Uma entrevista com
Vivek Chibber
Jacobin
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| O presidente russo Vladimir Putin posa com cadetes na Praça Vermelha em 4 de novembro de 2018, em Moscou, Rússia. (Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Image |
Entrevista por
Melissa Naschek
A Guerra Fria é frequentemente retratada como uma grande luta pelo poder entre as forças da democracia e uma ameaça comunista crescente. Mas e se a história convencional estiver totalmente ao contrário?
Neste episódio do podcast da Rádio Jacobin, Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber e Melissa Naschek discutem a ascensão do Império Americano e como os Estados Unidos usaram a Guerra Fria para disseminar o capitalismo pelo mundo.
Confronting Capitalism com Vivek Chibber é produzido pela Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy e publicado pela Jacobin. Você pode ouvir o episódio completo aqui. Esta transcrição foi editada para maior clareza.
Melissa Naschek
Nos últimos anos, tem havido a noção de que estamos entrando em um novo conflito da Guerra Fria com a China, que tem tanto uma dimensão militar quanto uma dimensão econômica. Você acha que estamos à beira de uma nova Guerra Fria?
Vivek Chibber
Não, estamos nela. Não há dúvida sobre Isso. Os Estados Unidos têm alimentado um conflito absolutamente desnecessário com a China.
Felizmente, ainda é uma guerra fria. Mas, pelo nível de insanidade que vemos agora entre os especialistas em política externa, ela pode se transformar em uma espécie de guerra semi-quente, com certeza.
Melissa Naschek
Acho que esta é uma boa oportunidade para examinar o que uma "guerra fria" realmente é e, especificamente, para olhar para a história recente e examinar a Guerra Fria do século XX.
Vivek Chibber
A Guerra Fria foi uma rivalidade histórica particular entre os Estados Unidos e a União Soviética. Mas por que foi chamada de "guerra fria"? Bem, é porque contrastava com uma guerra quente. Uma guerra quente é quando as pessoas estão realmente lutando e morrendo, e há exércitos envolvidos, matando uns aos outros. Isso é quente.
Esta foi uma guerra fria, pois havia animosidade, havia antagonismo, eles estavam tentando minar uns aos outros. Mas não houve combate direto envolvido. Então, foi uma guerra de décadas, bastante intensa. antagonismo entre dois países que envolvia todo tipo de manobras, desde bombardeios até disparos de armas.
Melissa Naschek
Melissa Naschek
A Guerra Fria é frequentemente retratada como uma grande luta pelo poder entre as forças da democracia e uma ameaça comunista crescente. Mas e se a história convencional estiver totalmente ao contrário?
Neste episódio do podcast da Rádio Jacobin, Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber e Melissa Naschek discutem a ascensão do Império Americano e como os Estados Unidos usaram a Guerra Fria para disseminar o capitalismo pelo mundo.
Confronting Capitalism com Vivek Chibber é produzido pela Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy e publicado pela Jacobin. Você pode ouvir o episódio completo aqui. Esta transcrição foi editada para maior clareza.
Melissa Naschek
Nos últimos anos, tem havido a noção de que estamos entrando em um novo conflito da Guerra Fria com a China, que tem tanto uma dimensão militar quanto uma dimensão econômica. Você acha que estamos à beira de uma nova Guerra Fria?
Vivek Chibber
Não, estamos nela. Não há dúvida sobre Isso. Os Estados Unidos têm alimentado um conflito absolutamente desnecessário com a China.
Felizmente, ainda é uma guerra fria. Mas, pelo nível de insanidade que vemos agora entre os especialistas em política externa, ela pode se transformar em uma espécie de guerra semi-quente, com certeza.
Melissa Naschek
Acho que esta é uma boa oportunidade para examinar o que uma "guerra fria" realmente é e, especificamente, para olhar para a história recente e examinar a Guerra Fria do século XX.
Vivek Chibber
A Guerra Fria foi uma rivalidade histórica particular entre os Estados Unidos e a União Soviética. Mas por que foi chamada de "guerra fria"? Bem, é porque contrastava com uma guerra quente. Uma guerra quente é quando as pessoas estão realmente lutando e morrendo, e há exércitos envolvidos, matando uns aos outros. Isso é quente.
Esta foi uma guerra fria, pois havia animosidade, havia antagonismo, eles estavam tentando minar uns aos outros. Mas não houve combate direto envolvido. Então, foi uma guerra de décadas, bastante intensa. antagonismo entre dois países que envolvia todo tipo de manobras, desde bombardeios até disparos de armas.
Melissa Naschek
Você diria que esta foi uma guerra imperialista?
Vivek Chibber
Foi uma espécie de rivalidade imperial. E é interessante porque a compreensão tradicional que a esquerda tinha do imperialismo era que ele surgiu de [Vladimir] Lenin e que deveria ser uma espécie de conflito entre Estados capitalistas.
Agora, esta foi uma rivalidade entre um Estado capitalista e um Estado não capitalista. Portanto, é imperial em um sentido mais amplo do que o que a esquerda tinha em seu próprio aparato conceitual e teórico, que não era realmente adequado para entendê-la. Porque, obviamente, quando Lenin apresentou a teoria, esse tipo de rivalidade ainda não existia, então era uma rivalidade entre impérios.
Agora, o que eram esses impérios? Os EUA fizeram parecer que havia uma batalha global entre o comunismo global e a democracia global. Eles nunca disseram capitalismo global. Eles diriam eufemisticamente "nosso modo de vida", com o qual se referiam ao capitalismo. Mas eles disseram que estavam defendendo a democracia.
Melissa Naschek
Então isso era apenas uma espécie de slogan de relações públicas? Eles estavam particularmente conscientes de que era capitalismo versus comunismo?
Vivek Chibber
Eles estavam absolutamente conscientes, porque era isso que direcionava sua estratégia. Agora, acho que, para nós, isso tem múltiplas dimensões. Então, vamos abordar isso sistematicamente. A rivalidade não era realmente global, em essência, porque havia uma assimetria dramática entre as ambições globais.
A primeira é: qual era o escopo dessa rivalidade? Isso está envolto em todo tipo de mitologia. A rivalidade não era realmente global, em essência, porque havia uma assimetria dramática entre as ambições globais. Os Estados Unidos, desde o início, pretendiam que seu império tivesse escopo global. A União Soviética pode ter nutrido tais ambições, mas o fato é que nunca teve os recursos para sequer cogitar um império global.
Império na Era do Capital
Melissa Naschek
Vivek Chibber
A verdadeira razão pela qual fomos para a guerra no Vietnã
Então você usou a palavra "império", mas a noção de império está mais associada a eras passadas ou a um poder fantástico e maligno, como em Star Wars ou algo assim. Então, os EUA e a URSS eram realmente impérios?
Vivek Chibber
Ambos eram impérios em um sentido genérico. Agora, o que é um império? Um império é uma situação em que uma nação ou um estado exerce controle ou dominação — e de alguma forma limita a liberdade de outros estados e nações.
É assim que o Império Romano era um império. Roma exercia poder por meio da conquista de outras regiões e então estabelecia sua supremacia sobre elas. Como sua supremacia é estabelecida? Roma nomeava seus próprios governadores sobre as populações locais, e eles estavam subordinados à República e ao Senado Romano ou ao ditador romano, qualquer que fosse.
Os impérios coloniais dos séculos XVIII e XIX eram um país governando outros países em ascensão. Os Estados Unidos e a União Soviética se encaixavam nesse aspecto, pois exerciam poder sobre outros estados. Agora, os mecanismos pelos quais eles fizeram isso eram diferentes em comparação com Roma e até mesmo em comparação com os impérios dos séculos XVIII e XIX.
Mas eles eram impérios, no sentido de que compartilhavam esta característica: os EUA dominavam os países sob sua influência — limitando sua liberdade, colocando seus interesses acima dos interesses deles — e a União Soviética fazia o mesmo. Dentro dessa rivalidade, no entanto, como eu disse, havia essa assimetria crucial, que é o fato de a União Soviética ser realmente um império regional.
Os soviéticos governavam a Europa Oriental. Eles tinham alguma influência sobre países periféricos como Cuba. Mas, fora isso, tinham poder muito limitado, mas até mesmo ambições limitadas. E eu chegarei a isso em um segundo sobre o porquê disso.
Os Estados Unidos, por outro lado, tomaram o resto do mundo como seu playground e insistiram que os soviéticos reconhecessem o domínio americano sobre o resto do mundo. Agora, isso é interessante porque, historicamente, a partir do início do século XIX, os EUA disseram ao resto do mundo: "A América Latina nos pertence". Essa era a Doutrina Monroe. Era essencialmente — literalmente — o ditado dos EUA: "Nós decidimos o que acontece na América Latina".
Ok, então você poderia dizer que era um império regional. E era porque, fora disso, Inglaterra e França dominavam.
Melissa Naschek
Certo. E isso se encaixa na noção mais tradicional de impérios, onde se trata de tomar o controle sobre um vizinho, por exemplo.
Embora os EUA, mesmo naquela época, fossem diferentes da Inglaterra e da França. A Inglaterra e a França estabeleceram colônias. Os EUA não tinham colônias na América Latina. Simplesmente os intimidavam e os dominavam bastante. Mesmo assim, era uma potência regional.
O que mudou depois de 1945 foi que os Estados Unidos rapidamente se moveram para as zonas geográficas que costumavam ser possessões inglesas e francesas. Assim, a Inglaterra exerceu poder no Sul e Sudeste Asiático, e a França também no Sudeste Asiático e no Norte da África. Os EUA rapidamente expandiram sua zona de influência para essas regiões também.
Não foi o caso da União Soviética. Os soviéticos, é claro, estavam presentes e exerceram alguma influência no Vietnã. Na África, nas décadas de 1960 e 1970, a URSS de fato desempenhou algum papel, mas foi limitado e, na maior parte do tempo, foi bastante defensiva. O objetivo era realmente garantir que eles fossem um ator, para que os EUA tivessem que levá-los a sério em zonas como a Europa, onde os soviéticos realmente tinham participação no jogo. Foi uma luta muito desigual entre os Estados Unidos, que aspiravam à hegemonia global, e a União Soviética, que queria simplesmente garantir que a hegemonia global dos EUA parasse na Europa Oriental e, no máximo, no Sudoeste Asiático.
Melissa Naschek
Como esses novos objetivos de império mudam os próprios impérios dos EUA e da URSS?
Vivek Chibber
Esses eram impérios bastante diferentes até mesmo dos impérios capitalistas dos séculos XVIII e XIX. Se observarmos o Império Britânico, que foi o maior império no século XIX e início do século XX, ele era diferente dos Estados Unidos por ser principalmente, não exclusivamente, mas principalmente, um império colonial.
Os britânicos tinham influência sobre áreas onde não eram um governante colonial formal, como o Oriente Médio — era mais um império informal. E mesmo em partes da América Latina, como a Argentina, pode-se dizer que os britânicos tinham domínio informal. Mas, na maior parte, nas partes do mundo onde a Inglaterra era mais influente, isso se dava por meio do domínio colonial direto.
Agora, o que é isso? Basicamente, significa que a Inglaterra entrou lá, conquistou-os militarmente, varreu seus próprios governos e estabeleceu seu próprio governo com administradores e políticos britânicos estabelecendo a lei e o regime militar sobre esses países. Então, se a Inglaterra quisesse, por exemplo, que a Índia fizesse algo diferente, ela simplesmente dizia ao seu governador: "Queremos que você faça x, y e z".
Logisticamente, isso apresenta poucos problemas. O mesmo com os franceses. Se os franceses quisessem mudar a política na Argélia, diriam ao seu homem na Argélia: "Aqui está o que queremos que você faça". A diferença nos Estados Unidos é que seu império está crescendo em um momento em que o domínio colonial está recuando. Então, agora, quando os EUA querem mudar a direção do que está acontecendo, digamos, na América Latina ou mudar a direção do que está acontecendo no Oriente Médio — eles não gostam de sua política petrolífera ou não gostam, na América Latina, das reformas agrárias que estão promulgando — eles não podem simplesmente dizer ao seu homem lá o que fazer. Afinal, quem é o governador deles? Eles precisam descobrir maneiras de fazer com que os latino-americanos ou os árabes façam o que eles querem. Agora, ainda existem mecanismos disponíveis: invasão militar, bombardeios, assassinatos — mas mesmo isso se torna cada vez mais limitado.
Portanto, o mecanismo para o governo imperial agora — se você tivesse que dizer qual é o mecanismo típico do governo imperial — não se trata de assassinatos. Não se trata de invasões militares. Trata-se de encontrar atores locais, atores locais que vejam seus interesses alinhados aos interesses corporativos americanos.
Melissa Naschek
Relembrando nosso episódio sobre o Vietnã, foi sobre isso que falamos no Vietnã do Sul.
Vivek Chibber
Ngo Dinh Diem era o cara local e eles o escolheram porque ele era alguém que via seus interesses como sendo promovidos pelos interesses imperiais americanos. Isso é importante porque, embora signifique que os EUA ainda podem obter o que desejam sob certas condições, limita o escopo da influência direta dos Estados Unidos. E muda a estratégia deles porque agora, em vez de apenas implantar seus governantes coloniais, seus governadores, seus senhores feudais nesses países, eles precisam tentar moldar o conflito de classes e a dinâmica política nos países sobre os quais desejam exercer influência. Muitas vezes, não há uma maneira direta de fazer isso. Portanto, o Império Americano é diferente dos impérios coloniais antigos porque este é um império que precisa funcionar principalmente por meio de representantes locais. Quando pensamos no imperialismo em meados do século XX e posteriormente, temos que pensar nele como uma série de alianças de classe — não como uma nação pressionando outra nação.
A razão pela qual isso é importante é que, quando pensamos no imperialismo em meados do século XX e posteriormente, temos que pensar nele como uma série de alianças de classe — não como uma nação pressionando outra nação. Mas como os governantes de uma nação estabelecendo ligações e conexões com os governantes de outra nação para que ambos se beneficiem — ainda que em condições desiguais.
Ainda existe um poder dominante e um poder subordinado, mas é realmente importante perceber que não se pode pensar nisso como uma guerra racial. Não se pode pensar nisso como nações pressionando umas às outras. Esta é agora uma guerra de classes, que envolve tanto a classe dominante branca americana quanto as classes dominantes não brancas dos países subordinados, e é importante para a esquerda de hoje, que vê tudo através da lente da raça.
Então, esse é o caso dos Estados Unidos. Agora, com a União Soviética, é um pouco diferente, só que havia uma relação de subordinação muito mais direta com a Europa Oriental e a ameaça militar era muito mais iminente. Assim, na Hungria em 1956 e na Tchecoslováquia em 1968, quando tentaram exercer autonomia em relação aos soviéticos, a resposta foi brutal e diretamente militar. Os EUA também fizeram isso, mas a União Soviética dependia muito, muito mais do poder militar.
Portanto, esses eram novos impérios. Ambos eram diferentes dos antigos. O ponto-chave a ter em mente, porém, é que não havia rivalidade global. Eram principalmente os Estados Unidos se expandindo e a União Soviética tentando acompanhar.
Melissa Naschek
What you’re describing now, where the US is the primary aggressor and the Soviet Union is really just playing catch-up, is pretty different than what we’re traditionally told about the Cold War, which is basically the opposite: that it was all the Soviet Union’s fault — they were the ones who were being aggressive and the US was just sort of covering its tracks to prevent the spread of communism.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, that’s exactly what we were told and that’s the official ideology. And it gets it, as you say, exactly backward. The American strategy for global expansion was really put in place before World War II even ended.
Around 1943, [Franklin D. Roosevelt] put together a series of committees in the State Department to plan for what the postwar situation would be. They were essentially setting up an agenda for how the US would conduct its affairs in the postwar scenario. This is in 1943, when you don’t even know what the outcome of the war is going to be. The US is fairly sure that the Allies would win. But it was not sure if the Soviet Union would even survive. It had absolutely no clue as to what the Soviets would do at that time.
What plans does it come up with? There were two pillars to this plan. One was that whatever else happened after 1945, the colonial empires would have to be dismantled, by which we meant the British and the French. Why does it want to dismantle them? It’s not to spread freedom and liberty and all those things. It saw those empires, politically and economically, very inimical to American interests and therefore also to global interests.
Melissa Naschek
Interesting because I think we’re told often that the goal was to eliminate the scourge of colonialism.
Vivek Chibber
It was to eliminate the way in which colonialism interacted with global political economy. This is the key. Freedoms were a secondary affair. What do I mean by the way it interacted? The US was absolutely convinced, and I think it was probably right, that a big push for the war came from economic rivalries between blocks of capital that were closed off from each other. And that created a kind of antagonism between them to open up markets that were otherwise inaccessible.
The British didn’t have access to French colonies and their markets. The French didn’t have good access to the British colonies. And the Americans had access to none of them. So the first thing to do is to break down these colonial barriers so that capital and labor can move freely. And the US thought that this will reduce the animosities. Now, because it reduces economic animosities, it should also reduce geopolitical rivalries.
As it happens, the second pillar of this was that American capital should be given special access to all these markets, of course, because it benefits the United States. But also because they thought the United States will be best positioned to superintend — to kind of be a referee for economic and political affairs everywhere. And if it has access to all these markets, American states will have an interest in an open playing field.
This should not be surprising because England also was pushing for the same policies in the 1840s and ’50s, a hundred years prior. Why both countries? England in the 1840s and ’50s, the United States in the 1940s and ’50s were the most economically efficient and productive economies in the world. They had nothing to fear from a globalized economy.
Both countries also had some degree of interest in opening up their economies to the others. I won’t go into why the British did — that was primarily because they were the biggest lenders in the world — but in the United States, the reason they wanted to have their borders open was that they knew that after the war, the entire world would need dollars for global trade and imports and exports.
Well, how are they going to get dollars? They can only get dollars if the US is buying goods from them and paying in dollars. So if the US wanted a global economy to thrive, it had to open up its markets to importers from the rest of the world. That meant as early as 1943 to 1944, the US had an agenda for expanding into the global economy before it knew if the Soviets would even survive.
Now, what happens in 1945 is the Soviets not only survive, but they have the largest army in Europe. And that means then that communism is now a real threat inside Europe as well. So now what this does is it adds an inflection to American global ambitions. Those global ambitions were always in place. The US intended to expand its influence over the entire world, but now it has to deal with the fact that there is a potential rival, at least in one part of that world, which is in Eastern Europe. That was a problem. It had to deal with it.
The initial signs after 1944–45 were not that the US would simply start up a deep antagonism with the Soviet Union. That took about eight, ten months to develop. The reason it developed so intensely, the reason anti-communism became such an issue, was that when [Harry] Truman and his people realized that in order to be the new police for the whole world, they would have to massively ramp up their military budgets and their military resources, Congress wasn’t willing to do it. So the one way in which they could get Congress to back this was to raise this specter of Communism.
Every time Congress resists him, he raises the bogey of the communist threat in Europe. This is how the Marshall Plan is passed. This is how the funding for NATO is passed. This is how the militarization of Asia and Europe is passed. So the US starts generating this ideology — the rhetoric of a global communist threat.
Melissa Naschek
Did the USSR have its own similar agenda of what it wanted the global economy to look like?
Vivek Chibber
The USSR had an agenda of what it wanted the postwar dispensation to look like. That agenda was very different from the United States. The US’s agenda was to expand the circuits of American investment and American trade and American corporate movements around the world.
The Soviets did not have a capitalist economy. Their economy didn’t run on finding new markets. On top of that, it was absolutely devastated by the war. The single most important difference between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1946 is that the US had been untouched by the war. But the Soviet Union had absolutely been devastated both in terms of how many people died — thirty million people — and in terms of physical infrastructure, [Adolf] Hitler wiped out all of the Western industrial manufacturing capacity that the Soviets had.
So their first order of affairs was simply to rebuild, and this is why [Joseph] Stalin was in no position to launch a big old offensive — forget the world, even in Europe. And the US knew that. The US’s own intelligence told them that, at least for the next five to eight, potentially ten, years, Soviets were both militarily and economically devastated. So when the US launched this Cold War, it knows it’s fictional. It knows that it has no bearing on reality.
It did it because it smoothed over conflicts within Congress. It papered over for the American people the traditional kind of weariness about entering into global affairs. The US had traditionally been a kind of — I don’t like this term, but I’ll use it — isolationist country. So the Soviets were in no position to have an agenda that paralleled the American agenda.
What they wanted was one simple thing. They had been invaded twice in thirty years by the West. What they wanted was a buffer zone — Stalin was clear on this — which means essentially a series of satellites on their western border that is Eastern Europe, which would be a geographical buffer between them and Europe because they didn’t trust Europe anymore. Keep in mind, this is brutal. What it meant was a brutal imposition by Stalin of Communist regimes on Eastern Europe. But after he gets into Eastern Europe, now the rest of the global ambitions are actually extremely limited.
Melissa Naschek
What you’re describing really goes against the conventional explanations for the Cold War.
Vivek Chibber
That’s exactly right, Melissa — what is the conventional description of the Cold War? It’s a term called “containment.” What the US was doing was trying to contain the Soviet Union. And what does that mean? It means that the Soviets are motivated by this ideology of global expansion, right? According to this, Communism doesn’t recognize national borders. It wants the whole world to be a communist world, and the US is trying to keep them at bay only for its own moral commitments to democracy. So that’s why they’d never use the word “capitalism.”
That means, essentially, the US is trying to contain Soviet ambitions. Now, the thing about containment is that the metaphor suggests a defensive posture. “We don’t want to be expanding across the world — we’re just doing it reluctantly because it’s the Soviets that were doing the expanding.”
What in fact I’m saying was happening is that the US from 1943 onward had a strategy of global expansion. The problem with the Soviet Union was that the Soviets stood in the way in two respects. One was that the Soviet Union as a model of political economy gave emerging nations a different sense of what they could do. They could opt out of an economy based on private property and profit maximization. So as a model, they were no good.
And the second problem was that the Soviet Union stood militarily and economically as a potential ally for countries that did not want to abide by the American rules and American strictures. It’s kind of ironic because for the most part, the Soviets sold everyone else out. But for the United States, the mere threat of the Soviets for that reason was intolerable.What the Cold War was really about was the aggressive expansion of American capitalist interests across the world in which the Soviets were presented as a threat and as an equal imperial rival.
What was actually happening was the US was acting on a prior strategic decision that it had made in 1943 of global expansion, and it saw the Soviets as an impediment to that expansion. Soviets were a minor player in all this, but the US had to pump them up because it was a great way of bringing Congress to heel, of getting the American people to be constantly terrified, constantly in a state of anxiety for which the American global and military expansion was seen, ironically, as a form of defense. Even though the US is expanding aggressively abroad, it’s presented as a form of defense. So what the Cold War was really about was the aggressive expansion of American capitalist interests across the world in which the Soviets were presented as a threat and as an equal imperial rival.
But in fact, they were a minor power that was just trying to keep up.
What the Soviet Union Was Really After
Melissa Naschek
I think the popular version of what the USSR satellite states were like is that Stalin sort of had his hands up the backs of the shirts of all the rulers and was basically just ruling through puppets.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, that’s actually pretty much was what was happening.
Melissa Naschek
If that’s the case, can you explain a little bit more?
Vivek Chibber
Except for [Josip Broz] Tito in Yugoslavia, Stalin and [Nikita] Khrushchev had very direct control and domination over the rest of the countries there. So with Eastern Europe, the metaphor of a satellite suggests these orbital bodies that revolve around a central gravitational pull of a big power, and that’s basically what this was because these communist parties were so beholden to Stalin. Now it’s an interesting question here — why are they beholden? This also gets at something interesting, the traditional understanding of empire is that the imperial core somehow extracts wealth and resources from its dominions.
Melissa Naschek
Right. As I’m listening to your description, I’m kind of thinking, “Well, to what end is the USSR doing this?”
Vivek Chibber
There isn’t a huge literature on the economic flows between the Soviets and Eastern Europe because obviously the data was not available for Western scholars. But it became pretty clear in the 1980s when these economies went into crisis that what was happening was probably not so much the Soviet Union bleeding Eastern Europe for its own enrichment, but the opposite.
This is a weird empire where the Soviets are actually probably generating a net outflow of resources into Eastern Europe because the Eastern Europe economies were just so much less efficient that they needed to have enough imports from the West in order to keep their wages high, in order to be able to afford the infrastructure that they were developing. The Soviets had to subsidize a lot of it. Why would the Soviets do this? It’s pretty clear. It’s because they were so terrified of the vulnerability on their western borders that they were willing to keep these very unpopular regimes in place.
The Polish, the Hungarian, the Bulgarian, the Czechoslovakian regimes — they’re willing to keep them in place because they thought that that was preferable to letting those regimes fall and having the West come right up to its borders. This is important to note because this is exactly why the Ukraine War is happening now, because once the West announced that Ukraine was going to join NATO — this is why Russia reacted with such alacrity, because it’s the memory of repeated invasions from the West from a power that has always been hostile to them.
The point here is that the dynamics of that empire were very different from normal empires. This was the Soviets essentially subsidizing autocratic regimes on their western border in order to ensure their own geopolitical safety.
Melissa Naschek
If the Soviet Empire ruled through satellite states, how did the American Empire rule?
Vivek Chibber
I think “satellite” would be too strong a word. What the United States did essentially was it had one red line, which is that as it expands globally, all states had to line up geopolitically with the United States somehow.
This was even more important to them than having those economies open to American corporate influence and American profit-making. If you go back to one of the first episodes [of Confronting Capitalism] we did when I was talking about tariffs, I had said that the typical policy in countries of the Global South is what was called import substitution. This is when they put up tariff barriers to actually keep American consumption goods out, and that was the means by which they developed their own manufacturing industries, because by keeping American products out, they created a market for their own capitalist class.
Now, the Americans actually were okay with this. There were two reasons they were okay with it. One was even though American consumption goods like cars and shirts and shoes were kept out of these markets, in order to produce those goods for themselves, these countries in the south had to buy machinery from the United States.The US didn’t want to make sure that the rest of the world was poor so it could rip them off — this is absolutely false. The US actively engaged in the development of capitalism everywhere else.
So one kind of market was open to American producers while another kind of market was not. Capital goods markets were open. Consumer goods markets were not open. But the Americans put up with this nonetheless. Why? Because the foreign policy establishment was okay with the fact that by generating its own markets and its own corporate community for itself, countries in the Global South were generating a capitalist class. And the US saw that class, as long as they’re hothousing a new capitalist class, is the best buffer against communism that we can ever imagine. So they were temporarily willing to put up with a semi-closure to its own capital and its own investments for the long-term political benefit of capitalism growing globally.
I want to stress this because there is a weird revival on the Left today of this kind of mercantilist understanding of the American Empire — that the US supposedly wanted to make sure that the rest of the world was poor so it could rip them off. This is absolutely false. The US actively engaged in the development of capitalism everywhere else.
Melissa Naschek
That makes it kind of an interesting historical moment because, generally, I think it’s Marxist “best practices” to assume that capitalists are doing things for their own self-interest and not so explicitly for the development of capitalism.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. This was the American state doing this, and American capitalists were not happy about it. So it is absolutely the case that all those industries that were now being kept out of countries like India, Brazil, and Mexico because of their import tariffs were now lobbying the American state to force these people to lower their tariffs. But the reason the US state was able to resist that was it had a lot of support from the capital goods industries that were benefiting from this.
But it also steadily insulated the presidency from congressional influence. All these capitalists who are being kept out of global markets, they were lobbying through Congress and one of the things that happens in the 1960s through ’80s is the American state insulates its foreign policy decisions from congressional approval. This is why Trump can now declare tariffs like he’s the monarch. It’s because the president was given unilateral power over foreign economic policy due to large sections of American capital being unhappy with how the US state was supervising the growth of global capitalism, because in some instances, it actually hurt the interests of large sections of American capital here.
So the state had to assert its independence from its own capitalists to be able to serve their long-term interests.
Melissa Naschek
This is really interesting because it cuts against one of the most often-cited lines from [Karl] Marx that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeois. It’s worth going into when and how the state was insulating itself from the capitalist class.
Vivek Chibber
One good example is when Japan — and a few years later Korea — when they start their industrialization processes, they do two things that a lot of American capitalists are unhappy about. One is they set up tariff barriers to US goods entering their countries, which the US producers of those goods are not happy about. This is mostly low-end consumer goods.
And then the second thing is they start invading American markets. So on both ends of it, American businessmen lobby Congress to reverse these flows. First of all, they want Congress to pressure the president to get the Japanese and the Koreans to lower their tariffs, to which the president says “no way.” And then on the other end of it, when they start getting flooded by Japanese and later Korean goods, they want Congress and the presidency to raise tariffs against the Japanese and Korean producers. And again, they’re told “no way.” Now who’s telling them no? Not Congress.
Congressmen are in no position to fend off corporate pressure because those corporations are funding the elections in their districts, and they’re pretty competitive districts. The rebuffs come from the presidency and over the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, the presidency increasingly urges Congress to allow itself insulation from this kind of pressure.
But this is also happening with regard to access to Brazilian markets, with access to Indian markets — the same thing is happening but this is why you can’t call them satellites. These countries are beholden to their own capitalists. They are trying to forge their own agenda. It’s just that the US makes sure that as long as that agenda is within the parameters of the larger American goal of expanding global capitalism — and geopolitically, making sure that the states that are on top of all these capitalist economies are lined up against the Soviet Union — they’re fine with short-term losses for American capital.
Now, is this the state being the executive committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie? Yeah, in a way it is in that the American state is looking out for the long-term interest of the American capitalist class. But that happens while having to deal with short-term displeasure from the capitalist just like with parents and children: sometimes you have to do things for the kids that they may not be so happy with, but it’s for their own long-term interest. That’s exactly how the American state saw its relationship to its capitalist class.
Melissa Naschek
Was this something that other capitalist states of the time agreed with and wanted, or were they just sort of along for the ride?
Vivek Chibber
To answer this question, you have to divide up capitalist states into two groups. The established capitalist states of the core economies, that is, Europe and East Asia — not only were okay with it, they welcomed it. And this is important: the United States was welcomed by Europe and Japan as a senior partner. They wanted the US to be a senior partner.
Why? The main reason is that in the first few years after the war, all of Europe and Japan were also devastated. So they really benefited from the United States coming into Eastern Asia and into Europe, and establishing a military presence and an economic stake. This meant that many of the responsibilities that their states would’ve had to undertake, particularly military responsibilities, could now be offloaded to the US and that money in the budget could be put toward other things.
Melissa Naschek
So their motivations are a little bit more self-interested.
Vivek Chibber
Totally self-interested. Absolutely. The second reason they welcome it is that both in Japan and Europe, what had happened between the 1930s and 1950 was the birth of the modern labor movement. In all of these countries now, in 1945 after the war, the Left came to power across the board. The Left was the most important new political force in all of these countries. What did the Left want? It wanted a massive welfare state, redistribution, labor rights — all of which meant that these countries could no longer have carte blanche to build up a military at the expense of everything else the way they could in the 1920s and the 1930s.
The US had the weakest labor movement in the advanced world. So the US was the one country where you had both a humongous economy and the most freedom to maneuver for its ruling classes because even though the US had the New Deal, the New Deal paled in comparison to the welfare states in Western Europe and even in Japan.
They welcomed the US because they had all these new responsibilities that they hadn’t had in the 1920s and ’30s for social expenditures. So the US allowed them to, relatively speaking, slow down the growth of their militaries, substitute for them, and funnel funds toward the welfare states that they were developing.The US allowed Japan and Europe to, relatively speaking, slow down the growth of their militaries, substitute for them, and funnel funds toward the welfare states that they were developing.
So for them, American Empire, it was — as some historians have said — empire by invitation. It’s a different dynamic with a second group, which is the newly emerging postcolonial countries. Now we’re talking about South Asia, Southeast Asia and — by the 1960s — African countries that are now free from French and British rule. The reason they were more ambivalent was that in many of these countries, the independence movements had led to the growth of very vibrant and large left-wing national liberation movements, and those movements had a very ambitious agenda of national development, which saw the Soviet Union as a potential model for them.
In those countries, they wanted to make up their own minds about whether they would have land reform or whether they would have huge nationalizations. The US was okay with import substitution. What it would not tolerate though was significant Communist Party influence over nationalizing industry. Because if you’re nationalizing industries, you’re wiping out the capitalist class. If you’re doing land reform, you’ll be wiping out landed classes, which are the bulwark of anti-communism in all these countries. So in those newly emergent postcolonial countries, there was a great deal more ambivalence toward the American Empire and, in some cases, hostility.
And that’s why you see the US using its military in some moments at some times. That’s not because the US was trying to subjugate those countries. It’s not because it was trying to impoverish those countries. It just wanted a reliable local ruling class that would participate in the project and the ambition of growing capitalism in these countries in partnership with the United States.
As long as they were in partnership, the US would put up with all kinds of things like import substitution and tariffs and things like that. It just wanted a signal that you are on its side. So with Europe, it was a very, very clear and uncomplicated relationship. In countries in the Global South, it was more conflictual, and therefore you see much more of a militaristic stance on the part of the US.
Melissa Naschek
The way that the Vietnam War is portrayed in the broader context of the Cold War is that it was a quintessential conflict in the sense that the USSR was supporting Vietnam because it was trying to become a communist country.
Vivek Chibber
The Soviets were extremely cautious. I’m not going to say that they never helped these countries out that were moving to the Left. But in the case of Vietnam, they sold out the Vietnamese left and right. Not just the Soviets — so did the Chinese. Now you can find instances where they did, in fact, try to come in and provide some assistance, but it was almost always with an eye toward making sure that the US understood that the Soviets can’t be ignored.
Melissa Naschek
Which conflicts are you thinking of?
Vivek Chibber
Thinking of Chile and obviously Cuba. All over Latin America. The Soviets basically stayed out. Now, I want to be careful with my language. I’m not saying that the Soviets let the US run rampant over Latin America. They did come in, they did offer assistance — sometimes logistical, sometimes monetary — but they absolutely understood that this is the US’s backyard. And we’re going to let them do what they need to do. It’s just that they wanted to always be taken seriously. And the reason for that was they were one-quarter the size of the American economy.
They were having to, in some way or form, compete with the US geopolitically. And so the dilemma for them was, if the US didn’t take them seriously, then the real core of Soviet concerns, which is the military balance in Europe, would also start to become renegotiated. The US would also now come in and start changing the European landscape, which the Soviets couldn’t afford.
So they needed to have a foot in Africa, some kind of foot in Latin America, some kind of foot in Asia, so that they could always say, “If you make trouble for us in Europe, we could make trouble for you in these countries as well.” But always and everywhere it was defensive.
And what’s underneath all this is that at the end of the day, you had an economy that’s probably around one-quarter of the size of the United States having to be on the world stage as a global rival.
If you’re trying to do that and your economy’s one-quarter of the size, it’s just not going to be a fight between equals. And if you let this history play out, ninety-nine out of a hundred times, the Cold War ends exactly the way it did, which is the Soviet Union losing.
America’s Twenty-First-Century Cold War of Choice
Melissa Naschek
Now we’re faced with all of these statements that we are once again in a cold war, and that seems to be based primarily on the US relationship with the Russian state and the US rivalry with the Chinese state. Generally, I’m just very suspicious of historical analogies.
Vivek Chibber
Let’s be clear about something. This notion of economic rivals is just nonsense because — what makes someone an economic rival? Is it the fact that they have a large, productive economy with their own corporations that are doing well? Okay. Well then why isn’t Europe an economic rival? Why isn’t there a cold war with Europe? It makes absolutely no sense. Why aren’t the rising economies in Latin America rivals? Russia is actually a smaller economy now than when the Soviet Union was around. Why is it a rival suddenly?
With China, the only reason it’s called a “rivalry” is because China is overtaking the American corporate community in certain sectors, which they used to rule the roost on for decades on end. Okay, well that’s just normal sectoral conflicts within capitalism. The same happened with Japan. The same happened with Germany. They overtook the US in key sectors. Why didn’t the US start rattling their saber saying we should invade Japan or invade Germany? So this idea that if new capitalists emerge and they become more efficient than the United States, there is necessarily then an economic threat to the United States is absolute nonsense.
So, therefore, the rise of China is entirely different from calling it a rival of the United States. It’s also a market for the United States and a supplier of cheap goods to the United States. The fact that it’s being called a cold war is entirely the making of the United States.
China doesn’t want such a war. China has made that very clear. What it wants is more integrated global circuits of production and exchange. Russia not only did not want a cold war, Russia, from 2000 onward, has been asking to be let into NATO. It wanted to be at the table. It wanted to share in the spoils of global empire, a seat at the table of global imperialism. It did not want to be a rival to the United States. It’s the US that shut both of them out — and is now stoking military rivalries with them.
The good news is that it means that there’s no natural order of things that makes it so that rising new economic powers must also become geopolitical rivals. I think this is a political choice and a contingent political choice that the American ruling class is making.
There was some basis in the post-1945 era for the American state to see its relations with the Soviets as a rivalry because that was a rival economic system. The Chinese and the Russians are not rival economic systems. China is ruled by a communist party, but it’s running headlong toward being a capitalist economy of some kind. So there’s no deep structural basis for global antagonism and global rivalries.
This Cold War, which we’re already into, is one of choice. It’s one that the US is stoking and which the US is inflaming, and I think the one good reason to study the second half of the twentieth century is to see that the conditions today are, in many ways, quite different from what they were back then.
The one thing that both eras have in common is this: the United States is still very much an imperial power, very much out for its own interests. And its ruling class is still willing to sacrifice the interests of its population for the profits and ambitions of its corporate community. The good news is that the putative rivals to American ambitions abroad, those rivals are not seeking to be permanent antagonists.
There’s no structural basis for a cold war right now. And I think if the balance shifts within the United States toward a more democratic, more populist governance structure, it should be pretty easy to wind down.
Melissa Naschek
In today’s world under Trump, is the US still trying to be a global hegemon?
Vivek Chibber
There’s two issues involved here. Is it trying to be a global hegemon versus can it be one today. So, is it trying? I think up until Joe Biden, yeah. I think it was still trying to be a global hegemon. So why would I say that that’s not the case with Trump?
I think it’s because with Trump, whatever you say about him, there’s an element in him that’s kind of a realist and he is seeing what is in fact true — which is that even though you might try to be a hegemon, the capacity to actually be one is probably not there.
Now, this says something interesting about the postwar era. Remember I had said that when we came out of World War II, Europe was devastated. The Soviet Union was devastated. East Asia was devastated. The US was the only country standing. In 1950, the US accounted for something like 25 percent of global GDP. It was orders of magnitude more economically powerful than any other country.Biden’s militarism was, in many ways, kind of this last gasp — a frantic kick to try to reassert itself globally when it cannot.
In that situation, you could actually contemplate being the sole superpower. And you know, as I’ve hinted in this interview, in many ways it was. The Soviets were not a global rival. They were a minor factor in the postwar dispensation. So what happens between 1950 and 2020? Primarily what happens is the rest of the world, as per American ambitions, becomes capitalist.
What is it that’s fundamentally true about capitalism? It’s growth oriented. So all these economies globally now are growing. As they grow, they also grow their state revenues. They also have bigger budgets. India has an order of magnitude larger budget than it did in 1960. Same with Brazil. Same with South Africa.
With all these budgets come larger militaries, larger global ambitions, which means that the American capacity to dominate other countries economically and militarily is reduced. Look what happened with the United States in Afghanistan. The United States got its butt whipped in Afghanistan. In Iraq, it tried to establish something like a semi-colonial rule, and it had to leave. These were some of the weakest states in the Global South. American abilities to dominate directly or indirectly the Global South today is much diminished compared to 1950. By no means has it disappeared, but it is diminished.
This means then that it can’t be a sole hegemon. It can’t be the only superpower. It has to reduce its ambitions. So Biden’s militarism was, in many ways, kind of this last gasp. It was this frantic kick to try to reassert itself globally when it cannot.
Melissa Naschek
Are you saying American Empire has metastatic prostate cancer?
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. And the test came awfully late, unfortunately. It might also be losing its mind and be senile. We can run with this metaphor in many directions. But I think it is inevitable that the world is now headed toward multipolarity. It’s inevitable, and you know, in many ways it could be better.
In fact, the US has always made it a point to break international law in order to show the rest of the world that the rules don’t apply to it because nobody else was in the position to discipline it.
If it has to now abide by respecting, say, the Chinese or Russian sphere of influence, there are ways in which that’s a positive. Of course, this is still multi-imperial rivalry. These are all going to be imperial states and they’re going to do a lot of damage to the populations over which they have power.
But it might end up being a situation in which there is less large-scale global conflict, the way the United States stoked it. I don’t know. We’ll have to see. But whatever happens, I think we can say that we are headed toward multipolarity and I don’t think in a post-Trump world you’re going to see a return to the kind of American supremacy the way you did before.
What you’re describing now, where the US is the primary aggressor and the Soviet Union is really just playing catch-up, is pretty different than what we’re traditionally told about the Cold War, which is basically the opposite: that it was all the Soviet Union’s fault — they were the ones who were being aggressive and the US was just sort of covering its tracks to prevent the spread of communism.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, that’s exactly what we were told and that’s the official ideology. And it gets it, as you say, exactly backward. The American strategy for global expansion was really put in place before World War II even ended.
Around 1943, [Franklin D. Roosevelt] put together a series of committees in the State Department to plan for what the postwar situation would be. They were essentially setting up an agenda for how the US would conduct its affairs in the postwar scenario. This is in 1943, when you don’t even know what the outcome of the war is going to be. The US is fairly sure that the Allies would win. But it was not sure if the Soviet Union would even survive. It had absolutely no clue as to what the Soviets would do at that time.
What plans does it come up with? There were two pillars to this plan. One was that whatever else happened after 1945, the colonial empires would have to be dismantled, by which we meant the British and the French. Why does it want to dismantle them? It’s not to spread freedom and liberty and all those things. It saw those empires, politically and economically, very inimical to American interests and therefore also to global interests.
Melissa Naschek
Interesting because I think we’re told often that the goal was to eliminate the scourge of colonialism.
Vivek Chibber
It was to eliminate the way in which colonialism interacted with global political economy. This is the key. Freedoms were a secondary affair. What do I mean by the way it interacted? The US was absolutely convinced, and I think it was probably right, that a big push for the war came from economic rivalries between blocks of capital that were closed off from each other. And that created a kind of antagonism between them to open up markets that were otherwise inaccessible.
The British didn’t have access to French colonies and their markets. The French didn’t have good access to the British colonies. And the Americans had access to none of them. So the first thing to do is to break down these colonial barriers so that capital and labor can move freely. And the US thought that this will reduce the animosities. Now, because it reduces economic animosities, it should also reduce geopolitical rivalries.
As it happens, the second pillar of this was that American capital should be given special access to all these markets, of course, because it benefits the United States. But also because they thought the United States will be best positioned to superintend — to kind of be a referee for economic and political affairs everywhere. And if it has access to all these markets, American states will have an interest in an open playing field.
This should not be surprising because England also was pushing for the same policies in the 1840s and ’50s, a hundred years prior. Why both countries? England in the 1840s and ’50s, the United States in the 1940s and ’50s were the most economically efficient and productive economies in the world. They had nothing to fear from a globalized economy.
Both countries also had some degree of interest in opening up their economies to the others. I won’t go into why the British did — that was primarily because they were the biggest lenders in the world — but in the United States, the reason they wanted to have their borders open was that they knew that after the war, the entire world would need dollars for global trade and imports and exports.
Well, how are they going to get dollars? They can only get dollars if the US is buying goods from them and paying in dollars. So if the US wanted a global economy to thrive, it had to open up its markets to importers from the rest of the world. That meant as early as 1943 to 1944, the US had an agenda for expanding into the global economy before it knew if the Soviets would even survive.
Now, what happens in 1945 is the Soviets not only survive, but they have the largest army in Europe. And that means then that communism is now a real threat inside Europe as well. So now what this does is it adds an inflection to American global ambitions. Those global ambitions were always in place. The US intended to expand its influence over the entire world, but now it has to deal with the fact that there is a potential rival, at least in one part of that world, which is in Eastern Europe. That was a problem. It had to deal with it.
The initial signs after 1944–45 were not that the US would simply start up a deep antagonism with the Soviet Union. That took about eight, ten months to develop. The reason it developed so intensely, the reason anti-communism became such an issue, was that when [Harry] Truman and his people realized that in order to be the new police for the whole world, they would have to massively ramp up their military budgets and their military resources, Congress wasn’t willing to do it. So the one way in which they could get Congress to back this was to raise this specter of Communism.
Every time Congress resists him, he raises the bogey of the communist threat in Europe. This is how the Marshall Plan is passed. This is how the funding for NATO is passed. This is how the militarization of Asia and Europe is passed. So the US starts generating this ideology — the rhetoric of a global communist threat.
Melissa Naschek
Did the USSR have its own similar agenda of what it wanted the global economy to look like?
Vivek Chibber
The USSR had an agenda of what it wanted the postwar dispensation to look like. That agenda was very different from the United States. The US’s agenda was to expand the circuits of American investment and American trade and American corporate movements around the world.
The Soviets did not have a capitalist economy. Their economy didn’t run on finding new markets. On top of that, it was absolutely devastated by the war. The single most important difference between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1946 is that the US had been untouched by the war. But the Soviet Union had absolutely been devastated both in terms of how many people died — thirty million people — and in terms of physical infrastructure, [Adolf] Hitler wiped out all of the Western industrial manufacturing capacity that the Soviets had.
So their first order of affairs was simply to rebuild, and this is why [Joseph] Stalin was in no position to launch a big old offensive — forget the world, even in Europe. And the US knew that. The US’s own intelligence told them that, at least for the next five to eight, potentially ten, years, Soviets were both militarily and economically devastated. So when the US launched this Cold War, it knows it’s fictional. It knows that it has no bearing on reality.
It did it because it smoothed over conflicts within Congress. It papered over for the American people the traditional kind of weariness about entering into global affairs. The US had traditionally been a kind of — I don’t like this term, but I’ll use it — isolationist country. So the Soviets were in no position to have an agenda that paralleled the American agenda.
What they wanted was one simple thing. They had been invaded twice in thirty years by the West. What they wanted was a buffer zone — Stalin was clear on this — which means essentially a series of satellites on their western border that is Eastern Europe, which would be a geographical buffer between them and Europe because they didn’t trust Europe anymore. Keep in mind, this is brutal. What it meant was a brutal imposition by Stalin of Communist regimes on Eastern Europe. But after he gets into Eastern Europe, now the rest of the global ambitions are actually extremely limited.
Melissa Naschek
What you’re describing really goes against the conventional explanations for the Cold War.
Vivek Chibber
That’s exactly right, Melissa — what is the conventional description of the Cold War? It’s a term called “containment.” What the US was doing was trying to contain the Soviet Union. And what does that mean? It means that the Soviets are motivated by this ideology of global expansion, right? According to this, Communism doesn’t recognize national borders. It wants the whole world to be a communist world, and the US is trying to keep them at bay only for its own moral commitments to democracy. So that’s why they’d never use the word “capitalism.”
That means, essentially, the US is trying to contain Soviet ambitions. Now, the thing about containment is that the metaphor suggests a defensive posture. “We don’t want to be expanding across the world — we’re just doing it reluctantly because it’s the Soviets that were doing the expanding.”
What in fact I’m saying was happening is that the US from 1943 onward had a strategy of global expansion. The problem with the Soviet Union was that the Soviets stood in the way in two respects. One was that the Soviet Union as a model of political economy gave emerging nations a different sense of what they could do. They could opt out of an economy based on private property and profit maximization. So as a model, they were no good.
And the second problem was that the Soviet Union stood militarily and economically as a potential ally for countries that did not want to abide by the American rules and American strictures. It’s kind of ironic because for the most part, the Soviets sold everyone else out. But for the United States, the mere threat of the Soviets for that reason was intolerable.What the Cold War was really about was the aggressive expansion of American capitalist interests across the world in which the Soviets were presented as a threat and as an equal imperial rival.
What was actually happening was the US was acting on a prior strategic decision that it had made in 1943 of global expansion, and it saw the Soviets as an impediment to that expansion. Soviets were a minor player in all this, but the US had to pump them up because it was a great way of bringing Congress to heel, of getting the American people to be constantly terrified, constantly in a state of anxiety for which the American global and military expansion was seen, ironically, as a form of defense. Even though the US is expanding aggressively abroad, it’s presented as a form of defense. So what the Cold War was really about was the aggressive expansion of American capitalist interests across the world in which the Soviets were presented as a threat and as an equal imperial rival.
But in fact, they were a minor power that was just trying to keep up.
What the Soviet Union Was Really After
Melissa Naschek
I think the popular version of what the USSR satellite states were like is that Stalin sort of had his hands up the backs of the shirts of all the rulers and was basically just ruling through puppets.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah, that’s actually pretty much was what was happening.
Melissa Naschek
If that’s the case, can you explain a little bit more?
Vivek Chibber
Except for [Josip Broz] Tito in Yugoslavia, Stalin and [Nikita] Khrushchev had very direct control and domination over the rest of the countries there. So with Eastern Europe, the metaphor of a satellite suggests these orbital bodies that revolve around a central gravitational pull of a big power, and that’s basically what this was because these communist parties were so beholden to Stalin. Now it’s an interesting question here — why are they beholden? This also gets at something interesting, the traditional understanding of empire is that the imperial core somehow extracts wealth and resources from its dominions.
Melissa Naschek
Right. As I’m listening to your description, I’m kind of thinking, “Well, to what end is the USSR doing this?”
Vivek Chibber
There isn’t a huge literature on the economic flows between the Soviets and Eastern Europe because obviously the data was not available for Western scholars. But it became pretty clear in the 1980s when these economies went into crisis that what was happening was probably not so much the Soviet Union bleeding Eastern Europe for its own enrichment, but the opposite.
This is a weird empire where the Soviets are actually probably generating a net outflow of resources into Eastern Europe because the Eastern Europe economies were just so much less efficient that they needed to have enough imports from the West in order to keep their wages high, in order to be able to afford the infrastructure that they were developing. The Soviets had to subsidize a lot of it. Why would the Soviets do this? It’s pretty clear. It’s because they were so terrified of the vulnerability on their western borders that they were willing to keep these very unpopular regimes in place.
The Polish, the Hungarian, the Bulgarian, the Czechoslovakian regimes — they’re willing to keep them in place because they thought that that was preferable to letting those regimes fall and having the West come right up to its borders. This is important to note because this is exactly why the Ukraine War is happening now, because once the West announced that Ukraine was going to join NATO — this is why Russia reacted with such alacrity, because it’s the memory of repeated invasions from the West from a power that has always been hostile to them.
The point here is that the dynamics of that empire were very different from normal empires. This was the Soviets essentially subsidizing autocratic regimes on their western border in order to ensure their own geopolitical safety.
Melissa Naschek
If the Soviet Empire ruled through satellite states, how did the American Empire rule?
Vivek Chibber
I think “satellite” would be too strong a word. What the United States did essentially was it had one red line, which is that as it expands globally, all states had to line up geopolitically with the United States somehow.
This was even more important to them than having those economies open to American corporate influence and American profit-making. If you go back to one of the first episodes [of Confronting Capitalism] we did when I was talking about tariffs, I had said that the typical policy in countries of the Global South is what was called import substitution. This is when they put up tariff barriers to actually keep American consumption goods out, and that was the means by which they developed their own manufacturing industries, because by keeping American products out, they created a market for their own capitalist class.
Now, the Americans actually were okay with this. There were two reasons they were okay with it. One was even though American consumption goods like cars and shirts and shoes were kept out of these markets, in order to produce those goods for themselves, these countries in the south had to buy machinery from the United States.The US didn’t want to make sure that the rest of the world was poor so it could rip them off — this is absolutely false. The US actively engaged in the development of capitalism everywhere else.
So one kind of market was open to American producers while another kind of market was not. Capital goods markets were open. Consumer goods markets were not open. But the Americans put up with this nonetheless. Why? Because the foreign policy establishment was okay with the fact that by generating its own markets and its own corporate community for itself, countries in the Global South were generating a capitalist class. And the US saw that class, as long as they’re hothousing a new capitalist class, is the best buffer against communism that we can ever imagine. So they were temporarily willing to put up with a semi-closure to its own capital and its own investments for the long-term political benefit of capitalism growing globally.
I want to stress this because there is a weird revival on the Left today of this kind of mercantilist understanding of the American Empire — that the US supposedly wanted to make sure that the rest of the world was poor so it could rip them off. This is absolutely false. The US actively engaged in the development of capitalism everywhere else.
Melissa Naschek
That makes it kind of an interesting historical moment because, generally, I think it’s Marxist “best practices” to assume that capitalists are doing things for their own self-interest and not so explicitly for the development of capitalism.
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. This was the American state doing this, and American capitalists were not happy about it. So it is absolutely the case that all those industries that were now being kept out of countries like India, Brazil, and Mexico because of their import tariffs were now lobbying the American state to force these people to lower their tariffs. But the reason the US state was able to resist that was it had a lot of support from the capital goods industries that were benefiting from this.
But it also steadily insulated the presidency from congressional influence. All these capitalists who are being kept out of global markets, they were lobbying through Congress and one of the things that happens in the 1960s through ’80s is the American state insulates its foreign policy decisions from congressional approval. This is why Trump can now declare tariffs like he’s the monarch. It’s because the president was given unilateral power over foreign economic policy due to large sections of American capital being unhappy with how the US state was supervising the growth of global capitalism, because in some instances, it actually hurt the interests of large sections of American capital here.
So the state had to assert its independence from its own capitalists to be able to serve their long-term interests.
Melissa Naschek
This is really interesting because it cuts against one of the most often-cited lines from [Karl] Marx that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeois. It’s worth going into when and how the state was insulating itself from the capitalist class.
Vivek Chibber
One good example is when Japan — and a few years later Korea — when they start their industrialization processes, they do two things that a lot of American capitalists are unhappy about. One is they set up tariff barriers to US goods entering their countries, which the US producers of those goods are not happy about. This is mostly low-end consumer goods.
And then the second thing is they start invading American markets. So on both ends of it, American businessmen lobby Congress to reverse these flows. First of all, they want Congress to pressure the president to get the Japanese and the Koreans to lower their tariffs, to which the president says “no way.” And then on the other end of it, when they start getting flooded by Japanese and later Korean goods, they want Congress and the presidency to raise tariffs against the Japanese and Korean producers. And again, they’re told “no way.” Now who’s telling them no? Not Congress.
Congressmen are in no position to fend off corporate pressure because those corporations are funding the elections in their districts, and they’re pretty competitive districts. The rebuffs come from the presidency and over the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, the presidency increasingly urges Congress to allow itself insulation from this kind of pressure.
But this is also happening with regard to access to Brazilian markets, with access to Indian markets — the same thing is happening but this is why you can’t call them satellites. These countries are beholden to their own capitalists. They are trying to forge their own agenda. It’s just that the US makes sure that as long as that agenda is within the parameters of the larger American goal of expanding global capitalism — and geopolitically, making sure that the states that are on top of all these capitalist economies are lined up against the Soviet Union — they’re fine with short-term losses for American capital.
Now, is this the state being the executive committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie? Yeah, in a way it is in that the American state is looking out for the long-term interest of the American capitalist class. But that happens while having to deal with short-term displeasure from the capitalist just like with parents and children: sometimes you have to do things for the kids that they may not be so happy with, but it’s for their own long-term interest. That’s exactly how the American state saw its relationship to its capitalist class.
Melissa Naschek
Was this something that other capitalist states of the time agreed with and wanted, or were they just sort of along for the ride?
Vivek Chibber
To answer this question, you have to divide up capitalist states into two groups. The established capitalist states of the core economies, that is, Europe and East Asia — not only were okay with it, they welcomed it. And this is important: the United States was welcomed by Europe and Japan as a senior partner. They wanted the US to be a senior partner.
Why? The main reason is that in the first few years after the war, all of Europe and Japan were also devastated. So they really benefited from the United States coming into Eastern Asia and into Europe, and establishing a military presence and an economic stake. This meant that many of the responsibilities that their states would’ve had to undertake, particularly military responsibilities, could now be offloaded to the US and that money in the budget could be put toward other things.
Melissa Naschek
So their motivations are a little bit more self-interested.
Vivek Chibber
Totally self-interested. Absolutely. The second reason they welcome it is that both in Japan and Europe, what had happened between the 1930s and 1950 was the birth of the modern labor movement. In all of these countries now, in 1945 after the war, the Left came to power across the board. The Left was the most important new political force in all of these countries. What did the Left want? It wanted a massive welfare state, redistribution, labor rights — all of which meant that these countries could no longer have carte blanche to build up a military at the expense of everything else the way they could in the 1920s and the 1930s.
The US had the weakest labor movement in the advanced world. So the US was the one country where you had both a humongous economy and the most freedom to maneuver for its ruling classes because even though the US had the New Deal, the New Deal paled in comparison to the welfare states in Western Europe and even in Japan.
They welcomed the US because they had all these new responsibilities that they hadn’t had in the 1920s and ’30s for social expenditures. So the US allowed them to, relatively speaking, slow down the growth of their militaries, substitute for them, and funnel funds toward the welfare states that they were developing.The US allowed Japan and Europe to, relatively speaking, slow down the growth of their militaries, substitute for them, and funnel funds toward the welfare states that they were developing.
So for them, American Empire, it was — as some historians have said — empire by invitation. It’s a different dynamic with a second group, which is the newly emerging postcolonial countries. Now we’re talking about South Asia, Southeast Asia and — by the 1960s — African countries that are now free from French and British rule. The reason they were more ambivalent was that in many of these countries, the independence movements had led to the growth of very vibrant and large left-wing national liberation movements, and those movements had a very ambitious agenda of national development, which saw the Soviet Union as a potential model for them.
In those countries, they wanted to make up their own minds about whether they would have land reform or whether they would have huge nationalizations. The US was okay with import substitution. What it would not tolerate though was significant Communist Party influence over nationalizing industry. Because if you’re nationalizing industries, you’re wiping out the capitalist class. If you’re doing land reform, you’ll be wiping out landed classes, which are the bulwark of anti-communism in all these countries. So in those newly emergent postcolonial countries, there was a great deal more ambivalence toward the American Empire and, in some cases, hostility.
And that’s why you see the US using its military in some moments at some times. That’s not because the US was trying to subjugate those countries. It’s not because it was trying to impoverish those countries. It just wanted a reliable local ruling class that would participate in the project and the ambition of growing capitalism in these countries in partnership with the United States.
As long as they were in partnership, the US would put up with all kinds of things like import substitution and tariffs and things like that. It just wanted a signal that you are on its side. So with Europe, it was a very, very clear and uncomplicated relationship. In countries in the Global South, it was more conflictual, and therefore you see much more of a militaristic stance on the part of the US.
Melissa Naschek
The way that the Vietnam War is portrayed in the broader context of the Cold War is that it was a quintessential conflict in the sense that the USSR was supporting Vietnam because it was trying to become a communist country.
Vivek Chibber
The Soviets were extremely cautious. I’m not going to say that they never helped these countries out that were moving to the Left. But in the case of Vietnam, they sold out the Vietnamese left and right. Not just the Soviets — so did the Chinese. Now you can find instances where they did, in fact, try to come in and provide some assistance, but it was almost always with an eye toward making sure that the US understood that the Soviets can’t be ignored.
Melissa Naschek
Which conflicts are you thinking of?
Vivek Chibber
Thinking of Chile and obviously Cuba. All over Latin America. The Soviets basically stayed out. Now, I want to be careful with my language. I’m not saying that the Soviets let the US run rampant over Latin America. They did come in, they did offer assistance — sometimes logistical, sometimes monetary — but they absolutely understood that this is the US’s backyard. And we’re going to let them do what they need to do. It’s just that they wanted to always be taken seriously. And the reason for that was they were one-quarter the size of the American economy.
They were having to, in some way or form, compete with the US geopolitically. And so the dilemma for them was, if the US didn’t take them seriously, then the real core of Soviet concerns, which is the military balance in Europe, would also start to become renegotiated. The US would also now come in and start changing the European landscape, which the Soviets couldn’t afford.
So they needed to have a foot in Africa, some kind of foot in Latin America, some kind of foot in Asia, so that they could always say, “If you make trouble for us in Europe, we could make trouble for you in these countries as well.” But always and everywhere it was defensive.
And what’s underneath all this is that at the end of the day, you had an economy that’s probably around one-quarter of the size of the United States having to be on the world stage as a global rival.
If you’re trying to do that and your economy’s one-quarter of the size, it’s just not going to be a fight between equals. And if you let this history play out, ninety-nine out of a hundred times, the Cold War ends exactly the way it did, which is the Soviet Union losing.
America’s Twenty-First-Century Cold War of Choice
Melissa Naschek
Now we’re faced with all of these statements that we are once again in a cold war, and that seems to be based primarily on the US relationship with the Russian state and the US rivalry with the Chinese state. Generally, I’m just very suspicious of historical analogies.
Vivek Chibber
Let’s be clear about something. This notion of economic rivals is just nonsense because — what makes someone an economic rival? Is it the fact that they have a large, productive economy with their own corporations that are doing well? Okay. Well then why isn’t Europe an economic rival? Why isn’t there a cold war with Europe? It makes absolutely no sense. Why aren’t the rising economies in Latin America rivals? Russia is actually a smaller economy now than when the Soviet Union was around. Why is it a rival suddenly?
With China, the only reason it’s called a “rivalry” is because China is overtaking the American corporate community in certain sectors, which they used to rule the roost on for decades on end. Okay, well that’s just normal sectoral conflicts within capitalism. The same happened with Japan. The same happened with Germany. They overtook the US in key sectors. Why didn’t the US start rattling their saber saying we should invade Japan or invade Germany? So this idea that if new capitalists emerge and they become more efficient than the United States, there is necessarily then an economic threat to the United States is absolute nonsense.
So, therefore, the rise of China is entirely different from calling it a rival of the United States. It’s also a market for the United States and a supplier of cheap goods to the United States. The fact that it’s being called a cold war is entirely the making of the United States.
China doesn’t want such a war. China has made that very clear. What it wants is more integrated global circuits of production and exchange. Russia not only did not want a cold war, Russia, from 2000 onward, has been asking to be let into NATO. It wanted to be at the table. It wanted to share in the spoils of global empire, a seat at the table of global imperialism. It did not want to be a rival to the United States. It’s the US that shut both of them out — and is now stoking military rivalries with them.
The good news is that it means that there’s no natural order of things that makes it so that rising new economic powers must also become geopolitical rivals. I think this is a political choice and a contingent political choice that the American ruling class is making.
There was some basis in the post-1945 era for the American state to see its relations with the Soviets as a rivalry because that was a rival economic system. The Chinese and the Russians are not rival economic systems. China is ruled by a communist party, but it’s running headlong toward being a capitalist economy of some kind. So there’s no deep structural basis for global antagonism and global rivalries.
This Cold War, which we’re already into, is one of choice. It’s one that the US is stoking and which the US is inflaming, and I think the one good reason to study the second half of the twentieth century is to see that the conditions today are, in many ways, quite different from what they were back then.
The one thing that both eras have in common is this: the United States is still very much an imperial power, very much out for its own interests. And its ruling class is still willing to sacrifice the interests of its population for the profits and ambitions of its corporate community. The good news is that the putative rivals to American ambitions abroad, those rivals are not seeking to be permanent antagonists.
There’s no structural basis for a cold war right now. And I think if the balance shifts within the United States toward a more democratic, more populist governance structure, it should be pretty easy to wind down.
Melissa Naschek
In today’s world under Trump, is the US still trying to be a global hegemon?
Vivek Chibber
There’s two issues involved here. Is it trying to be a global hegemon versus can it be one today. So, is it trying? I think up until Joe Biden, yeah. I think it was still trying to be a global hegemon. So why would I say that that’s not the case with Trump?
I think it’s because with Trump, whatever you say about him, there’s an element in him that’s kind of a realist and he is seeing what is in fact true — which is that even though you might try to be a hegemon, the capacity to actually be one is probably not there.
Now, this says something interesting about the postwar era. Remember I had said that when we came out of World War II, Europe was devastated. The Soviet Union was devastated. East Asia was devastated. The US was the only country standing. In 1950, the US accounted for something like 25 percent of global GDP. It was orders of magnitude more economically powerful than any other country.Biden’s militarism was, in many ways, kind of this last gasp — a frantic kick to try to reassert itself globally when it cannot.
In that situation, you could actually contemplate being the sole superpower. And you know, as I’ve hinted in this interview, in many ways it was. The Soviets were not a global rival. They were a minor factor in the postwar dispensation. So what happens between 1950 and 2020? Primarily what happens is the rest of the world, as per American ambitions, becomes capitalist.
What is it that’s fundamentally true about capitalism? It’s growth oriented. So all these economies globally now are growing. As they grow, they also grow their state revenues. They also have bigger budgets. India has an order of magnitude larger budget than it did in 1960. Same with Brazil. Same with South Africa.
With all these budgets come larger militaries, larger global ambitions, which means that the American capacity to dominate other countries economically and militarily is reduced. Look what happened with the United States in Afghanistan. The United States got its butt whipped in Afghanistan. In Iraq, it tried to establish something like a semi-colonial rule, and it had to leave. These were some of the weakest states in the Global South. American abilities to dominate directly or indirectly the Global South today is much diminished compared to 1950. By no means has it disappeared, but it is diminished.
This means then that it can’t be a sole hegemon. It can’t be the only superpower. It has to reduce its ambitions. So Biden’s militarism was, in many ways, kind of this last gasp. It was this frantic kick to try to reassert itself globally when it cannot.
Melissa Naschek
Are you saying American Empire has metastatic prostate cancer?
Vivek Chibber
Yeah. And the test came awfully late, unfortunately. It might also be losing its mind and be senile. We can run with this metaphor in many directions. But I think it is inevitable that the world is now headed toward multipolarity. It’s inevitable, and you know, in many ways it could be better.
In fact, the US has always made it a point to break international law in order to show the rest of the world that the rules don’t apply to it because nobody else was in the position to discipline it.
If it has to now abide by respecting, say, the Chinese or Russian sphere of influence, there are ways in which that’s a positive. Of course, this is still multi-imperial rivalry. These are all going to be imperial states and they’re going to do a lot of damage to the populations over which they have power.
But it might end up being a situation in which there is less large-scale global conflict, the way the United States stoked it. I don’t know. We’ll have to see. But whatever happens, I think we can say that we are headed toward multipolarity and I don’t think in a post-Trump world you’re going to see a return to the kind of American supremacy the way you did before.
Melissa Naschek
O Império Americano sobreviverá à multipolaridade?
Vivek Chibber
Como império regional, ele sobreviverá. Mas todos os impérios serão reduzidos no século XXI porque a capacidade dos Estados subordinados de resistir e de definir sua própria agenda é muito maior do que era.
Esqueça o século XIX, ou mesmo meados do século XX. Todos os Estados imperiais terão que recorrer a mecanismos de dominação mais sutis do que aqueles em que se baseavam no passado, que eram a invasão e o governo direto, ou coisas como a coerção militar. À medida que a economia capitalista global se desenvolve, a capacidade dos países subordinados de resistir aos ditames das potências imperiais dominantes também se desenvolve, o que significa que as potências imperiais dominantes serão mais limitadas em suas ações.
Colaboradores
Vivek Chibber é professor de sociologia na Universidade de Nova York. Ele é editor do Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
Melissa Naschek é membro dos Socialistas Democráticos da América.
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