We’ve gotten to a point in our class and geopolitical conflicts where our ruling class is increasingly turning its attention towards the domestic. Because the foreign ones have gained so many victories, the empire is being forced to prepare for a war against its own people. Since Russia accelerated U.S. hegemony’s decline by launching its Ukraine operation, the DC elites have of course been continuing to try to defeat their global challengers, but every battle they’ve picked lately has turned into another failure. This is producing a scenario where even as Washington’s global occupations, sanctions, and proxy wars carry on, the fight the elites are truly most afraid of losing is one within U.S. borders. That’s the fight to prevent the class struggle in the country from expanding beyond the left-liberal activist niche, and into the broader masses.
When the imperialists find themselves unable to reverse the transition towards multipolarity, as Ukraine has made apparent they can’t do, their best option is to degrow the empire’s core. To compensate for their terminally shrinking global market access by intensifying the exploitation of the workers they still solidly rule over, and descaling the market itself. The core capitalist countries need imperialism because constantly exporting their capital into the peripheral countries is how they can offset their crisis of overproduction. That’s the phenomenon where the capitalists produce too much to be able to make back a profit, so long as their operations are confined to their own country. Take away the ability of the core’s capitalist ruling class to dominate global markets, and the system they run starts to unravel. And imperialism’s challengers have become more effective than ever at hurting the imperialists in this most damaging of ways.
Biden instigated the proxy war in Ukraine because his circle thought this would lead to the economic collapse of Russia. If successful, this maneuver would have left China vulnerable enough to be subdued, letting U.S. capital restore its shrinking capacity to exploit the Global South. It became apparent within less than a year after February 2022 that this scheme would backfire on the empire, because Russia had by then won the economic war. The sanctions had failed to come close to doing the amount of damage they’d been intended to do, and the economic power of BRICS had greatly risen relative to that of the G7 countries. The overwhelming scale of this geopolitical failure made it so that the best the imperialists could now hope for was to make the war within Ukraine itself a serious problem for Russia. Which wasn’t a viable plan, because Ukraine was always supposed to be just another disposable proxy war tool for Washington. It couldn’t fill the role as Washington’s main means for destabilizing Eurasia, only effective sanctions could have done that.
Over the summer of 2023, the U.K. worked to escalate the conflict by sending Ukraine depleted uranium, and since then Kiev has been using its drones to bring as much destruction within Russia as it can. These efforts haven’t changed the math that’s always truly determined the conflict, though. The practical reality is that Ukraine has never had a chance of sustaining enough troops to achieve its strategic goals. Which has led to today’s situation where the military is drafting retirement-age men, and people are beating up conscript officers over the extreme measures they’ve taken.
As reported last week by Sputnik, Scott Ritter (who was among the early ones to point out Ukraine’s hopeless military situation) has concluded that Kiev is now relying on fantasies of being saved by a foreign army. Which itself wouldn’t be enough to take away Russia’s advantages:
“The Pentagon is definitely trying to create political cover for itself because their huge Ukrainian fantasy is falling apart,” Ritter asserted, explaining earlier that Ukraine had little choice but to hold Avdeyevka for as long as possible so that defensive lines could be built behind it, noting however, that Russian airpower prevented even that goal from being achieved…The Kiev regime is “waking up to the reality that their so-called friends and allies are abandoning them and leaving Ukraine to its own fate” Ritter explained earlier while discussing Macron’s comments that French troops may be deployed in Ukraine, a hypothetical that Ritter says is only being discussed because of the position Ukraine is in. “To understand why Macron would be even talking about this, you have to understand how dire the situation is for Ukraine right now. They are facing military collapse, right now as we speak the last reserves of Ukraine are being thrown into the battle outside the village of Orlovka,” Ritter explained. “This is to buy time for a miracle to happen and the Ukrainians are hoping the miracle will be the arrival of a French battlegroup.”
Everybody who’s been paying attention for the last two years has seen this coming. And because it’s been so apparent that Russia was in place to defeat Washington from the start, growing amounts of other anti-imperialist forces have been at least partly inspired by Russia to take action. Last summer’s revolutionary takeovers in the Sahel were carried out by pro-Russian movements. And the October 7 operation by Palestine’s resistance coalition was another example of this trend.
Consistent with the idea that the empire has become weakened enough to give its opponents a greater fighting chance, the Zionists (or at least the ones who no longer need to lie to advance their careers) have now openly admitted defeat in Gaza. They’ve also admitted defeat on the narrative and diplomatic fronts, which are crucial for the survival of the settler state. A former Israeli commander said this month that Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi
lost control of the ground a long time ago, but he started appointing colonels and lieutenant colonels in his likeness. This is the most serious scandal since the establishment of the army. We have already lost the war with Hamas, and we are also losing our allies in the world at a dizzying rate.
The genocide that the Zionists are committing against the Palestinians isn’t capable of negating Israel’s fundamental strategic weakness. Which means the blowback from the genocide may prove too much for the colonial power structure to handle. (Though that partly depends on how effectively we all work to advance the Palestinian cause.) Both Israel, and its partners in ethnic cleansing who run Kiev, have underestimated who they’re fighting.
The willingness of Hamas and its partners to carry out Operation Al Aqsa flood; and their ability to prevent Israel from reaching its strategic goals; have created another source of strength for the wider anti-imperialist struggle. Like how Russia’s military success has made African revolutionaries feel more secure in asserting their interests, the actions of Hamas have made the Houthis better able to advance their resistance efforts. As reported by Newsweek, which has quoted maritime security expert Ian Ralby, Hamas and the Houthis have together made Washington unable to form a coalition to intervene within Yemen:
What the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does do for [Houthis] is dissuade Arab countries from intervening, for fear of being viewed as indirectly supporting Israel. Currently, only one Arab nation, Bahrain, which hosts United States Navy Central Command’s headquarters, has joined the Operation Prosperity Guardian coalition established by President Joe Biden in December in response to Ansar Allah attacks. Thus far, not even this coalition, nor several rounds of joint U.S.-U.K. airstrikes on Ansar Allah military sites in Yemen, have deterred the consistent spate of attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, and the prospect of further intervention is likely to bring more instability to the region and its critical waters. “As far as the Houthis are concerned,” Ralby said, “they’re having the most successful period of their entire history right now.”
It’s these military victories for freedom fighters that are ensuring the imperialists will continue to lose in the wider, geo-strategic sphere. And that therefore our ruling class will have to depend on a domestic degrowth project for its survival.
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The liberal wing of the ruling class gave away that shrinking the economy is their end goal during the Obama administration, when the White House chose a science adviser (John Holdren) who co-authored a manifesto calling for the most extreme types of degrowth measures. The supposed goal of these liberal policy drivers was to combat the greenhouse effect. But if the Democrats really wanted to do this, they wouldn’t be pro-imperialist, as the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional polluter. They also wouldn’t be selling a greenwashed version of “climate action” that seeks to preserve capitalism, the system that perpetuates our ecological crisis. The real purpose of degrowth is to sacrifice the lower classes so that the elites can keep their profits up during capitalism’s apocalyptic stage. Which is only going to come if the ruling elites are allowed to stay in power, and carry out their pseudo-solutions on the environment.
Holdren and his intellectual circle have advocated for a “Planetary Regime” that would go beyond merely degrowing the economy, acting to also reduce the population. They want to make it so that individuals who “contribute to social deterioration can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.” The Obama administration naturally avoided answering questions about Holdren’s views, and since then the liberal technocrats have pivoted towards selling the degrowth agenda in a different way. They’ve decided they want the Democratic Party to be seen as an adequate source for economic growth, but in the long term they seek to make the U.S. economy small enough to handle capital’s contraction. And they’re creating the foundations for this through their creation of the inflation crisis, which has already negated many of the “benefits” from Bidenomics.
The outcome of this crisis, and of the new financial bubble that’s been growing since 2008, is an unprecedented economic meltdown. A meltdown that the monopolies, like the great real estate parasite BlackRock, will use to further concentrate their economic power. Whether our leaders say so or not, degrowth is what their policy model is guaranteed to produce.
The way they’ve changed their degrowth propaganda is by largely shifting away from using climate as justification for their goals, at least in less over-the-top ways. A decade ago, liberal media was intensively talking about global warming, so much that the left-leaning outlet Harper’s has since concluded that many commentators from that time exaggerated the extent of the threat.
These days, climate doomerism is increasingly coming from the right, with big oil’s psyops now seeking to inspire hopelessness and apathy on the climate. At the same time, the liberal wing of the elites have adopted the narrative that technological progress has already essentially solved the climate crisis. Or that we’re at least on the path to solving it because of the rise of “green” capitalism. Even though degrowth is the logical trajectory of our ruling class—as that’s simply how capitalism acts during its collapse—the liberal establishment is trying to convince us that the Democrats are bringing sustainable and meaningful growth.
In this sense, conservatives and liberals have switched their old roles within the climate discourse, with the right pushing a narrative of inevitable armageddon while the liberals pretend like the issue isn’t worth taking seriously. The liberals are even citing the wisdom of the free market as their rationale. It’s because at this stage, they want to conceal their intentions for brutal austerity, distancing themselves from degrowth rhetoric in the broader discourse while privately working to advance degrowth.
This is apparent in how the liberal narrative managers have reacted to the public scrutiny towards the World Economic Forum’s degrowth-adjacent statements. Over the last decade, the WEF has sought to introduce the idea of radical economic restructuring measures into the discourse. It’s done so in a way that lets itself keep plausible deniability on the question of whether it supports such measures, indicating that these statements have been experiments in how the public would react. When social media responded with alarm to the WEF’s infamous 2016 quote “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy,” the media’s fact-checkers tried to minimize it over the following years. They insisted that it wasn’t a policy endorsement, because it supposedly only presented a hypothetical scenario.
Now that the deep state has primarily invested in Biden getting a second term, the liberal narrative managers are trying to portray him as a great driver of growth, despite the elites’ intentions to apply unprecedented economic shock therapy. The way they’re attempting to sell Biden as a working class hero is by presenting the “gains” he’s made for the workers in isolation. In a recent column, David Brooks listed all the seemingly positive economic developments that have come from Biden’s policies, leaving out the highly relevant factor of how Biden’s proxy wars have exacerbated inflation. Since the growing alienation of the masses from our government is impossible to ignore, though, in the second half Brooks attempts to explain why the Democrats have been losing their traditional base:
Biden’s economic policies have done little to help the Democratic Party politically. In fact, the party continues to lose working-class support…Over the past three years, the Democrats’ lead among Black Americans has shrunk by 19 points. Among Hispanics, the Democratic lead has shrunk by 15 points…What’s going on?…the fact is that over the past few decades and across Western democracies, we’ve been in the middle of a seismic political realignment — with more-educated voters swinging left and less-educated voters swinging right. This realignment is more about culture and identity than it is about economics. College-educated voters have tended to congregate in big cities and lead very different lives from voters without a college degree. College-educated voters are also much more likely to focus their attention on cultural issues like abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and they are much more socially liberal than non-college-educated voters.
Matthew Goodwin, a political scientist who writes about the diploma divide in Britain, titled his recent book “Values, Voice and Virtue.” He argues the educated and less educated have different values. The former are cosmopolitan progressive, while the latter are traditionalist — faith, family, flag. He continues that educated voices drown out less-educated voices, thanks to their dominance at universities and in the media, the arts, nonprofits and bureaucracies. Less-educated voters feel unheard and unseen.
Because Brooks doesn’t want to admit how much Biden’s Ukraine proxy war has hurt workers, Black ones especially, this is only a partial answer. One whose flaws are easy to see, because those alienated Black urban residents don’t fit into the white conservative category that Brooks mainly focuses on. The truth is that both the parts of the masses that have been subjected to colonialism, and the parts that can still technically be considered “settlers,” have been getting increasingly impacted by the early stages of the degrowth program. Which has brought about this outcome where the Democratic Party is both under threat from conservative-leaning white workers, and losing its nonwhite base. These different types of disaffected U.S. Americans are capable of uniting against monopoly capital, and overthrowing the imperialist regime that seeks to crush them all.
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The liberal technocrats don’t view the political realignment Brooks describes as a threat because it has potential to help the Republican Party. Though Biden is the deep state’s favored candidate, it will be able to get Trump to advance the new cold war, like it did during his last term. These technocrats fear the realignment because it could lead to the increasingly antiwar conservative base uniting with the disaffected former Democrat voters, and forming their own independent united front against monopoly capital.
That’s the reason why the justice system is using lawfare against Trump, and why outlets like CNN have been refusing to feature Trump whereas in 2016 they excessively covered him: the ruling elites view the MAGA base as one among a series of mass elements that have potential for coming together against imperialism. Therefore the 2024 election must be heavily policed, any attempts at forming an antiwar united front must be undermined, and anti-establishment politics must be diverted towards controlled opposition forces.
The co-optation aspect of this counterinsurgency is right now most prominent in a controlled anti-woke backlash that the psyop agents are carrying out. And the “dissident” right-wing figures involved in this backlash aren’t just Republicans. There’s also emerged a breed of Democrat politicians, like John Fetterman, who seek to appeal to conservatives by taking supposedly subversive stances which upset the left. Of course, these stances all turn out to be ones shared by the pro-imperialist wing of conservatism, like Zionism.
Brooks praises Fetterman for advancing this controlled opposition project, concluding:
If there’s hope for Democrats, it’s found in people like Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who works strenuously to reduce social distance between Democrats and the working class. As the analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out in his The Liberal Patriot Substack, Fetterman has gone against progressive orthodoxy on immigration, fossil fuels and Israel. He shows his strength by tilting against party elites. Similarly, the Democrat Tom Suozzi won back his Long Island House seat by playing up issues like controlling the border and fighting crime.
This recent experiment in managing dissent, where certain Democrats replicate Trump’s strategy of selling Zionism under a rightist “anti-establishment” brand, can only partly succeed. As Brooks admits, the Democratic Party’s pivot towards appealing to more materially comfortable, cold war-compatible individuals is going to continue driving away its old working class base. Which means the Democrats can no longer sufficiently fill their role as absorbers of working people’s discontent. Perhaps through “anti-woke” figures like Fetterman, they’ll manage to manipulate some MAGA-type voters, but overall the elements that they’ve depended on are abandoning them.
This is the logical outcome of a collapsing social order, and the discrediting of a ruling class ideology: the synthetic political tendencies, the ones that gain their prominence through ruling class backing, lose the support of the majority. This was what happened within the Republican Party prior to when Trump took it over: most of the conservative base had become alienated from the neocon ideology of Bush, and was ready to embrace a perceived outsider who talked about how terrible the Iraq invasion was.
The opportunity communists and anti-imperialists now have is one of capturing both the element that’s been alienated from the Democratic Party, and that could become alienated from so-called MAGA. Because by progressively embracing more new cold war policies, now to the point where he’s called to increase funding for Ukraine, Trump has brought the death of MAGA. He’s made “MAGA” into just another brand that advances the agenda of the war machine. Which in retrospect it always was, but in 2024 Trump isn’t even posturing as an antiwar candidate, like he was in 2016.
Today he’s using the same strategy that Chuck Schumer said the Democrats were going to commit to from 2016 onward: forsake the working class in favor of the more affluent, liberalism-compatible voters. Not even the elements of the petty-bourgeoisie that have been getting squeezed by big capital, who largely made up Trump’s original target demographic. Instead, both Trump and the Democrats are prioritizing labor aristocrats whose interests are tied to U.S. geo-strategic goals.
The great majority of the country’s people don’t share those interests. Their interests are in the overthrow of the imperial state, and the establishment of a new system that works for the people. I’m of the tendency that sees communism as the thing this new system must take the form of, but somebody doesn’t need to call themselves a communist to assist in the advancement towards that goal. Within the emerging anti-imperialist united front, there are Marxists, libertarians, and antiwar lefties of more broad kinds. When it comes to building our own orgs, Marxists must follow Lenin’s advice of working to lift up the average person beyond the most basic class consciousness. But within coalition-building on anti-imperialism, ideological differences on domestic issues are secondary to the task of combating U.S. hegemony.
When one comes to understand this, they’re able to effectively resist the state. At this stage, foreign policy is the paramount issue within the class struggle. Whether we sufficiently resist the policies of the Atlanticists, the Sinophobes, and the Zionists determines whether we’ll be able to win the struggle within the empire’s core. And regardless, defeating imperialism is what one must strive for if they seek to have a progressive role in history. This isn’t just because the overwhelming majority of the globe’s people are being exploited by imperialism, or being societally destroyed by its genocidal wars. The domination of international monopoly capital is also holding back our own society’s development economically, technologically, culturally, and educationally. It’s dividing us from civilizations like China’s, when we could be sharing our resources and knowledge. It’s letting our infrastructure continue to deteriorate, when we could be building high-speed rails with China’s assistance. It’s continuously destroying our living standards, so that the richest can profit from the growing chaos.
We must advance a program that combines mobilization against these domestic injustices, with mobilization against the wars our ruling class is waging. As there’s no separating these things. Degrowth austerity in the core makes possible the violence that our government inflicts across the globe, and the same applies the other way around. Focusing on the domestic is no substitute for a serious anti-imperialist practice, though. Strategically, the most impactful thing we can do at the moment is resist the designs of the hegemon, which means we must continue to build this united front. The heroes in places like Russia and Palestine have been bringing the hegemon’s defeat much closer, but our help in this effort is indispensable. Like the proxy wars are connected to degrowth, the global liberation struggles are connected to our struggle.
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