Right now, the U.S. ruling class is trying to carry out a color revolution in Belarus, the only remaining former Soviet state that retains socialistic policies and a state-run economy. The imperialist propaganda machine is manufacturing consent for this regime change effort through the same propaganda approach that’s been used against Syria, Venezuela, and Bolivia: stoke dissension and within the targeted country, and paint the opposition as an unambiguously noble force (even though the opposition in Belarus has praised Hitler).
This latest U.S. attempt at replacing a disobedient government with a neoliberal, pro-Washington regime comes at a time when Western imperialism is escalating its military buildup and hybrid warfare against all the global powers which challenge it. The U.S. is expanding on its military encirclement of Russia and China through Eurasian war gamesand navy buildup in the South China Sea. The U.S. has been tightening sanctions on Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, and other countries during the pandemic with the goal of causing harm to more of their people.
Lebanon and Thailand are also being targeted with color revolutions. The imperialists have formulated a new plan for a neoliberal coup in Nicaragua, the Trump administration remains committed to regime change in Venezuela, and last month Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even declared that regime change is Washington’s goal for China.
The mission of the foreign policy strategists behind these moves is a long-term “great-power competition,” one that ends with the U.S. re-securing its hegemonic global position. But such a goal isn’t realistic at this point, nor are many of the regime change objectives that this scenario of restored U.S. influence would require. If the U.S. still hasn’t managed to overthrow Venezuela’s Chavista government, it definitely can’t accomplish this in China. And Bolivia, which the U.S. carried out a coup in last year, is experiencing an indigenous uprising that’s making it harder for U.S. corporations to use the country as a neo-colony. The regime that Washington has installed in the country can’t even hold control over much of the lands within its borders, since they’ve been turned into strongholds of the indigenous militias.
For the U.S. ruling class, this means that their machine of global capitalism will for the most part have to continue to contract in the coming years. The depression that America and the rest of the capitalist world has entered into will be exacerbated by increased U.S. economic isolation from China, the collapse of the dollar, and other economic symptoms of imperial decline.
So the new cold war that the imperialists are waging-as well as the war of repression that they’re waging internally-is taking on a desperate nature. This war is about staving off the unraveling of the capitalist-dominated world order, and the collapse of the capitalist hierarchy that would result from this shift in geopolitical power.
As Michael Parenti said, there can be no such thing as capitalism in one country. Corporations must expand in order to maintain a positive rate of profits-European colonialism was largely brought on by the demands from the region’s new capitalist ruling class to broaden their operations. This is why the imperialists have been taking such drastic measures to subdue Syria, Iran, Russia, and China in particular, and why they’re now attempting regime change in Belarus and Lebanon; if these countries forever slip from their grasp, they’ll mostly lose control over the crucial market territory of Eurasia. China is treated as the West’s greatest enemy because it’s at the epicenter of the shift towards a multi-polar world, and thus towards a future where Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and South America break away from U.S. hegemony as well.
It’s also why the U.S. and its proxy states have been increasing austerity and repression during the pandemic and the new global depression. Trump’s recent reduction of unemployment benefits and plans to defund social security, the Bolivian coup regime’s refusals to provide vulnerable people with the means to feed their families during the pandemic, the austerity measures that have been imposed throughout much of Latin America in the last year at the behest of Washington, and the recent EU bank bailout package that imposes austerity throughout Europe are all part of the effort to foist the costs of the crisis onto the lower classes. Gestapo-style arrests in U.S. cities, violent repression of pro-democracy protests in Bolivia, and the decline of civil liberties throughout NATO countries during the pandemic are also necessary to preserve the existing order.
This is an order where the world’s wealthiest billionaires have been collectively getting hundreds of billions of dollars richer this year despite the economic and social deterioration that surrounds their comfortable bubbles. To keep the capitalist economic machine running amid the decline of U.S. imperialism, they’re intensifying the exploitation of Washington’s Latin American neo-colonies, and of the proletariat within the imperial core. And to prevent revolution, they’re making their police states more brutal. The imperialist-controlled capitalist world is hurting due to its economic isolationism from Russia and China and its profound neoliberal inequalities, so its ruling class is taking reactive measures to stop things from falling apart.
The Cold War 2.0 and all of its related foreign interventions are part of this reaction. The brutal attempts to secure capitalist rule over Bolivia, as well as the campaigns to expand imperial control into Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Belarus, Lebanon, and Thailand, are the empire’s most feasible current efforts at growing its reach. It’s doubtful that the empire’s endeavors will succeed in any of these countries, and Washington’s rival superpowers will continue to rise in any case. So endless military buildup, authoritarianism, and cuts to poor and working people’s benefits are the best long-term strategies for preserving the wealth of the plutocrats.
But if the capitalist world’s economic conditions keep getting worse in the coming decades-which climate collapse is making inevitable-the system’s contradictions will grow too great for their order to continue. Especially as it keeps growing more isolated from the rising economic power of China. At some point, a new wave of socialist revolutions will sweep the globe, further shrinking the territory that the capitalist class can use to profit from.
The remaining capitalist-controlled countries will respond by becoming isolated, paranoid fascist states that turn to their nuclear arsenals for protection, and that try to cut their people off from the rest of the world. At that point, the world’s last capitalist ruling class will have the global economic machine that they’ve depended on shattered, and they’ll consequently be at war with the lower classes who they’ve treated so terribly.
What would follow such a scenario is too terrifying to the current ruling class for them to want to contemplate it. All they prefer to focus on at the moment is the task of imposing neoliberal domination onto countries like Belarus, which they like to think will be as successful as past imperialist operations. Nothing desperate about this, they want us to think as the color revolutions continue. It’s all business as usual.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here:
No comments:
Post a Comment