By Immanuel Wallerstein
The United States in decline? Few people today would believe this
assertion. The only ones who do are the U.S. hawks, who argue vociferously
for policies to reverse the decline. This belief that the end of U.S.
hegemony has already begun does not follow from the vulnerability that
became apparent to all on September 11, 2001. In fact, the United States
has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response to
the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this decline. To understand
why the so-called Pax Americana is on the wane requires examining the
geopolitics of the 20th century, particularly of the century's final three
decades. This exercise uncovers a simple and inescapable conclusion: The
economic, political, and military factors that contributed to U.S. hegemony
are the same factors that will inexorably produce the coming U.S. decline.
"The United States in decline" is an awkward expression for me. "Imperialism in decline" is not so much awkward as in need of explanation. "Capitalism or capital in decline" is a conception that demands clarification about modes of production.
Imperialism is much older than capital. Imperial powers have a rather long history on earth. At its root an imperial power is one that has the capacity to colonize others. What gives an imperial power this capacity is a certain development of its productive forces as expressed in its social and political organizations and military. As an abstraction - not considering the usual bloodletting and slaughter of the innocent, an imperial power is one that exports - in the last instance, a higher level of the material factors of production and social organizations to a less developed area or peoples. In this sense imperial is not in decline unless one is approaching the matter from the standpoint of a future society where the means of production has attained a degree of development and a world interactivity that has annihilated - in the main, differences in the development of the productive forces based on geography.
The hegemony of the United States or rather Anglo-American imperial bourgeoisie (capitalist) is another matter related to this specific evolution in the decay of capital. The decay of capital is conceptually fused with how one understands capital as a historically evolved specific mode of production.
The framework of that particular sector of Marxism from which I evolved understands capital to be a certain production of goods and services based on a specific form of buying and selling labor power. In its evolution capital has passed through specific boundaries of development beginning with what Marx and Engels called scattered production or handicraft; the overthrow of feudal economic and social structures in which capital was birthed; the transition to the domination of manufacture in society - in a strict since meaning "by hand," and through this phase to machino-facture (steam and horse power) to industrial production.
Today we are passing from industrial production (large machines driven by new energy source in the form of fossil fuel produced energy and the use of petroleum by products as lubricants, hence industrial) or electro-machino to the first phase of electro-computerized production. The reconfiguration of the societal infrastructure demands and presupposes the emergence of a new energy source to drive the process, which currently appears to be fuel cell energy.
Decline is therefore understood as a transition to a new mode of production and not simply expanding the boundary of capital or a production system based on profits as the driving force and inspiration for production. Decline emerges as opposed to a new boundary in capital because computerized production is a revolution of a magnitude that absolutely renders labor superfluous to the production process and undermine the value of products as commodities.
This in turn slowly raises the issue of a new configuration of how the productive forces are used to reproduce society or the demand for public property and production based on need as opposed to profits. We are experiencing a classic outbreak of the general crisis of Capital, wherein the gigantic forces of production outstrip the capacity of the market to consume its products and services. This classic outbreak was driven by some new features in the mode of accumulation in the form of speculation or the increasing tendency for capital to attain profitability increasingly divorced from the production of commodities.
This tendency for capital to attain profitability increasingly divorced from the production of commodities is related to the technological revolution that undermines the buying and selling of labor.
The undisputed tendency of our era is production with increasing less labor and consequently less surplus value production. This also means less wages in the relative and absolute meaning. With less wages and limited means of production, circulation of commodities becomes increasingly limited. The capitalist cannot realize the value in commodities. The period and law system of which Marx spoke is asserting itself for millions to see and understand in a graphic manner. Marx summarized the general features of the law of society as the following:
"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence — but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.
" (end of Quote)
Decline is understood - from my perspective, as society having reached "that certain stage" of transition. This was not the case 50 years ago. Rather, the various revolutionaries sought to come to power during an outbreak of a general crisis and establish public property relations.
Melvin P.
