Postcolonial Anti-Capitalist Subaltern Prophet
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What Conservative Movement?: Historians Write the Mainstream
Recent studies of conservatism bear an element of surprise in their narratives. There seems to be a new and urgent need to explain conservatives generally, or a rise in conservatism in the postwar period more specifically. Many historians of this era view their subject as a foreign element in an otherwise sane, liberal country. After all, as historian of conservatism Kim Phillips-Fein allowed, “many of the younger historians writing about the right are actually left of center, children of the Reagan era who came of age as scholars during the Bush years.” Some of these scholars query the rise of a conservative movement while accepting the general discourse of American capitalism and the norms of neoliberal privatization. Scholars today rarely discuss the conservative nation which begat twentieth century conservatism.
Binaries such as black/white, agency/oppression, and North/South are increasingly unsatisfactory. Historians have offered more nuanced studies of the contentious, shifting sites that rest between false dichotomies. Analyses of liberalism/conservatism have similarly been overly-simplified.
Read MoreHistory for An Ecological Age
‘We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.
That is a personal decision but then a social action.’
- Raymond Williams
‘All economic analyses begin with the cultivation of the earth. To the mind’s eye of the astronomer the earth is a ball spinning in space without ulterior motives. To the bodily eye of the primitive cultivator it is a vast green plain, from which, by sticking a spade into it, wheat and other edible matters can be made to spring.’
- George Bernard Shaw
Historian Fred Cooper, in his 2005 book Colonialism in Question, argued persuasively for avoiding large totalizing concepts such as ‘empire,’ ‘global’ or ‘identity’ in all historical or scholarly writing.’ However, Cooper’s scholarly interpretations and his political stakes turned out to be problematic. This essay attempts to show that global thinking fundamentally is necessary for understanding various locals. Considering collective environmental impact, resource and energy requirements, people movements, commodity flows, and global commercial interconnectivity, this essay reinterprets American historiography on the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that explicitly or implicitly addresses these issues. By examining environmentalists’ notions of cumulative impacts, sociologist Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and the belief that we live in what legal scholar and biochemist Joseph Guth called an ‘ecological age,’ I will demonstrate how local actions, and therefore local histories, possess global consequences. In this essay, I place the human subject not simply in a city, or on the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic World. Rather, scholars must re-imagine local agencies contained on a planet, especially considering global warming. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for research that explored the intersections of the history of capitalism and “species history” demonstrated a vital framework for historians to ponder. By engaging this type of analysis, I emphasize the need for studies that contain the local and the global and the various connecting points between.
Human beings are a geological agent. Perhaps, as some scholars have argued, we are living in the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty wrote, ‘we may not experience ourselves as a geological agent, but we appear to have become one at the level of the species.’ There are crises that ‘affect us all.’ And therefore, we can think about climate change now. Chakrabarty noted that, ‘climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows,’ especially given mounting and distressing scientific evidence, that, ‘the effects of our actions as a species’ matters greatly. Therefore, as histories of global capitalism proliferate, and attendant inequalities and environmental damage, ‘species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.’ Although our ‘species’ is not static, there is no denying our cumulative impact.
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“’Suspect in the Public Mind”: The 1970s, Global Corporations and America’s Multinational Moment
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous – and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it . . . John Maynard Keynes
- “We have to invent new wisdom for a new age. And in the meantime we must, if we are to do any good, appear unorthodox, troublesome, dangerous, and disobedient to them who begat us.” Stephen Hymer
- The multinational corporation is a relatively new phenomenon. It has only recently become a part of the American public consciousness, despite the fact that American overseas investment has had an explosive growth in the year following World War II – Senator Frank Church.
“In the last analysis, markets come out of the barrel of a gun, and to establish an integrated world economy on capitalist lines requires the international mobilization of political power.” This was the powerful conclusion of radical industrial economist Stephen Hymer in a seminal essay that appeared in 1972. Hymer’s utterance was a small piece of a general cultural explosion in the United States after 1968 connected to the dramatic increase in the size, reach and awareness of multinational corporations. These corporations appeared to be new phenomena, though they had existed in nascent form in the immediate postwar period, especially with foreign direct investment in Europe by American firms through the Marshall Plan. However, by the 1970s American companies had grown large and influential enough, and had moved into new postcolonial territories in Africa, Asia and South America, to suddenly seem strange, complex and ungovernable. Few people understood them or their role in society. The “multinational turn” in the 1970s underscored a change in scale and scope of the corporations’ reach, and an attendant alteration in the depth of popular, scholarly, legal and political awareness. Whereas multinational corporate activities in the immediate postwar period evoked little popular excitement or policy attention, by the 1970s the rapid expansion of corporate investments, growth and productive capacity triggered near-panic reactions on all levels of society. This broad cultural investigation of American multinational corporations prefigured debates in later decades about globalization.
This essay contends that the intense focus on multinational corporations represented a transformation in capitalism’s development after World War II, ultimately reaching mass popular suffusion in the 1970s.
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Tomaquag
“The Sun Never Sets Over the Global Corporation”: the Capitalist Vision of a One World, and the Problems of Growth during the Age of Limits, 1960-1981
“But without a commitment to economic growth, what is the raison d’etre of capitalism?” Daniel Bell, 1976
For all their antagonism to the United Nations, human rights activists, and other “one-worlders,” American capitalists in the postwar era invested considerable energy constructing a global vision. Defenders of the nation also created integrated networks well beyond the boundaries of the United States. The 1960s evinced astounding economic growth, and business enterprisers celebrated the vast expansion of market culture and multinational corporations. The 1970s, however, underscored the limits to capitalist imperatives of total growth. Capitalists increasingly were forced to defend themselves; their visions of an interdependent world conflicted with ecological and political constraints. Contradictions existed between state and corporate sovereignties, and tensions erupted that complicated the very idea of the American nation.
President Jimmy Carter resided at the center of this conflict, and might be considered a symbol of the problems of growth during the age of limits. Certainly, the political economic contest between his position and “big business” reflected central issues in American society. The capitalist class attempted to reconcile their One World vision with their traditional values. How did their beliefs translate into the material sphere, in the market and the built environment?
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