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Michael Yates wrote
What hope is there for radical change in the United States. Not
much. Jacobin just posted an essay wondering what we can do to make
sure that the choices we face in the 2036 election won't be as bleak
as the ones we face today. By 2036, most of the Brooklyn
intellectuals around Jacobin will have long since moved to the
right, so the question will be be moot.
On this sodden election day here in the US, I'm reminded of this, which
pretty much puts it in a nutshell. If we look beyond the dismal punditry
out there about causes, consequences and the possibilities for change, I
see this as one of the more profound, explicit statements of the problem
and solution by John Smith in the final chapter of his fine book
Imperialism in the 21st Century published by your invaluable MR Press,
Michael. This passage is vibrant with possibilities, both terrifying and
hopeful. Among other things, Smith accounts in his book for the
prolonged hiatus in western radicalism by the "vast global shift of
production to low-wage countries, with the result that profits,
prosperity, and social peace in imperialist countries have become
qualitatively more dependent upon the proceeds of super-exploitation of
living labor in countries like Vietnam, Mexico, Bangladesh, and China.
It follows that this is not just a financial crisis, and it is not just
another crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of imperialism." That plus
capital's very successful prevention of labor mobility so far, despite
which millions are at extreme peril managing each year to migrate.
Along with a huge expansion of domestic, corporate, and sovereign
debt, the global shift of production gave the outmoded and
destructive capitalist system a respite that lasted for barely
twenty-five years. The “financial crisis” that brought this to an
end is a secondary infection, a sickness caused by the medicine
imbibed to relieve a deeper malaise, one for which capitalism has no
alternative remedies. Exponentially increasing indebtedness
succeeded in containing the overproduction crisis, but it has
brought the global financial system to the point of collapse.
Outsourcing has boosted profits of firms across the imperialist
world and sustained the living standards of its inhabitants, but
this has led to deindustrialization, has intensified capitalism’s
imperialist and parasitic tendencies, and has piled up global
imbalances that threaten to plunge the world into destructive trade
wars. All of the factors that produced this crisis—increasing debt,
asset bubbles, global imbalances—are being amplified by the effects
of the emergency measures designed to contain it. The irony of
zero–interest rate policy and quantitative easing is that their
greatest success—preserving the value of financial assets and thus
the wealth of those who own these financial assets—blocks the only
possible capitalist solution to the crisis, namely a massive
cancelation and reassignment of claims on social wealth asset
values. QE and ZIRP—Zero Interest Rate Policy, or “crack cocaine for
the financial markets,” in a memorable phrase uttered by a Goldman
Sachs banker —are therefore means of postponing the inevitable, of
kicking the can down the road while waiting and hoping for the
growth engine to restart. Although the global crisis first
manifested itself in the sphere of finance and banking, what’s now
engulfing the world is far more than a financial crisis, it is the
inevitable and now unpostponable outcome of the contradictions of
capitalist production itself. In just three decades, capitalist
production and its inherent contradictions have been utterly
transformed by the vast global shift of production to low-wage
countries, with the result that profits, prosperity, and social
peace in imperialist countries have become qualitatively more
dependent upon the proceeds of super-exploitation of living labor in
countries like Vietnam, Mexico, Bangladesh, and China. It follows
that this is not just a financial crisis, and it is not just another
crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of imperialism. (pp313-314)
The interaction between living labor and nature is the source of all
wealth. Capitalism’s frenzied exploitation of both has resulted not
only in a grave social and economic crisis, but also in a spreading
ecological catastrophe. Rising concentrations of CO2 in the
atmosphere, along with the rest of the filth generated by capitalist
