As Washington’s global influence continues to decline, and the U.S. capitalist ruling class reacts to this threat to its profits by expanding neoliberal austerity policies, the country’s subsequent descent into a failed state is going to produce unrest even greater than the massive protests and strikes we’ve seen in this last year. Combined with the dysfunctionality that U.S. capitalism is already creating for itself, this uptick in the class struggle is going to drive the ruling class to desperate measures to keep profits up. As Richard Wolff concluded this week, capital — both in the U.S. and throughout the rest of the globe by extension — is at its weakest point during the last century:
Most of what remains of private capitalism is surviving on unprecedented, massive government life support, monetary and fiscal. A tired rerun of Cold War-style demonizing provides the ideological cover for the fading neoliberalism. Both major parties endorse huge and growing government economic interventions as urgently needed, homeland security-driven, anti-China policies. Pity the poor libertarians. Their audience fades because the same intrusive government they blame for all economic ills demands loyalty in its fight with China…Today’s declining U.S. capitalism can no longer repeat its previous bland celebrations of private enterprises and free markets. Too much is going wrong, provoking criticism, and deepening divisions across U.S. society.
The measure that they’re taking to keep this floundering system functional, to stave off the rise of a revolutionary socialist movement in the core of the empire so that capital can keep applying its neoliberal shock tactics, is to inundate the masses with propaganda. The same types of propaganda that the U.S. empire has used on populations like the Yugoslavians, who’ve had to be convinced to accept NATO’s violent Balkanization of their nation and the profound neoliberal impoverishment that’s resulted from this crime.
As commentator Daniel Kay has assessed, this social engineering campaign has been able to convince many people who once inhabited one of history’s most successful socialist countries to accept the fabricated narratives which NATO put out to justify Yugoslavia’s destruction:
While the media in the U.S. scoffs at this phrase (Alternative facts), I doubt they’d think twice about the idea in the Balkans. The Serbs and the Bozniaks will tell you two very different stories about the same war. The Croats, a third faction in the conflict, will have their own version. All the groups will insist their version of the truth is the only acceptable one. And that’s far from the only such issue in the area…These days, the territory once occupied by the large and influential Yugoslav Republic has been carved up into seven separate states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and the disputed Kosovo. The majority of these countries are wracked with crippling unemployment and widespread poverty. Lots of people will tell you life was better under Communism. Is it any surprise we don’t hear that narrative in American schools?
On the land that U.S. citizens live on, an equivalent campaign of destabilization, arbitrary imperialist territorial division, and exploitation has been carried out. The indigenous First Nations which should be holding jurisdiction over all of the continent’s land have had their territories carved up into unilaterally imposed borders. And in addition to the imperialism that the oppressor countries of Canada and the U.S. carry out globally, the victims of American colonialism are subject to an internal imperialism, where corporations gain wealth from indigenous resources while driving the disproportionately nonwhite lower classes into poverty.
To manufacture consent for this arrangement, the U.S. empire both conceals facts like Yugoslavia’s socialist success story from its citizens and targets the U.S. population with intensive propaganda. The CIA has been infiltrating U.S. media and other institutions for decades, promoting narratives about communism “killing millions,” U.S. oil wars being fought for “humanitarian” purposes, and U.S. imperialist outposts like Israel and Taiwan being beacons of “democracy.” In the last half-century, as capitalism’s crisis has intensified and neoliberalism has become a bourgeois necessity, the brainwashing has also sought to convince us that free market fanaticism is justified (like when CIA-aligned neoliberal economists falsely claim that Pinochet’s Chile was an “economic success story”).
Now that capital has weakened to a point where profits can only be kept up with a fragile safety net, and U.S. imperialism has declined so much that a crash of this safety net’s supporting currency the dollar is now imminent, this propaganda apparatus is growing fixated on manufacturing consent for cold war with China. To understand why the U.S. population is being bombarded with fabricated claims of Chinese Uyghur “concentration camps,” supposed Chinese threats to the “freedom” of capitalist Hong Kong and Taiwan, and baseless allegations about Covid-19 coming from a Chinese biolab, just look at the geopolitically related U.S. economic deficiencies described this March by senior executive vice president of the Bank of China’s Johannesburg branch Gao Desheng: “The inflation of the US debt, the actual negative interest rate of the dollar, the spread of the pandemic and the gloomy economic prospects have changed the flow of international funds. It has become doubtful whether the US’ financial game which has been played for decades can be sustained. It seems only a matter of time for the US dollar to end its hegemony.”
As this loss of the dollar’s primacy draws nearer, the imperialists are doing everything possible to fortify the system against a rising of class consciousness and the emergence of a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary vanguard. Through crisis capitalism, the U.S. ruling class can keep up profits for themselves amid the country’s compounding catastrophes; U.S. billionaires have collectively gotten $1.2 trillion richer since the start of the pandemic, and they can continue to use for-profit migrant detention, private mercenary armies, Big Tech surveillance expansions, real estate monopolization in the vein of BlackRock’s recent mass home purchases, and other means to exploit society’s collapse for profit. But this extreme neoliberal model is built on an ever-more unstable economy, making social engineering crucial for the preservation of capital in our era of intensifying crisis.
So using the officially legalized powers of covert domestic propaganda that the CIA has had since 2013, our ruling class is flooding us with strategic disinformation that’s designed to blunt the development of class consciousness and divert our attention towards the bogeyman China. The crimes of Euro-American colonialism and imperialism, which is currently placing indigenous communities at the border under traumatizingly intensive surveillance and detaining record amounts of migrants in inhumane detention centers, are being projected onto China through bogus claims of “cultural genocide” and mass detentions in Xinjiang.
Like the Yugoslavians whose views of recent history have been distorted by CIA disinformation, many Americans are buying into a manufactured hallucination, one where all of their own country’s atrocities are being committed by the socialist country the empire wants them to hate. Even as U.S. police continue to become more militarized after an uptick in racialized police brutality over the last decade, and migrants in U.S. detention report being gassed and forcibly sterilized, Americans are persuaded to instead point to China as an evil police state. And like is the case for Yugoslavia’s successful socialist experiment, Americans aren’t being told about how China has eliminated extreme poverty and enacted an unparalleled pollution reduction project. All they hear is that China should be hated and feared.
Naturally, this is harming the rise of revolutionary consciousness, since these believers in the fictitious Chinese genocide are led to associate a Marxist-Leninist country with colonialism-style atrocities. The Uyghur genocide hoax is a great layer of deception that’s being proliferated by the entire mainstream of the U.S. political spectrum, from Biden administration officials to right-wing pundits to anti-communist “leftist” online commentators. Its effect is both to keep the masses demobilized amid deepening neoliberal exploitation, and to diffuse opposition to Washington’s military provocations against China and perilous anti-Chinese nuclear buildup.
The U.S. is a deranged society, largely unable to see the capitalist causes behind its deteriorating living conditions and unaware that it’s walking into World War III. Only a committed struggle by those who’ve already gained class consciousness and seen through the CIA’s lies can bring revolution.
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