US Transition4

alexander zevin

D E T E F A B U L A N A R R AT U R

Empires and Tariffs

D
ylan rileys suggestive comments about Bonapartism
have both a superficial and a possibly more profound reso-
nance for the present: in the former column, as a star of
Page Six and reality tv, Trump as parody of Reagan, with-
out his movie career or even his stint as governor of someplace by way
of apprenticeship to power; in the latter, the sense of tensely balanced
class interests, overhanging and to a degree independent of the conflicts
raging beneath.1 Its not clear to me that either gets us much closer to
deciphering the American carnage, however, in part because the politi-
cal context that inspired Marx to describe mid-nineteenth century France
in this way, with its nostalgic and put-upon peasants, was so different.
(In part, also, because it is too soon to tell if the monster bursting out
of the rhetoric is not itself just another form of rhetoric, rather than a
historically new formation, as the Bonapartist analogy implies.)

At the risk of piling on historical analogies, Id like to offer another

that I think also captures some of the problems faced by the rulers of
the leading capitalist state todayperhaps the most important differ-
ence of all with the French caseat home and abroad. What if Trump
is less Bonaparte than Joseph Chamberlain? Though never Britains
Prime Ministerthat position would fall to his son Neville in the late
1930sChamberlain (18361914) rose to the rank of Colonial Secretary
in 1895 and played a dominant role in imperial policy during the Boer
Wars. Charismatic businessman with a flamboyant stylegold-rimmed

new left review 103 jan feb 2017 35

 36 nlr 103

monocle and fresh orchid for Trumps bronzer and hairpiecewho took
his campaign to get a fair deal on trade for British industry direct to
voters in 1903; whose unambiguous stance on imperial preference
Tariff Reform means Work for Allforced Balfour to call an election
on the issue in 1905. As an exile from the Liberals after 1886, then a
Liberal Unionist, Chamberlain was a radical outsider among the Tory
leadership, which preferred the middle-class patrician, pipe-toking
approach of a Baldwin; his rhetorical gifts were unmatched, despite his
having no higher education. Indeed, Lord Salisbury famously called
him a Sicilian bandit when as a young man he suggested marching on
the House of Lords, in a Twitter war for the Hansard age. Chamberlain
began: Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of the Lords,
a class of men who toil not, neither do they spin. Salisbury replied by
inviting him to march in the van so he could be punched in the skull.
Chamberlain accepted, provided Salisbury was also present, so that if
my head is broken, it will be broken in very good company, and invited
the noble lord in turn to take his next picnic in Hyde Park, not the
family seat of Hatfield, where I promise him he will have a larger meet-
ing than he ever addressed. On top of all that, Chamberlain wanted to
upend the consensus in foreign affairs, not balancing power in Europe,
but making a partner of its strongest power: Germany.

Manufacturing and finance

Those are similarities of background and outlook, against the backdrop of

an empire uneasy about its economic competiveness and military prow-
ess in the aftermath of an embarrassing, costly war. But Chamberlain
failed to make imperial preference a winning issue, whereas Trump
has so far succeeded. Why the failure of the former? Contextually, in
Edwardian Britain there was, firstly, still strong support for free trade
in traditional industrial sectors like textiles, reaping benefits from the
old free-trade empire in India, China and the Mid East, or in traditional-
cum-advanced ones like shipbuilding (in the us, Boeing). A second
factor was the miniscule agricultural interest at home, which might have
benefited from a deal to raise food pricesand, conversely, the presence
of a working class who could still be mobilized by the hegemonic ideals
of liberalism, at least insofar as they affected the big loaf, free breakfast
table, etc. Finally, Chamberlain was a Birmingham screw manufacturer,
shunned by the southern gentlemanly capitalists encircling the City, by
far the most powerful free-trade influence on economic policy.

1
See Dylan Riley, American Brumaire, in this issue.
 zevin: America 37

Why the latters success? Trump has pulled off what eluded Chamberlain,
at least up to the point of taking power, in a different national and global
setting, but with this point in commonthat, faced with intensifying
global competition, both were aiming to revise the trading relationships
on which the imperial hegemony of their respective states were based.
The answer in no small part lies in a voting system even more arcane at
this point than the British. But it is also significant that in Trump we have
a representative of the asset-inflated bubble economywhose manifest
failings as a businessman have not prevented him from keeping and
growing the pile of wealth he inherited from his father, thanks to the
staggering rise in real-estate prices and creative indebtment strategies
based on the unleashing of Wall Street: leverage, loans, bankruptcy, state
subsidieswho also promises to put industrial capital (and labour) back
on its feet by circumscribing free trade. Thus, despite being opposed by
a still larger cadre of squeamish capitalists than Chamberlain, he is well
suited to act as both yin and yang to the twin engines of American accu-
mulation. (In contrast to Chamberlain, Trump will have to contend with
a more powerful export-driven agriculture sector, but this is industrial-
scale, without the populist reserves of a farmer uprising of yore.)

Chamberlain could not square this circle: his campaign pitted industry
against finance, and tried to bring workers on side by arguing that if tar-
iffs raised the price they paid for food, these could also be used to keep
up wages and fund pensions. Trump promised jobs (and greatness) to
rust-belt workers, without dividing one set of capitalists from another;
and he faced little pushback on the issue of rising prices, presumably
because such attacks would not have resonated (even in a country where,
given the stagnation of median wages, they might have been expected
to). So far, the mooted infringements on free trade have tamed few
animal spirits: the stock market is bullish, setting new records; ceos
receive their Twitter tongue-lashings meekly, and resubmit their off-
shoring plans for further review; while disagreementson the Muslim
ban, for exampleare hashed out in respectful dialogue with Silicon
Valley, whose executive suites are treated by the New York Times as if
they were sites of resistance on a par with the maquis. Goldman Sachs
has penetrated further into the executive branch than ever before. (My
favourite, up for Army Secretary, the billionaire Vincent Viola, once
punched an attendant at a horse auction in the face; sadly, though, for
unconnected reasons, he withdrew his name from consideration.)

In Britain, free trade became the common sense of the nation only
gradually, over two centuries, with Adam Smith as patron saint, and a
 38 nlr 103

political party in Liberalism specifically dedicated to it. American capital-

ism, in contrast, was built behind tariff walls, and began championing
their rollback only seventy or so years ago, with many self-interested
deviations since 1945most notably the abandonment of Bretton
Woods in the early 1970s. The nineteenth-century political econo-
mists of stature it produced were all deviants, including Friedrich List,
Henry George, William Jennings Bryant (if he counts) or Thorstein
Veblen; by comparison, Hobson and Keynes, the two most influential
heterodox economists Britain spawned over two centuries, were pretty
standard liberals. In the us, add to the list Trumps trade advisor Peter
Navarro who, as the Economist notes acerbically, has no publications in
top-tier academic journals.

Home and abroad

In part as a result, the offers being made both to voters and to foreign
leaders seem quite different. Chamberlain and his supporters could
with some accuracy refer to their system as Imperial free tradetariff
walls would encompass the colonies, not exclude them. When, under
the force of circumstances during the Depression, something like this
finally came into existence in 1932, much grumbling arose from liber-
als and even some conservatives that this involved much greater benefit
to the colonies than to the mother country. America First sounds very
different; on one level, a disavowal that maintaining an imperial system
actually requires concessions from the empire in question to its array
of allies, satraps and formal or informal colonies. To wit, renegotiating
nafta with Mexico and Canada, while forcing the former to pay for a
wall, as an especially brutal form of home charge; cheering the demise
of the eu, while talking up nato as a bad deal and demanding European
countries contribute more to their own defence; the list goes on, even if
it is more talk than action so far. It is notable that, with the exception of
Mexico, the countries taking advantage of the us, for Trump, are devel-
oped; policy towards subaltern states seems unlikely to change, with
space for the screws to be turned tighter where these show any signs of
defianceIran, North Korea.

That said, in the moribund conditions of late-late capitalism, maybe a

new imperial order could in fact be renegotiated on this harsher basis.
Certainly, the spectacle of Shinzo Abe jumping at the chance to golf at
Mar-a-Lago, while offering up billions for investment in infrastructure;
 zevin: America 39

or Pea Nieto, dithering over whether or not to cancel his trip to the us
last month, in the face of insults so grave wars have started over less;
or Theresa Mays hand-holding; does not suggest much of a stomach
for a hard bargain on the part of Americas dependents. Perhaps this is
another advantage of the particular form of economic power exerted by
the us, which is partially distinct from that of its predecessor: based not
primarily on its role as exporter of capital, but as the safest destination for
it; trade deficits secured by its control of fiat currency. The dollar has been
put to more effective use as a political weapon and is better understood,
it seems, than London could ever manage with its gold-sterling standard.
Compare the latters confusion over the effects of returning to gold in
1925, or the crash of 1931, with Washingtons continual use of its indis-
pensable dollar (via the Treasury and Department of Justice) to blockade
Cuba or Iran, or to extract huge settlements from foreign firms like bnp
Paribas or Volkswagen.

One difference is that in this imperial-economic crisis, no challenge of

the sort that Germany represented for Britain is really on the horizon for
the us. At least not militarily: naval moves thousands of miles away in
the South China Sea are nothing like as serious as the build-up pursued
by Wilhelm II, which could have pinned down the Royal Navy at home
making maintenance of a blue-water fleet at even a one-power standard
difficult. At any rate, the change Trump seems to propose here is not
in the confrontational attitude to China, but in conciliating Russia
perhaps to isolate the former from the latter, and thereby ensure the
pivot to Asia achieves its original end (now without the need for tpp).

So, overall, the result could be continuity in foreign policy, but

with the hegemonic formula rejigged: more coercion, even less persua-
sion. Whether that will lead in turn to the hegemonic crisis Giovanni
Arrighi predicted may depend on the economic consequences of this
project, which seems unlikely to solve, and could worsen, the long
downturn of Atlantic capitalism. What does seem likely, based on the
thoughts sketched here, is that America is not about to embark on its
climacteric quietly.