- EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - 21/Jun 23:12

Tokugawa Amerika – OpEd

War movies are not a favored genre in the United States these days. But there are exceptions that make it big in the box office. One is Blackhawk Down, directed by Scott Ridley, which depicted the big, botched raid to capture General Aidid in 1992 that ended with the bodies of U.S. Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The other is more recent, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare. These two popular films have one thing in common: they depict hubris and arrogance that end in chaotic defeat. The popularity of these two films that are almost masochistic in their celebration of defeat is indicative of a larger social fact in the United States today—that there is no popular base for war, whether on the left, the center, the right, or the far right. The only ones rooting for military intervention and confrontation are the liberal internationalists, like Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and the neoconseratives, like Dick Cheney, who came together in the disastrous campaign to elect Kamala Harris president, and they are in total disarray. It was not only Biden’s horrible debate performance that sealed his and Harris’s fate. It was partly their unrelenting support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Equally important were their open-ended commitment to NATO’s war in Ukraine and their beating the drums of war in the Pacific. When Biden had all the other NATO heads of state join him onstage to pledge themselves to fight to the last Ukrainian during that fateful press conference last July, my reaction was that he was not only mentally dysfunctional, as revealed by his calling Zelensky Putin, but totally out of synch with the electorate when it came to foreign policy. The End of Class Collaboration One of the key reasons for the lack of a base for imperial war is something that Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, authors of Capital and Imperialism, enlighten us on in their dissection of the relationships that made the British Empire function for an extended period: The functioning of the price system, in short, was such that a rise in workers’ share in the gross value of output could be accommodated without a decline in capitalists’ share through a squeeze on the share of the primary commodity producers. It is not some category of ‘super-profits’ but the very modus operandi of the system that accommodates workers at the expense of primary commodity producers, and imperialism is the entire arrangement that makes this possible. The Patnaiks stress that this accommodation of the metropolitan working class must be seen not just in distributive terms, but also in terms of other mechanisms, such as state-led demand management that can function as a substitute external to the system for squeezing the colonies once they have ceased to exist. In the post-colonial arrangement that prevailed after the Second World War, Keynesian state-led demand management became the substitute for pacifying the working class in the metropolis, with continual real rises in working class income coupled with parallel rises in the the rate of profit that were kept in balance partly by the high marginal tax rates imposed on the rich. It was in this context, the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism, that President John F Kennedy could make that classic statement of imperial cross-class consensus in his inaugural address in January 1961, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The material and social conditions that allowed Kennedy to assume he had ordinary Americans behind him in his crusade in Vietnam and efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro no longer exist because, by gutting the state of its demand-management functions, the capitalist class imposed neoliberalism on the American masses as surely as the IMF and the World Bank imposed structural adjustment on the Global South. For the last four decades, income stagnation, greater income inequality, greater indebtedness, and the housing crisis so evident in San Francisco and so many other American cities have been the lot of ordinary Americans, a great number of whom are a central part of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) base. In short, the universal imposition of structural adjustment from the 1980s on deprived capital of that relatively privileged metropolitan white working class base necessary to support the imposition of imperial order both internationally and domestically. Imperial Defeats The absence of state-led demand management as an external prop is not, however, the only reason for the inability of the the capitalist class to provide both the energy and legitimacy to engage in imperial adventures. The fact is that, over the last four decades, the empire was dealt defeat in three critical fronts. In analyzing these struggles, two things must be emphasized: the agency of the Global South in accounting for these defeats and the way these struggles shaped the current politics of the U.S. working class. One front was the relationship between U.S. capital and the Chinese Communist Party. To cut a long story short, China got the better of the United States in the devil’s deal it cut with U.S. capital, which was to acquire foreign capital, markets, and advanced technology necesssary for a forced march industrialization in exchange for offering labor that was 2-5 percent of the price of U.S. labor. For millions of American workers, this contract between the transnational corporations and the Chinese Communist Party blessed by Washington translated into massive deindustrialization and the loss of millions of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs. Although China might have been portrayed as the distant beneficiary of this wrenching process, U.S. transnationals were actually experienced by workers as the real villains. The second front was the successful resistance of the developing country governments and global civil society to the effort of the United States and the European Union to institutionalize the radical pro-corporate global trading system via the World Trade Organization, a project that included the WTO’s becoming the agent of the Global North’s monopoly of advanced technologies, the arbiter of investment, competition policy, and state investment and procurement policies. Hundreds of thousands American workers, notably those in unions, gained a sense of agency through their participation in the successful effort to derail not just the WTO but also the Free Trade of the Americas and the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), and they would not forget that one of Trump’s first acts in office on January 21, 2017, was, owing to their resistance, to take the United States out of the TPP negotiations. The third front was the spectacular defeat of the 20-year-long U.S. drive to reshape global politics via military means through its invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. For most Americans, this experience was akin to Moses and the Israelites wandering for 40 years in the Sinai without ending up in the Promised Land of a supremacist America. In this regard, though I certainly was repelled ethically by his methods, we must nevertheless give the devil his due, as they say, and credit Osama bin Laden for his central role in baiting the Bush Jr administration into its unwinnable wars in the Middle East, for being the figure who translated into reality Che Guevara’s vision of creating a hundred Vietnams to disperse and debilitate imperial power. Individuals cannot simply be regarded as personifications of objective social forces—a perspective shared by most orthodox social scientists. Individuals do count and some, in fact, have an outsized imprint on history, their actions serving as the trigger that moves it from one track to another. Bin Laden is one of those figures who deserve the description “Napoleonic.” As Nelly Lahoud, the U.S. intelligence analyst who came out with the most detailed study of the inner workings of al-Qaeda under bin Laden’s direction, conceded, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for al-Qaeda, Osama still changed the world and continued to influence global politics for nearly a decade after.” If the United States is the confused and groping global power with a sick economy that it is today—one that has been, moreover, reduced to a dog being wagged by the Zionist tail, a relationship illustrated by Netanyahu’s push in recent days to get a reluctant Trump to bomb Iran—i...