Part of an interview on imperialism on March 23, 2017 from the American Herald Tribune:
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your book "International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle" is for me relevant and especially visionary. In your opinion, what are the most effective tools to fight against the ultra-liberalism and imperialism?
Prof. Harry Targ: That book was written to challenge the dominant discourse among those of us who study international relations. Reigning paradigms—realism, liberalism, and behavioral science—did not address imperialism, dominance, and dependency. The book was written in the early 1980s and reflected my growing engagement with theories of imperialism, particularly Lenin, and dependency, primarily scholar/activists from the Global South such as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Andre Gunter Frank, Fernando Cardoso and others. I wanted researchers and teachers of international relations in North America to incorporate these theories into how we looked at the world. Most importantly, I wanted our students to be confronted with ideas about imperialism and dependency, particularly the predominant imperial power of the United States.
From a historical and theoretical point of view much has changed since then, but yet the main lines of the theoretical argument remain the same. With the collapse of the Socialist Bloc and the dramatic shift at the apex of capitalism from manufacturing to finance, coupled with new technologies, we have seen the coming of the age of neoliberal globalization. And despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, US global hegemony has been increasingly challenged by China, India, various formations in the Global South, and massive uprisings everywhere motivated by opposition to austerity policies, ie. neoliberalism.
We are at a very difficult juncture in the world. Mass movements are springing up everywhere, some of which are rightwing, nationalist, neo-fascist, and others progressive. The US has countered its weakening economic position with an expansion of its military presence: over 700 military bases, private contract armies, new technologies such as drones, and collaborations with some of the world’s most reactionary regimes such as Saudi Arabia.
How to respond? This is the most difficult question. I would argue that the peace movement in the United States needs to connect with the other movements in the country, explaining how war/peace and anti-imperialism are connected to the struggles against racism, sexism, climate disaster and other issues. The peace movement also needs to network more effectively with movements around the world who are struggling for peace and justice; the way Arab Spring, Occupy, revolt in Madison, Wisconsin drew people, particularly the young into solidarity. And, in addition, we in the university need to reintroduce those radical ideas about imperialism and dependency and the interconnections between domestic and international issues into our curricula. It is important in our educational and social movement work to introduce the vision and possibility of creating a twenty-first century socialism. This will take a long time.
Whether it is in your "Constructing Alternative World Futures: Reordering the Planet" or "The Global Political Economy in the 1980s," I note that you have gone beyond your time and that your analyzes have been verified. How did you come to these conclusions especially before some systemic crises of capitalism like the stock market crash of 1987?
Constructing Alternative World Futures was a book a friend and I wrote in the early 1970s. We wanted to make the case that social movements needed to be guided by, even proceeded by, alternative visions of a better future. My part of the book was to survey the visions of a better society proclaimed and experimented with over the centuries. I looked at global visions, regional ones, and local utopian communities. I was particularly impressed with the idea of participatory democracy (ideas from the early New Left in the United States) and the experiments in utopian communities. Ironically much of the thinking about a twenty-first century socialism emphasizes workplace control, cooperatives, establishing real direct democracy, and privileging grassroots movements for change. The vision of community that so animated thinking in the late twentieth century is back. Some of it even has its roots in the early Marx. Today the Cubans are trying to build a new economic system based on worker cooperatives, without negating the supportive role of the state, and with limits, markets.
The expectations about the crises of capitalism, 1987 or 2009, come from my reading of the Marx and Neo-Marxist literature. Data makes it clear that over the last forty years capital accumulation has created an emerging global economic system based on monopolies, grotesque expansion of the gaps between rich and poor, and fundamental contradictions between the qualitative increase in productivity and the inability of workers to buy the goods they produce. Add to the contradictions of capitalism in general, we need to consider the environmental crisis. Most of us were insensitive to the environment forty years ago.
https://ahtribune.com/in-depth/1568-prof-harry-targ.html
