"Is Russia an Imperialist country?" -- That's Not the Right Question to Ask

V. I. Lenin’s pamphlet, Imperialism, remains the leading elaboration of the concept of imperialism for Marxists. It is the starting point for any discussion of the global dynamics of capitalism from the late- nineteenth century until today.

While capitalism has taken twists, turns, and even detours since Lenin’s time, the destination remains the same-- the exploitation of labor for profit, wherever workers and resources can be found. Capitalism’s evolution, concentration, growth, and uneven development are the necessary conditions for imperialism. Imperialism respects no social or political borders.

The pamphlet, Imperialism, captures the features of modern-- monopoly-- capitalism. Yet, many seemingly fail to read Lenin’s subtitle: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International Publishers, 2004). They fail to grasp that Lenin is writing about, elaborating on, explaining a particular stage of capitalism, not characteristics of individual states. He is describing an historically bound period, a period in which capital in its mature, financially organized, monopoly form comes to dominate the entire world through the conquests of the “great powers.” In Lenin’s words:

…we must say that the characteristic feature of this period [imperialism] is the final partition of the globe-- not in the sense that a new partition is impossible-- on the contrary, new partitions are possible and inevitable-- but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet… in the future only redivision is possible… (p. 76)

As Marx’s method demands, Lenin is addressing processes, tendencies-- in this case, a tendency for capital to not merely dominate nation-states, even regions, but the entire world. It is the completing or redividing that defines imperialism as an historical era, a process that-- through competition-- creates ever-changing alliances and blocs. In the final analysis, it is intense competition carried beyond national borders that may ultimately be settled with arms, by wars.   

These processes that Lenin associates with imperialism occur unevenly and in different forms. After the Bolshevik revolution, monopoly capitalism’s domination of the entire world was interrupted by the existence of the Soviet Union. An anti-Communist crusade on the part of the great capitalist powers ensued, but the underlying process remained the same: delivering every worker and peasant into the arms of monopoly and finance capital.

Again, after World War II, the growing power and influence of a socialist community proved decisive in the liberation of nearly all of what were once colonies of the great powers. New “independent” countries sprung up in Asia and Africa. But the underlying tendency identified by Lenin expressed itself again through a new expression of imperialism: neo-colonialism. 

Neo-colonialism maintained the old economic advantages for the dominating great powers, but without the burden of occupation and administration. “Spheres of influence,” a more benign term coined in the nineteenth century, captured the tendency for capital to penetrate every nook and cranny of the world, while masking the raw subjugation implied by “colonies.” Thus, a dependent “independence” was born, cemented more by economic necessity than naked coercion.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the most viable economic scaffold for independent development outside of the imperialist system was eliminated. Western commentators vigorously celebrated the prospect of unimpeded capitalist penetration to all countries without exception. Huge labor markets entered the capitalist system from Eastern Europe and from Asia, dramatically lowering the costs of goods, services, and most importantly, labor. 

Capitalism got a second wind, enjoying higher, more stable growth and profit rates. 

Capitalists scurried to pry open new markets, remove impediments to trade, accelerate foreign investments, secure mutuality in a manner unseen since the early decades of modern imperialism. Indeed, the later decades of the twentieth century resembled that earlier period of classical imperialism to many Marxists.

Ironically, capitalist triumphalism served to underscore the timelessness of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Once again, the global economy was dominated by the mobilization of great powers, seeking economic advantage (exploitation) and spheres of influence. 

With the US, like Great Britain in its nineteenth-century glory, claiming the right to determine the terms of economic activity and trade for the world, a period of cooperation and peace was foreseen. On this view, the capitalist economic links and mutual dependency would serve to cement social and political relations and insure stability in international relations. A new world order would be welcomed by all and guaranteed by the US.

Those few in the West familiar with early-twentieth-century Marxist revisionism noted that this fiction was remarkably similar to Karl Kautsky’s theory of “ultra-imperialism,” a theory that the big powers would divide the world and settle the matter between themselves without friction or conflict. 

Lenin, much earlier, mocked this idea. When he wrote Imperialism in 1916, he saw the catastrophe of World War I as the decisive refutation of the idea of stable imperialism or imperialist equilibrium. 

Most of the Western, non-Communist left, alienated from Leninism and blind to historical parallels, scrambled to make sense of the “new” post-Soviet era, failing to connect it with the classical imperialism described by Lenin and his adherents. At a loss for a theory, they cryptically coined the vacuous term “globalization” to describe monopoly capital’s celebratory lap. 

Post-Marxist, post-Fordist, Postmodernist theories abounded. Some academic “Marxists” thought the late twentieth century ushered in an era of the withering of the nation-state. Others thought we were seeing the rise of a supra-state, Empire, a totalizing entity sprung on the world like an alien invader.

The celebration of capitalist triumphalism came soon to an abrupt end with the return of constant, near-endless wars and frequent political and economic crises. Along with the exit of “benign” imperialism, leftist theoretical fantasies faded.

Global trade shrank in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 crisis and tensions between capitalist countries grew over who would gain and who would bear the burden of a sluggish or stagnant global economy. Centrifugal forces in the EU split the EU from north to south.

Germany dominates EU policies, imposing one-size-fits-all austerity on diverse, unevenly developed states.

PRC’s impressive entry into the global capitalist economy and subsequent remarkable growth threatens US hegemony, creating intensified competition and tensions.

The US has sought to quell independent development outside of the global hierarchies, using surrogates, war-by-other-means: sanctions, boycotts, and tariffs. And with exceedingly obstinate resistance, the US engages its coup-fomenting apparatus or unleashes its military to shepherd those who dare to escape from the US constructed imperialist corral.

“New” great powers replaced or changed places with the line-up active in Lenin’s time. The EU, despite its member differences, scraped together an imperialist agenda under the US stewardship of NATO, as witnessed by its participation in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Saudi Arabia, infused with petro-dollars, seeks to enforce its influence over its neighbors, demonstrated most recently by its bloody war in Yemen.

Even tiny Israel participates in the imperialist scramble by annexing territory from its neighbors and from the Palestinian people.

Where there is capitalism, there is a drive for territory, resources, labor, or influence.

As in Lenin’s time, countries fit into this chaotic, unstable cauldron in different ways-- sometimes as greater powers, sometimes as lesser powers or victims. Competition-- promotion or protection of economic interests-- stir this cauldron. 

In Imperialism, Lenin does not identify countries as “imperialist,” without qualification. It would violate his steadfast recognition of uneven development to do so. In Chapter VI, The Division of the World Among the Great Powers, he simply identifies those countries (the big six!) that have been most active between 1876 and 1914 in acquiring colonies.

He can be viewed as establishing an imperialist hierarchy, but this too can be misleading. Lenin, always attentive to historical contingency and shifting social forces, goes to some length to describe the variety within the “great powers”:

… great differences still remain; and among the six powers, we see, firstly, young capitalist powers (America, Germany, Japan) which progressed very rapidly; secondly, countries with an old capitalist development (France and Great Britain) ... and, thirdly, a country (Russia) which is economically most backward, in which modern capitalist imperialism is enmeshed, so to speak, in a particularly close network of pre-capitalist relations. (p.81) [my emphasis]

Lenin leaves no doubt that a country (czarist Russia) can be a big player in the imperialist scramble for colonies (or spheres of influence) while remaining a less-than-robust capitalist country with remnants or foretells of other (non-capitalist) economic formations or features. In other words, their place in the imperialist system is not strictly determined by their place in the capitalist hierarchy-- they can be a bright young capitalist star or a decadent, old star clinging to a brilliant past, while still playing a decisive role in the empire games.

It would be wrong, as some have argued, to mechanically take Lenin’s “five essential features” found in Chapter VII as giving a criterion for admission into some kind of imperialist club. It could not be clearer that Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism is not about the status of individual countries in the imperialist system, but about imperialism as a whole.

Capital concentration, the merging of financial capital with industrial capital, the export of capital, international monopolies, and the territorial division of the world (spheres of interest) are features of the imperialist stage of capitalism, and not necessarily any individual country in the imperial project.

Countries-- small or large, developed or backward, endowed or impoverished-- play different roles at different times in the march of imperialism.

Whether it is czarist Russia (a mix of emerging capitalist relations in urban areas and only weakly exited feudal relations in rural areas) or Putin’s Russia (a stunted industrial capitalist economy, but with enormous essential resources), the capacity to participate in great power activity, to enlarge or protect spheres of interest, to confront other great powers is an unquestionable reality. To hide this reality-- this active participation in the conflict with other capitalist countries-- behind the facade that Russia does not meet the “five essential features” characterizing the imperialist era is sheer sophistry. 

Lenin is clear. Apart from the “great powers” are a host of countries whose “participation” in the imperialist system is complex. The dialectics of uneven development produces no ideal types.

 Lenin speaks of smaller players in the imperialist system that have diverse relations with imperialism. Some have their own colonies but “retain their colonies only because of the conflicting interests, frictions etc., among the big powers…” They risk losing their colonies to a new colonial “share-out” to the big powers (page 81). 

He also recognizes “semi-colonies” like Persia, China, and Turkey which were, in his time, nominally independent, but exploited profoundly by the big powers. He refers to them as “examples of transitional forms which are to be found in all spheres of nature and society”; they are in “a middle stage” (page 81). Today, all three have transitioned into bigger players in the capitalist firmament.

In his discussion of Argentina and Portugal, Lenin anticipates the mid-twentieth century Marxist concept of neo-colonialism, discussing how independent countries can be tied into the imperialist nexus as financially dependent or as a protectorate (page 85-86). 

Thus, Lenin shows, with great nuance, that imperialism is a dynamic global system, constantly in motion, and that countries participate in the system in many ways. The imperatives of monopoly capital enjoin all capitalist countries to seek advantage in the competition for resources, markets, and labor. In this struggle, there are those that become the biggest powers and dominate others through the exercise of their power. Lesser powers lose to the most powerful, but may aspire to challenge, nonetheless, or exercise their power over the less powerful. The system tends to engage all economies in relations of dominance and dependence. Competition breeds aggression and war. 

Lenin derisively notes the petty-bourgeois reformist tendency to separate imperialism from capitalism, to deny “the indissoluble bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the very foundations of capitalism…” Without recognizing capitalism as the source of imperialism and war, anti-imperialism remains “a ‘pious wish’”. (page 111).

It might be useful to summarize this discussion by showing how a closer read of Imperialism might shed light on twenty-first century imperialism.

1. Twenty-first-century imperialism shares more features with the imperialism of Lenin’s time than differences.

2. Imperialism constitutes a system of global competition for resources, markets, and labor-power that pits capitalist countries against one another to establish spheres of interest and a better field of operation for its monopolies. The struggle instigated by the US for dominance of Ukraine involves monopolies in the energy sector and the weapons industry, as well as an attempt to secure and expand existing spheres of interest. While the US is the more powerful great power and the instigator, Russia is an aspiring great power drawn into invading a “transitional” country-- Ukraine. With successive corrupt governments, Ukraine has, since its independence, longed to be a protectorate of a great power, whoever offers the best bargain. At stake are the interests of the various ruling classes.

3. The argument popular among Western leftists over whether Russia is an imperialist country or an anti-imperialist country opposing US and EU imperialism is a sterile, scholastic debate. From a Leninist perspective, today’s Russia, like czarist Russia, is a nascent capitalist country vying for a position as a leading force in the scramble for markets and spheres of interest. Russia’s engagements in defiance of US imperialism-- in Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.-- is just that: defiance of a rival. That powerful rivals are aggressively threatening Russia’s ambitions is notable, but of little bearing on the interests of the Russian, Ukrainian, US, or EU working class. 

4. In fact, the Ukraine war’s “progress” has-- as a Leninist perspective would predict-- dramatically and negatively affected the fate of workers globally. Millions of lives have been disrupted, harmed, or ended.

5. The demise of the Soviet Union has freed the hand of imperialism, producing a world substantially congruent with early-twentieth-century imperialism. Some of the players have changed or assumed different roles, but the logic of great-power imperialism is intact. Those of us who defend the historical role of the Soviet Union must dispel any remaining romantic attachment to today’s Russia. It participates in the global system of imperialism as a great power.

6. As Lenin warns, the attempt to separate imperialism from its capitalist roots destines anti-imperialism to ineffectuality-- “petty-bourgeois reformism.” Moralistic anti-imperialism, what Lenin calls “the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy,” collapses into pacifism-- a posture good for the soul, but impotent against the schemes of the great powers. Today’s leftist celebration of a projected “multipolar” capitalist world is a further attempt to separate great-power rivalries from their roots in capitalist-- specifically, monopoly-- interests. Multipolarity was a feature of imperialism in the prelude to World War I. In fact, the attempt to impose multipolarity upon a world saddled with the domination of the British Empire was a critical factor leading to World War I.

7. The retreat from Leninism is essentially a retreat from socialism. Desperate, unfounded faith in (a) the efficacy of multipolarity, in (b) the hope of finding a principled anti-imperialist rallying point around an eviscerated, ravaged former socialist state now owned by mega-billionaires, in (c) the miraculous transformation of the existing money-driven, elite-led Western bourgeois parties, and in (d) the belief that the splintered, self-absorbed, multi-interest, multi-identity left can magically coalesce into a force for radical change are all products of a loss of confidence in the socialist project. 

The lessons of history and history’s most brilliant teachers are the best guides for the future we want. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com 

Stop the Spiral of Death and Destruction

Everything happening today in Ukraine must be weighed on the scales of history, understood in terms of precedents that attach meaning and clarity to today’s events. 

Over a hundred years ago, elites and their scribes in Europe were feverishly debating the meaning of an event in Sarajevo. As tensions mounted, they were to choose sides in a struggle between a small nation of Slavs raising their grievances against an aging, anachronistic empire in East-Central Europe. Four years later, twenty million had died, roughly half civilians, in a war that raged throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

In 1914, the questions of who caused the growing hostilities, who was at fault, who was evil, and who was good seemed burning questions. The web of alliances, the sensational press, the underlying economic interests, and the rabid nationalism of the time fueled a spiral of military mobilization, belligerence, and ultimatums that-- once in motion-- led inexorably to war of a scale never seen before.

In retrospect, the “burning questions” of 1914 were not the important, decisive questions at all.

For the millions of poor, working-class victims of the war, the only important question was what kind of a world allows a spark in Sarajevo to lead to the shameful slaughter of World War I.  

Tragically, most had joined the march to war, including the large leftist political parties that presumed to represent the interests of working people. 

Standing against the madness, against the war hysteria, were a motley group of rump socialists, pacifists, and revolutionary Marxists, principally V.I. Lenin. In 1915, they met in Zimmerwald, Switzerland to analyze the betrayal of internationalism by the left and to unify around an anti-war strategy. 

Soon after the Zimmerwald conference, Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, bringing clarity to both the era in which World War I occurred as well as an understanding of the ultimate causes of war in that era and ours, as well.

Lenin “proved that the war of 1914-18 was imperialistic (that is, an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies, ‘spheres of interest’ of finance capital, etc.” [Lenin’s Preface to the French and German Editions of Imperialism].

In our time, the demise of the Soviet Union, so-called “globalization,” a false perception of the decline of the nation-state, the “end of history,” and other real and imagined changes to global capitalism were thought by an immature or opportunistic Western left to signal the irrelevance of Lenin’s thinking.

But the nation-state has never been more relevant than today. Monopoly capitalism continues to dominate the global economy, expanding explosively in the crisis-ridden twenty-first century. Finance capital has never known both the decisive influence and share of profits that it does in the most advanced capitalist countries. And the division of the world “among great powers” is today sharper and more intense than at any time since the 1950s and the then large-scale people’s movement for liberation from classical colonialism. Lenin’s Imperialism could not be more fitting for understanding today’s world.

Consequently, “imperialistic wars,” as Lenin describes them, have been occurring more and more frequently since the demise of the Soviet Union.

As Lenin would no doubt affirm, the war in Ukraine launched by Russia is a continuation of the series of brazen “imperialistic” wars and wars by other means typical of the twenty-first century, from economic sanction-wars against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and other states and “hot” wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and others targeted by “the great powers.” 

Ukraine is no different. The Russian government, with its own interests and twisted anti-Leninist and great-power nationalist ideology, initiated a brutal invasion, inflicting terrible costs on the working class of both Ukraine and Russia. This is an undeniable fact and despicable.

At the same time, Russia’s capitalist elites were responding to several decades of veritable siege by the US, NATO, and a tag-along EU. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US, NATO and the most violently nationalistic, anti-Russian Eastern European EU states have encroached on the borders of Russia with missiles, troops, and provocations, baiting Russia into responding to their aggression. Note how the US administration ruled out direct military engagement early on in the crisis.

One cannot help but be reminded of US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s alleged “Afghan trap” when he supposedly baited the USSR into attempting to restore stability to the then Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1979, subsequently overseeing a
massive arming of the mujahideen (including the Taliban) and a counter-revolutionary bloodbath.

The US similarly baited the Saddam Hussein Iraqi regime into invading Kuwait in 1991 when ambassador April Glaspie assured Saddam that the US "inspired by the friendship and not by confrontation, does not have an opinion" on the dispute.

Drawing adversaries into ill-advised action is an old trick of US foreign policy.

For the US, the most insistent “big power” pressing Russia, the stakes are (1) markets for the military industry: anti-tank weapons, air-defense weapons, F-35s (a particularly important boondoggle), and other advanced weaponry and (2) markets for the energy industry: particularly wresting the natural gas industry from Russia’s low-cost pipelines to higher-cost liquified natural gas imports, the products of the US fracking revolution.

Already, the US has won massive weapons purchases to replace the weapons donated to Ukraine by other ultra-nationalist Eastern European countries. Both Germany and France have committed to huge increases in their respective military budgets, which will further energize the US war industry (Finland is now pressing to join NATO).

Germany has committed to a new, costly LNG terminal to receive liquified natural gas in the future, turning away from the cheaper, more efficiently delivered gas available from Russia. The Western European allies of the US have been bullied or extorted into putting their own imperialist interests aside to comply with the war contrived by the US and NATO and prosecuted by Russia.

Like World War I, there are no good guys, only foolish, self-interested, agents of “great powers” and want-to-be powers. In a few words, the war is an imperialist war.

Like all imperialist wars, the great losers are the working classes of Ukraine and Russia, cut down in service to “annexationist, predatory, plunderous” aspirations of misleaders, as well as the tragic “collateral damage” of innocents, and the profound pain of displaced people.

Liberal and social democratic opinion in the US and Europe predictably jumped on the hate-Putin bandwagon with no context offered, joining the monopoly-media mainstream and promoting the US and NATO consensus. As events spin out of control, crude anti-Putinism cedes the issues to Western imperialism, including its new-found hope of deposing Putin. Like the 2014 coup in Ukraine engineered by the US State Department, regime change in Russia is NOT a democratic demand. Nor is joining the ultra-right “Glory to Ukraine” crowd a recipe for peace and de-escalation.

No better is the response of those on the left who-- cognizant of the US meddling in Ukraine’s affairs and the US acquiescence to, even promotion of the rise in influence of ultra-nationalism and the Ukrainian ultra-right-- seek to clothe Putin’s administration in social justice garments. Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russian foreign policy has vacillated between supplication to Western capitalism and belligerent reaction to the arrogant rebuffs. It is not an instrument of national liberation. Instead, it makes policy based only on self-interest.

Like the principled left that organized at Zimmerwald in 1915, we must avoid the temptation of taking sides and organize and agitate against imperialist war. It is the working class that stands to lose the most in this war and it is the working class that can stop it by unifying around the understanding that this war’s outcome cannot benefit the people, only the elites. It must stop now.

Belligerents should stand down and disarm. All foreign intervention must end. NATO must be dissolved. The people must be allowed to speak. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

 

Imperialism, the Enemy of Peace

On February 2, I wrote: “Clearly, the Biden administration is fishing in troubled waters, exploiting unjustified fears of Russian aggression to advance narrow economic goals: natural gas sales and military-armament production and sales.” The point is that US behavior can be explained and is best explained as that of an imperialist superpower in the classic Leninist sense.

It was not concern for a fragile new democracy and human rights, nor was it resistance to autocratic power that motivated the US in the Ukraine crisis, as government officials and media in the US would have it.

Nor was it a misguided foreign policy or poor political choices exhibited by US leaders, as some liberal critics and center-left analysts would maintain.

Instead, the US was saber-rattling, fomenting discord, and war-mongering in the classic late-nineteenth century fashion chronicled by Lenin in his 1917 book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Standing behind the high-minded, moralistic goals voiced by Biden, Blinken, and Nuland were the economic interests of the most powerful capitalist state. With his trumpeting of the war danger, Biden was carrying water for the US energy and military industrial sectors and guided by the imperatives of finance capital.

The “Western Marxists,” post-Marxists, and neo-Marxists that have seduced so many of the younger anti-capitalist activists in the West will recoil from this analysis, denouncing it as “reductionist,” reducing complex motives to simple, basic economic exploitation.

But US behavior is impossible to explain in any other way. US allies, with their own imperialist interests, have sought to defuse the US-generated crisis. As I wrote earlier, the Schönbach affair in Germany, resulting in the firing of the German Naval leader (explained in detail by Victor Grossman), along with the hectic diplomacy of France’s Macron, illustrate the depth of European resistance to Biden’s war baiting. They, along with Ukraine’s President, Zelensky, have sought to moderate Blinken and Nuland’s hysteria and slow the rush to war.

After Biden’s first formal meeting at the White House with Germany's new chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, on February 2, Biden could only enthuse that war would suspend the development of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. He is quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to it… I promise you we will be able to do it.”

Scholtz, on the other hand, would not link war with the pipeline’s fate. The shameless US media saw Scholtz’s response as a sign of his newness on the job!

Those who remain skeptical of the economic motives behind the US warmongering must explain why Biden placed natural gas politics ahead of any other matter before him and his German ally in this first significant policy exchange. Biden’s glee-- not shared by his German counterpart-- reveals the importance the US government places on seizing the natural gas market from the Russians, their rival in the energy business.

The Ukraine crisis presents other economic advantages as well. In less than two weeks, the US has sent eight cargo planes to the Ukraine with military supplies, part of the $200 million Biden authorized in new military aid. The xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Baltic states and Poland have sent massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine as well, much of which is sourced from US corporations and will be replaced by aid or purchases from the US.

Whether Ukraine joins NATO or not, Ukraine is being militarized and will continue to be a destination for US arms. On this front, the US military-industrial establishment will win, regardless of the crisis outcome.

Adversaries on both sides of the Cold War-like divide will be armed to the teeth and the possibility of war raised accordingly.

Now that Afghanistan is gone as a source of demand for US military hardware, Biden’s team is looking for new conflicts to generate dollars for the misnamed “defense” industry and to prime the pump on a stagnating US economy.

The old term for the linkage between US economic performance and military spending is “military Keynesianism,” the idea that economic activity can be stimulated with unending, costly, and wasteful military contracts for exotic weapons and instantly obsolescent munitions. Since it's out of fashion to blame the swollen bi-partisan military budget for our ills (like inflation!), the floodgates for future military spending are now open.

In a recent op-ed piece, an academic and foreign policy think-tank heavyweight, who is well-situated in ruling class circles, Walter Russell Mead, makes the case for dramatically increasing military spending. Mead offers little or no compelling reasons for expanding military expenditures beyond the now conventional foes: Russia, the PRC, and Iran. Nonetheless, “America must again get serious about defense [sic] spending.”

Mead goes to great lengths to unfavorably compare the current share of GDP devoted to the military budget with that of past periods: the Cold War, the so-called War on Terror, the Reagan era, and even World War II. By these standards alone, we are not spending enough! A rather arbitrary and self-serving argument!

But that is just window dressing for Mead’s real purposes:

Increased defense spending wouldn’t be a drag on economic growth. The capacities America needs to add to its defense arsenal are mostly high-tech and have civilian as well as military applications. Just as Israel’s investments in cybersecurity and high-tech weaponry helped it become a startup nation with the most dynamic civilian economy in its history, a renewed commitment to national defense can increase the competitiveness of American industry while boosting national security [my emphasis].

So, behind the facade of national defense and serving America is the economic advantage that Mead sees from pouring hundreds of billions more into military spending.

The Ukraine crisis should underscore lessons about US foreign policy that the often disoriented US left should have long drawn from our history.

The US media functions like every other monopoly-dominated industry: driven by profits and expediency, while serviced by and serving the state. It’s trusted service to the state is rewarded with front-row seats in the state’s propaganda circus and full access to its ministers of misinformation.

CNN, a network swamped with turmoil and scandal, demonstrated the depths of state servility with a recent bizarre public scolding of Putin for his vulgarity in the gentlemanly and gentlewomanly diplomatic process-- an indulgence in triviality.

The Guardian, the supposed left flank of the mainstream media, expressed alarm over French President Macron’s energetic diplomatic initiative to de-escalate the crisis over Ukraine, accusing him of “freelancing” and expressing “his particular view of Russia as a European nation, and lofty talk of new security guarantees…” which “will have set alarm bells ringing” in the exclusive NATO club.

Both commentaries are all too fitting and predictable from a lapdog capitalist press.

It should also be obvious to opponents of war that this risk and all risks of conflict in the era of imperialism spring from the clash of imperial powers or the pressing of their interests on other nations. While the anti-war movement is and should be a big tent, it will be limited in its success if it fails to grasp this point. Moralistic arguments or appeals to the political parties committed to imperialism, like the US Democratic Party, will have little effect. The long established bi-partisanship of the two parties on foreign policy and aggression, except in periods of a severe crisis of policy like late in the Vietnam war, should shine the necessary light on that fact.

Further, a genuine left committed to building a mass anti-war movement must not link the fortunes of such a movement to the fortunes of pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist (they are the same thing!) political parties like the Democratic Party.

With the Democrats holding power, fear of disrupting their rule disables the effort to avert war, as it does today.




Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

A Foreign Policy Built on a Foundation of Lies

Cuba, a country with a population roughly the size of Paris, France, poses no threat to the United States, except in the minds of the deranged. Yet there is a remarkable number of “deranged” people populating the upper echelons of US government officialdom, the foreign policy academy, and the media.

Given that Cuba has a military largely armed with, at its best, late Soviet-era armaments, the idea of any military threat to the US is ludicrous.

Nor does Cuba have any binding mutual defense pact with any great power.

What Cuba does have is a citizenry organized and impassioned to defend the country’s integrity and independence.

So, we must conclude that the virulent hostility that the US government has shown since the revolution until today comes from tiny Cuba’s audacity, the audacity to insist upon its unflinching, uncompromising independence.

With a long and well documented history of obsessive US intervention in Cuban affairs-- from the ludicrous to the outrageous-- it should be clear that Cuba is a constantly irritating mote in its giant Northern neighbor’s eye.

From unending, James Bond-inspired assassination attempts on the revolution’s venerated leader, Fidel Castro Ruz, to criminal, false-flag operations jeopardizing, even potentially taking the lives of US citizens, as proposed by the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (Operation Northwoods), the US has shown no restraint in seeking to remove that mote.

With very few exceptions, the US ruling class has been united and unabashed in its demented determination to overthrow the Cuban government. Well over half a century of a cruel, inhuman economic blockade attests to the perfidy of the US government, its office holders, and apologists.

When called out by public UN resolutions condemning the illegal blockade, most US allies vote against it; yet, none dare defy the US and break it-- a shameful, disgusting stain on their cowardly leaders of every conventional political persuasion.

When we think that US policymakers have reached the limits of insane depravity toward Cuba, they reach beyond that limit. In 2017, the US government concocted the “Havana Syndrome,” a mysterious Flash Gordon-like death ray that Cuba uses to incapacitate only those who represent US interests, leaving others untouched.

While this absurd claim should evoke some doubts from even the most gullible, the US (and European) media pounced on the story like it was bloody red meat.

Even after headaches, dizziness, and anxiety “struck” stalwart US officials in such diverse and seemingly unrelated places as Peoples’ China, Russia, Taiwan, Austria, Poland, Georgia, Russia, Serbia, Colombia, Vietnam, Geneva, and Paris, the media and the State Department saw a deep conspiracy. A support group, Advocacy for Victims of Havana Syndrome was founded. A Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act was passed by our caring Congress and signed by President Biden in October.

For over five years of relentless fear-mongering, we have been led to believe that Cuba and possibly her malicious friends are in possession of a powerful new weapon that could distress the heroic efforts of US agents of imperialism.

But now we are told by a no-less-authoritative source than the Central Intelligence Agency that the “Havana Syndrome” was not likely caused by US foes. Quoting the noticeably disappointed Wall Street Journal, “Instead, the agency concluded that other medical conditions, stress or unexplained factors could be behind the ailments…”

Another fable of imperialism exposed, yet the fantasy will persist.

******

The same hysteria purveyors who have for decades abused tiny Cuba with serial lies are now turning their attention on giant Peoples’ China (PRC). 

Recognizing that the PRC is today an economic rival and a relatively independent force with a significant military and its own foreign policy, the guardians of the empire have focused their security scrutiny on those of Chinese descent who are working and living in the US. One such unfortunate person, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and former head of his department, was arrested and accused of lying on an application for a US Department of Energy grant in 2017.

Gang Chen was charged in January, 2021 with failing to reveal information required on his Energy Department grant application and failing to report money received from Chinese institutions ($19 million!).

The problem with the FBI’s investigation and their xenophobic dragnet was that Professor Chen’s Energy Department application did NOT require him reveal the information allegedly withheld. Furthermore, the money allegedly received by Chen was in actuality a GRANT awarded to MIT from the PRC’s Southern University of Science and Technology.

Chen’s tragic story is part of a 2018 “China Initiative” undertaken by the US Department of Justice to ferret out spies, saboteurs, and other nefarious agents of People’s China bent on taking unfair advantage of the US, its research facilities, and universities. Implicit in the initiative is the understanding that the PRC is catching or overtaking the US in technological innovation, explicitly 5G networks. Thus was born a racist and nationalistic witch hunt of academics, students, and researchers of Chinese ethnicity.

Thousands have been investigated, with few convictions but lots of disrupted lives, discredited careers, and an experience “traumatic and deeply disillusioning” in the words of the exonerated Gang Chen. The US is finally dropping the charges after a year of public pillorying.

The unwarranted harassment of both Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals mirrors the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s and the accompanying illegalities committed by the FBI, all in the service of bolstering a rabid anti-PRC foreign policy.

After five years of scandalizing Cuba’s good name and nearly four years of demonizing Chinese and Chinese American academics, US officials have recognized their folly. Of course, irreparable damage has been done.

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To read the universally compliant US capitalist media, Russia has amassed 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine and is waiting for the moment-- frozen turf, a false-flag operation, an inadequate US response, a provocation, etc.-- to cross the border and march on Kyiv. The figure of 100,000 appears constantly without even a cautious media challenge. Where does the number come from? What does it mean?

Russian intentions are never questioned by US talking heads. “Putin is evil” replaces serious analysis.

Russian interests in the confrontation are never explained. The betrayal of US, Western, and NATO promises to refrain from eastern expansion go unmentioned or derided. And aggressive moves by the Eastern European extreme nationalists-- Poland and the Baltic states-- are whitewashed as defensive.

The entire establishment-- politicians, academics, think-tankers, NGO directors, newspaper editors and their toadies, celebrities, etc.-- are united in predicting an imminent invasion of Ukraine by Russian hordes. All march in step with the State Department press releases crafted by the Russia-haters, Blinken and Nuland.

The feverish campaign reached its most absurd moment with the phone call from US President Biden to Ukraine President Zelensky warning of a fast-approaching barbarian invasion and the “sacking” of Kyiv. The next day, Zelensky asked the Western press to report Ukrainian calm and to tone down the imminent-war rhetoric.

Few in the West have noticed the President and State Department’s inconsistency. On the one hand, they project an Eastern European apocalypse and on the other hand, they propose no serious military deterrent on the part of the US or NATO. Instead, Biden’s administration harps on Trump-like sanctions aimed at the Russian economy and, not least of all, its energy sector.

If oil was a motivating factor in US foreign policy activism in the 1980s and 1990s, then natural gas is a decisive motivating factor today. Where the US was determined to secure oil resources in the past, energy independence and the fracking revolution motivate US policy makers to secure natural gas markets today.

In essence, the US is baiting the Russians into actions that will encourage the Europeans to reject their dependence upon cheap Russian natural gas. Instead, they want Europe to rely on expensive US liquified natural gas, a change that Europeans have, so far, resisted. War hysteria is meant to frighten the Europeans into rejecting the nearly completed Nord Stream pipeline and, instead, build costly liquified natural gas terminals to accept US gas. Thus, the underlying strategy is economic-- a not-so-subtle bullying of Europe into aligning with US economic interests.

The goal is to restart the botched, overinvested, badly managed fracking revolution that would now ride the tide of high energy prices.

The French and German leadership understand this gambit and have tactfully urged negotiation. The Germans, in particular, recognize the dangerous consequences for their economy. Their recent commitment to move away from nuclear energy and coal, leave their export-driven industries vulnerable to natural gas prices.

While visiting an Indian think tank, the German naval chief, Schönbach, recently spoke candidly of the confrontation in Eastern Europe, urging discussion and “respect” for President Putin. Though a voice of moderation and, no doubt, reflecting a broad section of European opinion, NATO hardliners forced his resignation.

Clearly, the Biden administration is fishing in troubled waters, exploiting unjustified fears of Russian aggression to advance narrow economic goals: natural gas sales and military-armament production and sales. Unfortunately, the dangers of violent confrontation are only multiplied by the boot-licking of many European leaders and the media. Much hinges on how the Russians weigh their options. They, too, have narrow interests, opportunists, and warmongers.

All wars based on lies end tragically.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com