I think this is terribly mistaken. Reaction is inherent in any society undergoing change. It’s not something imposed from the outside.
Sure, but a fundamental cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and revisionism and outright anticommunism everywhere. While the USSR was already dealing with organic internal issues, the Cold War continually heaped more on top of that. Color Revolutions don’t just happen because the revolution wasn’t good enough, there are continual CIA injections of cash and propaganda and people.
Revisionism in the USSR had nothing to do with the West and everything to do with the reactionary elements within the USSR that wanted to make socialism compatible with enterprise for profit and individual enrichment.
It’s both. Reactionary elements within the USSR were supported by the West.
The Cold War was the way that the US created pressures on the USSR without engaging them in nation-state war. The USSR needed to manage these pressures, and they failed to do so. The counter-revolutionaries within the USSR outmaneuvered the revolutionaries, and Stalin had no one to pass the torch to when he died. Kruschev launched the anti-Stalin campaign and from that point forward there was an attempt to build a new world power that allowed for private wealth accumulation and would compete with the West on economic and hard power grounds instead of ideological ones.
These things are all true, but I think you’re undervaluing the material forces at play during the Cold War. US dominance was a material outcome of its position after WWII, its extremely favorable geography, its rapid development from primitive accumulation and its continued internal colonization of Black and Indigenous people, and its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Revolutionaries weren’t just outmaneuvered by counter-revolutionaries, but by the vast empire that they had supporting them.
It still is. The problem isn’t that the USA got soft from it’s success.
This is a contradiction. If the USA has gotten soft, then it’s not the formidable power it once was.
And it certainly has gotten soft. As I’ve said before, the current leadership consists of Cold War mummies and their sons who grew up in the End of History. I believe that the growth of BRICS and the push towards dedollarization, the ICJ ruling against Israel, countries pulling out of ECOWAS, the deal China made with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Iran, these are all signs of the empire’s decline.
I don’t think this is a mistake. The apparent divisions politically are really useful rhetorically. You can easily see this because there’s clearly continuity in the USA’s behavior, despite the appearances of lacking a united front. The way the USA prosecuted the proxy war in Ukraine is identical to how to it prosecuted other proxy wars, but this time they did while putting out an image of division. The image and the reality don’t match up. The reality belies the continuity and consistency. The only conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the image is artifice.
Trump ended US occupation of Afghanistan, and unlike Biden’s fake withdraw from Iraq where he left the US’s handpicked leader in place and left US troops behind, Trump actually just pulled all US troops out and surrendered Afghanistan back to the Taliban. Does that not strike you as a break of continuity? How about when Trump pulled out of the TPP, which promised to open up global markets even further to US capital? And how about this most recent obstruction of Ukraine funding or Texas blocking federal border patrol agents?
What other colonial actors and capital interests are acting in defiance of empire? The international bourgeoisie is firmly in control of the empire. There are no wars between billionaires. And just to pre-empt the obvious - Russia and China are not colonial powers.
Please, I’m not a liberal, I’m well aware that Russia and China are not colonial powers. But I was talking about Brexit here:
How is this defying empire? The UK participated in a project to create a European economic union and then backed out to protect some of its interests. In no way is this a defiance of empire.
By placing limits on the movement of capital between the UK and the rest of the EU. Capital needs to be able to flow freely within the imperial core to serve imperialist interests, and what the UK did runs counter to that. It also introduced coordination complications between the imperialist armed forces and forces the UK to muster up its own inferior military capabilities (i.e. a “citizen army”) to make up for it.
It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.
Maybe you’re right, but they didn’t need to do that before.
The political superstructure hasn’t changed at all towards polarization and partisanship.
Yeah I was getting ahead of myself. I think that’s starting with them trying to make it illegal for Trump to run for office and Trump promising to jail his political opponents, but that could all be theater like you said.
They were manipulated into it through the propaganda arm of empire. The empire chose to make them extremely partisan. It serves the interests of empire.
See my previous examples of Afghanistan and the TPP and Brexit. These are outgrowths of partisanship that the empire manipulated people into, but now the blowback is setting in and this partisanship is starting to make empire management more difficult.
You haven’t shown any subgroups of the ruling class being in contradiction with each other.
Fair.
How about the so-called “labor shortage”, which is in direct contradiction with anti-immigrant/anti-refugee partisanship? The empire grows stronger when it can steal labor from other countries to come be superexploited in the imperial core and, for some reason, the partisan divide is pushing towards less immigration and less admittance of refugees. That’s hard to explain except as blowback.
Or the contradiction between States barring foreign land investment and the need for the market value of land to perpetually increase?
Or the contradiction between starting a microchip tradewar with China and creating microchip shortages that harm business interests (a tradewar that accomplished nothing funnily enough, China is completely fine and only US businesses were impacted)
Then there’s the Nordstream Pipeline, which was clearly sabotage meant to force the EU into a permanent war footing with Russia. Europe doesn’t benefit from this at all, only the US does, and as a whole this also weakens the empire by weakening the Euro’s purchasing power.
I think there are more contradictions within the ruling class than you give credence.
You’re getting confused by the image of conflict. There’s no real conflict within the ruling class.
Maybe. Or maybe you’re overly cynical.
This has been fun, but I think I’ve said my piece. You may have the last word.
It is true that a cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and anticommunism everywhere, but a cornerstone of any communist revolutionary state must be to be able to deal with it. However, I disagree that the color revolutions created revisionism. They did not bring Kruschev to power, they did not create Kruschev and his posse, nor their political positions.
So while reactionary elements in the Eastern Bloc were supported by the West, in the central committee during the days of Lenin and Stalin I don’t think you’ll find much evidence of it. The failure of the USSR was in the central committee and the ascendance of the counter revolutionaries who were motivated and powerful in their own right. The vast empire supporting them seemed to work at a distance, primarily creating external pressures, not internal ones. The empire made the USSR suffer economically, caused brain drain, caused the focus to be on proxy wars instead of domestic development. It’s not like the situation in Iran in '53. The counter-revolutionaries in the USSR weren’t backed directly by the CIA, they weren’t brainwashed, they weren’t directed.
If the USA has gotten soft, then it’s not the formidable power it once was.
My words were unclear. The USA has not gotten soft. It’s just that the whole idea that it was a formidable power in WW2 is sort of just not true. The USSR defeated 80% of the Nazi forces, the rest of the Allies combined fought 20%, the USA only a portion of that. The rest of the US’s “formidable power” was spent killing peasants, and they still lost to guerilla warfare. The Nazi army was the most advanced and powerful army the world had ever seen, not the USA army. The USA continues to operate the strongest spy network in the history of the world, it’s still as strong or stronger than it was in those days. It’s just that the material reality is that this strength is not enough and perhaps was never enough. The Western Europeans were already struggling with colonialism by the 1800s and had begun developing neocolonial superstructures long before the USA unseated them. Once the USA unseated them, the USA inherited a world where the development of advanced guerilla warfare was showing North Atlantic military strategy to be fundamentally incapable of sustainable occupation.
And it certainly has gotten soft. As I’ve said before, the current leadership consists of Cold War mummies and their sons who grew up in the End of History. I believe that the growth of BRICS and the push towards dedollarization, the ICJ ruling against Israel, countries pulling out of ECOWAS and AFRICOM, the deal China made with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Iran, these are all signs of the empire’s decline.
There’s a huge difference between the empire getting soft and the periphery getting strong. Everything you’re saying is evidence of the periphery getting stronger. You could propose the hypothesis that this is all the fault of the USA getting soft. I find that hypothesis underwhelming. It takes away agency from the periphery. The hypothesis I think has more evidence behind it is that the strength of the USA is now irrelevant in the face of the contradictions of empire. Neocolonialism and neoliberalism were attempts at solutions to those contradictions, but they don’t seem to have worked out for the empire. I think the periphery has gotten better at analyzing the material conditions and are exploiting those conditions to finally turn the tide against empire. I would not characterize that as the USA going soft.
Trump actually just pulled all US troops out and surrendered Afghanistan back to the Taliban
This didn’t happen: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/10/13/trump-ordered-rapid-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-after-election-loss/
Instead, here’s what we see: https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/ “The fact is, President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were both eager to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end what Biden referred to in his Aug. 16 speech as “America’s longest war.””
Your belief in the conflict between the parties can only be formed by filtering out evidence like this. Which, not to blame you, is actually what most people do.
Trump pulled out of the TPP
The TPP was never approved by Congress. Trump formally pulled it from the table. I don’t have a full analysis on the whys and wherefores of the maneuvering here. Congress is mostly millionaires. They come together all the time for the interests of the rich. The fact that they didn’t ratify the TPP tells me more about the flaws in the TPP than it does about the conflict between parties.
this most recent obstruction of Ukraine funding
Obstruction of Ukraine funding is perfectly timed to fit the timeline of other proxy wars. The Ukrainian’s don’t have enough soldiers, the Russians have destroyed everything the West has given to Ukraine. It no longer serves the interest of the USA to keep the proxy war going, so it’s Congress’s job to stop it. If Biden and his cabinet stopped it, they would publicly have to take up a position the Ds are not willing to take publicly because it will cost them votes. So now its Congress’s fault. The reality, however, is that this is continuous with the history of US proxy wars and quite frankly it’s the only way the Ds could stop funding Ukraine if that’s what they wanted to do. It seems that it’s exactly what they want to do.
limits on the movement of capital between the UK and the rest of the EU
The UK doesn’t want to be harmed, so they protected themselves. They aren’t opposing the USA by doing it, not in any meaningful way, they’re just following their profit motive and risk profiles. There’s no chance the UK attempts to assert dominance of the empire nor that it attempts to undermine the empire in favor of the Axis of Resistance, and there’s no chance it’s going to ride it out alone without the support of the empire. What you see as a schism I see as merely bureaucracy.
It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.
Maybe you’re right, but they didn’t need to do that before.
They did, but differently. There was a time when one party was all about the working class and the other was not. There was a time when one party was all about industrialization and the other was not. The history is rife with sloganeering, minor rebellions, etc. I think you’re correct that there’s something distinct about its character today. I think your diagnosis is off. I think that the culture war is all that’s left to them, and I think the nature of the culture war is that it is self-reinforcing, creating a runaway schism. But that schism is rhetorical and electoral for leadership, and personal, emotional, and moral for the populace. If the USA had a way out of the contradictions of empire, political energy would go towards that path, but I think we’re seeing that the empire is trapped and all of that political energy has to go somewhere that is infinitely expansive - culture war.
trying to make it illegal for Trump to run for office and Trump promising to jail his political opponents, but that could all be theater like you said.
I think this whole thing is being carefully managed. The timing of it is ridiculously obvious. It always needs to reach critical points at specific electoral windows that are too short for anything to actually happen but long enough for it to mobilize voters. It’s a total choice whether Trump ends up in jail or not, and that choice is going to be made on the basis of the consequences for the maintenance of empire.
These are outgrowths of partisanship that the empire manipulated people into, but now the blowback is setting in and this partisanship is starting to make empire management more difficult.
I just don’t think TPP and Brexit make it more difficult to manage empire. Empire is more difficult to manage because BRICS, the BRI, Chinese debt forgiveness, and the productive capabilities of the periphery are all taking up the space the empire needs to inhabit.
How about the so-called “labor shortage”, which is in direct contradiction with anti-immigrant/anti-refugee partisanship?
This is part of the set of contradictions that go along with the labor aristocracy in empire. From a purely economic situation, they would just flood the nation with migrants and tank wages, but there would be revolt. The migrants would eventually revolt as well, developing solidarity with the working class, so we need jingoism against the migrants. Now we both need cheap labor and also can’t have cheap labor. But the evidence of what I’m saying is here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/26/biden-urges-bipartisan-border-deal-00138206 Both parties want the same thing.
The rest of your contradictions are things I agree with. I just don’t think it’s the ruling class in contradiction with itself. Capitalists are all in on the US Dollar. Europe is primarily consumer market at this point. There will be rifts in the empire as European politicians attempt to stay in power by courting BRICS for energy and goods, but capital is going to stay with the US. This is because the USA is strong, not weak, but also because that strength cannot resolve these contradictions.
Texas blocking federal border patrol agents
That’s one to watch for sure. Balkanization of the USA points to some interesting conclusions. But this is long enough. Thanks for the chat.
