Gabriel Kolko on U. S. government repression of black and anti-war leaders.

#TheBlackPanthers #GabrielKolko #COINTELPRO

The purpose of the IMF and World Bank are just as valid as those for still having NATO around: zilch and nil.

#IMF #WorldBank #NATO #GabrielKolko

Updates - bookrastinating.com https://bookrastinating.com/user/pivic/quotation/144415#anchor-144415

'Given the melange of factors-the stratified, divided nature of the working class, its tentative relation to America, its high mobility physically within and without the country, its cultural alienation and overlapping, confused identities, its racial irrationality, and much else besides there was one profoundly different alternative to class politics and consciousness for the American working class, one for which there is no historical precedent: individual disintegration. Elsewhere economic crises produced social and political responses, and that is the history of defeated as well as successful socialist movements. In America, to an unparalleled extent, personal disintegration more than anything else was the reaction of the millions of individual victims of capitalism: crime, drugs, breakdowns, personal isolation, violence... In this sense, therefore, the failure of the Left was inevitable regardless of its numerous shortcomings, and the latter only further sealed an evolution for which one cannot identify any real options in the past. The collapse of the Left was ultimately but one more aspect and a reflection of the older, deeper, and intensifying generalized crisis of all American society in the twentieth century.'

#GabrielKolko #capitalism

Gabriel Kolko on U. S. dominance over Latin America in the start of the 1920s.

This book is extremely illuminating on modern American history (until 1976, when this book was first published).
https://bookrastinating.com/user/pivic/quotation/133034#anchor-133034

#GabrielKolko #USA #LatinAmerica #hegemony @bookstodon

From 'Main Currents in American History' by Gabriel Kolko:

'The Enigma of Ideology

Discussions of the role of ideas and ideology as the basis of American foreign relations will always necessarily be artificial; and divorced from the actual conduct of diplomacy, they will also prove grossly misleading. That leaders can or do relate each specific action to some intellectual frame of reference is to exaggerate the role that ideas are designed to play, yet standards and parameters of conduct exist and some are capable of being subsumed as principles. Indeed, the very lack of precision and the inability always to relate actions to final objectives and principles must be taken into account in order to comprehend the latent weaknesses and dilemmas of United States foreign policy. More pressing in the daily reality is the existence of constituencies and their concrete pressures to accomplish this or that goal, but even these have a minimally predictable coherence. Ideology, therefore, can be based on formal propositions and doctrines, or it can also be the merger of ideas and the functional practices which real interests impose on the conduct of foreign relations in a capitalist society. At various times and places it can be both, or either. More often, the practice searches for its own rationalization after the fact, and simply reflects the pervasive truth that the distribution of power in a capitalist society rarely had allowed Washington to conduct policies counterproductive to those tangible interests which could be measured not in terms of doctrinal purity but in dollars or the promise of them. In this regard, the first principles of United States foreign policy can be considered as purely utilitarian: those which satisfy the interests of powerful constituencies are followed so long as they succeed, with doctrinal purity being less important than accomplishments. Historians, in brief, can make too much of the ideological basis of United States foreign policy, and are especially wont to do so when they separate ideas from practice. A speech, after all, is much more likely to be written to satisfy an occasion than to articulate a basis to guide future action.'

#GabrielKolko
https://bookrastinating.com/user/pivic/quotation/123536#anchor-123536

#GabrielKolko #capitalism

Book quote: 'In the decades preceding World War One the architects of a system of political capitalism elaborated piecemeal views on assorted subjects; and while no one man or group embodied them all, it can be said that main characteristics emerge for what is necessarily an artificial portrait. They were anti-competitive, and hence their attraction to federal sanctioning of price and production accords and insulation of the larger industry from cutthroat entrants. The trade association movement was but the logical nonpolitical expression of this sentiment when political reticence and frustration with earlier efforts left the integrationists few options after 1920. They tended to oppose taxation as a tool of regulation, and gladly destroyed the wartime excess profits taxes which had been temporarily used to feed them more contracts. Equity in the social sense scarcely moved any of them, and their penchant for racism was a common social attitude of the period in any case. Order, hierarchy, and efficiency were more congenial notions, though not as ends in themselves but justifiable because they were profitable. Some saw social welfare reform outside the criterion of the cash nexus, but most were moved by what seemed pecuniarily rewarding. Northern textile-mill owners worried about the children their Southern competitors exploited, not the conditions of their own adult labor. Others saw company-organized unions as superior to autonomous organizations, and workmen's compensation and unemployment insurance systems as means not only of reducing labor costs via lower turnover but transferring the liabilities of employers to the state. Out of this melange of attitudes, impulses, and interests no consistent, overarching sophisticated philosophy could emerge, though indeed businessmen and their spokesmen never tired of banally defining their own interests and hegemony in universal rather than class terms. But it embodied the ingredients and contradictions in what was essentially a typically eclectic American philosophy for adjusting to a troublesome new reality that the merger of industrialism, growth, and space was distinctively creating in the United States.'

Gabriel Kolko on the advent of the FTC, to the benefit of capitalism; for capitalists to create something to prevent 'unfair competition' is delusion: https://bookrastinating.com/user/pivic/quotation/87665#anchor-87665

'In certain economic sectors, such as insurance and utility regulation, advocates of regulation were stymied, but they further illustrated the fact that many businessmen increasingly saw politics as the arena in which to find solutions for wasteful competition, inconsistent state regulations, the easy entrance for new firms into their industry, and potential crisis. What was politically impossible for the moment because of divisions within the industry might prove relevant another year-and often did. Meanwhile, the numerous federal acts and agencies created during the "Progressive Era" left an important, if incomplete, basis for later reforms. In addition to the railroad regulatory system there was now a Federal Trade Commission and a Federal Reserve Board, food and drug legislation, a meat inspection that the biggest firms had much desired, and diverse other laws.

In the case of assorted industrial regulations, here too one finds the advocates of national legislation emerging in response to decentralization and competition in the various industrial sectors, from steel to meat; and their success in the form of the Federal Trade Commission is more equivocal because of the imprecision of the law and the ignorance of all in face of the sheer magnitude of the task of regulating a capitalism characterized all too much by its mythical virtue of competition. "Unfair competition" was made illegal under the 1914 law, curiously banning price cutting designed to reduce the number of competitors in a field, but more to the point was the desire of the FTC, in the words of its first chairman, Joseph H. Davies, in 1915, "that our industries shall be integrated and stabilized" to confront the national and world economy. That the way to attain this goal remained a mystery to even its most ardent advocates was of less immediate significance than the definition of the goal itself. And what was most essential for later efforts in all fields was that, in a piecemeal and exploratory fashion, an extensive foundation of the modern American political economy had been laid and critical precedents established in a comprehensive fashion.'

#GabrielKolko #ftc

https://kolektiva.social/@pivic/109757025410173108

https://bookrastinating.com/user/pivic/quotation/86989#anchor-86989

The United States from its inception has been a nation blind to itself - its past, its present, and its future. Intellectually and culturally underdeveloped, it has left it to a handful of European commentators and rare, alienated mavericks to produce some of the more penetrating assessments of American life and society. No industrialized people confronts reality so ill-prepared in terms of ideas and insights to cope with the problems before it.

In a critical sense, this myopia is the consequence of the pervasive selfsatisfied chauvinism which characterized the United States during its first modern century after the Civil War, and optimism is virtually the national ideology. Until the traumatic experience of Vietnam, which undermined the illusions of an unprecedented number of Americans, vaingloriousness or the absence of a critical vision was virtually unanimous among those who wrote about their own nation. Even occasional critics thought that reforms which were, in the scale of things, essentially minor could redeem the society. Vietnam temporarily and quite superficially broke that consensus, but how long this skeptical mood among some will continue remains to be seen. America yet marches into a future with its eyes turned toward the past, remaining astonishingly indulgent of its own tragedies and foibles, and as menacing to itself and the world as ever. The large majority of its writers and scholars continue to reinforce its optimism, mindlessness, and banality, even if they no longer celebrate the nation as during the great euphoria of the first two decades of the postwar epoch. And they nevertheless persist in avoiding the fundamental questions of the causes of the United States' growing, even inexhaustible, problems at home and the dangers it poses abroad. The consequence of this aversion to fundamentals is that there still exists, even today after the Korean and Vietnam holocausts, an only minor dissenting tradition in American thought-one which leaves unchallenged the far larger and influential mood of national optimism and self-satisfaction, to say nothing of the dissociation between reality and the definition of it. Absent is a critical alternative overview of the American historical process and system.

#GabrielKolko

'Main Currents in Modern American History' by Gabriel Kolko, first printed in 1976.

At last I'm starting to read this one. Noam Chomsky :chomsky: has recommended it many times. Let's see what it's like.

https://bookrastinating.com/book/130192/s/main-currents-in-modern-american-history

#GabrielKolko #NoamChomsky #book #reading @bookstodon #bookwyrm