We in the imperial center live under a cultural hegemony that blocks out the perspective of the rest of the world. We’re conditioned to feel like the United States is the world, and therefore that whatever prevails within the United States will prevail throughout the globe. It’s only after we overcome this cultural hegemony that we can understand the true dynamics of class conflict, which is to say to understand that class conflict doesn’t as a whole mirror what class conflict looks like where we live.
Crucial to this realization is a socioeconomic analysis. Because the world is divided between core and peripheral countries, with the core countries engaging in imperialist extraction of the labor and resources of the peripheral ones, there naturally exists a potential for gargantuan social upheavals within the periphery. A far more immediate potential than has so far been the case within the core, though the implosion of capital in the core is steadily being accelerated by capital’s growing implosions abroad. The contradictions in the exploited countries are much more severe, and even more importantly for a successful revolution, capital within these countries tends to be weaker. For these reasons, the exploited countries rather than the imperialist countries have been where socialism has primarily begun to develop.
Mao, upon building the largest example of socialism within the formerly colonized world and therefore confirming this trend, predicted that over 90 percent of the world will ultimately rise up against the imperialists. And no doubt he was envisioning a scenario where the imperialist countries are in the minority of less than ten percent, faced with an overwhelming majority of the global population cutting these countries off from their means for parasitism. With the victories for anti-imperialism in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and numerous other parts of the exploited world since then, this view of a bottom-up trajectory for the worldwide socialist revolution has further been proven likely.
This trend, and Mao’s prediction, don’t call for a dogmatic approach where we in the imperial center simply wait for those who we exploit to create the revolutionary conditions for us. Just because socialism is stronger in the peripheries, doesn’t necessarily mean none of the core countries will undergo revolution before all the peripheral countries have undergone revolution. We in the core have a responsibility to bring revolution to where we live as soon as we can, despite relatively more obstacles towards revolution existing where we are; destruction of the central imperialist apparatus would make revolution easier in the peripheral countries, and regardless we should never needlessly hold back from going on the revolutionary offensive. But this trend does show us that when the scenario Mao anticipated comes true, our task will be made far easier.
Without the economic foundations of global exploitation that it’s build on, capital in the imperial center will be rendered fatally weak. As Cecil Rhodes assessed, any given imperialist country would easily undergo a revolution if it weren’t able to exploit the peripheral countries, because imperialism functions as a way of foisting capitalism’s most severe and proportionately massive exploitation onto those within the exploited countries. When wealth is pouring in from the exploited countries, the imperial center bourgeoisie can cultivate a broad middle class, which can numerically overpower the poor people who exist within the core. And when class conflict comes to a boiling point, the bourgeoisie can rally this middle class towards fascism, acting as a militant fighting force in violently suppressing the class struggle.
But when the global majority has risen up, that social base for fascism in the imperial center will shrink along with the contraction of capital. And however big fascism’s social base remains in spite of this, it will be fighting to preserve a socioeconomic model that’s running on an extinct dynamic, that being the exploitation of most of the world by a minority of imperialist powers. The reactionaries will be a global minority of less than 10 percent, fighting for capitalism’s preservation without the global economic leverage that they used to enjoy.
No amount of bullets can make up for an economy that doesn’t function. No amount of propaganda can reverse an irreversible decline in super-profits. What Mao implicitly described is a scenario where the ruling class in the imperial center, after losing access to most of the world’s markets, have been forced to bring imperialism’s extreme exploitation inwards, to the effect of also importing the massive potential for upheaval that exists within the exploited countries. An economic and social pressure that keeps getting more intense the more the anti-imperialist victories spread, and the smaller imperialism’s range of domination becomes. Capital needs to perpetually expand into new markets, and for it to perpetually shrink would be fatal.
We’re seeing exactly this dynamic throughout the decline of U.S. hegemony, which hasn’t even required a new wave of socialist revolutions so much as a self-imposed economic isolation on the empire’s part. Washington’s ever-expanding sanctions on the rising superpowers Russia and China are costing it market access, as shown by the fact that its latest sanctions on Russia will ultimately cause more harm to the core imperialist countries than to Russia’s people. This shrinking of imperialism’s exploitative range has correlated with the decline in the rate of profits, which as of half a century ago has compelled the bourgeoisie to intensify their exploitation through neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has brought austerity, wage stagnation, and other material losses for the masses, which are intensifying class conflict. When capital grows weak enough, which will likely occur when the U.S. imperialists get almost totally kicked out of Asia, revolution here will become an immediate prospect. At which point the imperialists will likely also be dealing with a new wave of socialist revolutions throughout Latin America, Africa, and the other exploited regions.
Faced with this unprecedented isolation and internal weakness, the imperialists will totally impose fascism upon those within their borders. The extermination campaigns they’ve carried out in peripheral countries like Indonesia will be applied to their own people, as will the scorched-earth warfare methods that they’ve applied to victims of U.S. aggression like Iraq. If they’re allowed to act unchecked, even after losing control over most of the world, they’ll kill millions internally while potentially carrying out more Hiroshima-style nuclear bombings onto the countries they’re desperate to subdue. We can’t sit back and wait for the imperialists to destroy themselves. As Mao warned, the imperialists will never lay down their weapons, and will continue fighting ferociously till they’ve either been finally defeated or blown up the planet in nuclear holocaust. It’s our duty to minimize the harm they’ll do by carrying out revolution in the imperial center as soon as the conditions allow.
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