Lee Harris: The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing
Part 5 – America as “Root Cause” (Policy Review, 2002)
The Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxist theory shifted the locus of immiserization from domestic workers in advanced capitalist states to the entire developing world. The prosperity of the West—and especially the United States—was now portrayed as the direct cause of Third World poverty.
This reinterpretation preserved the oppressor-oppressed dynamic central to Marxist analysis while explaining the absence of revolutionary consciousness among Western workers. The United States emerged as the new primary agent of global exploitation, making anti-Americanism a logical extension of Marxist critique.
Harris argues that this intellectual move transformed empirical policy disagreements into a moral indictment of American existence itself, providing a foundation for systemic anti-American sentiment that persists in certain academic and activist circles.
Next: Part 6 – 9-11 Calling
