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Michael Yates wrote
What hope is there for radical change in the United States. Not
much. Jacobin just posted an essay wondering what we can do to make
sure that the choices we face in the 2036 election won't be as bleak
as the ones we face today. By 2036, most of the Brooklyn
intellectuals around Jacobin will have long since moved to the
right, so the question will be be moot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On this sodden election day here in the US, I'm reminded of this, which
pretty much puts it in a nutshell. If we look beyond the dismal punditry
out there about causes, consequences and the possibilities for change, I
see this as one of the more profound, explicit statements of the problem
and solution by John Smith in the final chapter of his fine book
Imperialism in the 21st Century published by your invaluable MR Press,
Michael. This passage is vibrant with possibilities, both terrifying and
hopeful. Among other things, Smith accounts in his book for the
prolonged hiatus in western radicalism by the "vast global shift of
production to low-wage countries, with the result that profits,
prosperity, and social peace in imperialist countries have become
qualitatively more dependent upon the proceeds of super-exploitation of
living labor in countries like Vietnam, Mexico, Bangladesh, and China.
It follows that this is not just a financial crisis, and it is not just
another crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of imperialism." That plus
capital's very successful prevention of labor mobility so far, despite
which millions are at extreme peril managing each year to migrate.
Along with a huge expansion of domestic, corporate, and sovereign
debt, the global shift of production gave the outmoded and
destructive capitalist system a respite that lasted for barely
twenty-five years. The “financial crisis” that brought this to an
end is a secondary infection, a sickness caused by the medicine
imbibed to relieve a deeper malaise, one for which capitalism has no
alternative remedies. Exponentially increasing indebtedness
succeeded in containing the overproduction crisis, but it has
brought the global financial system to the point of collapse.
Outsourcing has boosted profits of firms across the imperialist
world and sustained the living standards of its inhabitants, but
this has led to deindustrialization, has intensified capitalism’s
imperialist and parasitic tendencies, and has piled up global
imbalances that threaten to plunge the world into destructive trade
wars. All of the factors that produced this crisis—increasing debt,
asset bubbles, global imbalances—are being amplified by the effects
of the emergency measures designed to contain it. The irony of
zero–interest rate policy and quantitative easing is that their
greatest success—preserving the value of financial assets and thus
the wealth of those who own these financial assets—blocks the only
possible capitalist solution to the crisis, namely a massive
cancelation and reassignment of claims on social wealth asset
values. QE and ZIRP—Zero Interest Rate Policy, or “crack cocaine for
the financial markets,” in a memorable phrase uttered by a Goldman
Sachs banker —are therefore means of postponing the inevitable, of
kicking the can down the road while waiting and hoping for the
growth engine to restart. Although the global crisis first
manifested itself in the sphere of finance and banking, what’s now
engulfing the world is far more than a financial crisis, it is the
inevitable and now unpostponable outcome of the contradictions of
capitalist production itself. In just three decades, capitalist
production and its inherent contradictions have been utterly
transformed by the vast global shift of production to low-wage
countries, with the result that profits, prosperity, and social
peace in imperialist countries have become qualitatively more
dependent upon the proceeds of super-exploitation of living labor in
countries like Vietnam, Mexico, Bangladesh, and China. It follows
that this is not just a financial crisis, and it is not just another
crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of imperialism. (pp313-314)
The interaction between living labor and nature is the source of all
wealth. Capitalism’s frenzied exploitation of both has resulted not
only in a grave social and economic crisis, but also in a spreading
ecological catastrophe. Rising concentrations of CO2 in the
atmosphere, along with the rest of the filth generated by capitalist
production and dumped on land and into rivers and oceans, are
already causing extreme weather conditions across the Global South.
Capitalism’s tendency to exhaust labor and nature is as old as
capitalism itself, but like its voracious appetite for cheap labor
and its dream of circumventing production altogether through
financial alchemy, all of its destructive tendencies are reaching
their most extreme expression at the same time. The capitalist
destruction of nature means that this is not just capitalism’s
greatest-ever crisis, it is capitalism’s final crisis, an
existential crisis for humanity. From here, then, all roads lead
into the crisis. This, in the words of Cuban revolutionary leader
Raúl Valdés Vivó, is “un crisis sin salida del capitalismo,” a
crisis with no capitalist way out. The only way forward for humanity
is to “begin the transition to a communist mode of production. . . .
Either the peoples will destroy the imperialist power and establish
their own, or the end of history. It is not ‘socialism or
barbarism,’ as Rosa Luxemburg said in 1918, but socialism or
nothing.” (p315)
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