The decline of the United States is the most concentrated expression of the crisis of world capitalism. The colossal industrial might and financial resources of American capitalism enabled it to resurrect world capitalism after World War II. The post-war system of international relations and the economic expansion which it fostered were organized by the American bourgeoisie to prevent a relapse into the conditions of disequilibrium, depression, war and revolution that had prevailed since 1914, and create a framework favorable to the expansion of American capitalism. The United States was the major factor for capitalist stability internationally. The loss by the US of its industrial supremacy and financial solvency has made it impossible for it to play such a role. On the contrary, American capitalism has become the greatest factor in the destabilization of world capitalism.
The epicentre of the economic crisis that produced the world Depression of the 1930s was the decline of European capitalism. Europe never really recovered from World War I. As a result, the US lacked sufficient markets for its surplus goods and surplus capital. The crisis in the US was overcome only by the immense stimulus provided by war production for World War II. In the war, the US demonstrated the superiority of its advanced production methods, far outstripping the capacity of Germany and Japan to turn out planes, ships, tanks and bullets and feed and equip their soldiers. At the end of the war, the supreme power of American capitalism was rooted in its industrial might, more than its military supremacy. To give some indication of the preponderance of American industry in the decade following the war: four out of every five cars sold throughout the world were produced in the US; America, which had 6 percent of the world's population, produced and consumed one-half of the world's goods. America's gross domestic product rose from $100 billion in 1940 to $300 billion in 1950 and $500 billion in 1960. The post-war boom rested, in the final analysis, on the increased rate of profit resulting from the use of American production methods. By the end of the 1960s, however, profit rates started to fall. This was to lead to a major global recession in 1974-75--the deepest to that point since the 1930s. The 1970s was the period when Keynesian deficit spending policies broke down in the face of "stagflation." It was also the decade that saw a sharp growth of European and Japanese imports of industrial goods into the US and a rapid deterioration in the share controlled by American companies of both the global and US markets in autos, steel, electronics and other sectors. The US share of auto production fell from 65 percent in 1965 to 20 percent by 1980. The United States produced 39.3 percent of the world's steel in 1955. By 1975 that percentage had fallen to 16.4 percent. In 1984 it was just 8.4 percent. What BusinessWeek at the time dubbed the "deindustrialization of America" marked a decisive shift of American capital from productive forms of investment to purely speculative forms of wealth accumulation. The indices of the growth of financial speculation in the US economy are staggering: In 1982, the profits of US financial companies accounted for 5 percent of total after-tax corporate profits. In 2007, they made up 41 percent of corporate profits. Between 1983 and 2007, the share of the financial sector's profits in US gross domestic product rose six-fold. The United States, by far the world's largest debtor nation, with a current account deficit of nearly $800 billion, is today sustained by the importation of $1 trillion in foreign capital every year, or over $4 billion every working day. There is an organic connection between the colossal growth of economic parasitism and the ever more brazen concentration of wealth at the pinnacle of society. CEO compensation exploded in an environment of uncontrolled speculation and political reaction. An ever-greater share of the social wealth was funneled from the working class to the financial elite. The collapse of the unions deprived the working class of any organized means of resisting the plundering of the national wealth. Hedge fund president John Paulson took in $3.7 billion in 2007 (by betting on a collapse of the subprime mortgage market) and the top 50 hedge fund managers netted a combined sum of $29 billion. The latter sum is about the same as the annual GDP of Kenya, a country of 32.5 million people, and a billion dollars less than the GDP of Sri Lanka, the home of 20 million people. If one takes Paulson's income for 2007 and divides it by 365, one arrives at a daily intake of $10,137,000. This breaks down to $422,374 an hour, $7,040 a minute, and $117 per second. If one were to assume that Paulson worked a 40-hour week, 52- week schedule, his hourly "wage" would be 24,136 times that of the average worker in the US. Is it any wonder that, in terms of its prevailing social principles, the US has become the most backward and irrational of all major capitalist countries? The malignant state of social relations is expressed in the soaring prison population in the US, whose 2.2 million inmates by far outnumber those of any other country. More than 1 in 100 American adults were incarcerated at the start of 2008. Another indicator of social decay is the fact that more than 40 percent of high school students in America's 50 largest cities fail to graduate. The United States today ranks 42nd in life expectancy, behind Singapore, Costa Rica and South Korea. In the figure of George W. Bush, the semi-literate scion of a wealthy and politically well-connected family, one sees the political personification of the criminality that has come to characterize so much of the corporate-financial elite. But it is impossible to find figures of much greater intellectual or moral stature in any section of the American political establishment. The internal rot of the ruling class and the rise to its summit of the most predatory and criminal elements has affected foreign policy decisions and the methods employed to carry them out. The recklessness, shortsightedness, ignorance and, one might add, incompetence exhibited by the American bourgeoisie in the management of its economic affairs has found a reflection in its foreign policy. The following is a list of direct US military interventions (invasions, air strikes, occupations, etc.) over the past quarter century: Lebanon (1983), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991, followed by twelve years of continuous air strikes), Somalia (1991-93), Haiti (1994), Afghanistan (1998), Sudan (1998), Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001 to the present), Iraq (2003 to the present), Haiti (2004), Somalia (2006), Pakistan (ongoing). In addition there have been dozens of US proxy wars and covert actions, including in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola and the former Yugoslavia. As in the domestic sphere, the American ruling elite has conducted itself on the world arena with increasing brutality and lawlessness. Obama and the degeneration of American liberalism The Obama campaign is the logical outcome of historical, political and ideological processes bound up with the decay of American liberalism. Obama is the end result of the assiduous promotion of identity politics over a period of nearly four decades-precisely the period of the visible and rapid economic decline of the United States. In the course of its protracted degeneration, American liberalism has increasingly sought to obscure the question of social class. After World War II, liberalism virtually dropped its Depression-era advocacy of structural reform of capitalism, along with its critique of monopoly, its denunciation of "economic royalists" and its advocacy of greater economic equality and some form of industrial democracy. Post- war liberalism placed its emphasis not on production and the producers of wealth, but rather on consumption and the consumer. The Democratic Party no longer styled itself as the party of the "working man," but rather as the party of the "middle class." The well-being of the middle class was to be ensured by providing an environment in which the corporate world could flourish and the market economy could provide full employment and rising living standards. The trade unions adopted this new liberal perspective and abandoned any struggle for serious economic reform. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations marked the denouement of American Cold War liberalism. The attempt of the Democratic Party to combine populist rhetoric and limited social reforms at home with counterrevolution abroad collapsed. The Vietnam War, which involved a level of savagery and violence without parallel since the heyday of the German Wehrmacht, exposed the counterrevolutionary essence of Cold War liberalism. It dealt a blow to the political credibility of the Democratic Party from which that party has never recovered. The impact of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggles, the urban riots and the strike wave fueled by worsening economic conditions undermined the New Deal coalition that had been formed under Roosevelt. The credibility of post-war American liberalism and the "middle class" consumer society it espoused had depended on a continuation of the economic expansion that followed the war and ever- rising prosperity. But by the late 1960s, the boom was beginning to unravel. Within a few years the Democratic Party was openly distancing itself from New Deal social reform policies. As it moved away from even the attenuated social reform policies of the post-war period, the Democratic Party sought to refashion itself, beginning with the McGovern campaign of 1972. In what was presented as a far-reaching democratic reform, the party organization was decked out with layer upon layer of "participatory" structures, and racial and gender diversity increasingly became the watchword. The party incorporated into its very structure the principle of identity politics. "Affirmative action" and similar policies were employed to dispense privileges to elite layers among various racial and ethnic constituencies and among women, while the living standards of the broad mass of working people, African-American and Latino as well as white, stagnated or declined. The Democratic Party assumed the form of an inchoate alliance of competing interest groups, including the civil rights establishment and more privileged layers of blacks and other minorities, feminist organizations, gay rights groups, environmentalists, etc. The unions, which had played a central role in the old New Deal coalition, became one among many interest groups allied to the Democratic Party. The embrace of identity politics by the Democratic Party was part and parcel of its further movement to the right. The elevation of race and gender as the touchstones of "progressive" politics corresponded to the repudiation by American liberalism of any conception of democracy that included economic equality and a curtailment of the power of the corporate-financial elite. The democratic and egalitarian impulses that had animated the movement of the African-American masses in the historic civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were undermined by the shift in political focus from the fight against segregation and poverty to a policy aimed at securing preferential treatment and privileges for a few. These processes of a reactionary character underlie the campaign of Obama. Barack Obama, a man of boundless opportunism and a certain measure of political dexterity, learned in the course of his apprenticeship in the corrupt and ruthless ways of Chicago Democratic Party politics to play the angles of multiculturalism and utilize his multiracial parentage to his advantage. In his candidacy, the attempt to use identity politics to conceal the class nature of American society, confuse and divide the working class, and give American imperialism a more "democratic" visage finds its consummation. Whatever the outcome of the election, the working class is already making important experiences with Obama. The breathtakingly rapid and brazen lurch to the right by Obama since he secured the nomination is dispelling illusions and providing a salutary lesson about the social interests served by the Democratic Party and identity politics. The emperor of hope has no clothes. He has nothing to offer the working class, except more war, poverty, fear and repression. On Nov 23, 4:26 pm, killer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I THINK HE HAS THE CONTEXT INWHICH TO BE A GREAT PRESIDENT.HE HAS AN > ECONOMIC AND A WAR TIME CRISIS TO DEAL WITH.THE TIMES NOW ARE VERY > ANALAGOUS TO 1932 WITH A GREAT DEPRESSION AT HOME AND FASCISM ABROAD > THE VERY FABRIC OF AMERICAN SOCIETY WAS BEING TORN APART.IT TOOK THE > OPEN MINDE, INNOVATIVE POLITICAL GENIUS OF FDR TO PUT IT BACK > TOGETHER.ALL OF THE SIGNS THUS FAR ARE ENCOURAGING AND I THINK OBAMA > CAN DO MANY OF THE SAME THINGS AND GET THE COUNTRY BACK ON A HOPEFUL > ROUTE.HE MUST END THE WAR IN IRAQ, GET OSAMA,AND REFORM THE FINANCIAL > SYSTEM, AND FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE THE FOCUS OF AMERICAN INDUSTRIES > CONCENTRATING ON IMFASTRUCTURE REPAIR AND GREEN ENERGY.THIS IS A TALL > ORDER BUT I THINK THIS GUY HAS THE LARGENESS OF PERSONALITY TO GET IT > DONE.I SURE PRAY HE DOES. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. 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