[Book] Super Imperialism

http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/superimperialism.pdf

Super Imperialism
The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance
Revised edition

Michael Hudson

This new and completely revised edition of “Super Imperialism” describes the genesis of America’s political and financial domination.

Michael Hudson’s in-depth and highly controversial study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception which — he argues — were intended to preserve the US’s financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the international economic system has become apparent; the IMF and World Bank were set up to give aid to developing countries, but instead many of the world’s poorest countries have been plunged into insurmountable debt crises.

Hudson’s critique of the destructive course of the international economic system provides important insights into the real motivations at the heart of these institutions – and the increasing tide of opposition that they face around the world.

Michael Hudson is an independent Wall Street financial economist. After working as balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Anderson in the 1960s, he taught finance at the New School in New York and is presently Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He has published widely on the topic of US financial dominance, as well as “Trade, Development and Foreign Debt” (Pluto 1992) and has been an economic adviser to the Canadian, Mexican, Russian and US governments, and to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).

“Michael Hudson’s brilliant shattering book will leave orthodox economists spluttering. Classical economists don’t like to be reminded of the ugly realities of Imperialism. Hudson is one of the tiny handful of economic thinkers in today’s world who are forcing us to look at old questions in startling new ways.” — Alvin Toffler, best-selling author of “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave”

‘One of the most important books of this century. It is the first work to synthesize the new and different forms which capitalist imperialism has assumed since Lenin.’ — Terence McCarthy, Columbia University

Complete book in pdf format, in Word format: zipped.

425 pp pages, 5 3/4″ x 8 3/4″, March 2003
cloth, 0 7453 1990 4, $85.00

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Imperialism-Origin-Fundamentals-Dominanc/dp/0745319890

Super-Imperialism is better viewed as a radical alternative to common undergraduate textbooks such as Joan Edelman Spero's, "The Politics of International Economic Relations" than as an update to the theories of Lenin or Hobson. (His background and prose style are similar to Spero's and his book covers similar ground.)

It has three sections, each which could have been a separate book.

Chapters 1-6 are a history of U.S. international economic relations from World War I through Bretton Woods.

Chapters 7-10 are a critique of the "The Institutions of the American Empire" (GATT, the World Bank, the IMF and U.S. foreign aid mechanisms). If you have ever wondered what all of the huge protests of the World Bank and IMF were all about these chapters are for you.

Chapters 11-15 are about the U.S. economic transition in the late 1960s and early 1970s from running consistent balance of payments surpluses to running consistent deficits. (We used to export more than we imported; Now we import more than we export.) At the same time the U.S. stopped backing dollars with gold, which forced other countries to lend the surplus dollars created by our trade deficit back to the U.S. government (i.e. to buy treasury notes), thereby also subsidizing our chronic budget deficits. This is the "super-imperialism" of the book's title. This situation was still new and strange when the first edition was published in 1972, and the book's reputation rests on the light Hudson was able to shed on it.

The 2003 Edition has a new introduction and two new chapters at the end. The rest of the book has occasional new material, but does not appear to have been extensively re-written.

It's a difficult and rewarding book. The difficulty lies partly in the subject matter itself, partly in Hudson's convoluted prose and partly in the numerous typographical errors that mar the 2003 Pluto Press edition.

The book is rewarding because it's honest. Readers educated in the U.S. will initially regard Hudson's account with some skepticism. We can't help it; We've been systematically miseducated by pro-U.S. polemics presented in an "objective" tone.

In contrast Hudson is a strident critic of the U.S. management of the global economy. But so is any reasonably objective person who is apprized of the facts. I much prefer an author who honestly tells you the real story as he understands it to one who conceals the awful truth behind an ostensibly impartial facade. But a "revisionist" has to work twice as hard to make his case, and that is why the book contains the detailed explication of what reviewer Myers calls the "intricacies of events and negotiations that gave rise to the present order."

I think an open-minded reader will be won over by Hudson's thoughtful use of contemporaneous sources (e.g. government publications and articles in the business press) and also biographical sources to illuminate how key decision makers understood the alternatives, and their motives for pursuing the policies that they did when forging the post-war economic order. As he places these choices in context it quickly becomes evident that the motives on the U.S. side have been consistently aggressive and that U.S. policy makers have all along viewed multilateral economic institutions as instruments of national policy--to the world's detriment.

Hudson also has a keen sense of the painfully narrow horizon of human foresight. The historical sections sometimes read like a conspiracy theory in which the conspirators are not very smart. E.g., Franklin Roosevelt's stubborn insistence that World War I debts be repaid prolonged the Great Depression; When J. M. Keynes was negotiating Bretton Woods for the newly elected Labour government, he got them a terrible deal; The U.S. transition to "super-imperialism" which is the main story of the book (chapters 11 through 14) was originally an unintended consequence of the huge budget and trade deficits caused by the Vietnam War.

If you are interested in "globalization" this book is an important piece of the puzzle, but it really only covers up through 1973, and it spends more time on the relationship between the U.S. and Europe than on "North-South" relations. Having said that, Ch. 8 "The Imperialism of U.S. Foreign Aid" is very good, esp. how foreign aid benefits the U.S. balance of payments and the harmful effects of U.S. agricultural exports. China is hardly mentioned.

If you are an economics student and you sense that they aren't telling you the whole story, or just a thoughtful citizen who wants to sharpen your conceptual tools for understanding and resisting the strategies of U.S. imperialism, this book is for you.