towards producing epochal shifts in that common sense. This is what I am talking about in relation to ecological economics. I am not suggesting ‘easy accommodation of irrationality’; I am pondering what is likely to be the most effective political strategy to work towards progressive change, given the current prevailing conditions, including the fear-mongering of the mass media. I am interested in how we can move beyond fear to positive action, without having to go through the necessity of telling large numbers of people that they have been brainwashed. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that that is likely to be a politically effective strategy.

I am more than happy to disagree with you politely on this, and I wish you luck in your efforts to convince most Australians that AGW is a globalist-funded hoax. I do take exception at your suggestion that mine is not an ethical approach; I think I have made it abundantly clear that my vision is for a socially just & environmentally sustainable future for this country & the planet, and that this requires transformative political and economic change. I fully accept, and said in a previous post, that AGW can be, and has been, co-opted by commercial interests. However it can also – and is being – employed in other ways to advance entirely different agendas. Far from being futile or servile, I see this as a potentially fruitful form of Gramscian counter-hegemonic politics. Tell us about your political strategy.

[TOYB: “Harvey doesn’t make a simplistic equation ‘US=imperialism’...”]

If you check the OUP summary of Harvey's book, the final sentence is crystal clear: “The compulsions behind the projection of US power on the world as a 'new imperialism' are here, for the first time, laid bare for all to see.” I did not claim that Harvey makes such a “simplistic equation” as "US=imperialism". I stated that he rather makes a “simplistic identification” - I think your explanation points to Harvey's separate, detailed equations of force projection around which he identifies a US empire. Therefore, Harvey's equations may be other than simplistic, but I maintain that his identified solution or sum of such equations is simplistic (and misleading or otherwise inaccurate).

[TOYB: “I do take exception...”]

I restate: “your concession that I may be right reveals your argument's disturbing absence of sound ethical principle, implying also some (misguided) opportunism.” Therefore, if you have doubt about the AGW dogma, then your pursuit of any AGW-based agendas will be in bad faith, thus unethical, whatever your “vision” purports as a goal. An implicitly graver ethical problem arises from the effects of ETS and emissions reduction on the poor in developing countries: if you have doubt about AGW dogma, how can you then justify efforts to deny such people the living standards enjoyed in the west during the 20th century? Hence my conclusion about your “easy accommodation of irrationality”.

In discussions with my fellow workers, AGW is a cause for general derision and disgust: it is intuitively clear that hegemony itself aims to proselytize AGW to adjust “the common sense” for hegemony's own purposes, but perhaps such processes fit more Brechtian not Gramscian conceptions about power maintenance.

Via simple demonstration of facts over time, identification with AGW dogma will have further discredited those avowedly “leftist” organizations which join the hegemons' worldviews. On matters of strategic formulation, pro-AGW activists' obvious loss of initiative, authenticity and – ultimately – credibility, promises to merely aid hegemony; there will be no “moral high ground” except that held by those non-compliant developing countries and my dissident friends.

Mil-Observer

I have read Harvey’s book cover to cover. It looks at the interplay and tensions between the recent projections of US power and the global spread of finance-driven monopoly capitalism. The implication of his argument - that the world may be entering another phase of inter-imperialist rivalry, perhaps resembling the late Victorian era – seems to have considerable validity. Sabre rattling – and more - appears much in evidence as the financial / economic crisis intensifies: this morning the US has violated Syrian sovereignty for the first time.

Re: AGW, I think the most reasoned stance is that, having regard to the extent of the scientific debate and conflicting evidence, at the present time, one cannot state with 100% confidence that it is happening, nor state with 100% confidence that it is not happening. It is a question of probabilities. You choose to believe it is not happening, categorically. I choose to believe that it probably is, but I’m prepared to keep an open mind. Neither stance it seems to me is per se immoral.

The real issue is what we do with our respective beliefs and choices. I have never said that I support any inter-governmental agreement that would maintain majority populations in developing countries in poverty. However we both know that the globalist AGW-agenda is far from being the only thing likely to keep these populations in poverty. There have been no restrictions on burning fossil fuel for the past 150 years and levels of poverty and inequality have fluctuated over that time, but recently intensified quite dramatically. A basic cause is the imperialist world system – whether it is US-led or not is really beside the point. And that is what has to change. A Northern-dominated ETS won’t help; equally if there is no ETS and no change, the Northern countries will capture & use most of the resources anyway, as they – we - have done for the past 500 years. Hence my interest in counter-hegemonic narratives & movements that can bring about major political - and behavioural - change in the North.

TOYB,

I never suggested doubts that you'd read (and comprehended) Harvey's book; I stated merely that Harvey's book obviously identifies “the US” as “the New Imperialism”, and that you carry much the same interpretation of facts. Your replies confirm that my statements do not misrepresent either Harvey or yourself on that basic point.

My main concern about such “New Imperialism” interpretations is that they seem to miss – almost entirely - the severe effects of globalized, free-trade capitalism on state sovereignty, including that of the US. How can war crimes / crimes against humanity be isolated to “the US” as a state entity when even the US military has had a dramatically reduced agency of initiative and design in such enterprises? Then there is the obviously globalized and transnational quality of all such enterprises. In short, if oligarchs care nothing for sovereignty, then all of sovereignty's symbolic trappings mean little under that aggressively globalist, monetarist and (almost) borderless oligarchical regime.

[TOYB: “The real issue...”] In fact, if I recall correctly, the real issue in our discussion is the disintegration of the neolibs' entire monetarist system, euphemized variously as “financial crisis”, “credit crunch”, “brink of recession/depression”, etc. Our digression into AGW/ETS pertained originally to that overriding context of the monetarists' collapse. It may be very interesting to extrapolate some existential or ontological considerations about “ what we do with our respective beliefs and choices”. However, to my trained perception your emphasis there smacks of such sweeping universality, ill-defined focus, and alienated (even blinkered?) individual subjectivity about personal “choice”, that it would keep us in precisely the same directionless vacuum as that occupied by neoliberalist/consumerist treadmills.

I'm unconvinced by your claim to grasp “probabilities” about AGW, so I maintain that you seem to “accommodate irrationality” there. Nonetheless, perhaps you can consider other “probabilities” on AGW: if World Bank men and other free-trade monetarists have been so compliant even complicit in policies causing this disastrous global market, would we not be misguided and irrational to ignore the high probability that such people are seriously wrong – if not fraudulent too – on AGW?