What happens when a ruling class can’t agree on a coherent plan for how to preserve the existing social system? When the interests of the higher-level and lower-level elites are so disconnected, if the former were to get their desired program then the latter would be essentially destroyed? You get an opportunity for the proletariat to win the class war. For the exploited to take advantage of the growing divisions among their exploiters, and emerge as the class which defines the direction society goes in.
The reason why inter-elite rivalry in the United States has become so pronounced is that capitalism has reached an unprecedented stage in its decline. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall has now rendered the system so dysfunctional that profits can no longer be kept up merely through the neoliberal policies of the last half-century. To survive, capital now needs to take those policies to their logical conclusion. Which is a scenario where our economy has become “degrown,” and inequality’s growth thereby gets vastly accelerated.
Neoliberalism was always a way to engineer a controlled collapse of society so that the means for profit-making get streamlined, and the wellbeing of the many gets sacrificed so that the few can maintain their status. With Washington’s failure in Ukraine—which sped up the collapse of the NATO countries while ensuring that the imperialists can’t destabilize Eurasia—the elites now need to implement a more extreme version of these austerity measures. They need to intensify the exploitation of the workers even further, while embracing an even more aggressive type of militarism.
Not all the elites are alike, though. And for the highest levels of elites, the ideal version of this program looks quite different from what capital’s lower levels desire. The smaller capitalists in the petty-bourgeoisie and the military-industrial complex favor a revitalization of industry, as they’re more concerned with making money than with winning the geostrategic competition. So they support more austerity for the welfare system and other government services, but they want the economy to be made more productive. The most powerful of the capitalists, those being the monopolists and the international financial bosses who’ve fused with them, need the austerity to specifically look like “degrowth.”
Their interests are in further deindustrializing the country, destroying our society’s productive capacity so much that monopolies and big finance are essentially the only iterations of capital that remain. Or at least the non-monopolist businesses get fully shut out of decision-making, and are pushed to the margins enough that their ability to make profits has been permanently reduced.
The pandemic got us much closer to this scenario. It gave the big banks and multinational corporations an opportunity to bail themselves out, while letting finance capital’s allies in the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies carry out psyops that grew their own power. All illiberal political forces were vilified as threats towards public health, and became even more heavily censored. The feds got their counter-gangs in the MAGA movement, such as the heavily intelligence-infiltrated Proud Boys, to storm the Capitol. This gave the Democrats a narrative precedent for carrying out a liberal coup, expanding counterterrorism measures so that both left and right dissident groups could be more thoroughly targeted. With this fortified narrative and political control, the Biden administration continued the provocations against Russia. The plan was that when Russia inevitably took action in Ukraine, Washington would weaken Russia enough that China got left without its biggest strategic partner. Thereby, U.S. hegemony could be fortified.
Now this plan has backfired. And over the last year, Russia’s victory has helped inspire Africans, Palestinians, and Yemenis to initiate their own counter-attacks upon the hegemon. So the highest-level elites are scrambling to complete their degrowth scheme. It’s now apparent that the only war the empire has a real chance of winning is the war against its own people; all of its global wars are merely attempts to slow down the next inevitable contractions in American power. This means the biggest elites are coming to feel increasingly unwilling to compromise with capital’s lower levels.
They’ve kept public discourse relatively open, and held back in their attacks against non-monopolist businesses, out of desire not to provoke the lower elites too much. With every passing month, though, they get a greater sense of urgency to purge society of illiberalism. To fully use the expanded institutional powers that the intelligence agencies have gained throughout the new cold war, and impose a complete liberal totalitarianism.
This is what they increasingly want to do, at least. There are too many obstacles for this to be something that can be done in a smooth and safe fashion. There’s too much opposition towards it from not just the non-monopolist elites, but also regular Americans across all parts of the ideological spectrum. There are elements of the lower-level conservative elites who’ve recently shown themselves to be willing to unite with the liberals on supporting Israel, even after these conservatives have opposed aid to Ukraine. But this doesn’t mean that all within the capitalist class have united behind Israel, or that the Zionists can rely on support from the MAGA base. There are conservatives who’ve chosen the pro-Israel side, ones who’ve chosen to oppose Israel’s actions, and many others who have yet to make up their minds on this issue.
Support for the anti-imperialist cause isn’t confined to left-liberals, like the elites want it to be; the cause is capable of gaining allies from more conservatives and libertarians than it already has. It can also gain backing from the types of lower-level elites who are so opposed to the agenda of finance capital, they could come to assist communists on certain goals. These actors could use their leverage to make a crucial difference in how the class conflict goes.
The liberal technocrats are trying to prevent such a tipping point in the balance of power. They’re directing their counterinsurgency efforts towards not just anti-imperialists on the left, but also people on the right who have even partial sympathy towards antiwar ideas. Additionally, the feds and the liberal-aligned media are working to undermine every organization that so much as provides an alternative to what the big corporations have to offer. That cultivate social spaces which aren’t on social media, or that present ideas which deviate from the CIA/CNN liberal orthodoxy.
This is why Netflix has been producing so much content designed to make viewers frightened of cults: the financial elites want the public to avoid all groups which may lead them towards independent thought, and blanketly dismiss them as being sinister. These elites are threatened by all efforts to nurture social trends that they don’t control. As they want to secure a total monopoly not just over markets, but over culture and ideology.
This shows how fragile our social order is becoming. If the monopolists feel the need to preemptively intervene against illiberal groups that don’t even presently focus on anti-imperialist ideas, then further disruptions towards the liberal cultural hegemony could greatly accelerate our class conflict. This paranoia among the high elites is rational. Because not only do destabilizations within the discourse create openings for the existing anti-imperialist forces to gain influence; they can also prompt illiberal forces which were previously more detached from anti-imperialism to embrace a progressive role in this struggle. In recent years, the Libertarian Party has become more active in the antiwar movement, and has come to ally with communists as part of this effort. This is because of the failure by the richer, imperialism-invested conservative political donors to keep control over the organization.
There’s no telling what political forces will next become renegade in this way, and start functioning as liabilities towards finance capital. The Democratic Party wants communists to refuse to accept help from these renegade forces by convincing us that allying with them necessarily means subordinating ourselves to their interests. So long as we work with them on an equal organizational footing, the reality is the opposite. The goal of communists is to build a socialist system in which the state plans the economy. Under this system, the lower-level capitalists whose operations have survived the revolution will have the same role that they do within a socialist country like China: still able to make profits, but unable to dictate the state’s actions.
I’m in suspense over which allies anti-imperialists like myself could find as the struggle continues to develop. And when I start working with them, I plan to do all I can to help fortify our movement against the intensifying attacks from the highest elites. If monopoly capital’s enemies survive the counterinsurgency, we’ll be able to outmaneuver the forces of reaction, and build a new system that’s not dominated by the monopolists.
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