#pcb
On the worsening of the international situation
18 November 2024
by Jorge Cadima
(machine translation)
Imperialism is sinking the planet into chaos and war. Among the terrible news that are coming daily, it does not need to lose sight of the general context and understand the causes and nature of the crisis. In order to identify the main enemy, the resistance forces and potential allies. In order to be able to streamline the movement of the workers and peoples for Peace and against the promoters of war – a movement that will ultimately be the decisive factor in shaking the way to disaster.
Humanity is being led into a huge catastrophe. The idea of a Third World War in the midst of a nuclear age is called into place. Senior leaders of the main imperialist powers (USA, England, EU countries), the European Parliament and NATO, publicly defend missile attacks against Russia, a major nuclear power, while covering up attacks by the Ukrainian regime on nuclear power. The genocide of the Palestinian people has been mercilessly pursuing for more than a year, although increasingly removed from the headlines of the capitalist media, in an attempt to make the ongoing barbarism – barbarism carried out by Israel, but armed, financed, sponsored and protected by the great imperialist powers. The crimes of Israel/USA increasingly openly assume a monstrous nature, open terrorism against civilians and mass extermination in Palestine, and now also in Lebanon and other countries of the Middle East. The US/EU provocations against China are up tone, triggering the opening of a new open-ended front of conflict, this time in the Far East. The danger of an uncontrolled spread of the ongoing world conflict is real. As always, growing militarism is accompanied by the strengthening of authoritarianism, repression and censorship, the promotion of fascist or fascist forces, the attack on the rights of workers and peoples with a serious increase in levels of exploitation. Imperialism is sinking the planet into chaos and war.
Among the terrible news that are coming daily, it does not need to lose sight of the general context and understand the causes and nature of the crisis. In order to identify the main enemy, the resistance forces and potential allies. In order to be able to streamline the movement of the workers and peoples for Peace and against the promoters of war – a movement that will ultimately be the decisive factor in shaving the way to disaster.
The Decline of the Imperialist Powers
The moment we live in is the result of the profound crisis of the traditional imperialist powers and their economic, social, political and military system. The US and the old European powers, whose prosperity has historically settled on colonial and neocolonial domination over the rest of the planet, is already in an undisguised historical decline. The euphoria of his counter-revolutionary victory at the end of the 20th century momentarily hid this process, but did not reverse it.
This crisis is evident in its relative economic decline; in the multiplication of the great financial crises that (partly from 2007-8) have put to nuance the unsustainability of the system; in the exponential growth of the debt (public and private) of the main imperialist powers, also resulting from the spending (public) in its gigantic war machine and subversion; in the growing difficulty in imposing its military hegemony at the planetary level (resistance of Venezuela and the resistance of the United States.etc.). The crisis translates into a marked loss of consensus among the peoples of the imperialist centers themselves (although this discontent is often channeled into false ‘system opponents’). And it is reflected in an unprecedented multiplication of the cleavages and internal disputes between the ruling classes of the imperialist centers, of which the weakening of central power in the US and the saga of its presidential elections are examples. The danger is real that, in this context, adventurous actions of the most fascistizing sectors of imperialist power emerge, of which Israel and the Zionist sectors in the US and EU are a living example.
When in 1991 the US became the ‘single superpower’, after the demise of the socialist USSR, they seemed destined to hegemonize the planet for a long period. But it is now evident the economic ‘challenge’ that the old powers of the G7 (USA, Germany, England, France, Japan, Italy and Canada) face the meteoric rise of the People’s Republic of China, and also India, Indonesia, Brazil and other countries of the once called ‘Third World’ as well as Russia. With all its limitations, the GDP numbers (in Purchasing Power Parity) reflect this reality. According to IMF estimates for 2024, G7 countries account for 29.6% of world GDP, while the five original BRICS countries (China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa) accounted for 32.7%, a number that rises to 36.7%, joining the five countries that entered last year for this organization (Ir, Egypt, UAE, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia (1). 30 years ago, in 1994, the corresponding percentages were 45% (G7), 17% (BRICS to 5 futures) and 22% (BRICS to 10). According to World Bank figures for PPP GDP in 2023, three of the four largest economies now belong to the BRICS (China first, India in third and Russia in fourth, the latter having surpassed Japan and Germany (2). The list of countries that have already requested, or expresses an interest in joining the BRICS process, already exceeds three dozen. At the G20 meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the Russian MNE reported that the use of the dollar in transactions between the BRICS countries does not reach 29%, 60% with the use of their national currencies. This percentage rises to 90% in transactions between countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (which includes Russia and China) (3).
Very heterogeneous and even contradictory in their composition, the BRICS have the particularity of having emerged outside the structures of world imperialist domination. Seated on the China-Russia axis, they claim to defend their national interests, fighting for rules of ‘multipolarity’, alternatives to the U.S. planetary dictatorship and its vassals. The iron control that the US has exercised over the international financial system and its structures since World War II and the role of the dollar as a hegemonic reserve currency, have always been used as a weapon of domination by the US over the rest of the planet. But the successive crises that from the 1980s broke out in countries subject to financial ‘interventions’ (Brazil, Asian tigers, Russia, etc.) and the increasingly blatant use of these hegemonized tools by the US as a weapon of war (generalized sanctions: confiscation of the national property of countries that refuse to submit – Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and the imposition of ‘transnational rules’, arrogating the law of the U.social, economic and political systems, in the class nature of their systems of power, in their history and culture – seeking alternative forms of cooperation. The future will tell whether, and on what terms, this cooperation will march forward (4): whether a will to autonomy will prevail or if the imperialist hesitations, contradictions, threats and pressures (or even subversions) will hinder the process.
The passage from the ‘unipolar time’ to world chaos
The question is natural: how was imperialism possible, and in particular its main head, the US, to have gone from its moment of almost planetary hegemony in the 1990s to this decline?
From the 1980s, and developing processes that came from behind, the US and British economies were being deindustrialized and transformed into economies based on financial speculation and renting. This process corresponded to the attempt to counteract the effects of the law (discovered by Marx) of the trend of the rate of profit. Profits that were scarce in productive activities – the well-designated ‘real economy’ – were sought through fantastic financial operations, each more speculative (such as the ‘future’ and ‘derived’). This process was accompanied by the relocation of effective production to distant stops (imperialist globalization) by multinational companies that thus benefited from lower wage levels and channeled their mega-profits into the financial system controlled by imperialism (accounts and financial institutions, in much of the US and England). As an additional political advantage, the imperialist centers could thus destroy the large industrial centers of their countries (as happened from the 1980s, also in Portugal), putting the working class and its organizations on the defensive. It looked like the hen of the golden eggs.
But the viability of this system of imperialist domination requires total control of the world financial system. And the punishment of those who refuse to submit. This in turn requires the use of military force to destroy any attempt of sovereign affirmation of other countries. The context that emerged in the late 20th century, with the demise of the USSR and the counter-revolutionary victories in Eastern Europe, helped imperialism to impose its planetary hegemony. On the one hand, the alternative that the USSR and the socialist system represented in the economic and financial plane disappeared. Almost all countries came under the IMF cleaver and other institutions in the service of the US planetary dictatorship. On the other hand, the US ‘unipolar time’ allowed it to launch a brutal succession of wars of aggression that tried to destroy any shred of sovereignty: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and other countries felt in the skin as the ‘laws of the free market’ work. They became evident the mass recourse to lying and provocation, the unprincipled use of authentic armies of terror, such as ISIS (Islamic State). Almost all countries that wanted to preserve some element of sovereignty were victims of the mechanisms of ‘hybrid warfare’, the subversions and ‘color revolutions’ of imperialism. The process of ceaseless expansion of NATO, which included the coups and wars in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine and other ex-Socialist or even former Soviet countries, as well as attempts at subversion of China (such as Tien An Men and Hong Kong) showed that no country, not even the largest and most populous, was out of the sight of imperialism. It was the revival, in a new context, of the process of world expansion of imperialism a hundred years before.
But the contradiction is dialectically in all living phenomena, and the imperialist chicken laid not only golden eggs.
England and the USA, whose world power had settled on industrial development unparalleled in its time, have become increasingly fictitious economies, where effective value has been replaced by the paper (and bits) of real underlying value. Deindustrialization and the tax evasion of big capital feeds public and private indebtedness (the debt is the ‘raw matter’ in which the banking and financial system lives). The costs of the imperialist war and subversion even more fuel the public debt. And the conflict in Ukraine shows that the deindustrialization of the imperialist centers also has unexpected results, namely the inability to produce armaments in the quantities required for a large-scale ‘conventional’ war.
The unsustainability of the new Anglo-Saxon ‘economic model’ has become evidence with the outbreak of the 2007-8 crisis. The ‘unconventional’ methods of trying to stop the crisis created unlimited amounts of money that was delivered to large finance, at the same time that billions of financial waste (at the time there was talk of ‘toxic products’) were transferred to central banks, with states as guarantors. A gigantic fraud, which rewarded offenders and punished taxpayers, accelerating the processes of centralization and concentration of wealth. But if these ‘unorthodox’ methods have avoided the total implosion of the system for now, debt volumes have also increased, which today is growing exponentially and therefore unsustainable. The US public debt is around $35 billion (5) (when its annual GDP, estimated by the IMF, is 28 billion). The debt interest alone paid in the last quarter of 2023 totals a staggering $1 billion (6), more than the country’s gigantic official annual military budget (7). In the UK, too, the national debt has already exceeded 100% of GDP (8). In Japan, public debt exceeds 200% of GDP. This situation is unsustainable, especially since the exponential growth of debt happens at a time of a general weakening of the mechanisms of imperialist world domination (notably the role of the dollar as a reserve currency). There are growing difficulties in finding who buys the US public debt. Also for this reason came the policy of high interest rates that, however, further depresses economic activity and ends up increasing the debt itself. The hen is ceasing to lay eggs and only lays promissory notes.
At the same time, the relocation of production from the imperialist centers contributed to the growth of other countries, namely China, which has always maintained sovereign and state control over its financial system and always considered that the low wages that attracted the colossal external investments were a transitional phase, within the framework of a development process that was kept under public control. China is today, not only the factory of the planet, but is present in many high-tech and high-tech industries (informatics, telecommunications, electric vehicles, high-speed trains, space program, etc.). China’s spectacular growth is based on the achievements of its great revolution of 75 years ago (launch of the industrial bases, literacy and raising the cultural level of the people, etc.), but it was carried out in the fundamentals with the international rules established by imperialism. The successes of China’s PR led imperialism to throw away all the platters of its propaganda (‘free markets’, opening of borders, globalization) and turning to mechanisms of protectionism that are increasingly declared (custom tariffs, national subsidies, sanctions). As on so many other fronts, hypocrisy is revealed. The ‘rules’ change in the middle of the game, always with the taste of imperialist interests.
This process of deindustrialisation is now advancing in the EU, particularly in Germany. The US sabotage of the NordStream pipeline, which destroyed the cheap Russian energy supply that was vital to German industry, and the suicidal economic sanctions on Russia – which the European Commission seems determined to extend now to China – are destroying the German economy at an ever-faster pace, while the Russian economy reveals unexpected resistance and greater growth than the EU. Volkswagen’s recent announcement that it is considering closing, for the first time in its history, factories in Germany, is an example among others. A long series of bankruptcies threatens to stall the famous ‘EU locomotive’ (9). Mário Draghi’s Report in September reflects awareness of the problem, although the recipe is more of the same.
The accelerated militarisation of the EU is a dangerous signal to the peoples. The European Commission’s ‘war economy’, reproducing in the EU yet another facet of the ‘American model’, is proof that the EU vassals have not learned the lessons of what has led to the deep crisis of their American beacon.
Isn’t it Putin’s fault?
There are those who want to convince us that if the world is on the brink of war, ‘it’s Putin’s fault’. They are the ones who try to start telling the story from February 24, 2022. They are the same ones who try to tell the story of Palestine from October 7, 2023. In one case and in others they erase decades of history. They erase their own crimes and their own wars. They lie and erase their long history of never-be-held promises, of always torn agreements.
In the three decades leading up to Russian military intervention in Ukraine, all wars were initiated by the US, NATO and the EU powers. The attempt to imposition by the force of the US planetary dictatorship that is behind the destruction of the Middle East and the rampant chaos on the planet was also present in the endless expansion of NATO to the East, in the succession of coups and subversions in the countries surrounding Russia, aiming to transform them from friends and partners into open enemies of that country. The destruction of Yugoslavia, which had its high point in the 78 days of NATO bombing in 1999, is the marching plan of imperialism towards Russia.
Putin’s Russia is a capitalist country. This is also visible in his economic policy; in his criticisms (which are accentuated) to the role of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the history of Russia (although it brings advantage of the gigantic work of economic, social, political and military construction of the USSR); in his distrust in the intervention of the peoples (not only in Ukraine, as in the Donbass himself). But the great “crime” that the imperialist powers do not forgive Putin is to have resisted the subjugation and dismantling of his country. It has not allowed them to complete the work of pillage and the nap of their gigantic natural resources. As Putin himself confesses, there were many of his illusions (and of all those who collaborated in the destruction of the Soviet Union) about the ‘Western world’. But, disrupting Yeltsin’s handsome path, Putin began a consolidation process that brought back a Russia that was on the brink of collapse in the 1990s, and asserted it as a sovereign and viable country. Putin’s Russia has struggled to be accepted as a ‘partner’ of the imperialist powers. He even offered to join NATO. But the plans of US imperialism and its allies were the same ones that applied to Yugoslavia. The siege of Russia, the incessant enlargement of NATO, the tearing of the disarmament treaties, the coup d’état of the Ukrainian Nazis in 2014 and the “Western” non-compliance with the 2014 Minsk Accords (preparing the maintenance of the Donbass in Ukraine, with the status of autonomy), were pieces of the path that led Russia to consider that it had to fight to survive.
Already a quarter of a century ago General Loureiro dos Santos revealed that the US was preparing a world war to preserve its planetary hegemony (10). The historical truth is that if the Russian response to the offensive of imperialism that has long sought its destruction can be the object of criticism in the forms and means, the fundamental problem is another. As Palestine made abundantly clear. Those who promote and defend the genocide of the Palestinian people are the same ones that promote the eternalization of the war in Ukraine, the enlargement of the conflict, the fight to the last Ukrainian to defend the interests of the planetary hegemony of imperialism. In one case and in another, the US and its NATO vassals do not have the interests of the peoples or the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations.
The main danger of war, the main threat to peoples and humanity, lies, today as in the past, in imperialism. And in his current attempt to impose the US planetary dictatorship. In the crisis that led to World War II, the main dangers of war came from the rising powers, which sought to modify the correlation of world forces by war. Today, it is the declining powers – the US and its EU, NATO and Israel vassals – that constitute the main danger of planetary warfare. They refuse to accept their decline. They refuse to lose their hegemony. They refuse new rules of international relationship that do not lie in domination. The ruling classes who consider themselves superior beings and holders of the ‘divine right’ to exploitation, colonization, slavery and extermination as a way of maintaining their wealth and power are willing to all crimes to maintain their class domination – convinced of their impunity. As the martyrdom of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples shows in the hands of the criminal Zionist/American power.
The Role of People
In this very dangerous and complex framework, a crucial element remains far below what is necessary: the intervention of peoples.
The profoundly harmful consequences of counter-revolutionary victories and the alteration of the correlation of world forces of the late 20th century have not yet been overcome, including the weakening of the communist and workers’ movement. That were the forces that, in the historical course of Humanity, knew how to create and advance the great historical alternative to capitalism, from the great October Socialist Revolution 107 years ago, being at the center of the defeat of the most barbaric and genocidal expressions of capitalism, such as Nazi-fascism.
Anti-communism, even when dressed in ‘left’ or ‘modern’ clothing, is an obstacle to the necessary development of the anti-imperialist resistance and struggle movement. Anti-communism serves as a biombo for attacks on the victims of imperialism and to isolate them in its resistance, thus being an objective factor of aid to imperialism.
There is still a way to go in identifying the great masses of the common enemy of all peoples: imperialism, with US imperialism in the first place.
But the popular components of anti-imperialist resistance, namely the heroic resistance of the martyred Palestinian people and the peoples of the Middle East in general, are of great importance. And they have contributed to generate a huge global movement of solidarity that is a factor of weight in the world context and points the way forward and intensify.
The work to rebuild a great world anti-imperialist movement is a more than urgent task: it is vital for humanity to be able to bar and defeat the enormous dangers it is faced with.
Notes
(1) Saudi Arabia has not yet formalised its accession, although it is participating in the meetings.
(2) In the IMF estimates the Russian economy is still in sixth place, behind Japan and Germany.
(3) Text of Lavrov's intervention in https://karlof1.substack.com/p/lavrov-g-20-on-ano-sidelines
(4) This article was written before the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia.
(5) ‘Trillions’ in the designation of U.S. finance.
(6) Forbes, 30.5.24. This value of the US debt service is more than triple the nominal GDP of Portugal.
(7) The true amounts of the US domination machine are not known. A very important ‘parallel economy’, linked to trafficking of all kinds, finances the activities of the CIA and other secret services.
(8) kynews, 20.9.24.
(9) Politico.eu, 13.7.23 and 19.9.24.
News Log, 13.3.00.
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