1. Coadjutors speak on Empire
2. Henry N Brailsford vs. John A Hobson

(By way of Mr. Lydon is this transcript of an interview of Chalmers Johnson, which may serve for readers who lack time to read The Sorrows of Empire.) "The Empire that Fell as it Rose:..an exchange" between Tom Engelhardt & Jonathan Schell, in the August '04 issue of Mother Jones.

A reconsideration of several centuries of the imperial "war system," as it built up through a series of extreme moments of violence in the last century to ...global paralysis that ...left the Earth ...in deadly peril, Unconquerable World also laid ...the successful resistance to that system, ...In the process, Jonathan uncovered a series of nonviolent pathways in history...

[extract of letter by Mr. Schell to Mr. Engelhardt]...When I was writing and you were editing my book The Unconquerable World, you were much readier than I to call American policies "imperial" and the United States an "empire." I hesitated; I hung back. After all, one theme of the book was that the age of empires was over. The newly expired twentieth century, I pointed out, was one huge boneyard of empires: the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians.

Ignatieff and Ferguson appear to look at twentieth century history as a contest among empires that was won by the United States, opening the way for it to run the world. As I see it, however, the United States is likely to prove the last of the long series of imperial tenpins that have been knocked down not by other empires but by local independence struggles. Once it has become clear to everyone that the American imperial bid has failed, and with it the entire age-old imperial enterprise, we can return to the mountainous real work of our time, which is to put together what we have never had but now must create — an anti-imperial, democratic way of organizing the world.

Part of our problem, I suspect, lies in conceiving of an empire-less world; or put another way, one legacy of all those empires you wrote about, even though each of them fell before the unconquerable world, the people's world, that you speak of so eloquently, is that our only script for hundreds of years was imperially dominated. That was no less true of the ...revolutionaries who ..[fought] empire (and so, ...became in one way or another imperially fused). The United States, having ...reached ..., a global imperium...in a thoroughly half-assed ...fashion ...seems to be proving that the very idea of empire is indeed bankrupt... Trying to deal with this situation, I think we're hobbled by having no other script. We don't quite know what to do without the idea of eempire.

It's like trying to imagine victory in a war on terror. Suppose we kill or capture the entire membership of al-Qaeda, then every other terrorist movement...soon it becomes obvious this needs to include white supremacist terrorists (Orcinus, 1, 2, 3), then people whose acts of "terror" are little worse than annoyances (like the minbo of the Japanese yakuza)...eventually it becomes necessary to genetically alter humans to be incapable of intimidation. Or we turn on terrorism by national governments, which soon leads us to have to deconstruct "terrorism" as a concept (is deception in the enforcement of laws a form of state terror? Is any coercion "state terror"?). The defeat of imperialism is never going to be absolute, just as the defeat of terrorism is never going to be absolute. Imperialism isn't defeated with the defeat of an "imperial power"; although the capitulation of an empire to anti-colonial resistance does render imperialism costlier and harder. The biggest mistake is imagining that, when a nation melts down, its imperial connections vanish; an empire is a business enterprise, an intangible possession that can change ownership. When the nation that holds an empire implodes, the outcome is the transfer of ownership.

In fact, the US State Department is simply a footsoldier of capital that flows into our bankrupt and unsustainable economy on IV tubes. That capital is managed by people who have no need of defending their policies to their compatriots, or even to themselves. This seems to me to be an economic problem—if those financial managers saw a popular national movement in the USA brewing, could they not "Argentinify" our country long before that movement coalesced into actual power? The beauty of it is, the lack of any serious effort to sell neocolonial policies to Western Europeans, coupled with the notion that their own period of colonial mastery of the earth was a golden age, will motivate Europeans to applaud the wreckage they inflict when payback time comes. "Those ignorant Yankee savages had it coming," they will all say, regretting only that the wreckage is financial rather than nuclear.

By including European nationals in my historical narrative, I am saying something that will seem to most readers as wildly libelous of the former imperial powers: that they are, along with the USA and other nations, actually a unit of collaborative institutions; as a matter of a fact, US foreign policy is not "unilateralist" at all. American voters, to be sure, have been brainwashed to accept things like the prison abuse of foreigners, and that's a national shame; but it's also inevitable. When people are confronted with the suffering their livelihood causes others, it is human nature to rationalize. And as I say, European citizens don't understand, and never approved of, their financial leaders' role in the world project of "globalization" (or, as Lionel Jospin told French voters, "americanization"). So I'm not accusing Europeans; but their financial institutions are part of the machinery that drives "American hegemony," and with each passing year of American trade deficits, our subservience to those financial institutions grows.

• The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace, by Henry N Brailsford, 1914;
• Imperialism, by John A Hobson, 1902

This entry was stimulated by a challenging little essay, "Economic Imperialism" (A.J.P. Taylor, 1952), which declares Brailsford to be a sort of antidote to the "Leninist-Hobsonian" analysis of imperialism. Hobson's analysis of imperialism is radical, not leftist; it includes, but does not confine itself to, class struggle as an explanatory influence on human affairs. Not to belabor the point, but Hobson often admits he does not want to get sidetracked on an unproductive tangent, and, to reconcile theoretical Tybalts, concedes all but the one point he is required to make; so, for example, rather than allude to "class struggle," which is all to likely to be interpreted as saying, "Classes have no relationship beyond struggle," he simply says "sectional interests." Lenin is the historical extreme of a theoretical Tybalt, and exploits Hobson, like an oil company exploits an oil-rich nation. Taylor also pits Brailsford against Hobson, despite the fact that the former cites Hobson once, and that favorably.

I'd rather not spend too much time refuting Taylor's critique of Hobson, which is more in the spirit of a drive-by raspberry than a critique. Hobson, as a radical, does not have a single explanation for anything; Lenin, a demagogue, is required to. Hobson does show there is a correlation between British expansion and capital export, and Brailsford agrees with him unconditionally; readers are invited to read this passage and draw their own conclusions. Taylor objects that most capital exports of the UK (and other capital exporters) went to countries not in the empire; in doing so, he advances the example of Morocco, where French investors were reluctant to invest. But Hobson never claims that imperialism is uni-causal; Brailsford, likewise, introduces the export of capital as merely one motive force among three or four. The surmise that imperialism, driven by one unique cause (say, the need of capitalists to export capital) must necessarily proceed in a conspiratorial fashion to seize lands so they can yield a return precisely commensurate with the cost of seizing the lands, is one that Hobson himself rejected.

Brailsford is often paired with Hobson, although Hobson's interest in imperialism tended to become more detached from his views on economics as his life progressed. On the eve of WW1, Hobson wrote:

The civilised Western world is coming more consciously to mould its practical policy, political and economic, and its sentiments and theories, upon a white exploitation of the lower and the backward peoples. Imperialism is displacing, or at present is crossing, class supremacy, and is evolving an intellectualism and a morals accommodated to the needs of this new social cleavage. It is moving towards a not distant epoch in which Western white nations may, as regards their means of livelihood, be mainly dependent upon the labour of regimented lower peoples in various distant portions of the globe, all or most members of the dominant peoples enjoying a life of comparative pleasure and leisure and a collective sense of personal superiority as the rulers of the earth.
[Work and Wealth: A Human Evaluation, XI, §7; 1914]

The other fellow I've known to link Hobson and Brailsford is a pop historian, Niall Ferguson (Empire). Taylor is an anarcho-capitalist; Ferguson, a neo-conservative fellow traveller. While Taylor is annoyed with Hobson for "fingering" capitalism and sloppily lumps him with Lenin (!), Ferguson needs to nail Hobson as an anti-semite before his readers take a notion to actually read Hobson for themselves. Hobson's Imperialism refers to the Rothschilds once ("Does any one seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State... if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?" I.IV.34), and his serially published Capitalism and Imperialism in South Africa, which included a hostile analysis of the role of Jewish immigrants in the Rand. Let me point out that Ferguson cites a passage of Hobson to support his claim that the latter, as a non-Marxist opponent of imperialism, was therefore a crackpot peddler of conspiracy theories. He transitions to this passage of Brailsford, implying that the latter was a co-author of Hobson:

In the heroic age Helen's was the face that launched a thousand ships. In our golden age the face wears more often the shrewd features of some Hebrew financier. To defend the interests of Lord Rothschild and his fellow bondholders, Egypt was first occupied, and then practically annexed by Great Britain.

Readers need to understand that Hobson and Brailsford were referring to something that was quite real in the time of the 1880's; Jewish historians such as Dr. Howard M Sachar (The Course of Modern Jewish History) and Dr. Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.134, fn.34) discuss this with sympathy. Arendt explains the economic role of the Jewish bourgeoisie at great length, and declares it to be a crucial influence on the "Final Solution"; yet, Hobson and she both explain the external forces that compelled the elites of the Jewish community—which was as splintered as any other group of Europe—to adopt the position it did. Ferguson is a polemicist, who has the cunning to manipulate readers by withholding crucial context, but has not the breadth of knowledge to do it successfully.

Brailsford, of course, also uses the "n-word"—to sneer at the parasitic relationship of finance capital to nationalism:

The home market is "glutted"—-which means that the masses have nothing more to spend. He, therefore, looks abroad. An Egyptian Khedive wants money to squander on ballet-girls and palaces and operas. Japan wants money to build ironclads. Russia wants money to pay for the repression of her subjects. Or perhaps gold has been discovered in Ashanti, or the niggers of West Africa have developed a taste for gin. Into such enterprises goes the capital that cannot find employment at home.
[Op. cit.]

It is a real pity that I felt obligated to answer these vulgar critics of Brailsford and Hobson, since Brailsford has some interesting insights of his own. I get the impression that Taylor's mind was poisoned against Hobson by the fact that Lenin quotes him with respect; Brailsford updates Hobson's essays and adds some insights on the political side of the equation. While Hobson was a professional and original economist, writing in an era of undisputed British preeminence (1902), Brailsford was writing a dozen years later, when Britain's relative industrial decline and snowballing global "commitments" had left it dangerously exposed. And because the phenomenon of imperialism had advanced, in the sense that it was now far more costly than it had been in 1902, Brailsford was compelled to pay more attention to the political landscape created by economically-motivated imperialism:

A doctor who explains the madness and death of a man by a clot of blood in his brain, must seem to a simple spectator to be assigning a ridiculously inadequate cause for a tremendous effect. A student who traces all the armaments and angers and heroics of our seven years' struggle over the balance of power, to the fact that German industry looks forward to the early exhaustion of its native supplies of iron-ore, and hoped to replace them by obtaining access to the mines of Morocco, may also seem to be trifling. Was there really nothing else in all this crisis? Of course there was. There was the anger. When the plain man sees the Dreadnoughts rising on the stocks, and listens to the gossip about crises and military preparations, his common-sense is offended when he is told that the trouble is about nothing more serious than a few mines and railways and bankers' ventures. The plain man is right. The potent pressure of economic expansion is the motive force in an international struggle; for a people like the Germans which has bent all its brains, and will bend them for a generation to the task of industrial organisation, mines and railways in the half-exploited regions of the earth are not a trivial matter. But the starting-point in such a rivalry is soon forgotten.
[Brailsford, op cit.]