Multipolarity represents an indispensable step in between when the U.S. empire is in power, and when the working class has won victory worldwide. Now that multipolarity is becoming realized at an exponential pace, the effect is naturally one of destabilization for the social and governmental systems the ruling class depends on to perpetuate its power. What follows this period of untethering, of broadened possibilities, depends on how well those with the knowledge to bring proletarian revolution navigate these rapidly changing circumstances.
The more global variables fall out of the control of the U.S. empire, the more the USA’s domestic situation loses the stasis that liberalism depends on. During this year so far alone, we’ve seen the coming of the developments that guarantee Ukraine’s prompt defeat; the prediction by the IMF that Russia’s economy will grow amid the sanctions; the further strengthening of China and Russia’s ties; the acceleration of BRI projects and efforts to shift away from the petrodollar; the rejection of Taiwan relations by Honduras; a trajectory of growth among the BRICs countries that will ultimately make it outpace the imperial economies; and Chad’s nationalizing the assets of Exxon. The latter event indirectly builds upon last year’s pan-African revolutionary development of Mali’s expelling French NGOs, like how the rest of these things also build upon the previous multipolar victories which respectively made them possible.
The next victories will be built upon these latest ones, and so on until U.S. power has been weakened to the greatest extent that it can within the present revolutionary stage. At that point the USA, its economy, and the economies of its imperial partners will be in an extremely contracted state, desperate to maintain whatever holdings they still have. It’s then that we’ll be ready to go beyond the multipolar stage, and enter into the stage where the globe undergoes a new wave of socialist revolutions.
When the transition to multipolarity becomes complete, the only governance model that can keep the system alive is fascism, the option the bourgeoisie resort to when civic society has become in danger of collapsing. At that point, a U.S. invasion of Mexico will be a more plausible scenario than it is now, when reactionary lawmakers are merely making hypothetical plans about doing that. It was always intuitive that when the American imperial state reached the same kind of direness that Germany was in after its imperial crisis, it will carry out a Lebensraum-type land grabbing effort, one directed towards the exploited countries in its own hemisphere. As the country lashes out in these reactive ways, its domestic policy will also grow more Nazistic, except in ways that America’s distinct conditions make possible. This continent isn’t culturally unified enough to avoid getting balkanized, or at least brought to civil conflict and warfare among its own ruling class, should fascism take on such an overt form. We’re seeing all the precursors to this: the liberals prosecuting the reactionaries for selective types of crimes, the reactionaries storming government buildings, more and more states morphing into quasi-fascist regimes that wage war against trans people, school districts banning books that contradict the American mythology.
The great points of unification among the ruling class are that the police state needs to keep being militarized, and that austerity needs to keep being made more severe. These things alone are the makings of fascism, a fascism that’s compatible with a liberal government. This is the only option the ruling class has amid the failure of the Ukraine proxy war, which was an attempt to restore U.S. hegemony by destabilizing Eurasia. The system’s hope for survival is now to make this fascism into something sustainable, letting capital survive after it’s lost the global dominance that kept the liberal model tenable.
At this moment, we’re in a phase where the liberal order is fighting for its survival. The more U.S. hegemony declines, the further our conditions will transition to their next phase. But that’s not the only influencing factor. The even bigger threat to the system is the class struggle, which is now capable of becoming an existential threat towards the state because of multipolarity’s implications. With neo-colonial profits diminishing, the empire is losing its ability to displace capitalism’s crises onto the peripheries. Which is forcing America’s people to confront the dysfunctional nature of the system they live under.
This is shown by how as the war exacerbates an economic crisis, and the capitalist state deliberately drives up unemployment to create more leverage for employers, the people are looking for answers. They were promised a great new infrastructure plan, an end to police violence, and a successful war that vindicated the liberal humanitarian myth. Now society’s collapse is accelerating, the police are still murdering people, and this war has done nothing besides drive up inflation while enriching arms companies. Hersh’s report on how Biden blew up Nord Stream has exposed how Washington’s motives in Ukraine were from the start cynical, and made it easier to accept the reality of Ukraine being a Nazi state.
What happens when the narrative basis for the social order has disappeared? What happens is the emergence of a vacuum within our cultural and political sphere, a vacuum that can be filled either with reactionary politics or with revolutionary politics. The state’s narrative crisis has come at the same time that the system’s material basis itself is being lost. And the state has lost control of the narrative as a consequence of this deeper deficiency. In reaction to the decline of American influence, Washington decided to provoke Russia into intervening, a geopolitical gamble that Washington has lost. The inherent foolishness of the endeavor, which relied upon a proportionate economic strength compared to BRICS that the imperialist powers simply don’t have, is why Republican leaders have been largely apathetic towards Ukraine. As strategically mindless as their support for anti-Chinese military buildup is, they’ve at least had the intelligence to recognize the aid project is wasteful. Both projects are ultimately futile, since Washington’s arms excesses and global military occupations can’t reverse the historical process which the BRI’s rise represents. But some of the imperialists can see reality a bit better than others.
As liberalism becomes fully discredited by the economic catastrophe that this war has contributed to, the reactionaries are doing all they can to fill that cultural vacuum. But the amount of minds they can sway with their new transphobic obsession is limited, since making this obsession the center of their propaganda strategy failed to produce a red wave in the last election. The best recent development for them is ironically the indictment of Donald Trump, whose targeting by the bourgeoisie’s liberal wing can rehabilitate him as a supposed rebel figure. These two rival factions of capitalists will continue to war with each other, prompting both more militia activities and more repressive measures by what’s crudely called the “deep state.”
The political force that can do what the reactionary insurgents can’t, and win over the majority of the people, is the proletarian revolutionary movement. To be effective, this movement must prove itself principled in its anti-imperialism. That the right presently represents the most prominent opposition towards the Ukraine war shows communists must be more aggressive in our anti-imperialist practice. We have to expunge the Democratic Party’s ideological influence over our movement, and build the left flank of the resistance to the war. Then the working class people who’ve been harmed by the war will be drawn to us, as unlike the right, we offer a program for giving the workers democratic control. We’re capable of leading the people to victory in the midst of growing systemic instability, and attempts by the ruling class to displace the system’s crises onto the people.
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