Harry
Targ
The
writings of 1960s historians who became known as the “revisionists,” challenged
traditional interpretations of the interests, goals, and ideology underpinning
United States foreign policy. Historians such as William Appleman Williams,
Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas Paterson and others who were discussed in a prior essay, http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/harry-targ-celebrate-historical.html, offered a compelling explanation for
sixties activists and those that followed them about why United States foreign
policy was as it was.
First, the revisionists saw fundamental
connections between economics and politics. Whether the theoretical starting
point was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, these historians looked to the underlying
dynamics, needs, and goals of the economic system as sources of policy. And,
these writers began with the assumption that economic interest infused
political systems and international relations. Revisionists argued that while
security, ideologies, personalities of elites, and even human nature had some
role to play in shaping policy, all of these forces were influenced in the end
by economics. And economic interest shaped how political power was used.
Second, the behavior of dominant
nation-states, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, was
propelled by trade, investment, financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or
cheap labor, and access to vital natural resources. Economic gain, in the end,
drove the system of international relations. Sometimes economic gain required
cooperation; other times it necessitated war.
Third, since the use of the word
“capitalism,” in the depth of the Cold War, signified that the user was some
kind of Marxist, the reality that capitalism had been the dominant economic
system from the fifteenth century on was ignored by most scholars. As more and
more historians and social scientists employed the political economy point of
view developed by the revisionists, it became apparent that as the economic
system of capitalism changed over time international relations also changed. Capitalist
enterprises and their supporting states accumulated more and more wealth,
expanded at breakneck speed, consolidated both economic and political power,
and from time to time built armies to facilitate further colonization and
control on a global basis.
Analysts,
borrowing from Marx, wrote about the evolution of capitalism using analyzes
about the accumulation of capital and newer forms of the organization of labor.
Some theorists wrote about the rise of capitalism out of feudalism highlighting
how primitive accumulation was based on the enslavement of peoples, the
conquest of territories, and the primacy of the use of brute force.
The
slave system led to increased production and the rise of a global economy based
on trade. Capitalists traversed the globe to sell the products produced by
slave and wage labor. This era of commercial capitalism was followed by the
emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques, particularly a
factory system that brought workers together under one roof for mass
production, increased pressure to promote the sale of products in domestic and
global markets.
By the 1870s, in a number of capitalist
countries the accumulation of capital, in products and profit created enormous
surpluses. These required new outlets for sale, additional ways to put money
capital to work, and ever expanding concentrations of capital in manufacturing
and financial institutions.
Late-twentieth
century theorists wrote about a new era of monopoly capitalism. Inspired by
Lenin’s famous essay on imperialism, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, argued that a global
economic system had developed in which most economic activities were controlled
by small numbers of actors, multinational corporations and banks. Subsequently
some theorists made a compelling case for the view that the new capitalism of
the twenty-first century had become truly global, leading to the declining
salience of the nation-state system from which it was launched.
It was
the research contributions of the historical revisionists of the 1960s which
overcame the historical amnesia about the connections between economic
interests and international relations. In addition to analyses of economic and
political trends they uncovered concrete cases of links between economics and
politics. These included the influence of huge U.S. and British oil companies
on the U.S. managed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the
coup in Guatemala in 1954 after President Arbenz threatened to nationalize
lands owned by the U.S. based United Fruit Company. The revisionists found long
term patterns of economic domination and foreign policy. They also uncovered the
aforementioned specific cases where particular economic elites influenced
foreign policy such as to Iran and Guatemala. And revisionists saw that the globalization
of capitalism was threatened by the spread of nationalism and forms of socialism
as a world force.
Fourth, the political economy approach
regarded class structure as central to the understanding of the foreign policy
of any nation. Since every society has class divisions, some classes dominate
the political system at the expense of others. In capitalist societies, those
who own or control the means of production dominate the political life of the
country. Therefore, while conventional analysts prioritize states as the most
important actors in world affairs, political economists saw states and classes
as inextricably connected. Most international relations scholars saw states as
important to world affairs but it was political economists/historical
revisionists who demonstrated the connection between states and classes.
Finally, revisionist historians who wrote
from the lens of classes controlling the foreign policy process tended to take
a “hegemonic” view of that control. Their analysis of the concentration of
economic and political power was a critical contribution to theory and
practice. However, they often did not factor resistance into their theoretical
frame. The end result was a perspective implied by many that the United States
was omniscient, all powerful, unbeatable, and unchangeable in its conduct.
After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War some analysts began to write
particularly about the challenges that the hegemonic power the United States
faced in the world, even from the Global South. But, in the main the historical
revisionists developed a way of understanding international relations that was
top down.
Many
theorists and activists, therefore, remained intellectually ill-equipped to
identify forces that resisted and constrained the drive for economic,
political, and military hegemony throughout modern history. Lacking the more
nuanced view of the drives for dominance and the resistance to it, activism
sometimes shifted from radical enthusiasm to despair.
But in
the end, contemporary analysts and activists owe a special debt of gratitude to
those “historical revisionists” who offered a political economy explanation of
why the United States role in the world (and before it other imperial powers)
has been the way it was. Those of us who analyze the United States and the
international system should add to the important theoretical contribution of
the revisionists recognition of patterns
of resistance as they occur on a global basis and constitute an integral component of the way international relations
works.
