Effective people function as intermediaries between Washington and foreign capitals, selling the riches of an empire in decline.
By Jason MORGAN
“Comprador capitalist” is not a compliment. The term signifies a merchant in a poor country who brokers handle immigrants, parleying his knowledge of local conditions and his contacts with abroad traders into enormous revenues for himself.
Even– particularly– as the immigrants calm down into trading posts and then begin controling and managing the government of the region or even the entire nation, the comprador capitalist continues to play both sides. He offers himself as the eternal middleman, the entrepôtto the unusual world the immigrants want to dominate and the point-person for negotiations between the put-upon regional authorities and the attacking imperialists.
Whatever the foreigners want to offer, even society-wrecking poison like opium, the comprador capitalists will find a buyer for it. Whatever the immigrants wish to buy, even slaves for their ship galleys or for their fields back home, even women for their bedchambers, the comprador capitalists will discover a seller.
The history of comprador capitalism came to mind as I was reading through a stack of books recently on corruption in American government. There are many such books, no doubt because the topic is essentially limitless. One standout of late is Peter Schweizer’s 2018 volume Secret Empires, explaining a phenomenon Schweizer examined in close-up in his 2015 book, Clinton Money.
The method the American federal government runs at the greatest levels is, now, essentially compradorian. Powerful people– the Clintons, obviously, however likewise players with last names like Bush, McConnell, Kerry, Biden, and Trump– act as middlemen between the “political economy,” a euphemism for “cesspool,” of Washington and the political economies of foreign capitals.
A double layer of compradorism makes this all in some way legal. The Clinton Foundation, Hunter Biden, Elaine Chao, Christopher Heinz: It isn’t the bigwig him- or herself who takes the allurement straight; it’s the “charitable organization,” the partner, the child, the stepson who gathers the “contribution” or the “speaking charge” or the financial investment in the “tactical partnership.”
But much like the cohongmerchants in Qing-era Canton, the main thing is to be the hinge in between two opposing aircrafts. The point where strength and strength link is extremely profitable, and comprador capitalists understand precisely how to maximize lucre while browsing the realities of power.
But as I reviewed this a bit more, the term “comprador capitalism” began to seem off. For what is being bought and sold in 21st-century America is not really dog crates of tea and porcelain, but power itself. Take the case of Sant and Vikram Chatwal and Amar Singh. In chapter four of Clinton MoneySchweizer lays out how these extremely well-connected and extremely enthusiastic insiders in Indian politics finagled proximity to the Clintons– literally, as in a seat of honor for Singh near the Clintons at a 2005 Clinton Global Initiative soiree– to obtain clearance for the nuclear weapons deal that the Indian federal government coveted. Chapter eight, “Warlord Economics,” concentrates on the Clintons’ relaxing relationships with transparently, nearly comically corrupt strongmen in Africa. The Clintons themselves have no special abilities besides a genius for grift. What they dohave in spades is the charism of federal power. They exhibit the aroma of peacock-blue carpet, mahogany furniture, and governmental drape. This is the currency of the late-imperial realm: the sentimental features of the tottering empire that still, like the Qing circa 1890, has the chops to impress petitioners with the weight of the dead past.
Yes, there are physical and financial rewards to be gained from all this, and those are what servants who sidle as much as the Clintons seek. However what the Clintons themselves are selling is not the gold, diamonds, oil, uranium, or whatever else their hangers-on want. The Clintons are selling the aura of American may. They are selling the afterglow of power. The Clinton cohongsare trafficking in the American empire itself, trading access to the empire’s unraveling power structures in exchange for money and popularity and magnificence and all the rest.
This is various from comprador commercialism. This is comprador imperialism. It has ended up being the default, maybe the only, way to do organization at the upper echelons of the federal power pyramid.
Comprador imperialism is Burisma, and Hunter Biden’s fingerpaintings, and Rudy Giuliani’s odd Ukrainian rolodex, and even the rush amongst party cadres in Beijing to get their princeling offspring into Harvard and NYU. The American empire is a fading image, but while it lasts there are numerous in the world who wish to bask in its passing away light. Individuals on every occupied continent scramble to proper on their own the iconography of a thing that no longer exists, the Star Spangled Banner waving high up on a building, while down below the streets are covered with needles and feces, and, inside, the shell corporations trading derivatives can’t manage to keep the lights on.
This photo-op-ism, this magical force that comes from propinquity to a sagging power couple or from weaselly words out of the mealy mouth of a senator from Kentucky, is what comprador imperialists are offering. And people are buying. Huge time. Hunter Biden and his partners received billions of dollars from Chinese companies with deep ties to the central government in Beijing.
Photos with the American flag are not what the Chinese truly desire, though, obviously. The Chinese have actually seen the feces-smeared and needle-littered streets and have actually rejected the runaway liberalism that gives the world such gifts. The Chinese don’t care about the future of American power, just its consistent desuetude. They want to whittle the American empire down so they can take its place as world hegemon. They are currently doing this, but it works much more effectively if somebody inside the shop runs the fire sale.
Indian politicians, Ukrainian mafiosi, African warlords, Canadian billionaires– they want in on the scraps, too. “Managed decline” is not what we believed it was. Somebody is handling it, and it isn’t the federal government. It’s comprador imperialists, the ones in extremely expensive matches cutting deals with very unpleasant characters in parts of the world that not even Instagrammers care to check out. Did you think I implied Kinshasa? No, I meant San Francisco.
But there you go. San Francisco was where the United Nations Charter was signed. It is now basically a city-sized opium den. Cohongs, indeed. This hollowing-out of the empire is Samir Amin’s reliance theory in reverse. The periphery was once depending on the royal metropole. Now, the unclean metropole is dependent on the periphery. Due to the fact that the periphery will soon be king. And the “comprador bourgeoisie,” as Marx called them, are offering, again in reverse of the initial theory, their huge nation out to the “nationalist bourgeoisie” of the 3rd world.
The empire is devouring itself, and the comprador imperialists are the ones assigning out the assistings.