Destiny of Civilization, Interview by Ben Norton

《文明的命运》，本·诺顿访谈：

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the Nobel Prize is given basically for junk economics. And probably the worst junk economist of the century was Paul Samuelson.
He made the absurd claim that he proved mathematically that, if you have free trade then, and don’t have tariffs, and don’t have any government protection, then everyone will become more equal. At least the proportions between labor and capital will be more equal. Well, the reality is just the opposite.
And the term “free-trade imperialism” was actually created by a British historian of trade theory who pointed out that, wait a minute, when England went for free trade, the idea was, if we have free trade, we can stifle other countries from being able to industrialize, because if we have free trade, then we can tell America, we will open our doors to your markets – meaning the markets of the slave South, that Britain supported – and in exchange, you will open your markets to our industrial goods.
And America followed that until the Civil War, which was fought not only over slavery, but by the Republican Party after 1853 that said very explicitly, if we’re going to win the election – the Whigs never could win – if we, the new party, are going to win the election and industrialize America, we’ve got to integrate ourselves with the anti-slavery issue, with emancipation, but for us, the economic war of America is a war of, either we’re going to have protective tariffs in the North, or we’re going to end up as a non-industrial, raw materials-producing society, as the South wants.

迈克尔·哈德森:
诺贝尔奖基本上是颁给垃圾经济学的。本世纪最糟糕的垃圾经济学家可能是保罗·萨缪尔森（Paul Samuelson）。他提出了一个荒谬的主张，他从数学上证明了，如果你有自由贸易，没有关税，没有任何政府保护，那么每个人都会变得更平等，至少劳动力和资本的比例会更加平等。但事实恰恰相反。
“自由贸易帝国主义”一词实际上是由一位研究贸易理论的英国历史学家创造的。当英国追求自由贸易时，我们的想法是，如果我们有自由贸易，我们就可以扼杀其他国家的工业化，因为如果我们有自由贸易，我们就可以告诉美国，我们将向你们的市场——即英国支持的南方奴隶市场——敞开大门，作为交换，你们将向我们的工业产品开放市场。
美国听从了建议，直到南北战争。这场战争不仅是为奴隶制而战，而且在1853年后由共和党发起。它非常明确地说，如果我们要赢得选举，辉格党就绝不能胜选。如果我们，这个新党，要赢得选举，实现美国工业化，我们就要把自己和反奴隶制以及解放运动结合起来。但对我们来说，美国的经济战争是一场——要么我们在北方实施保护性关税，要么我们将像南方所希望的那样，成为一个非工业的、原材料生产的社会。

that was the debate from 1815, when the Napoleonic wars ended and world trade began again, until really the Civil War.
And America became strong in the way that Germany became strong too, by having protective tariffs, in order to have prices large enough to nurture what was called infant industry, to nurture American manufacturing.
And I wrote a long book about this, published some years ago based on my PhD dissertation, “America’s Protectionist Takeoff.”
Well, the English tried to fight against other countries protecting their economy, saying that if you just have free trade, you’ll get rich. Whereas the reality is, if we have free trade, you’ll get poor, if you’re not already able to have industrial and labor productivity and agricultural productivity on par with the most advanced countries.
Free trade was an attempt to prevent other countries from investing government money and building up their agriculture, and building up their industry, and building up their productivity, and creating a school system, to raise wages, to make wages more productive.

这种争论从1815年开始，拿破仑战争结束，世界贸易重新开始，直到（美国）内战爆发。美国变得强大，就像德国变得强大一样，通过保护性关税，为了让价格足够高来培育所谓的婴儿工业，培育美国制造业。
关于这个问题，我写了一本很长的书，几年前以我的博士论文《美国的保护主义起飞》为基础出版。
英国人试图与其他国家对抗，保护他们的经济，他们说，如果你有自由贸易，你就会变得富有。然而现实是，如果我们有自由贸易，你会变穷，你就不能拥有与最先进国家相当的工业、劳动和农业生产力。
自由贸易试图阻止其他国家投入政府资金发展农业，发展工业，提高生产力，建立教育体系，提高工资，提高工资效率。

the American protectionists said, well, we’re going to have a high-wage economy because high-wage labor undersells pauper labor. And skilled, well-fed, well-rested American labor can produce much more than the pauper labor of other countries that have free trade.
Well, what the leading American protectionist economist, Erasmus Peshine Smith, went to Japan and helped industrial help Japan break away from British free trade, helped Japan industrialize.
And other American economists, other foreign economists, all picked up the ideas of the American protectionist, like Friedrich List went to Germany promoting protectionism.
And Peshine Smith’s book, “The Manual of Political Economy,” was translated into all the foreign languages – Japanese, Italian, French, German.
And you had Europe realizing that free trade polarizes economies. Well, it was this that after World War One, and especially World War Two, when you had orthodox economics turning into basically propaganda.

美国的保护主义者说，好吧，我们将会有一个高工资的经济，因为高工资的劳动力（成本）低于贫穷的劳动力。有技能、吃得好、休息得好的美国劳动力可以比其他拥有自由贸易的国家的贫穷劳动力生产出更多的产品。
美国著名的保护主义经济学家伊拉兹马斯·佩辛·史密斯（Erasmus Peshine Smith），去了日本，帮助日本脱离英国的自由贸易并实现工业化。其他美国经济学家，其他外国经济学家，都接受了美国保护主义的观点，比如弗里德里希·李斯特（Friedrich List）去德国提倡保护主义。
佩辛·史密斯的书《政治经济学手册》被翻译成日语、意大利语、法语和德语。你让欧洲意识到自由贸易使经济两极分化。正是在一战之后，尤其是二战之后，正统经济学基本上变成了宣传。

That’s where you and Samuelson and others try to convince other countries, governments are bad, leave everything to the wealthy people, to the finance people, trickle-down economies, it’s all going to trickle down, don’t worry, just give more money to the rich, and don’t have any government interference with markets. Whereas America had got rich by interfering with markets, to shape them in the years leading up to World War One. But after World War One, America had already achieved its industrial dominance. And it was after World War One that America said, ok, now our protective tariffs have enabled us to outproduce all the other countries, and our protectionist agriculture especially – the most protected sector in America, has always been agriculture, since the 1930s.
Basically it said, well, now we can outproduce other countries, we can undersell them, now we can tell them to go for free trade.
And after World War Two, the Americans created the World Bank for economic impoverishment, and the International Monetary Austerity Fund.

萨缪尔森等人试图说服其他国家：政府是糟糕的，（应该）把一切都留给富人，留给金融家，这是涓滴经济，它会涓滴下去，别担心，把更多的钱给富人，政府不干预市场。而美国是通过干预市场致富的，在第一次世界大战之前的几年里对市场进行了塑造。
但在第一次世界大战后，美国已经取得了工业主导地位。第一次世界大战后，美国说：现在我们的保护性关税使我们的产量超过了所有其他国家，尤其是我们的保护主义农业——自20世纪30年代以来，美国最受保护的部门一直是农业。基本上它在说，现在我们可以在生产上超过其他国家，我们可以在售价上低于他们，现在我们可以让他们进行自由贸易。
第二次世界大战后，美国人为解决经济贫困创立了世界银行和国际货币紧缩基金组织。

the World Bank’s leading obxtive was to prevent other countries from investing in their own food production.
The guiding line of the World Bank was, we’ve got to provide infrastructure for building up plantation agriculture in Latin America, and Africa, and other countries, so that they will grow tropical export crops, but they cannot be permitted to grow grain or wheat to feed themselves; they must be dependent on the United States.
And so the function of free trade, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund has been to finance dependency, backed up by the American support of dictatorships throughout Latin America who agree to have client oligarchies supporting pro-American trade patterns and avoiding any kind of self-reliance, so that the United States can do what it has recently done to Russia and other countries, impose sanctions – say, well, now that you depended on us for your grain, we can now impose sanctions, and you can’t feed yourself if you don’t follow the policies we want.

世界银行的主要目标是阻止其他国家投资本国的粮食生产。世界银行的指导方针是，我们必须为拉丁美洲、非洲和其他国家的种植园农业建设提供基础设施，所以他们可以种植热带出口作物，但他们不能种植谷物或小麦来养活自己，他们必须依赖美国。
所以自由贸易的功能就是，世界银行/国际货币基金组织一直在为依赖提供资金，美国支持整个拉丁美洲的独裁政权，这些独裁政权同意政治支持亲美贸易模式，避免任何形式的自力更生。这样美国就可以像它最近对俄罗斯和其他国家所做的那样，施加制裁——比如说，好吧，现在你们的粮食依赖我们，我们现在可以施加制裁，如果你们不遵循我们想要的政策，你们就无法养活自己。

That was the policy that America tried to use against China after Mao’s revolution. And fortunately for China, Canada broke that monopoly, and said, well, we’re going to sell grain to China. And China was always very friendly to Canada in those earlier decades.
So basically, free trade means no government, no socialism. It means central planning essentially by Wall Street – countries should let American firms come in, buy control of their raw materials, resources, control of their oil and gas, and mineral rights, and forests and plantations, and basically let other countries send their whole economic surplus to the United States, where it will be duly financialized to buy out other countries’ raw materials and rent yielding resources.

这也是新中国成立后美国试图用来对付中国的政策。幸运的是，加拿大打破了美国的垄断，它说，我们要向中国出售粮食。在新中国成立后的几十年里，中国一直对加拿大非常友好。
所以基本上，自由贸易意味着没有政府，没有社会主义，意味着由华尔街主导的中央计划——各国应该让美国公司进入，购买他们的原材料、资源、石油和天然气的控制权、采矿权、森林和种植园的控制权，基本上是让其他国家把他们的全部经济盈余送到美国，在那里，这些盈余将被适当地融资来购买其他国家的原材料和租用产生收益的资源。
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BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, and in your book, you have a very funny passage that I think really encapsulates this ideology that you’re talking about here.
You referred to Charles Wilson, who was the secretary of defense under Eisenhower in the U.S., and he was also the former CEO of General Motors.
And he famously said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” And that idea has morphed into the idea that, “What’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”
And then you note that “this merged with evangelistic U.S. foreign policy that says ‘What’s good for America is good for the world.’ And therefore the logical syllogism is clear: ‘What’s good for Wall Street is good for the world.’”
And you describe this, you lix it to the new cold war, this idea that what’s good for the U.S. is good for the world and what’s good for Wall Street is good for the U.S., therefore, what’s good for Wall Street is good for the world.
You argue, “We must recognize how finance capitalism has gained power over industrial economies, above all in the United States, from which it seeks to project itself globally, led by the financialized U.S. economy. Today’s new Cold War is a fight to impose rentier-based finance capitalism on the entire world.”

本杰明·诺顿:
是的，在你的书中，你有一段非常有趣的段落，我认为它概括了你在这里谈论的意识形态。你提到了查尔斯·威尔逊，他是美国艾森豪威尔时期的国防部长，他也是通用汽车公司的前首席执行官。
他有句名言:“对通用汽车有利的事，就是对国家有利。”这个想法已经演变成“对华尔街有利的就是对美国有利。” 然后你会注意到，“这与福音派的美国外交政策相结合，该政策认为“对美国有利的事情就是对世界有利。”
因此，逻辑上的三段论很清楚:“对华尔街有利的事，就是对世界有利。”
你描述了这一点，你把它与新冷战联系起来，这种观点认为对美国有利的事情对世界有利，对华尔街有利的事情对美国有利，因此，对华尔街有利的事情就是对世界有利。
你认为，“我们必须认识到金融资本主义是如何在工业经济中获得力量的，尤其是在美国，它试图从美国在金融化的美国经济的领导下，在全球范围内投射自己（的力量）。今天的新冷战是一场将以食利者为基础的金融资本主义强加给整个世界的战斗。”

And this is such an important analysis. Because among those very few people of us who talk about this idea of the new cold war and how dangerous it is, there are very few people who frx it in economic terms.
Usually we frx it in political terms, right, the geopolitical interests between the US and the EU on one side, and China and Russia on the other.
And going back to Brzezinski and The Grand Chessboard, his 1997 book, where he talks about the importance of preventing near strategic competitors from emerging in Eurasia. That’s of course a geopolitical discussion and economics is part of it, but it’s often not at the forefront.
But your analysis I think is even more important, and more accurate, because your argument is not only is it geopolitical, but the geopolitical struggle is rooted in economics. And this is an economic struggle between systems.
So talk talk more about the new cold war and how you see it.

这是一个非常重要的分析。因为在我们当中很少有人谈论新冷战的概念以及它有多危险，很少有人从经济角度来框定它。通常我们用政治术语来描述它，对吧，一边是美国和欧盟，另一边是中国和俄罗斯之间的地缘政治利益。
回到布热津斯基和他1997年的著作《大棋局》(The Grand Chessboard)，他在书中谈到了防止战略竞争对手在欧亚大陆崛起的重要性。这当然是事关地缘政治的讨论，但经济也是其中的一部分，尽管通常不是最重要的。
我认为你的分析更重要，更准确，因为你的论点不仅是地缘政治，而且地缘政治斗争植根于经济学。这是制度之间的经济斗争。
所以，这里谈论更多的是关于新冷战的话题以及你如何看待它。

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, as we’re seeing now, the world is dividing into two parts. We can see that in the fight against Russia, which is also a fight against China, and against India, as you noted. And it seems Indonesia and other countries as well.
The United States is pushing a world that can be controlled by American investors. The ideal of the American neoliberal plan is to do to other countries what it did to Russia after 1991: take all of your public domain, your oil companies, your nickel mines, your electric utilities, give them all to the wealthy oligarchy, that can only make money once it’s taken control of these companies, by selling the stocks to the West.
The West will buy out oil, just like Mikhail Khodorkovsky tried to sell Yukos oil to Standard Oil in the West. And we’ve got to put an oligarchy that will sell all of the national domain, all of the patrimony and natural resources, and all the companies, to American investors on the cheap.
The Russian stock market led all the stock markets in the world from 1994 up to about 1998. This was a huge rip off. The United States wants to be able to do that to the rest of the world.

迈克尔·哈德森:
正如我们现在看到的，世界正被分成两部分。我们可以从与俄罗斯的斗争中看到这一点，正如你提到的，这也是与中国和印度的斗争。印度尼西亚和其他国家也是如此。
美国正在推动一个由美国投资者控制的世界。美国新自由主义计划的理想是对其他国家做它在1991年后对俄罗斯做过的事情: 把你所有的公有领域，你的石油公司，你的镍矿，你的电力设施，都交给富裕的寡头政治，他们只有控制了这些公司，才能赚钱，才能通过卖股票给西方。
西方会买下所有的石油，就像霍多尔科夫斯基试图把尤科斯的石油卖给西方的标准石油一样。我们必须建立一个寡头政治，将所有的国家领土，所有的遗产和自然资源，以及所有的公司，廉价地卖给美国投资者。
从1994年到1998年，俄罗斯股市在全球股市中遥遥领先。但这是一场巨大的骗局。美国希望对世界其他国家也能这样做。

And it was furious when Russia said, we’ve lost more population as a result of neoliberalism than we did in all of World War Two fighting against Nazism. We’ve got to stop.
And Russia began to say, we’ve got to use Russia’s population, and industry, and natural resources for Russia’s benefit, not for the United States’ benefit.
Well, the United States was absolutely furious with this. And the fury has erupted in the NATO war against Russia in the last few months, and what’s ongoing now.
And the United States says, U.S. State Department officials have said, what we want to do is carve up Russia into maybe four different countries: Siberia, western Russia, southern Russia or Central Asia, maybe northern Russia.

当俄罗斯说，我们因为新自由主义失去的人口比我们在二战中与纳粹主义作战时失去的人口还要多时，这令人非常愤怒。我们必须停下来。
俄罗斯开始说，我们必须利用俄罗斯的人口、工业和自然资源来为俄罗斯造福，而不是为美国造福。美国对此当然非常愤怒。过去几个月里，北约对俄罗斯的战争爆发了愤怒情绪，现在还在继续。
美国说、美国国务院官员说，我们想要做的是把俄罗斯分成四个不同的国家：西伯利亚，俄罗斯西部，俄罗斯南部或中亚，也许还有俄罗斯北部。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


And once we’ve done that, we cut Russia off from China, then we go into China. We finance, we send ISIS and al-Qaeda into the Uyghur areas, the Muslim areas, and we start a color revolution there. And then we break up China, into a northern part, a southern part, a central part.
And once we break them up, we can more or less control them. And we can then come in, buy up their resources, and take over their industry, their labor, and their government, and get richer to obtain from China, Russia, India, Indonesia, and Iran the wealth that we’re no longer producing in the United States, now that we de-industrialized.
So the world is dividing into two parts. And it’s not simply the United States and its European satellites on the one hand versus the non-white population on the other hand; it’s finance capitalism versus the rest of the world, which is protecting itself by socialism, which in many ways fulfills what was the ideal of industrial capitalism during the 19th century, when industrial capitalism was actually progressive.
And it was progressive. That’s part of the whole theme of my book. It was revolutionary. It tried to free economies from the legacy of feudalism, from the legacy of hereditary landlords.

一旦我们成功，我们就切断了俄罗斯和中国的联系，然后我们会对准中国。我们会提供资金……一旦我们成功，我们就能或多或少地控制他们。然后我们就可以进入、买下他们的资源、接管他们的产业、他们的劳动力、他们的政府，
从中国、俄罗斯、印度、印度尼西亚和伊朗获得财富，这些财富是我们在美国不再生产的，因为我们去工业化了。
所以世界分成了两部分。这不仅仅是美国和它的欧洲卫星国与非白人人口的对抗。这是金融资本主义与世界其他国家的对抗，后者通过社会主义来保护自己，后者在很多方面实现了19世纪工业资本主义的理想，当时工业资本主义实际上是进步的。
进步，是我这本书的主题之一，它是革命性的。它试图将经济从封建主义和世袭地主的遗产中解放出来。

And now the financial class is no longer the landlord class, but the landlord class pays most of its rent to the financial class in the form of mortgage interest, as it borrows money to buy property and housing and commercial sites on credit.
And you have the kind of financialization that has increased housing prices in the United States to over 40% of income, that is officially guaranteed for mortgages. That has priced American labor out of the market.
Privatized health care, 18% of GDP, that is pricing America out of the world market. Debt, auto debt, student debt, which in other countries education is free; that’s pricing America out of the market.
So you have a basically un-competitive economy that’s committing financial suicide, following the same dynamic that destroyed the Roman empire, where a predatory oligarchy took over and maintained power by an assassination policy of its critics, just very similar to what America has been doing in Latin America and other countries.
So you’re having history repeat itself with this same kind of world split. And this split couldn’t have occurred back in the 1970s, with the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. There were other attempts by the Non-Aligned nations to break free of American imperialism, but they didn’t have a critical mass.

现在金融阶层不再是地主阶级，但地主阶级以抵押贷款利息的形式向金融阶层支付大部分租金，因为他们贷款购买房产、住房和商业用地。这种金融化将美国的房价提高到收入的40%以上，这是官方担保的抵押贷款。这导致美国劳动力因价格过高而被挤出市场。
私有化的医疗保健，占GDP的18%，正把美国挤出世界市场。债务，汽车债务，学生债务，正将美国挤出市场。而在其他国家教育是免费的。
这是一个基本上没有竞争力的经济，这是在自寻死路，与摧毁罗马帝国如出一辙。当时，掠夺性的寡头政治通过对其批评者的暗杀，来接管并维持权力，这与美国在拉丁美洲和其他国家所做的非常相似。
所以历史在重演同样的世界分裂。这种分裂在20世纪70年代印度尼西亚万隆会议时是不可能发生的。不结盟国家也曾试图摆脱美帝国主义，但他们没有达到临界质量。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


So right now, for the first time, you have a critical mass. And you have the ability of China, Iran, Russia, India, other countries together to be self-sufficient. They don’t need relations with the United States.
They can handle their own; they can create their own monetary system outside of the International Monetary Fund, which is basically an arm of the Defense Department. They can give loans to build up the infrastructure of countries outside of the World Bank, which is basically an arm of the Defense Department, the deep state.
So you have the American economy – essentially a merger between the military-industrial complex and the Wall Street FIRE sector, finance, insurance, and real estate – really cannot develop any more than the Roman Empire could develop, by trying to obtain militarily what it could not produce at home anymore.

现在，第一次，你达到了临界质量。中国，伊朗，俄罗斯，印度，还有其他国家都有能力自给自足。他们不需要与美国建立关系。他们能处理好自己的事情。他们可以在国际货币基金组织之外建立自己的货币体系，国际货币基金组织基本上是国防部的一个部门。他们可以向世界银行以外的国家提供贷款来建设基础设施，世界银行基本上也是国防部的一个部门，深层国家。

So you have the American economy – essentially a merger between the military-industrial complex and the Wall Street FIRE sector, finance, insurance, and real estate – really cannot develop any more than the Roman Empire could develop, by trying to obtain militarily what it could not produce at home anymore.
Well, China and other countries, now that they have their industrial base, the raw materials, the food, the ability to feed themselves, the agriculture, and the technology, they can go their own way.
And so we’re seeing in the last few months the beginning of a war that is going to go on for, I think, 20 years, maybe 30 or 40 years. The world is splitting away.
And it won’t be a pretty sight, because the United States and its European satellites are trying to fight to prevent an inevitable break away they cannot prevent, any more than Europe’s landlord class could prevent industrial capitalism from developing in the 19th century.

这就是美国经济——本质上是军工复合体和华尔街FIRE部门，即金融、保险和房地产的结合，与罗马帝国一样，它无法获得更多的发展，因为他们试图通过军事获取国内无法生产的东西。
中国和其他国家，现在他们有了自己的工业基础，原材料，食物，养活自己的能力，农业和技术，他们可以走自己的路。所以我们看到在过去的几个月里，一场战争开始了，我认为这场战争将持续20年，可能30年或40年。世界正在分裂。
这将不会是一幅美好的景象，因为美国及其欧洲的卫星国正试图阻止一场他们无法阻止的、不可避免的分裂，就像欧洲的地主阶级在19世纪阻止工业资本主义的发展一样。
（未完待续）