What's Red and Green and Blue All Over?

Libertarians of a certain sort are notoriously obsessive when it comes to political theory and economics. The too easy trope for such political obsession, whether of a libertarian bent or not, is to call it 'religious' and for some, at least, the label is apt. There are Articles of Faith, after all, about which any contrary evidence is brushed aside, studiously ignored or defined away. In full rant mode, the true believer's gaze takes on a disquietingly feral intensity of the sort that, in another setting, would prompt mental health professionals to go running for the industrial strength Haldol. You know the type; otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.

Still, when it comes to a fanatical devotion usually reserved for the unexpected minions of the Spanish Inquisition, nothing beats your dyed-in-union-label Marxist. I fondly remember listening back in the 60s and 70s to these fellows at school, standing behind tables strewn with ink smudged CPUSA pamphlets printed on paper too flimsy to make credible toilet tissue. As it became my avowed purpose in life by the mid 70s to distance myself as far as possible from my proletarian origins, their efforts were ultimately wasted on me. Still, like Scientologists, Lyndon LaRouche's followers and cultists of all sorts, one had to admire their almost inexhaustible capacity for cognitive dissonance.

They're getting harder and harder to find these days, even in American universities. Harder but, by golly, still not quite impossible. Here then, by way of Arts & Letters Daily, is a bit of newly-minted nostalgia (hey, that phrase sounds vaguely dialectical!), eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster's latest searing indictment of The Imperialist World System.

Let me just stir your own memories with the opening paragraph:

The concept of the imperialist world system in today’s predominant sense of the extreme economic exploitation of periphery by center, creating a widening gap between rich and poor countries, was largely absent from the classical Marxist critique of capitalism. Rather this view had its genesis in the 1950s, especially with the publication fifty years ago of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth.1 Baran’s work helped inspire Marxist dependency and world system theories. But it was the new way of looking at imperialism that was the core of Baran’s contribution. A half-century later it is important to ask: What was this new approach and how did it differ from then prevailing notions? What further changes in our understanding of imperialism are now necessary in response to changed historical conditions since the mid-twentieth century?

Oh, yeah... good times!