Perry Anderson, the leading Marxist scholar of the day, confounds the vulgar Marxism that US policy is about “oil” and “profits”, a view that would reduce Nazism to a matter of Russian oil and wheat. These excerpts are followed by a link to the piece.

“The Middle East is the one part of the world where the us political system, as presently constituted, cannot act according to a rational calculus of national interest, because it is inhabited by another, supervening interest. For its entire position in the Arab—and by extension Muslim—world is compromised by its massive, ostentatious support for Israel.”

“The outstanding work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has finally broken this silence… In striking contrast has been the general pusillanimity of the American Left, prone to emphasizing the role of its bugbear the Christian Right as a more acceptable culprit, when the latter’s function has clearly been in effect a force d’appoint.”

These remarks are in section IV.7 of this article, and in the note in that section.

New Left Review, n. 48, November-December 2007
Perry Anderson
Jottings on the Conjuncture