The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 7)
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Decline of empire: Who will navigate the ship of state during the terminal crisis of capitalism?
The U.S. 2024 elections present no class independent option for the working class. Unless the working class breaks out of the confines of economistic syndicalism and declares its political independence, the ship of state will, short or reactionary insurrection remain in the hands of Biden and the neocons. Not that the public supports the neocon agenda, but the four times indicted Trump has soiled his base and no longer can hold the independents he needs to win. The ex-Trumpers, John Bolton, Bill Barr, Chris Christie, Liz Cheney, Asa Hutchinson and Brad Raffensperger reflect a break away layer of disgusted Republicans who are not yet ready to sign on to a fascist coup. The raft of Trump’s co-conspirators pleading guilty and turning state’s evidence confirms what has been known all along, that every other word out of his mouth is a lie. A major setback for the MAGA world, but not insurmountable, as the hyenas and jackals, snout deep in entrails, scrap it out for His blessings.
So it is Biden’s to lose.The Republicans finally back in legislative session parse funding the imperialist project to the extent they can agree on it. Legislative stalemate and pending government shutdown confirm the capitalist class is floundering. The working class has an opportunity to build on the energy of the UAW, UPS, Nurses, Amazon and Starbucks workers’ struggles to step onto the stage politically. Such a militant challenge would require an internal struggle to replace the labor fakers leading the unions today! Today every class battle is limited to parameters acceptable to the Democratic party. And as such never challenge the anti-labor laws. Taft-Hartley is still on the books and used to prevent the outbreak of solidarity strikes. Our sellout leaderships collude with the Democrats to keep our struggles compartmentalized so they never grow over to become General Strikes!
Every major struggle sees government interference on the side of the bosses – showing clearly that it is nothing more than the executive committee of the ruling capitalist class. Workers had misplaced faith in Obama. After shutting down Occupy, he then sent the Coast Guard to intimidate the ILWU in Longview, WA; likewise Biden stepped in with the threat of the Railway Labor Act to stop the railroad workers and the DSA stooges in Congress went along with it. The UPS practice pickets had to be restrained, so Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats stepped in to put pressure on the union to back away from their demands and the threat of strike. And even though the two tier system of wages frozen by the 2008 global economic crisis was a product of the Obama/Biden intervention to save the Big Three at the expense of the workers, Biden had the audacity to put in a photo-op session on the UAW picket line to ensure labor’s boots were firmly cemented and shackled to his personal fate.
To win any strikes, to regain what has been lost, we need class struggle tactics; sit-down strikes, solidarity strikes, general strikes to finally defeat the anti-labor laws like Taft Hartley on the job and in the streets. To do that, a break with the Democratic party hacks leading the unions is necessary and will require charged political discussion and militant organizing by class struggle caucuses in unions and workplaces advancing a transitional program. It is only by creating such an atmosphere that the working class can break the chains to claim its independence, build a class struggle leadership and prepare the fight for a workers’ government.
American politicians have always been front men for and sometimes members of competing wings of the ruling capitalist class who administer the capitalist state, not some fictitious ‘Deep State.’ The epi-phenomenon, the decline of empire, the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict feeds the irrationalist’s conspiracy world of disinformation and alternative facts without substance. But, neither Biden/Harris nor Trump can stop what is coming, because the unfolding crisis is structural. The preservation of the empire cannot be willed. The internal limits of capitalist exploitation of nature and labor has hit all the advanced and developing capitalist economies. And as the world is falling into recession the fact of the waning of the U.S. empire has become apparent to all. Biden can’t outdo the Belt and Road Initiative and Trump cannot retreat to fortress America and hide behind tariffs and tax cuts. So we face three options, two bourgeois, one proletarian. Inter-imperialist realignment with war, or without war, or proletarian revolution.
The rise of the new power bloc competing for economic and strategic advantage defines the era of inter-imperialist conflict which neither the isolationists nor interventionists can avoid. Neither a retreat from NATO nor its expansion can stop the slide of the U.S. empire. Because the clash of titans is inevitable and either the west will find a negotiated path to keep business afloat or the history of WWIII (if anyone is alive to write it) will begin in Ukraine or elsewhere. If it is in Ukraine it will be said to have started not in 2022 or even in 2014 but in the long term project aimed at breaking up Russia (and long prior to capitalist restoration in the USSR.)
Four more years (precious years needed to mitigate climate catastrophe) will be wasted by either the return of the Trumpian reaction, high tariffs (that workers pay for) and tax cuts for the rich. Or on the flip side, Biden remains as Bidenomics implodes under the pressure of the slow de-dollarization, the Fed’s desperate attempt to sell treasuries at elevated interest rates and the inevitability of quantitative easing (money printing/devalorization), which will be required as the petro-dollar and U.S. reserve currency status is challenged in real time. Note that India just bought oil from UAE in Rupees, Russia has been reconciling business with China in Yuan, and the U.S. is desperately lobbying Saudi Arabia to stick with the petrodollar, but that ship has sailed and although it may take a decade or more for the U.S. reserve dollar to be dethroned, the writing is on the wall.
The bludgeon of the U.S. Reserve Currency/Petrodollar and SWIFT system of reconciliation, which sustains U.S. financial might on the international scale is no longer being tolerated, in part because of the threat of sanctions as used against Iran and Russia. The comprador bourgeois class in the semi-colonial world is slowly shifting allegiance from the declining hegemon to the competition navigating for the best deal. China is willing to play the long game, forgiving debt to lay down win-win infrastructure deals for its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), ensuring a logistics path for raw materials from the periphery to the center and a reverse market path for finished goods. Combined and uneven development condensed what it took a century for the west to accomplish into a few decades in the east; now with its enormous working class, the concentration of the forces of production and projected economic weight, Chinese imperialism is overtaking the reigning hegemon.
China, having elevated the law of value over the controls of the central plan, is no longer immune to the laws of capitalist crisis. The state monopoly of foreign trade no longer exists to insulate the workers of China from the demands of the profit system and the global crisis. Although their current growth rate is higher than the west’s, it is no longer sustaining double digit growth, can no longer bail out a worldwide recession (or won’t) and is facing a crisis at home. Its internal debt crisis, mortgage/housing crisis, and youth employment crisis is imploding the ‘progressive’ left mythology of China as a viable alternative to western capitalism’s decay and imperialist exploitation.
Yet across the world misleaders of the workers’ movement guide the masses to align with semi-colonial capitalists and pragmatic tycoons cutting deals and making business with the China/Russia bloc, promoting these arrangements as a progressive alternative. In this way most of the Stalinists, Maoists, Bolivarians, Third Worldists, Pan Africanists, and a few of the self identified Trotskyists (in particular those who do not identify capitalist restoration in China or its emergence as an imperialist power) choose to promote the China/Russia contender in the inter-imperialist conflict. They want you to see in the China/Russia bloc an ‘anti-imperialist alternative’ and so become social-patriots for the new imperialists and abandon the working class role in its own liberation, denying the Leninist solution to turn imperialist wars into class war at home.
Thus on top of unfolding climate catastrophe the next administration is navigating (poorly if we put a long historical lens on it) the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict. The consequences of the inter-imperialist realignme amount to the structural crisis itself, like nuclear fission, man-made but out of control. Every path the various alternative capitalists and imperialists offer are hopeless attempts to cling to the porcelain walls of the bowl flush after flush.
Either Trumpian isolationists or Biden-like interventionists can stumble us into WWIII regardless of what they do with their hands on the levers of power. It is no surprise that those who look to the Democrats as a voice of peace and reason instead find uber-hawks promoting bigger military budgets and militarization of local police forces and an expanded FBI. The Democrats put their FBI on the attack against the non-violent Pan-Africanist Uhuru African Socialist Party and hold fast in efforts to prosecute Julian Assange for being a journalist. Likewise, for all the isolationism of the Trumpian Republicans, the MAGA congress keeps pumping up the military budget with wild abandon, waving the militarist flag of the heroic veteran while abandoning actual veterans in need of long term care, and those who are homeless and drug addicted. The Biden Democrats rally the workers and middle class to expand NATO and stand fast to defend the dominant position of the U.S., hiding imperialist reality and its decline behind the mythology of a progressive America projecting freedom and democracy as universal values.
Decline of empire: Navigating the decline of empire, the divergence of U.S. Bourgeois Movers, a split in the ruling class on their historical faultline, isolationist vs. the interventionists
Recall how Rockefeller and Fulbright turned against the VietNam war. The price of global hegemony was always too high for their understanding of business even though it’s the petrodollar that kept them afloat until 2008. Ironically, it was emergent Chinese imperialism that saved the world market, and it is ultimately the petrodollar that keeps up such hegemony as the U.S. still has. To threaten world war with the China/Russia bloc maddens the isolationists, who don’t see cause for it in real Chinese and Russian market competition.
Trump’s preferred policy was especially evident in his first two years, before the Mueller Investigation and before Helsinki, when it was possible to hide his white nationalist attempt to split Russia from China (preserving his chances to build a Trump Moscow hotel) with abolition of NATO as a prospective carrot. Thereafter he blamed China for COVID, but he didn’t get an economic or much political benefit from this because he stopped U.S. agricultural exports to China. He was able to keep his isolationists, such as those who were not already onto his grifter racketeering, on his side in his party. And decades of Union leadership pushing “Buy American” campaigns of national chauvinism infecting the working class found echoes among Democrats and this can (and has) played both ways, i.e. Buy America and pro-war. The Quincy Institute think tank now unites capitalist top donors Charles Koch (Rep.) and George Soros (Dem.) in a retreat from a world policeman role. These top capitalists, including Buffett and Gates, know war is not especially good for the accumulation of surplus value.
National Review (i.e. the Buckleys and Venezuelan oil) has turned on Trump, while Atlantic Monthly has gone completely ‘never Trumper.’ Just as isolationist is the pro-Trump Forbes, to balance this picture.
Abandoned today is any pretense of upholding conservative principles and feigned adulation of laissez faire free trade. But imperialist prerogatives and capitalist necessity have never seriously been restrained by ideological moorings. Trump, on top of tax cuts for billionaires, initiated tariffs which backfired on American farmers and consumers. Likewise Biden’s Chip Act, blocks EU/Nato member Netherlands chip factory fabricator’s right to free trade with China. Under the guise of national defense are the U.S.’s last ditch attempts to sequester the most advanced technology. But big industry leaders don’t like being bossed around to protect the dying hegemon at the expense of market share. Big capitalist enterprises, all over the world, despite their national allegiances, must, in order to serve their shareholders quarterly interests, navigate the unfolding inter-imperialist “changing of the guard.”
Blocked from access to ASML’s EUV technology which makes 3-5 NM node chips, Huawei and SMIC developed a work around to the technology ban with production of their own 7NM chips (5 yr. old technology.) Huawei’s new phone can compete in the mass market with the iPhone and will boost production with investments in R&D to keep pace with and overcome the trade barriers. Canon in Japan recently announced its new tech which promises to make 2-NM node chips faster, cheaper and easier. While China is still behind in the unfolding Chip Wars, and Biden considers expanding the ban to include the older Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) machines. China has an enormous bank of qualified engineers. Despite sanctions, the extremely complex and large quantity of unique inputs with proprietary trade secrets and specialty manufacturers in the west under U.S. sanctions, catching up is just a matter of time. The new Huawei’s phone has shown, even without the most advanced chip making machine, market shocking ‘work-arounds’ are being engineered!
This will be Biden’s election to lose, i.e. Trump’s fascistic appeals and behaviors may not be to bourgeois taste, but Biden can’t seem to find them a policy that delivers profits.
Already by the late sixties the price of the empire was an unfavorable balance of payments due to the worldwide sprawl of U.S. military bases. By the ’70s, even before the invention of modern derivatives trading, this price of empire became an unfavorable balance of trade. In these straits Biden behaves like his old “bipartisan” self (senator for Dupont/Delaware), out of joint with these times when the extreme right has the Congress captive. Trump faces four indictments, the last three ‘criminal’ and it is an open question whether he can be kept from office by the 14th Amendment for his January 6th 2021 putsch. Like the 25th (the insanity clause), the 14th has never been tried on a chief executive, and a Supreme Court majority who loves him may not uphold its use. Nevertheless, the number and immensity of the conspiracy charges could mean he’ll be doomed by the Georgia racketeering trials, which are to be televised.
Moreover, “Big shot” western policy figures of the past and present, such as Kissinger and Janet Yellen have been visiting Chinese leaders stressing the necessity to defend a unitary world market that would be needlessly damaged or destroyed by anything approaching a world war. But we haven’t seen any backing down in the policies of either imperialist bloc. And there’s a perfectly understandable reason. They cannot do otherwise than to attempt to regain super profits by exporting surplus Capital to exploit cheap labor. It’s that or depression or war, i.e. the destruction of Capitals, fixed and variable, the variable being wage labor, us.
The Cold War Ukraine policy, the starting gun for which was Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 1946, began serious espionage and subversion operations with the object of splitting Ukraine from the USSR. This was never shelved altogether and was revived post-capitalist restoration, ultimately leading to the Orange revolution with bipartisan support. Then in the period where Russia was able to overcome its shock-therapy anarchy and turn rent profits and money laundering into a minor imperialism, the Hillary Clinton State Department helped arrange the big players in the Maidan uprising against Yanukovich. With her support these players connived at a war with Russia that Putin unexpectedly gave them! Putin and Xi skipped this year’s G20 meeting.
Ergo there is no longer any denying the decline of the U.S. empire. The shift of the weight of the forces of production from the G7 to the BRICS has reached and surpassed the inflection point. Like every dying empire throughout history the militaristic failings, nationalist protectionism, “turning inward” isolationist rhetoric, and authoritarian repercussions are already all present, yet will all together not stop the bloody realignment of the inter-imperialist pecking order. Only depression, war, climate catastrophe or proletarian revolution can interrupt the changing of the imperialist pecking order which is unfolding at an increasingly rapid pace. We are tobogganing toward a no-future future, but it doesn’t have to be. We hurry to tell all who will listen that the choice is either socialism or extinction and so long as you follow the capitalist class you will not get to choose.
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