xipe posted:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article197477.html
http://www.voltairenet.org/article197541.html

The thing I feel that is essential to note here is the Lenin himself described the imperialist phase as rotten-ripe capitalism and parasitic capitalism; even back then the capitalist system had crossed a Rubicon from "dynamic" (if it ever was since it was fundamentally built on genocide and continued "primitive accumulation") to parasitic and retarding. That was in the 1910s and we are over a hundred years later. During this time the American hegemony has risen at a time of, and this is key here, overall capitalist decay. I feel this is key to seeing the extremely short lived phase of total American dominance - From the ultimate defeat of their main rivals, Germany and Japan, and the final usurpation of Britain to become the dominant global power in 1945, to now. The "golden age" of the US hegemony only really lasted until the late 60s to early 70s with an explosion of national liberation struggles including the US defeat in Vietnam, the US inversion from global creditor to global debtor, the great oil shocks, and the economic resurgence of the other imperialist countries. It is worth making an important point here that at the end of WW2 the US could have crushed defeated Germany and Japan, it could have turned them into part of the global south if it had wanted to attempt to prevent them from ever again rising to challenge its hegemony. I feel that the only reason it didn't was because of the threat which the Soviet Union and communist movements in east Asia posed, the US needed allies, and strong ones at that, thus planting the seeds of many of the economic problems it has continued to face since the late 60s.

American hegemony has been in decline ever since, but, and its a big but, there have been successive waves of attempts to arrest this. The big one we all know about is the “neo-liberal” push, the exportation of manufacturing to the periphery to take advantage of the border enfrced low wage periphery. The second, which xipes stuff discusses in a way that I feel is slightly backwards is the post 9/11 phase. Now unlike the article above I don’t believe that the original intention of the invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) was to destroy the countries and sow chaos – I think it was, and there is stuff to back this up, a failed experiment to re-establish a colonial empire proper. Decades on from Vietnam Afghanistan and Iraq were testing grounds for the “neo-con” Bush crew to see if it was possible to maintain an actual honest to god empire with occupying troops and all. This was their attempt at a “novel” solution to American decline. Needless to say it didn’t work, instead it produced chaos. But there’s always a plan B, which is where the article xipe posted comes in – this was not the original intention, but since it happened it can be capitalised on – what Robert Biel described as capitalism parasitic on its own decay. Entropy in the capitalist system has built up to such a high degree that the historic degree of control has been shown via Iraq and Afghanistan to no longer possible, instead the most feasible option is to sow successive waves of chaos and destruction in the periphery to destroy or prevent to formation of strong states, of which the follow-ups, Libya and Syria, were the test subjects, one success, one catastrophic failure in the biggest defeat for US imperialism since Vietnam.

The final thing I want to mention and this is one of the main flaws of a "crude" third worldist outlook when peering into the future, and that the article underplays the rivalry that occurs between existing imperialist nations, a rivalry that is only suppressed through absolute US military (nuclear) dominance (not going away anytime soon) and US dollar hegemony(ever so slowly but surely eroding away, as evidenced by things like the dollar-gold exchange rate and so on). For while the US military hegemony enforces a prohibition on war between imperialist states (competition by "other means") it does no such thing with economic competition. I think the Trump presidency has brought to the fore the struggle between the US and (primarily) Germany in a way we haven’t seen before, even if it seems relatively minor and very slow moving. The quoted article above seems to depend on a situation where the post-1945 US hegemony over rival imperialist powers is maintained in its existing form, something that I believe fundamentally cannot occur.

Comfort reigned for few while the Anglosphere held sway
War and chaos summon all as the Anglosphere decays.

Anyway this is a bit of a sideshow to the original article so *shrug* felt like writing something and also replied in a different thread, rhizzomatically

Synergy posted:

tears posted:

The "golden age" of the US hegemony only really lasted until the late 60s to early 70s with

but doesn't the overthrow of numerous socialist/progressive states all over the world (especially the USSR) in the last few decades show an increase of power? where is the resistance going to come from that can compete with the ever increasing US military budget? i wouldn't be surprised if in 30 years all that remains is the DPRK and China

This is why I was keen to stress that the US hegemony has risen in a period of terminal decline.

It might not feel like it where you are but if you look at class relations globally you will see that, to quote Marx "Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" - the growth of the global proletariat over the past 3 decades has been incredible, the greatest mass movement of people from the countryside to the cities the world has ever seen. Thats where I see resistance, and actual victory, coming from - the global proletariat, not in the isolated remnants of previous waves of struggle.

On the military aspect you need to understand that the US military is, to quote Mao, a paper tiger. This is what Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown us. The US spends billions on its military but huge amounts of this is on waste and on “Army welfare” - keeping the US army personnel, and thus the class which it is derived from, happy. And, it shouldn’t be underestimated that the vast amount of money spent by the US army is to police the current order as it is, the US needs to spend all that money just to keep things from falling apart with the current level of resistance from oppressed people, pushback from other imperialist nations etc etc

Giap said in the big victory; the great task that “The U.S. expeditionary troops have been fighting without an ideal and, as a result, their morale has been very low. The more they are defeated, the worse this basic weakness becomes”. We can look at the house of Saud's war in Yemen to see a perfect example of this in mini – to carry out a sustained campaign to victory you need ground troops – occupation of conquered areas. And to use ground troops you have to be willing to accept casualties, which they are not, hence a sustained air campaign and use of mercenaries. Only an army with high morale, the “Moral forces” as Clausewitz described them, will be able to absorb even a small number of casualties before morale breaks to such an extent that you see active resistance in an army to combat, and public opinion containment on the home front fails.

They are the spirits which permeate the whole element of war, and which fasten themselves soonest and with the greatest affinity to the will which puts in motion and guides the whole mass of powers, unite with it as it were in one stream, because it is a moral force itself. Unfortunately they seek to escape from all book-knowledge, for they will neither be brought into numbers nor into classes, and want only to be seen and felt.

The spirit and other moral qualities which animate an army, a general, or governments, public opinion in provinces in which a war is raging, the moral effect of a victory or of a defeat, are things which in themselves vary very much in their nature, and which also, according as they stand with regard to our object and our relations, may have an influence in different ways.

This is why the US army is a paper tiger, and why they fail over and over again to the point where they have fallen back to this "chaos and destruction" strategy - this is a sign not of their strength but their terminal weakness.

tears posted:

Now unlike the article above I don’t believe that the original intention of the invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) was to destroy the countries and sow chaos – I think it was, and there is stuff to back this up, a failed experiment to re-establish a colonial empire proper. Decades on from Vietnam Afghanistan and Iraq were testing grounds for the “neo-con” Bush crew to see if it was possible to maintain an actual honest to god empire with occupying troops and all. This was their attempt at a “novel” solution to American decline.

Really interesting idea. I don't see how this could've been viewed as being even remotely possible, the inertia of the decolonization of the 20th century and the modernization of the third world would seem to preclude this contingency. So either the empire is desperate and was throwing a hail mary, or it was a simply trying to knock out a potential hegemon/defend the position of the US dollar as the international reserve currency. Imo the latter seems more likely.

shapes posted:

we will probably have to wait another 30 years for all the records to become declassified in order to really know what they were thinking, but i suspect that the reason they actually thought this was remotely possible was because of the First Iraq War. that convinced a generation of brass and Pentagon officials that the US military had reached a sufficiently technologically advanced state that they could now win asymmetrical wars with minimal casualties.

i used to think that but nowadays i don't think that "winning" those sorts of wars is anything but a rhetorical ploy that uses that defeated PNAC reasoning, i think it's good enough for current policy as long as a new one starts up nearby and prevents the emergence of counter-hegemonic stability.

what i find weird is that out of all of my ignorant hinge brain farts, this is the one where a lot of the left seems to have come to agree and provide evidence to prove it i would never have been able to dig up on my own

“They are trying to punish, judge and discredit us because we did not submit to those scenarios. The scenario and the plot are obvious and they are doing this with their co-operators in our country. They are doing it with FETÖ . You will not be able to deceive us, you should know that,” Erdoğan said at the provincial congress of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the eastern province of Ağrı.

“They aggravated the PKK for that. They put FETÖ to the front and sent Deash to our country and even now they are using the person who is the head of the main opposition, also known as the main ‘treason party,’ for the same purpose,” he added, referring to the Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu who has recently alleged that the president and his relatives had off-shore accounts.

tears posted:

chickeon posted:

counterpoint: the US maintians enormous on the ground presence in dozens of countries with a volunteer army largely full of psychopaths willing to kill and die for the fourth reich and its ideals.

i agree with all of this except the bit about them being willing to die for amerikkka. I think that the professional militaries of all the imperialist countries are fundamentally cosseted cowards who are primarily used as occupying garrisons around the world and far more interested in goofing off, murdering people, raping the locals and getting others to do the actual fighting. If they really were 100% committed to the American ideals then casualties would be celebrated as martyrs to the American cause, not mourned as tragic failures of battlefield health and safety.

The first month with alpha company was a peculiar time. It was mostly a vacation. We wandered up and down the beaches outside Chu Lai, pulling security patrols and a very few night ambushes. It was an infantryman's dream. There was no VC, no mines, sunny days, warm water to swim in, daily resupplies of milk and beer. We were a travelling circus. A caravan of local children and women followed us from one stretch of sand to the next, peddling Coke and dirty pictures, cleaning our weapons for a can of C rations. During the day we played football. Two or three lovers lounged under their ponchos with Vietnamese girls. They flirted, and there were some jealousies and hurt feelings. When we moved to a new position, our column stretched out for a quarter-mile, filled with soldiers and prostitutes and girls carrying bags of Coke and children carrying our packs and sometimes even our rifles. At dusk the children dug our foxholes. Each GI had his personal mascot, his valet. My own helper was a little guy called Champion. He was seven years old, prehaps even younger, but he knew how to disassemble and clean my rifle, and he knew how to give a back rub.