Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: The Politics of Humiliation

well welcome to anti- capitalist Chronicles which is a product of uh politics uh in motion today I want to uh do a sort of wide ranging search uh in and around the question of international relations uh because this now seems to be something that has coming to the Forefront of where the world is at [Music] now I've always been interested for some reason or other in the settlement that ended World War I which is the Versa uh treaty and uh I was interested initially for a couple of reasons that had to do with the fact that uh that treaty with Drew uh the boundaries of many new European States uh did so globally it dealt with the if you like the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the disintegration of the uh austr Hungarian Empire and uh also the whole kind of question of uh the colonial Legacy and Germany's role in that uh Legacy uh and all of that uh certain cartographic uh requirements existed and those were provided by the American geographical society that was headed up at that time by a man called Isaiah Bowman now Isaiah Bowman was uh a very well-known geographer and advisor to various administrations and at a certain point he became president of Johns Hopkins University where he set up a geography program in which I ultimately taught it was that program that hired Owen Latimore uh which I have mentioned in a much earlier podcast so there is if you like a bit of geographical history that goes into uh all of this but I'm now actually more concerned with the content of the Versa settlement and some of the things that uh were going around uh at that time now the versailes settlement was essentially a negotiation between four major figures uh from the United States woodro Wilson from Britain Lloyd George from France George closo and from Italy a man called Orlando who played not very much of a role now the the anticipation would be that uh woodr Wilson would have called the shots because uh it was the weight of uh the mass of the US economy and the US engagement at the end of the war which finally uh ended the war so he had if you like of the moral Authority and the economic clout but it seems that he didn't perform terribly well there are various reasons for this some people think that he had a a dose of uh the 1980 Spanish 1918 Spanish Flu uh which uh debilitated him some but the other reason is that uh the French prime minister that time closo was a very persuasive and very sophisticated negotiator and apparently ran rings around woodro Wilson and uh KL so however was what you might call a sort of social Darin and as a social Darin he saw States as Perpetual institutions always in competition and fighting with each other and the F survival of the r of the fittest was very much upon his agenda and he was going to use the Versa treaty as a way of reestablishing France's Authority one of the things that he did was to insist upon regaining the two uh provinces of France alas Lorraine which France had seeded to the Germans in the fight of 1870 so this was a very very tense thing in which a lot of the negotiation was over borders and who had the right to what and all the rest of it the English delegation was somewhat at one side but within the English delegation was one particular person a very bright and upand cominging Economist who was delegated to the treasury for the per period of the versai conference and that uh uh person was John mayard KES uh now KES was therefore there at the negotiation but about 34s of the way through he fell sick and so he uh actually returned to Cambridge which was his base and uh saw the conclusion of a treaty from afar and kanes was quite outraged by what was going on in terms of this uh this treaty uh from kan's Viewpoint uh the the the most important thing was to reestablish a vibrant economic system for Europe and what Cain saw was a debilitated uh Germany a a a heavily indebted and destroyed France and that therefore needed to be a kind of a uh a serious attempt made to reestablish uh the capitalist forms of Economics that canes was in favor of and I've often mentioned canes as a figure who wanted to save capitalism from the capitalists in this case kanes wanted to save Capital uh from the nationalists and people like closo who sought simply National Advantage out of the whole thing rather than the uh Revival of the economy and uh so what Cain saw was uh economic weakness he saw a great deal of mass poverty perhaps even starvation in some parts of Europe he saw kind of a a serious depression and that nobody at the Versa conference seemed to be concerned to get together to try to say what are we going to do about this how are we going to revive the economy in such a way that it functions not only for capitalists but at least it provides a minimum standard of living for the mass of the population of uh Europe and that uh otherwise as kan's pointed out uh the mass situation would be one of uh uh impoverishment uh social instability economic instability and that this was not there a good treaty at all and KES wrote a book along these lines which was his first major piece of work which was called The Economic Consequences of the Peace and what he in effect did was to dissect uh the Versa uh conference and point to all of its shortcomings and point to an alternative and the one other big shortcoming was the the uh insistence of the main participants in the conference that Germany pay for all of the reparations that were needed uh to cover what had happened in World War in World War One the reparations were of a huge amount and was were going to be stretched over 30 years uh canes thought they were essentially unpayable asked the question what happens if they refuse to pay do we go in and reinvade ver Germany or whatever so he thought this was a very very bad idea and in general uh what The Economic Consequences of the Peace did was to dissect all these elements in the Versa conference in very detailed fashion but the main message was this that if you actually deal with Germany by humiliating it and and actually draining it of any POS economic possibilities uh keeping it lost underground as it were uh there will be instability all across Europe and there will be uh sort of Social uprisings and all the rest of it so what canes was kind of predicting in a way was the sort of social instability that started to become very apparent almost immediately after the Versa conference in 1922 uh when uh Hitler uh launched his C attempt in in the Munich Beer Hall and it was generally laughed at and said this was a kind of a a very amateurish operation and that therefore didn't go very far and Hitler got arrested and was actually sentenced to jail for 5 years but got out after five months but every nobody took this seriously and you can see some certain analogies with you know what's going on in the United States that we while while we protest about Trump uh we don't really take it seriously but what what uh Hitler learned out of the beer putch was uh actually a coup is not a good idea that the best way is to subvert the electoral process and to use the electoral process to have a legitimate form of power uh and uh which of course is what happened in 1929 1933 so so canes was kind of sort of saying humiliation is not a very good idea at all uh and uh interestingly then uh when we look at the settlement that came after World War II we find a completely different approach to to the situation now whether now KES happened to be the lead British negotiator at the Breton Woods conference which was about the settlement of World War II and what degree to what degree his influence was felt elsewhere I I I really don't quite know but nevertheless the the settlement of World War II was completely the opposite of what wasi was about it was about uh revitalizing and not humiliating the two defeated powers that is West Germany as it was there as it quickly became and and of course Japan and that what you did was instead you used uh your your your Surplus product uh particularly in the United States to reestablish uh the economies of Japan and West Germany in such a way that they reintegrated into uh the National scheme in a Peaceable way and didn't therefore pose a threat and the amount of instability uh in in West Germany and Japan was negligible uh because the capitalist economies were were were going very strong and by the time you get to the 1980s uh the United States found itself in a situation where it had two rival economists which were doing much better than the United States those of West Germany and Japan and so if we were in this meeting uh in the 1980s we would all be saying everybody has to be like the West Germany and Japan they are the ones who are kind of leading capitalist Powers uh they've been they've recovered entirely from uh World War uh two so the World War II settlement in fact uh did not engage in the humiliation of those defeated and in fact uh sort of approach them uh with uh compassion and uh with uh uh a certain amount of empathy and and and went out of its way to try to reestablish the basis of a healthy capitalist system now it wasn't really a healthy capitalist system because all of the divisions which had existed in the 1930s in which nationalist interests had been in competition were still there and so the United States not only did it tolerate the revitalization of the economies of Japan and and west Germany but also it set out to reduce tariff barriers and to say that the there is a global exchange and the health of the capitalist economy is about the construction of the World Market which of course is a central proposition of marks and Engles in The Communist Manifesto and that this uh this this World Market was going to be actually very much uh sort of u a support for a very uh vibrant and and expansive uh capitalist economic system in fact the capitalist economic system did not expand very much uh in the post uh the post Versa period in fact it was rather stagnant in the 1920s and 1930s in spite of all of the sort of excesses of the upper classes in having you know the sort of the the Berlin Cabaret and the nightclubs in New York and all the rest of it the upper class es were having a ball as it were but the rest of the world was was was really foundering during that period and what uh uh the World War II settlement was about was trying to revitalize in such a way that at least the mass of the population could gain some benefits uh from an expansive capitalist system that was reestablishing uh capitalist wealth and power uh around around the world on a much more egalitarian basis than was possible in after the Versa settlement so this was if you like uh one of the things that was you know terribly important and when you look at it you you kind of say um maybe there's a lesson to be learned here that if you are engaged in in sort of contestation and competition with other countries and so on uh if you win uh do you humiliate them in the process or do you actually integrate them in and it's pretty clear from uh the evidence of the settlement after World War I and the settlement after World War II that the World War 2 style settlement which I think probably came from serious people re going back and looking at Cain's uh analysis in The Economic Consequences of the Peace of kind of saying well if we want to establish a regime of Peace which people were talking about in 1945 then the only way to do it is to actually set up an economic system that was actually going to to at least uh ameliorate uh the the politics of uh nationalist rivalries on the one hand and also of course the Dynamics of class struggle uh on on on the other hand so this is if you like a general proposition but as a general proposition it has certain applications and I think those applications are rather are rather useful to to think about uh for example right now uh we have two Wars uh in the in in the world uh which seem to be very very serious uh conflagrations uh there is the War uh with uh between Ukraine and Russia with the United States uh sort of using Ukraine as a proxy for uh fight against Russia and at the same time uh there is of course the the uprising of of Hamas and the response of the Israelis uh to that in in in Gaza so we have those two congrations and one of the questions I would kind of ask is to what degree uh do those configurations come out of a politics of humiliation and to what degree is humiliation played a very important role in in in setting the stage and in fact in some ways is the kind of the trigger uh for uh these uh conflagrations that exist let us take first of all uh the the Ukraine conflict and I've talked about this before and I you have to forgive me if I repeat myself but I think the theme is important enough to be able to sort of reestablish it again uh when Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia emerged uh what happened to it economically was a disaster a total disaster it essentially turned to the to to uh key economists and to the international monetary fund and and also the treasury Departments of the of the major European powers uh for for for advice as to what to do and the advice was well you you have to go through what's called shock therapy and the shock therapy was a dismantling of all of the economic relations that existed in the past and the the attempt to recreate uh a whole capitalist economy uh where the laws of motion of capital are fully established uh in other words you you were supposed to sort of uh drop all of the institutional Arrangements that had uh existed under um uh the Communist regimes drop all of those dissolve them all uh and and then at the same time try to imagine you can rebuild a capitalist economy from nothing with no cultural background no kind of talent and all the rest of it so Russia went through this terrible terrible period in which uh gross domestic product diminished by about I don't know 30 or 40% life expectancy crashed all the rights of Labor disappeared the rights of women disappeared uh and and at the same time uh there was a kind of a triumphalism in the west which talked about the end of history and the Total Domination of the World by by neoliberal capital and all the rest of it so there was a there was a real attempt uh if you like to kind of hum humiliate the Russians the Russians lost their currency the rubal was had no reliability and and at a certain point uh it turns out that the main currency in in Russia between the big corporations was bottles of vodka people were trading in in Commodities and there have been situations of this kind of course uh immediately after World War II in Germany and and and and so on and and so what you find is uh uh Russia in in a terrible terrible state for about 3 or 4 years after glos took over and communism effectively ended and that terrible state was then uh made even worse by the fact that uh Russia had been very nervous about well okay what's going to happen in terms of the the post Cold War era and there was a a sort of meeting in Bucharest where an agreement was made that the West would not expand NATO and would not be aggressive with uh with uh with Russia but of course uh in what what what happened in the United States was kind of interesting that Clinton was in power and Clinton started to talk about a peace dividend uh and saying well we don't no need to think about uh uh all of this warlike stuff and we don't we can leave you know reduce uh military uh military expenditures uh and uh go you know start to you know invest in schools and hospitals and all the rest of it and Welfare uh so this this notion of a peace dividend came along and immediately of course the military industrial complex folk and all the rest of it started to agitate in Congress and and and and so on about you know the threat that existed and turned uh Russia into a threat so by the end of the 1990s uh Russia was being considered as a threat uh even though it really really wasn't uh and uh therefore military expenditures were were pushed up uh you got into military keynesianism uh and all the rest of it in the 1990s and and and so somehow an opportunity to demilitarize the world was lost uh uh Clinton who came in promising you know good social welfare and and you know benefit in terms of schooling and education and so on ended up you know being a a good neoliberal and doing all the neoliberal things and and and and NATO started to expand now NATO has always said there are simply a defensive organization but the Soviet Union was gone so what was it defending against why was it expanding and everybody at that point suddenly realized that NATO was not and never had been a defensive organization it was always been an offense one as well as defensive so in effect started to be very offensive and started to expand itself uh up to the the borders of the of what had been the Soviet Union and that of course immediately alerted people to the fact that you know this Russia was again being humiliated not only through the economic collapse but was being humiliated geopolitically and uh there was a very important statement made at the end of the 1990 90s by uh by George Kenan now George Kenan had been the architect of cold world politics in the 1960s and 1970s and something through the 1980s by the time he get to the 1990s he's a Grand Old Man of the thing and so he but here is here's what he said and I think it's very important to take him seriously because he was one of the most serious uh policy makers uh in in in the world in the 1960s '70s and ' 80s and and therefore he's worthwhile listening to and this is what he said about this he started to talk about uh the way in which uh uh NATO and the expansion of NATO during the 1990s uh was in fact threatening to set up was the beginnings of what of a new Cold War and this is what he said he says I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies I think this is a tragic mistake there was no reason reason for this whatsoever no one was threatening anyone anymore the expansion would would make the uh founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves if there's going to be um of course uh there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia and then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you that that's the way the Russians were and that is just wrong so here's Kanan Kanan saying uh the humiliation of Russia is going to have very very negative consequences and of course the negative consequences were all there to see in terms of the Ukrainian Invasion uh the US response to the Ukrainian Invasion the reestablishment of NATO after uh Trump had tried to weaken it somewhat uh that Biden has being concerned with so here is the situation again where you're going back and if you'd read kan's on The Economic Consequences of the Peace you wouldn't have done that you would have said okay let's take the peace dividend let's really reestablish things in our own country let's build the hospitals and schools and affordable housing and all those things we could start to do by cutting back on the military budget but no that was not done we repeated the the the the the the errors of the versailes settlement uh in in the Russian case so in the Russian case and that war you would say that humiliation and the politics of humiliation uh is in fact very much part and parcel of what is going on now at the same time I could kind of point to another example one one I think which is very very interesting which is that Ma when they got power in 1949 gave a speech and one of the things he said was the the era of insults and humiliation that has guided China's presence in the world for the last 100 years is over and will be over forever so China is very sensitive about this H and if you talk with people in China after a bit they will tell you that the humiliation that existed in in the S of late 19th and throughout the 19th right the way through to the Communist takeover the the humiliation was something that was very very very strongly in their psyche and and affects very much uh how they are and and you remember when the humiliation was about was about uh going back historically it was about it was about opium and the Opium Wars now the Opium Wars occurred in sort of 1839 to 1860 now in the 18th century it had been the case that some British Traders had found that was a very profitable Enterprise uh as there always is with with the drugs uh to take opium into China and sell it to the Chinese and the Opium started to be cultivated in India so there was already a sort of a trade in opium from India uh to China which was run by the British merchants and it was that was like that for the 18th century but in the 19th century there was this massive expansion in in in mass production of of uh textile Goods in Britain and it need mass production needed a mass market and the big Mass market for for that stuff from Manchester was uh China but the problem was well sorry India but the problem was that India didn't have anything to send back so how did India pay for it and so the idea came to the some of the British well they'd expand the opium trade and they' expand it in such a way that they would trade OD opium for S silver so you got a situation where uh the British were taking opium to China selling it for silver the silver came back to India and then of course ended up back in London and in the and and in the cotton manufacturer's Pockets so this was a system but for this to happen required that U free access be given to the Chinese market for selling opium and the Chinese tried to stop it and refused and they closed their Market to Opium and the British said no no you're going to have to have an open market for opium and so they got together with the French and they they they they went up the yany and they blew the apart the Chinese Fleet and they established these concessions uh in Shanghai and other places and the concession in Shanghai was such that a large area was taken up with being the an area where the British could trade under British law and British if there was any kind of violence of somebody murdered somebody you would be trade you will be um liable to to British jurisdiction not Chinese jurisdiction so this place was carved out in in Shanghai and this became the center of the opium trade and and of course the the opium dens of Shanghai became a feature of lurid fiction in the even up until the 1920s 1930s and and and so so in a sense in a sense uh Britain balanced the the whole kind of B budget by forcing China uh to accept the opium trade and now there's a certain kind of uh historical kind of quid pro quo that came I was very interested Biden just met with X and what was one of the big big items that was discussed and concerned with fenel that is the Chinese are selling fentanyl to the United States in such a quantity and this is a bit like the opium trade in Reverse but you can see where this is where where this is going but anyway uh the point here is that Mao was absolutely sure that imperialism was about you know this these sorts of relations being forced down the throats of the Chinese and that the China China was never under the Communist Party rule ever ever going to submit uh to anything so any hint of humiliation uh in in in China politics is met immediately in China with a long historical memory of this it really does exist I mean a few times I was in China this issue came up uh several times that no China is not going to allow so there's a certain suspicion of imperialism and imperialist Tra P practices so the avoidance of humili ation and and and the refusal and and as soon as there's any sense that China is being humiliated which started to happen with all of this stuff with you know cutting down Huawei and so on elicits a very very strong response from the Chinese so you've got to be very delicate about that that question so this brings us to the second uh case of uh war in the Contemporary period which uh is a very very complicated one but I just just simply want to to point out something here and that is on one side you have uh uh the Jewish people and the Jewish people are very very familiar with the whole history of uh insults and uh humiliations and they have managed to survive those in fact in an attempt to eradicate them from the face of the Earth was uh very well resisted and there is much of talk about the importance of that Legacy and I think one of the features that is very strong about it is to say that Israel now is far far stronger in defeat in defense of the Jewish people uh in in in a way as a testimony to it their capacity to overcome all of the tragedy that exists in their past but unfortunately the Israelis seems to me have not actually recognized one of the featur of their own history which will supply will apply to others and that is that the Palestinians have at the hands of the Jewish State and uh many Israeli uh movements amongst settlements and so on have also been subject to uh insult and humiliations and uh even a warlike attempt to abolish Hezbollah has ended up with Hezbollah being far more far stronger uh far more well set up uh so that there's now real fear that Hezbollah will join in the fight uh the people who kind of uh uh claim to know the ground on this say Hezbollah uh is in fact a very dangerous military force that almost certainly it would lose uh to Israel if it uh actually ventured into the cont into the contest but that uh in invent it would actually inflict very very great damage upon the Israeli state in so doing so here is the situation where again humiliation and insults and so on don't work uh they in fact uh make your opponent stronger in the long run and hisbah is stronger now than it was 10 years ago when the last fight with uh uh the Israelis took place and this is in in a way the sort of tragedy of of the the centuries that the inability uh to recognize that uh the way to handle these issues is not uh insult and humiliation and attempts to eradicate but attempts to incorporate attempts to empathize uh and attempts to use compassion to integrate into uh a situation in which two peoples coming from with very diverse histories and very diverse opinions can actually coexist and work together in common purpose and this seems to me to be one of the lessons which uh comes from Reading canes on The Economic Consequences uh of the peace and that we have lived this Century uh and not not actually recognized uh the significance of this Dimension uh to the conflicts which are going on around us [Music] h

Channel: Politics In Motion

Views: 3,268

Keywords:

Id: YvtH5456jNc

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2023