4-09-08, 9:55 am

Blows against Empire: U.S. Imperialism in Crisis by Gerald Horne New York: International Publishers, 2008.

Historian and contributing editor of Political Affairs, Gerald Horne has a new book titled Blows Against Empire, a series of nine powerful essays on contemporary crisis of U.S. imperialism as it confronts the world, its counter-revolutionary Cold War against the USSR, the Peoples Republic of China and all socialist countries and movements created.

But first something should be said in praise of Gerald Horne and his remarkable body of work. The Library of Congress catalogue shows 26 book entries for Horne including the soon-to-be released edition of Blows against Empire. Horne's works range from studies of the 1965 Watts uprising to the Hollywood Blacklist to biographical treatments of , Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Benjamin Davis, a study of African American soldiers in the southwest during the Mexican Revolution, , the , among many other topics.

If the old McCarthyite censors undertook to remove Gerald Horne's body of work from libraries here and abroad (as they did in the 1950s with W.E. B. Du Bois and others through the world) it would be a major task. Given the present administration they would probably outsource it.

Gerald Horne has maintained a high level of quality of research and writing in producing this enormous quantity of scholarship. He has managed to write book after book that not only deals with vital issues but also puts them in a Marxist framework that is consistently non-dogmatic, flexible, and in its lucidity accessible to general readers. In a sense his remarkable ongoing work is reminiscent of the late Philip Foner, who helped craft a usable past for generations of labor activists that reactionaries still attack. Blows against Empire continues his remarkable set of accomplishments, using history to illuminate and help to liberate our present.

Horne’s introductory chapter, 'The Crisis of U.S. Imperialism,' begins with a heart-wrenching scene of a Puerto Rican mother tearing the flag of the United States from the coffin of her son, a soldier in the U.S. army killed in Iraq, and calling upon parents not to send their children to fight for the U.S. military.

While this scene is unknown to most Americans, it is widely known to Puerto Ricans. Americans also don’t know that 57 percent of Puerto Rican high school students and/or their families have voted to deny information to the Pentagon that could be used for their military recruitment, although Puerto Ricans are aware of that fact.

This opening chapter combines economic, political and culture sources, which Horne uses to show the disaster that U.S. imperialism under the Bush administration has produced for itself and the world.

First, the “victory” in the Cold War, hailed as the “end of Communism” and for the even more deluded, “the end of history,” has, to paraphrase the late Karl Marx, done little more than dig the grave of U.S. monopoly capitalism deeper. Today, the nation vilified by cold warriors as “Red China” is still under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and controls well over $1 trillion in U.S. debt and reserves, giving it substantial economic power against U.S. imperialism at all levels. As Horne mentions, some have referred to this financial disparity as “China’s nuclear option.”

The integration of the European Union and the huge rise of its currency the euro, against the U.S. dollar is yet another benchmark of U.S. imperialism’s decline. The forces of “Islamic fundamentalism,” from the feudal Saudi regime to the Al Qaeda global terrorist network, the former “allies” and the latter largely creatures of U.S. imperialism, now play a negative role in both economic and military affairs. The former controls vast amounts of oil supply and unilaterally raises prices, while the latter launches attacks against U.S. military and civilian personal in the name of creating a puritanical global Islamic state.

While Al Qaeda's existence and aims are both universally abhorred and shockingly new to most Americans, even in the government, Horne reminds us that the U.S. in the 1980s trained, funded, and hailed Osama bin Laden and those who would later establish Al Qaeda as “freedom fighters” in the counterrevolutionary war against the Communist-led government of Afghanistan and its Soviet supporters. All the while, U.S. policy makers in the Reagan administration smiled at the atrocities the “freedom fighters” committed against Soviets and Afghan civilians, and remained blind to the possibility that like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, those 'freedom fighters' would turn against their creator.

Horne also makes the important point that the defeat and elimination of European socialist states was not the “end of Communism.” In Asia, Africa, Latin America, where the great majority of the world’s people live, socialist forces and movements have either sustained their influence or have been on the ascendancy.

In his treatment of U.S. imperialism’s economic decline, Horne often uses major capitalist analysts representing Wall Street houses and those engaged in the practical management of capital to support his points. His opening chapter concludes with a plea for international working class solidarity, and states that in subsequent chapters, he will examine how such solidarity “will aid immeasurably those involved in resistance to the depredations of U.S. imperialism.”

In the next installment, I will look at chapter 1, “The Business of War.”