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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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