Norman Pollack, Capitalism, Hegemony, and Violence in the Age of Drones

Norman Pollack, Capitalism, Hegemony, and Violence in the Age of Drones. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2018, 483 pages; $179.99.

Norman Pollack established himself in the 1960s as one of the most important historians of the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century. His first two books, The Populist Response to Industrial America (1962) and The Populist Mind (1967), earned Pollack a richly deserved reputation for insisting that the Farmers’ Alliances of the 1880s and the People’s Party of the 1890s were a homegrown social democratic alternative to laissez faire capitalism, the incubators of this country’s modern radical progressive politics. These books demonstrated Pollack’s lifelong conviction that class analysis is the most effective tool for uncovering and understanding the bases and purposes of those who wield power in American society. Although in the 1960s he was frequently dismissed by critics in the history profession as just another young New Left Marxist, in fact Pollack was throughout his career a radical social democrat. As he makes clear in Capitalism, Hegemony, and Violence in the Age of Drones, FDR and the New Deal were always proof that modern America could produce class-conscious social democratic politics capable of checking the unrestrained accumulation of wealth and political power by corporate capitalists while at the same time empowering working people.

Pollack tells the story of how he became an outspoken critic of the corrosive moral influences of corporate capitalism and militarism in American life in Chapter 8, titled “Political Reflections: Education of a (Sometimes) Radical,” that separates the two main sections of this book. In a lively and engaging style he describes his youthful admiration of FDR and the New Deal, working at age 15 for Henry Wallace’s election in 1948, challenging segregation as an undergraduate at the University of Florida in the early 1950s, and campaigning for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956. Norman Pollack received his PhD in History from Harvard University, where he began his teaching career. He tells us that securing tenure in order to support a family was an important motivator in the 1960s, but one that clearly did not restrain his outspoken radicalism. He taught next at Yale University but knew his politics would effectively prevent tenure there too, so he moved onto Wayne State University and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and then finally to Michigan State University where he taught for thirty years until 1998. On all those campuses, Norman Pollack was a very public figure in the movements for racial equality and against the nuclear arms race and America’s war in Indochina. During the 1970s, after American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement fragmented, Pollack pulled back from public politics, concentrating on the scholarly work that eventually produced two unparalleled studies of the Populists’ ideas and ideology: The Just Polity (1987) and The Humane Economy (1990).

Capitalism, Hegemony, and Violence in the Age of Drones is very different from those masterful scholarly studies of nineteenth century Populism. It is an angry incisive critique of contemporary America’s political-economy, political culture, and imperial foreign policy. Its first seven chapters describe in broad strokes the patterns of modern American history that have produced what he insists must now be recognized as an American form of fascism. Here Pollack emphasizes a process he calls “interpenetration,” the long term development of an inseparable mutuality of interests of government and corporate capitalism, that he stresses is the central theme of American history since the 1890s. This interpretation was the centerpiece of courses that I took with him in the 1970s when he was my doctoral advisor and mentor in American history. Pollack recognizes the confirmation of interpenetration in the bi-partisan foreign policy consensus formed during the Clinton presidency that “Globalization, at least as business and government leaders see it, represents the affirmation of American leadership in the world”(108). Moreover, he identifies as specifically fascist the increasing militarization of the relationship between business and government since then “as if this was indispensable for economic growth.” Americans, he claims have been ideologically fed “an addiction for war and correlative activities vital to the national psyche.” America today, Pollack concludes, “is unable to subsist without resort to war (and certainly preparation for war)” (109). The proof, he observes, is evident every year in Congress’s routine approval of massive military budgets that “all but nullify a vital social safety net.”

Interpenetration and militarization are the foundations upon which Pollack builds a devastating critique of recent American foreign policy in the longest and last section of this complex book. Two-thirds of Capitalism, Hegemony and Violence in the Age of Drones is a pared down and carefully edited version of the 421 posts Norman Pollack published online in Counterpunch between October 2012 and April 2017. The result is a chronologically organized set of very close readings of news of American military and intelligence operations as reported in the New York Times, Washington Post, and by other investigative journals. By carefully parsing and piecing together details and the words of officials found in public sources, Pollack shows us that U. S. foreign policy after the Cold War has been consistently defined by the drive to expand and protect a global military empire. The result has been a state of permanent, mostly secret, warfare in which Americans have killed uncounted innocents abroad while political attention here in “the homeland” has been focused on domestic cultural issues, bitter partisanship, and personalities.

In this book Pollack especially wants us to see what is usually hidden from public view, the real “war on terror” and its ceaseless campaign of assassination by unmanned drones under the control of “pilots” who remain safe on the ground on bases in North America. What is euphemistically called by officials “targeted killing,” is the principal “light footprint” strategy of unceasing warfare. This strategy has been evolving since the failures of massive interventions by “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan and Iraq ordered by George W. Bush. It now includes all the secret “black operations” being carried out in dozens of countries by the 70,000 members of America’s numerous elite military units that are directed by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command. What most people think they know of this secret warfare is actually patriotic myth constructed by Hollywood, TV, and video games with the assistance of military advisors and experts, repackaged ancient archetypal war stories that emphasize the skills, strengths, and close comradeship of daring warriors who kill the bad guys that threaten good people everywhere. Thus, the bloody truths of America’s global military empire are ignored, disappeared in the long saga of the nation’s civilizing mission once proudly called its “Manifest Destiny.”

Capitalism, Hegemony and Violence in the Age of Drones presents a truly scathing moral indictment of Barack Obama’s presidency. In this book, Obama is not seen as the cool model of progressive leadership he projected in public appearances. Instead Norman Pollack returns again and again to the image of Obama as the military commander-in-chief who meets daily with his intelligence chiefs to pick and choose targets for his drone pilots and his special forces. For Pollack the blood of all the noncombatants who died and were ignored or dismissed as “collateral damage” in the secret warfare of the Obama years is on the hands of America’s first black President. Thus, for him, depicting Obama as inheritor of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. is not just bad history, but a moral insult to all those who recognize King as America’s greatest champion of peace and nonviolence.

There is much else of value in this book, especially on the ways that militarism and daily violence, including mass shootings, has been normalized in contemporary American culture. Pollack’s moral indictment of our government and its recent leaders is especially convincing. However, I think his concept of “interpenetration” does not fully explain the motivations for their actions in defense of America’s post Cold War foreign policy. While advancing “unilateral dominance in shaping global stabilization for purposes of advantageous trade-and-investment opportunities” (214) remains an intrinsic and important reason for war and constant preparation for new wars; the maintenance of military dominance everywhere, including outer space and cyberspace, has become the principal motive for America’s ceaseless warfare. The foreign policy establishment uses jargon terms like “unipolarity” to describe and sanitize this global ambition. But in 2006 President George W. Bush used plain language everyone could understand when he insisted America was “the decider” in the Middle East. The United States’ assertion that it is the decider possessing both the right and ability to determine political outcomes in far away lands against the opposition of any and all challengers whether they are non-state actors like Al Qaeda and ISIS, powerful countries like Russia and China, or “rogue states” like Iran and North Korea remains today what it was for ancient Rome, the essence of imperialism.

Ronald W. Edsforth
Department of History
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH
Ronald.W.Edsforth@dartmouth.edu