The New Mandarins of American Power

Submitted by on 22 January, 2004 - 12:00

by Alex Callinicos (Polity)

This is a book of sensational tabloid headlines, but its substance is Guardian-bland. It skips from the "rhetoric of conquest" to the "cultists of eternal war", rises to "the collision of empires" and ends with "catastrophe immanent" - though Callinicos is never so bold as to predict that Armageddon is about to happen.

However in places, Callinicos seems to believe that a fourth world war is on the agenda. The Cold War apparently counts as the third. So the US and UK on one side and Germany, France, Russia and China on the other, are currently jockeying for position, ready for a clash of the titans? The vague warnings are cast in quasi-religious overtones, warning that: "Nemesis awaits the 'democratic imperialists' in the Pentagon... The only question concerns the form that retribution will take" (p.129).

Beneath the hyperbole is a rather mundane trawl through the literature on George Bush's coterie and a rather lame effort to fit reality into the straitjacket of Callinicos' version of a "Marxist" theory of imperialism".

Callinicos rather pretentiously models his book on Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins (1969). Chomsky's book was an indictment of the mainstream, liberal intellectuals - the "new mandarins" - who provided the ideological cover for the Vietnam War.

But just as the war in Iraq is not the Vietnam War, the mandarins Callinicos discusses are not the liberal apologists for imperialism. They are the group of right-wing Republicans (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc.) who run the US government.

Much of what Callinicos says about them is true. The mandarins around Bush have articulated a self-conscious global political project for the US ruling class, what he calls a "grand strategy", that includes facing down rivals, reordering the Middle East, removing the threat of terrorist attack, ensuring their oil supplies, and so on. But Callinicos adds very little to what has already been published - by the liberal mandarins of today.

Callinicos follows Samuel Huntington (1999) when he refers to the USA as a "rogue superpower". There are quotes from Tony Blair's former adviser Robert Cooper on the need for a "post-modern" empire, Bush's speech at West Point in June 2002 announcing the "doctrine of pre-emptive action" and references to the National Security Strategy (September 2002). The roots are traced to the draft Pentagon Defence Planning Guidance, written in 1992 by Wolfowitz, and the Project for the American Century (1997).

Callinicos tries to give it all a Marxist gloss. But his method - so terribly even-handed and urbane - is just like a modern mandarin, with a nod to authorities left and right, the hard edges softened by constant qualification.

Callinicos compares the US imperium today with the British empire of the nineteenth century, but then acknowledges that multinationals, trade patterns and other forms of interdependence makes them very different. On the one hand the US is a "hyperpower" (quoting former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, p.112) presiding over an "imperialism of free trade" (p.106), but then again the US is in economic decline and democracy is difficult to distinguish from the "older forms of colonialism" (p.34).

For Callinicos, imperialism - meaning the old pattern of great power rivalry - "is back with a vengeance" (p.100) and apparently once again rival coalitions "struggle for mastery" (p.102). He says: "The geostrategy pursued by the Bush team has in its sights the major rivals of the United States" (p.80) and "the underlying tensions burst to the surface" over Iraq (p.79).

But whereas in early periods, this big power rivalry led to world war, Callinicos draws back from such a conclusion "in the short term". European imperialism is not unified, and anyway European powers can't afford to increase military spending (because of the Euro pact!). So whilst the split over Iraq is "serious", it is unlikely "to lead to the emergence of a serious geopolitical challenge to American hegemony" (p.121).

This perpetual criss-crossing would be less problematic but for Callinicos' insistence that all can be reconciled with his stripped-down version of "the Marxist theory of imperialism". Of course, the world is a complex place to analyse, and Marxists a century ago have much to teach us. But for Callinicos to cram it all into this pastiche is the work of a priest - not of a Marxist.

He says "the Marxist theory of imperialism" is based on the development of the capitalist mode of production. "Its central claim was that, in unifying the world, capitalism created a highly unequal world dominated by a handful of Great Powers that competed both economically and militarily (p.100). This is true - but banal, and strips away an awful lot else that Lenin and others wrote about.

He says this "Marxist" theory is superior because it treats "the diplomatic and military conflicts among states as instances of the more general process of competition that drives capitalism". The Bolsheviks recognised that "in the course of the nineteenth century two hitherto relatively autonomous processes - the geopolitical rivalries among states and economic competition between capitals - increasingly fused."

But the classical Marxists used these rivalries to explain two world wars. Yet what Callinicos describes today - the reality of US hegemony since 1945, and the absence of great power rivalry leading to great-power war - ought to mean the "theory" needs revision, development and in places pruning. But he does none of this work.

And Callinicos says nothing about other developments - such as the sub-imperialist drives of some capitalist states, which might trigger regional and local wars. The involvement of others states, not big powers but nevertheless capable of pursuing their own regional ambitions, is one of the crucial differences between the current period and previous history. But this dimension is entirely absent from Callinicos' perspective.

The allusion to the mandarins (in the sense of intellectuals, rather than priests) is important at another level too. The Republican "new mandarins" are realistic, hard-nosed ideological class warriors for their own bourgeoisie. But because Callinicos offers only a one-dimensional analysis focused on US power, he fails to provide the fully-rounded picture on which to base the political strategy of the real anti-imperialist force, the international working class.

Having spent over one hundred pages setting out the US ruling class's strategy, Callinicos spends only the last paragraph on the possibility of a progressive alternative - and then makes the bizarre suggestion that the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements might "finally put an end to the capitalist system". The possibility that American and other workers might oppose their own ruling classes is not even discussed.

So from Callinicos we get a "Marxist" theory uncoupled from its necessary referents - the reality of global capitalism and its system of multiple states, and from the working class as the necessary global agent of a progressive anti-imperialism. In short, then, this book is a long way away from genuine Marxism.

Score: 3/10
Reviewer: Paul Hampton

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.