This economic crisis has come at the perfect moment to catalyze society’s breakdown

Photo by Micah Williams

When we analyze the collapse that our civilization is undergoing, we need to factor in the reality about collapse that our ruling class doesn’t want us to consider: collapse isn’t a politically neutral thing. It’s something that exists because capitalism has made the conditions for it possible. The pandemic wouldn’t have led to millions of workers getting disabled from long Covid if our socioeconomic system didn’t prioritize profits over the population’s safety. The climate crisis wouldn’t be on the verge of setting off several tipping points if 100 companies weren’t here to create two-thirds of carbon emissions, or if the U.S. military weren’t here to serve as the largest institutional polluter. This economic crisis, and the destructive measures the Fed is resorting to in order to delay it, wouldn’t have come if capitalism didn’t unavoidably produce crises on a periodic basis.

If collapse is the built-in outcome of our social order, if it was inevitable since this order first came into being, then the decline of our conditions is not merely something that’s happening. It’s a manufactured crisis, engineered for the purpose of keeping up profits amid capital’s contraction. Every facet of the chaos that we’re experiencing in our daily lives—the exploding prices, the ongoing reality of a pandemic that our government pretends is gone, the climatic disasters impacting growing amounts of society—is at its core about a power struggle. A power struggle between the people, who are being hit ever harder by our crises, and the ruling class, which is deliberately letting these crises worsen so that the machine of capital can keep running. This model for maintaining the system is obviously unsustainable, making the economy more and more top heavy. But it’s the only way the system can be maintained at this stage, when capitalism has consumed far too much and must now eat itself at an accelerating rate.

Such is the context that’s crucial to understand when observing the implications of this latest economic crisis. These implications are that the crisis has come at the perfect time to maximize the destabilizing impacts which economic downturns have. It’s appearing at the same moment that a new pandemic has come to upturn civilization in the way the Black Death did; that U.S. hegemony has been steadily unraveling for two decades, to the effect that Washington’s power is close to being spent; and that a climatic and ecological crisis has come to disrupt humanity on a more widespread and permanent level than any previous crisis has.

All four of these crises—crash, plague, falling empire, environmental ruin—serve to compound each other, and therefore can be considered to make up the same crisis. The capitalist crisis, in which growing numbers of people see their conditions deteriorate, become more vulnerable to the virus and to the growing natural disasters, and all the while are viewed as expendable by a ruling class that’s only concerned about maintaining an ailing system. This is a process that can’t be reversed, not for as long as the current social order remains in place. Until revolution comes, the situation’s deterioration can only get faster. In the last three years alone, the amount of Americans living paycheck to paycheck has gone up by 5% from 59 to 64 percent, and millions of Americans in addition to the newly unemployed long Covid victims have come to no longer have paychecks. As the crash unfolds, this transition into an impoverished country will no doubt speed up even further. All the while, our government will respond by intensifying its policies to weaken the working class, and to enable the disaster capitalists who exploit our societal traumas.

Collapse isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. A crime being perpetrated against us for the benefit of a tiny minority. Recognizing this nefarious motive at the root of our situation is the first step in working to correct it. Support for revolutionary change doesn’t come from poor conditions alone, but from the people’s realization that their conditions could be better if not for the way society is set up. We could be living under a social order like the one in China, where the government has stepped in to save millions from the virus, where poverty has been steadily decreasing over the last half century rather than going up, and where a green new deal has been implemented to the effect that the country’s pollution has vastly cleared up during the last ten years.

Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, instead of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, even severe contradictions like the past smog levels within Chinese cities can’t be expected to simply keep getting worse. The productivist errors the Communist Party of China made during its market reforms have since been corrected, and the country’s liberalizations have been getting reversed under Xi Jinping. The opposite is the case under the capitalist states. Our ruling class will never be willing to undo the damages its policies have wrought upon humanity and the environment, because these damages are the thing keeping its system in place. The policies that led to China’s era of extreme pollution were a bug in the system, not a feature; they stemmed from Deng’s having given too much authority over production to the local authorities, making environmental impacts difficult to regulate. That flaw has been fixed. No such improvement has come within the United States, or practically any other bourgeois-controlled country.

To justify this vicious cycle’s perpetuation, the partisans of our social order claim there’s no alternative to dictatorship by the rich. Because the system can only keep contracting, and there’s no way imperialism’s benefits can again be used to buy the population’s docility, capitalism’s defenders can only justify their position by saying the systems besides ours are invariably even worse. They spin narratives about China’s pandemic successes having come at some grievous cost, like any cost could be worse than several million deaths and rapid mass disability. They prop up celebrity north Korean defectors who fabricate over the top horror stories about existing socialism. They describe the pro-Ukraine side in the present conflict as the “free world,” when the U.S. is the country with the largest number of prisoners. These ridiculous pieces of propaganda are how they can continue to make the argument Mark Fisher described:

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine, and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that it is to say, capitalism’s ostensible “realism” turns out to be nothing of the sort…Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.

Even from that perspective, where the nebulous concept of “terror and totalitarianism” is more scary than the benign evils of capitalism, capitalism still needs to be scrapped. Our own social order has produced terror in the form of militarized police, the terrifying prospect of homelessness, the dangers from Covid-19, climate destruction, and the other threats capitalism subjects us to. And as far as “totalitarianism” can be considered a substantive term, our system has been drifting towards it with the mass surveillance and censorship of the War on Terror era. There is no honest argument for perpetuating the existing social order. Replacing it is the only rational option.

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Liberalism lied to us: American global leadership has brought catastrophe, not prosperity

The global economic collapse that will soon be in full effect in the USA, and that’s already come to the UK, is the latest manifestation of how the destruction imperialism causes comes to afflict the imperialist countries themselves. This always happens when an imperial order is in decline. The destruction that the oppressors inflict upon their victims abroad ultimately gets imported, and the catalyst for this karmic process is the system’s unraveling.

A terminally ill socioeconomic system 

When capitalism won the Cold War thirty years ago, imperialism’s benefactors convinced themselves that such consequences would never come for them. That their complicity in the globe’s ravaging would have no blowback. This was how things had gone for them since World War II, when the U.S. rose to become the largest empire in world history and Americans were showered with the spoils of neo-colonialism. But no sooner had this empire reached its peak than were the conditions created for its rapid undoing. A civilization that lives off of stealing from other civilizations can’t last, its history is only a rapid rise followed by a precipitous fall. The Roman empire’s fall took centuries, whereas the U.S. empire’s took decades, because Rome’s colonial parasitism at least involved projects to develop the places it occupied. The U.S. empire has only brought destruction and suffering to the places it’s assimilated, sending in its neo-colonial hitmen to loot the Global South.

Washington’s way of operating is so nakedly kleptocratic because it’s a capitalist empire, and capitalism demands endless growth. The core countries perpetually need to expand their reach into new markets, leaving no room for the development of the peripheral countries. It’s pure exploitation, exploitation that must continue for the system to function. So as soon as the empire was met with a combination of challenges, having faced the costs from its failed Vietnam war effort and an oil crisis from OPEC’s penalizing U.S. support for Israel, it underwent an economic crisis. 

Capital reached a stage where it could no longer afford to sustain a welfare state even in the richest countries, and neoliberal austerity was implemented to keep up profits. Along with this came the financialization of the economy to catastrophic effects we saw in 2008, the transferring of the tax weight onto the working class, the depression of wages so that they couldn’t keep up with inflation, the further normalization of corporate electoral interference and bribery, and privatization and deregulation that gave corporations feudalistic control over a weakened working class. A collapse of society had been engineered. It was an utterly unsustainable way to structure a socioeconomic system, like how the neo-colonial model is. But both neoliberalism and neo-colonialism are crucial for capitalism’s survival at this stage in the profit rate’s decline.

With this process of upward wealth transfer now being in effect for almost half a century, the supposedly mild “recession” that we’re entering into is having the same effect on the working class as a depression. The workers are already deeply in debt, unable to get jobs that let them afford houses, and having to navigate healthcare and educational systems designed to bankrupt them. Long Covid has forced four million workers out of the workforce, rendering the economy even more anemic. Since the start of the pandemic, millions more of these workers, especially in rural areas, have had to give up on looking for work. And what work they can find has come to pay less than it did just a few years ago. In 2019, 59% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, and this number is now 64%. 

The people are faced with an economy that was deindustrialized decades ago in order to squeeze out more neo-colonial profits, and that’s consequently leaving more U.S. workers behind with every crisis. Every year at the current rate, the country is being filled with millions more people like the man on the sidewalk from the 1990s film Falling Down, who had no recourse other than to hold a sign protesting his disenfranchisement and sarcastically shout about how he’s now “not economically viable.” 

What our ruling class has done is sabotage the imperial center’s own economy, dooming it to be unable to absorb the inevitable catastrophes neoliberalism would produce. But the ruling class couldn’t do anything else, because making the economy more top down—and therefore more unstable—was the only way to keep capitalism alive amid its contraction. Concentrating greater and greater amounts of wealth at the top is the self-defeating strategy that the system has adopted to keep itself alive. What makes capitalism doomed is that even though this process can’t be sustained, there’s no other way to delay the system’s implosion. 

The thing poisoning the system is the system’s only available prophylactic for the crises the system self-generates. This was true before the coming of neoliberalism; in response to the crisis of overproduction that capitalism experienced, capitalism was impelled to carry out imperialism so that this crisis could be displaced, which made the system dependent on a U.S. global dominance that’s now coming apart. The same dynamic applies to the Federal Reserve’s tool for trying to stave off the looming new Great Depression; flooding the economy with more currency is its only way of delaying the crash, but that comes at the cost of making the crash even worse when it does come. The outcome will be an economic crisis so big, and in effect at such a late stage in Washington’s geopolitical decline, that it breaks the empire.

Capitalist authoritarianism as a tool to delay collapse

The liberals who are honest about our present conditions know the predicament their socioeconomic order is in, and the conclusion they’re coming to is that the only way to preserve the system is by abandoning the pretexts of personal liberty that exist within the truncated bourgeois version of “democracy.” In other words, to embrace fascism, the fighting wing of capital. The neoconservative Robert Kaplan in effect declared so in an analysis from this year, which included a rare admission that the government Washington supports in Ukraine does not represent an example of truly democratic governance: 

President Joe Biden talks of Russia’s war in Ukraine as part of a “battle between democracy and autocracy.” But we are not actually in a fight for democracy, however counterintuitive that seems. After all, Ukraine itself for many years has been a weak, corrupt, institutionally underdeveloped basket case of a democracy…leading a worldwide coalition against the two great Eurasian revanchist powers — Russia, which seeks to annex Ukraine, and China, which seeks to annex Taiwan — requires the sort of pragmatic vision that Secretary of State James Baker employed when organizing 35 nations, including autocracies, to stand against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Kaplan isn’t only advocating for a renewed effort to install and back dictators in response to the decline of U.S. hegemony. He’s also concerned about the growing contradictions of capitalism. And about how these contradictions may lead to capitalism’s downfall if capital doesn’t strengthen its fighting wing, as has happened within post-coup Ukraine. In his turn of the millennium book The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, Kaplan sounded the alarm over the consequences that the world’s growing inequality may have. Which, like his blunt description of the Ukrainian state’s despotic nature, shows a kind of honesty one wouldn’t expect from a rightist like him:

For every sixty-five dollars earned in rich countries, one dollar is earned in poor countries, and the gap is widening. That division is not only between “North” and “South,” but within countries and regions themselves, including the United States, where an upper-middle techno-class joins the global economy, while a vast realm of the citizenry has seen little rise in their salaries and own no stocks or mutual funds…social stability results from the establishment of a middle class…in many of these countries Hobbesian realities—in particular, too many young, violence-prone males without jobs—have necessitated radical action. In a York University study published last year the scholars Christian G Mesquida and Neil I. Wiener demonstrate how countries with young populations (young poor males especially) are subject to political violence.

In the paragraph following the last quoted passage, Kaplan advocates for increased police and surveillance to maintain social stability in a world where unending neoliberalism is straining the population to a breaking point. Because those from Kaplan’s school of thought aren’t fascists per se, but rather pragmatically minded defenders of capital, he advocates for the bourgeois states to transition into what he calls “hybrid regimes” rather than into outright fascist states. 

He writes that these regimes “will call themselves democracies, and we may go along with the lie—but, as in Peru, the regimes will be decisively autocratic…Moreover, if a shortage of liquidity affects world capital markets by 2000, as Klaus Schwab, the president of the World Economic Forum, and other experts fear may happen, fiercer competition among developing nations for scarcer investment money will accelerate the need for efficient neo-authoritarian governments.” Sure enough, since 2000 we’ve seen a rise in repression and surveillance across the exploited countries, from India to Brazil to Colombia. As well as in semi-peripheral imperialist puppet states like Ukraine, and in the imperialist countries themselves.

Reactionary barbarism vs a multipolar future

In practice, the transition into this more nakedly dictatorial model of bourgeois governance is not looking like some adoption of benevolent technocrats who safeguard the people’s personal rights despite the decline of democracy. That’s a romanticized fantasy, one which Kaplan himself clearly knows isn’t being realized due to his recognition of Ukraine’s character as a corrupt potemkin “democracy.” Along with the rise in Ukrainian corruption since the 2014 U.S. regime change operation has come a rise in hate crimes by state-backed Nazi militias; laws that discriminate against ethnic minorities; and a governmental adoption of nostalgic language when it comes to Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators. It’s been a crude, dysfunctional kind of fascism, with grave human costs.

The additional waves of neoliberal shock policies have left the people unable to absorb the damages from the civil war, which due to Washington’s saber rattling against Russia has expanded into a total war. The Kiev regime’s inept and reactive military has needlessly put Ukraine’s own civilians in danger throughout the conflict, and the breakdown in the rule of law has let the militias terrorize marginalized groups with impunity. The armed forces have been shooting at migrants. The regime has carried out a campaign to haphazardly execute and imprison “traitors,” banned all of the parties that oppose the agenda of its NATO puppeteers, banned books to the effect that it’s illegal to purchase Marxist literature, and criminalized speech that points out how Bandera and the other Ukrainian “founding fathers” helped the Nazis—in other words, institutionalized Holocaust denial. 

Kaplan argues that it’s myopic to argue that democracy should be upheld on purely “moral” grounds, regarding morality as something that shouldn’t get in the way of practicality. For this reason, he and the U.S. officials who share his foreign policy reasoning don’t regard democracy as paramount. The foremost priority, they believe, is protecting the world from “aggressors.” When you understand why their case is misleading, you understand why every communist party with the correct analysis on the Russia-Ukraine situation is supporting Russia’s Operation Z. In reality, Russia’s action in Ukraine is not aggression, but a humanitarian mission to neutralize a fascist terror state. It’s more in the bounds of international law than any military action Washington has ever taken. You only need to honestly look at the conditions in Ukraine to see why Russia is justified in intervening.

When Washington’s adversaries take military action, it’s to thwart Washington’s schemes for destabilizing the globe through terrorist actors like the Zelensky regime. Not to advance imperial ambitions of their own. Because by the Leninist analysis of what imperialism is—rather than the shallow definition the liberals use that’s designed to portray imperialism’s challengers as the real imperialists—Russia, China, and Iran are not imperialist powers. They lack the dependent relationship upon the peripheral countries required to fit the criteria for being participants in neo-colonialism, and therefore aren’t acting in service of any imperialist socioeconomic interest. Rather they’re acting in rational self-interest, which in their case means in the interests of a cooperative new multipolar world. The liberals portray them as imperialist to justify their new cold war, and the destruction of global democratic rights that this war is involving.

As imperial collapse continues, the cynical reasoning Kaplan uses will increasingly be applied by our ruling class. The system will react to its endangerment by resorting to its most brutal tools. This applies both to the empire’s global warfare, and to the class war in the imperial center. Ukraine is a testing ground for the state and paramilitary violence that’s coming to the USA. The more our society deteriorates under growing inequality, and the more of a failed state we become, the more communists will be met with fascist terror, like Ukrainian communists have. The liberals will talk of this in detached terms, like they have when talking about the violence Washington has exacted abroad in response to its decline. They’ll say sacrifices of freedoms must be made to defend from some even worse outcome, where the enemies of liberalism’s supposedly optimal social order are allowed to triumph. 

During this decisive moment in the class confrontation, these liberals will be easily recognizable as liars. Because if liberalism is being shown to bring neither prosperity nor liberty, its dysfunctionality is exacerbating a new plague, and its corporate militaristic paradigm is destroying the very planet we need in order to survive, what reason do the people have to support its continuation?

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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.

Russia has already won: Washington’s empty nuclear threats show how the U.S. has been outmaneuvered

Five years ago, President Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen” upon north Korea if Kim Jong Un didn’t comply with Washington’s demands. Within a year after that comment, Trump was the one complying with Kim Jong Un’s demands, hosting a meeting between the two that the imperialist media was infuriated by. This was because as the journalist Daniel Lazare said, “North Korea outmaneuvered the U.S.” well before Trump made this threat. The DPRK’s attainment of nuclear weapons had made it in Washington’s rational self-interest to start showing the country respect, at least insofar as an imperialist country can “respect” a country it wants desperately to turn into a neo-colony. 

The Americans can be racist towards Koreans by calling their socialist project a “monarchy,” they can be bitter about the north’s resilience, they can threaten to commit another genocide against them. But they won’t attack the north, because if they do, the imperial center will be hit by the north’s own nuclear missiles.

“With our reliable and effective self-defensive nuclear deterrent, there will be no more war on this earth, and our country’s safety and future will be secured forever,” declared Kim in 2020. The DPRK has also overcome Washington’s economic warfare, getting the sanctions to backfire. Lazare described how “To the extent sanctions had any impact at all, they may actually have backfired by encouraging the DPRK to diversify its economy much as they did in Iran prior to the 2015 nuclear accord. Mitsuhiro Mimura, a Japanese expert who has visited the North 45 times since 1996, calls the DPRK ‘the poorest advanced economy in the world,’ meaning that while output is low for the moment, technological knowhow is high. This allows the country to marshal its resources so as to produce a wide range of capital goods.”

For someone who’s been following the side of the Russia-Ukraine conflict that the pro-NATO media doesn’t talk about, these ways in which the DPRK has managed to overcome imperial provocations look familiar. Russia is doing the equivalent to what Kim did, both in military and economic terms. By holding last month’s referendum to have the former Donbass republics join Russia, Putin has carried out his own version of Kim’s nuclear leveraging against Washington. Putin didn’t even need to threaten to use nuclear weapons for the imperialists to see that if they go too far in backing Ukraine’s counteroffensive at this point, they’ll destroy the equilibrium that Mutually Assured Destruction depends on. 

Russia would act on its stated practice of striking if it’s existentially threatened, a scenario which the imperialists will never intentionally bring about. Even they can’t afford nuclear war. So they now have no choice but to surrender the newly annexed territory to Russia. That’s why they’re threatening nuclear war with Russia, and even bringing back their nuclear threats against north Korea, but won’t act on these threats. If World War III happens, it will be either an accident born out of a nuclear close call gone wrong, or an initially non-nuclear war between the major powers that the U.S. instigates in a cold war focal point like Taiwan. Washington knows that as Pepe Escobar writes, “The Empire will ‘lose’ its pet project, Ukraine,” because Russia has outmaneuvered the U.S. like north Korea did.

NATO’s backing of Ukraine will continue, at least until the imperialists forsake Ukraine like they forsook the Mujahideen, the Kurds, and their other former proxy warfare partners. But even as the weapons flow and economic warfare continue, and we’re fed a narrative about Ukraine’s victory being inevitable, it’s increasingly clear that the imperialists are no longer backing Ukraine with a genuine hope of winning against Russia. To win, they would need to prevent Russia from achieving what its operation’s goal has been from the start: disabling Ukraine’s military to the effect that Kiev can no longer menace the Donbass. 

This goal is already on track to being accomplished. Ukraine’s military is increasingly exhausted. Its capacity to inflict damage has been diminished so much that its operations have come to primarily consist of local battalion fights, exploratory in nature rather than being guided by a coherent military strategy. To manage even this random, ill-conceived warfare model, it’s having to tap into its retirees, launching a mobilization of all men up to 60 years old.

“In the Ukrainian battlefield, NATO’s crusade against Russia is doomed – even as in several nodes as much as 80 percent of the fighting forces feature NATO personnel,” writes Escobar. “Wunderwaffen such as HIMARS are few and far between….Ukraine, by the spring of 2023, may be reduced to no more than an impoverished, rump black hole. The imperial Plan A remains  Afghanization: to operate an army of mercenaries capable of targeted destabilization and or/terrorist incursions into the Russian Federation.” 

A year from now, when Ukraine has been defeated by any definition based upon the terms of symmetrical warfare, we’ll still be told Ukraine’s victory is at hand. The day will never come when our media and politicians say “dang, looks like we’ve lost this war,” the narrative will always be that Russia is on the verge of losing. The context NATO’s propagandists will be leaving out is that Ukraine will at that point only be substantially fighting on the front of asymmetrical warfare, utilizing terrorist attacks like the one it recently committed at the Kerch bridge. 

The narrative managers will try to spin these attacks as falling within the international laws of warfare, as they did after the Kerch attack. But the reality is that Washington is about to find itself having to portray a defeated, bombed-out terrorist hub as still being a country with a functioning military and a fighting chance. Ukraine’s recent campaign to retake many territories hasn’t represented a loss for Russia, as Russia’s goal was never to gain as much land as possible but to neutralize a threat. And it’s doing this, first by exhausting Ukraine’s military forces and now by taking out its tools for carrying out terrorism. 

Escobar assesses just how ineffectual these terrorist operations are at fulfilling NATO’s goal to destabilize Eurasia: 

From an imperial perspective, the prospects in the Ukrainian battlefield are gloomy. Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) has seamlessly morphed into a Counter-Terror Operation (CTO): Moscow now openly characterizes Kiev as a terrorist regime. The pain dial is incrementally going up, with surgical strikes against Ukrainian power/electricity infrastructure about to totally cripple Kiev’s economy and its military. And by December, there’s the arrival on the front lines and in the rear of a properly trained and highly motivated partial mobilization contingent. The only question concerns the timetable. Moscow is now in the process of slowly but surely decapitating the Kiev proxy, and ultimately smashing NATO “unity.” The process of torturing the EU economy is relentless. And the real world outside of the collective West – the Global South – is with Russia, from Africa and Latin America to West Asia and even sections of the EU….in coordination with China, Iran and major Eurasian players, Russia is working to eventually decommission all those US-controlled international organizations – as the Global South becomes virtually immune to the spread of NATO psyops.

As the imperial sphere undergoes this collapse, Russia is managing to gain the same kinds of economic advantages amid sanctions that the DPRK gained. The sanctions have increased Russia’s revenues, not decreased them. Russia has shown to be a self-sufficient economy. It’s repeating the patterns the DPRK created a precedent for: a country is menaced by imperialism, then it outmaneuvers the U.S. while coming to function regardless of the sanctions, leaving the declining empire further diminished. The success of Operation Z is not a vindication of Russian capitalism. Just as Operation Z can’t be considered Putin’s operation, as Putin only happened to be in power when intervention in Ukraine became necessary, Russia’s victory can be considered not a victory for Russian capitalism but rather a victory for Russian anti-imperialism. That’s why Marxists with the correct analysis support Z. Not because we like Putin, but because we’re anti-imperialists.

The Russians, even as they have yet to restore socialism, are combating imperialism. They’re going off of military knowledge passed down from the effort to defeat Nazi Germany, kept relevant by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (which helped pressure Putin into taking action). They’ve mastered the art of war, unlike their flailing enemies have.

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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.

When the U.S. empire’s own propagandists exposed Washington‘s hypocrisy

In its July 15, 1996 edition, Time magazine featured a cover that boasted about how Washington had just violated Russia’s sovereignty. The story that it covered was something you would expect a radical anti-imperialist publication to report on while the legacy media outlets ignored it, but in this case, it was the legacy media which did the most to bring the story to light. By Time’s own description, the story was about how “For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign.” This meddling effort, the article said, was primarily behind Yeltsin’s beating his communist opponent in the election, an outcome which it admitted “was by no means inevitable.”

I say that the legacy media has primarily been behind the effort to expose Washington’s interference in that election because twenty years after this story’s publication, the infamous Time cover, featuring a portrait of Yeltsin and a celebratory headline describing the meddling operation, popped up on social media. Time couldn’t have provided a better piece of rhetorical ammunition for the political commentators who skeptically viewed the claims of “Russian interference” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

These commentators could handily point to proof, put forth by the USA’s own major media, that Washington had been engaging in precisely what it was now accusing Moscow of doing. Whether this proved the Russian hacking accounts were false was another matter, though there’s evidence those accounts have a shaky foundation. The point is that this cover from a generation ago had unintentionally come to serve as a powerful tool for instilling the kind of doubt in the prevailing media narratives which I began to experience during that time. 

Because of this cover, many people in addition to myself have gotten influenced towards questioning what our most powerful media outlets tell us about Washington’s adversaries. We know this because the discourse the cover generated during and after the 2016 election cycle was substantial enough as to warrant a clapback from said media outlets; at one point, The Daily Beast featured a column which angrily proclaimed that the charges of U.S. meddling in Russian politics were absurd. The argument this article puts forth is a familiar one when it comes to commentary which defends U.S. foreign policy. This being that Washington’s actions in the given situation were supposedly benign, in contrast to the unacceptable actions that Washington’s adversaries are always portrayed as engaging in. 

Whether you accept the Daily Beast’s case depends on how you view Washington’s “rules-based international order,” on whether you’re willing to believe this order has a right to exist. If one believes Washington and the “west” deserve to be in charge of the globe, the meddling the U.S. geopolitical bloc carries out can be seen as justified, and therefore get reframed as being not meddling but rather aid to friends of “democracy.” The alternative is to go against every aspect of how our cultural hegemony talks and and thinks about the way the world works. 

If Washington was in the wrong for sending operatives to manage post-Soviet politics, a foreign policy measure which was done in order to impose catastrophic neoliberal shock policies onto Russia, then how sure can one truly be that Washington is to be trusted in the accusations it makes? A country that’s perpetually seeking to dominate and exploit the globe, rather than act as a friendly “world policeman,” isn’t one that can be relied upon to tell the truth about global affairs. Everything it says has an ulterior motive.

As soon as you admit Washington is a hypocrite for crying Russian meddling, every other part of the imperialist media’s narratives becomes recognizable as suspect. You become more willing to look at the evidence of Ukrainian war crimes, or of the 2014 Euromaidan overthrow having been a U.S.-orchestrated coup, or of Kiev’s support for neo-Nazi militias. You may even become more open to the Marxist analyses that these facts relate to, and accept the Leninist socioeconomic case for why Russia lacks the role of an imperialist power.

The same applies to the narratives about Washington’s other geopolitical targets. If Ukraine indeed has deep historical and cultural ties to Russia, a reality imperialism’s propagandists seek to cover up, it’s a lot easier to see how Taiwan has similarly fundamental links to China. And how in that case as well, imperialism is trying to conceal the full context behind the relationship the two given places have so that driving a wedge between them is easier. 

Washington sees both Ukraine and Taiwan as nothing more than locations for proxy warfare. It’s trying to provoke China into taking military action within Taiwan, like it did with Russia in Ukraine. Across multiple fronts in the new cold war, the imperialists are doing the equivalent of what they did in Korea: establish a proxy military presence in a part of Korea (the south), exacerbate this manufactured division within the country by provoking the country’s anti-imperialist part using the U.S.-controlled part, then blame the anti-imperialist part when it acts to neutralize the threat from the imperialist proxy state. This is what happened when the south’s U.S.-backed dictator planned to invade the north, prompting Kim Il-Sung to intervene. For acting in his people’s best interests, Kim was labeled the aggressor, and Washington was given sanction by the U.N. to intervene to stop his “aggression.” This let the U.S. murder several million Koreans and burn down every town in the north with impunity, like how the Ukrainian U.S. puppet state is continuously getting away with war crimes throughout its counteroffensive.

Because Washington has provoked Russia by using Ukraine as a comprador fighter, and has aggressively censored or stigmatized any content documenting evidence of the 2014 coup, it’s been able to claim to have no role behind creating the present conflict. It’s also concealed the actions of the Ukrainian puppet state that provoked Russia into intervening, namely Kiev’s campaign to ethnically cleanse the Russian speakers and Kiev’s pursuit of putting nuclear weapons along Russia’s borders. All of these realities are preemptively rejected by a mind that’s been trained in the mentality that the imperialist media conditions people into. This is a mentality of analytical stuntedness, where any information contradicting what NATO says about the Ukraine conflict is viewed as malicious propaganda. Even when this information includes huge parts of Eurasia’s long-term and recent history, or when there are clear parallels between Washington’s actions in Ukraine and Washington’s past imperialist schemes (such as the one in Korea).

All of these ideas appear outlandish to somebody who’s only been exposed to the pro-NATO side of the story. But when you encounter odd things like the 1996 Time cover, things that don’t match up with what you’ve been told about the USA’s global role, this side of the story starts to look not so plausible. You may become inclined to seek out different sources of media, ones that don’t only report on Washington’s imperialist machinations when they want to portray these things as good. You might find Consortiumnews, which reported on how digital forensics disproved the Russian hacking account. Or The Grayzone, which reported on how the west has continued to carry out more recent meddling within Russia in the form of covert foreign media psyops. The end point in this process of self-education, I’ve found, is to come to recognize Russia’s actions in Ukraine as justified, as the actions of the DPRK in the Korean war were justified. Both are victims of imperialist warfare that have had no choice but to defend themselves.

This is why Casey Michel, the author of that defensive Daily Beast column who’s since gone on to write an infamous Atlantic article calling for Russia to be balkanized, was compelled to respond to the discourse about the Time cover. Washington’s propaganda from after the fall of the Soviet Union had become too brazen for its own good. Washington felt too comfortable during that moment, and made a mistake in allowing its media lackeys to document its dirty tactics within the former USSR. When Russia broke away from U.S. client state status, and Washington brought back its old maneuvers for trying to break Russia, this old propaganda came back to work against Washington’s goals.

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The Ukraine proxy war’s propaganda is akin to MKULTRA mind control

It’s useful for communists to view the enemies of Marxism as cults, or at least as in the vein of cults. This is especially true during our time of renewed great-power competition, when the CIA and NATO have been opening up the legal systems for ubiquitous psychological operations while partnering with neuroscientists to innovate in their cognitive warfare. 

Cults are historically the most powerful psychological weapons that the forces of reactionary intrigue have used, leading individuals who could otherwise have become revolutionaries into pseudo-Marxist intelligence fronts like the People’s Temple or the LaRouche Organization. They can do so much damage because they’re capable of emotionally binding their members to them, making potential communists into either vulnerable targets for the forces of reactionary intrigue or active agents for the state. To them, you’re either someone to entrap, someone to assassinate, or someone to use as a disposable weapon against your own cause.

Though the LaRouche Organization (for one example of a modern pseudo-Marxist cult) is still around, and trying to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to rope naive individuals into its honeypot scheme, it and the other entities of its ilk are relatively small manifestations of the traps these psyops are laying. They’re the entities that are specifically meant to recruit potential revolutionaries into front organizations for the intelligence agencies. For this reason, they can appropriately be called cults, as they fulfill the cult criteria of an intensive, direct group dynamic where leaders are immediately present to abuse and indoctrinate members. The larger-scale psyops are the ones which share the cult traits of indoctrination and hostility towards perceived enemies, but which are too loose in their control to accurately be called “cults.” In the journey that class conscious individuals go on, mass media psyops are the precursors to the more focused dynamics of manipulation which the intelligence centers have set up.

The biggest of these large-scale psyops at the moment is the one which solidifies support for NATO. It’s the cultural hegemony that imperialism’s narrative managers are cultivating during the Ukraine proxy war, in which Russia is viewed as the unambiguous bad actor within this conflict and NATO is seen as the noble force trying to stop Russia’s wicked machinations. All knowledge that disproves this narrative, such as the Leninist economic analysis disproving Russia being an imperialist power, the history of the U.S. meddling which installed an imperialist puppet regime in Kiev, or the threat of ethnic cleansing in the Donbass posed by the Kiev regime, is preemptively rejected by this belief set. Its followers are conditioned, through continuous repetition within our media’s rhetoric, to disregard any challenges to the pro-NATO account as malicious disinformation. 

The belief set’s aim is to negate the possibility for critical thought. It promotes a simplistic and crude version of geopolitical analysis, reducing the entire picture to individual personalities. It portrays Operation Z as Putin’s operation, when any country in Russia’s situation would have intervened in Ukraine and Putin is merely the one who happened to be in power when force became necessary. It says Ukraine can’t be fascist because Zelensky is Jewish, when the country is truly ruled by a U.S.-puppeted permanent state that threatened Zelensky into being complicit in the backing of the Nazi militias. It maintains its psychological control over the population by perpetually manufacturing false flags, and painting Russia as the perpetrator of a deliberate pattern of war crimes. It plays on empathy, and twists it into a zealous loyalty towards imperialism, just like it’s done throughout the wars against Serbia, Syria, and the other targets of “humanitarian” imperial schemes.

Imperialism’s narratives are possible to defeat within somebody’s mind. When exposed to the right information, one can train themselves to reject the lies they’ve been exposed to about this and other U.S. wars. What the indoctrination system of NATO does is poison the psyches of its followers so that recovering them from their sickness, from the xenophobia and constrained analytical capacity they’ve been conditioned into, becomes fraught with obstacles. Obstacles that consist of the kinds of mental blocks which afflict those whose neurology has been rewired by MKULTRA mind control programming.

The range of what constitutes MKULTRA is quite wide. It need not involve drugs, they’re only one among the countless tools that a predatory actor can use to mold someone’s mind into shapes of their choosing. The process encompasses any operation to subject someone to psychological shocks, for the purpose of destroying their old neurological framework and making way for a new one. Those who practice it view human beings as meat puppets, able to be taken apart and put back together into new, “correct” forms. 

We saw this with Manson’s cult, wherein CIA mind control researchers used Manson as a tool to prime his followers for the same kind of homicide-ready mentality that other MKULTRA victims have been conditioned to adopt. We saw this with the LaRouche cult, which used psychoanalysis practices to thoroughly assimilate members into the leader’s CIA-influenced beliefs. I’ve personally encountered individual movement wreckers who’ve gone beyond the usual abusive relationship tactics that wreckers use on their manipulation targets, and employed deliberate traumatization methods to try to desensitize me towards assisting in their goals for violence against my own cadre members. MKULTRA wasn’t a failure, the Manson murders showed that. And it’s perhaps getting more prevalent as a counterinsurgency weapon while class struggle intensifies, and the ruling class seeks to escalate its campaign of violence against radicals.

The psychological tools that the current war propaganda campaign utilizes can be analogized to MKULTRA insofar as similarly to CIA mind control, these tools are damaging the mental health of those they target to make the indoctrination more effective. The frequent documentation of this conflict’s atrocities on social media poses a mental health risk to those exposed to these horrific events, a fact which the intelligence-puppeted tech companies are exploiting to give more power to NATO’s narratives. Users of imperialist-controlled social media sites, news sources, and search engines are corralled towards content which depicts the vilest of the war crimes, which are the ones that Ukraine commits in order to pin them on Russia. Social media is a tool for amplifying the psychological influences, and damages, of false flags, shoving unspeakable acts of violence in people’s faces and telling them that Washington’s geopolitical rival is behind it.

The other kinds of mental health harms that Washington’s Ukraine proxy war is causing are the exceptional stress rates which people have been experiencing due to the inflation the conflict is exacerbating, and the mass fears of nuclear war that have emerged since NATO’s propagandists portrayed Putin as threatening nuclear confrontation. These manipulators are manufacturing crises, then exploiting those crises to traumatize the masses into embracing their militarist “solutions.” Which has been a trend for imperialist propaganda throughout the new cold war. As the journalist Caitlin Johnstone wrote in 2019 in response to a study showing how anxiety had increased since Trump’s election:

Pacific Standard and its “growing body of research” ignore the most obvious and significant culprit behind this phenomenon which is tearing people’s health to shreds: the mass media which has been deliberately fanning the flames of Trump panic. The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia’s natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing. And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Now we’re seeing the consequences of the further escalations that these psyops led to: a new war in Europe that the imperialists are willing to risk escalating to atomic proportions. Which creates more opportunities for exploiting trauma to promote imperialism’s lies.

I may be able to avoid the effects of these mass media psyops due to my getting educated on imperialism’s deception tactics, but I’m not immune to propaganda or manipulation, as evidenced by how I’ve gotten targeted by the types of psyop agents who go after those that have gained class consciousness. The path to becoming a revolutionary is one in which you need to first unlearn the indoctrination the cultural hegemony has instilled within you, and then learn to resist the even more intensive, personal manipulation that you’ll be met with when you enter the scene of radical organizing. The more experience I get, the more knowledge I gain on how to resist manipulation. So I know it’s possible to find one’s way out of this sinister maze of psyops, and effectively resist imperialism.

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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.