US imperialism in a dead-end
By Daniel
Paquet dpaquet1871@gmail.com
Mid-October
2016, a few weeks before the end of the current presidential race, The New York Times complains:”Can the
U.S. really win the election?” And again
like most of the time, it relates to US imperialism. But what is it all about? “We have to begin
with as precise and full a definition of imperialism as possible. Imperialism is a specific historical stage of
capitalism. Its specific character is three-fold: imperialism is (1) monopoly capitalism; (2)
parasitic or decaying capitalism; (3) moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by
monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism.
Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts – the
concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these
monopolistic associations of
capitalists; (2) the monopolistic
position of the big banks – three , four or five giant banks manipulate
the whole economic life of America (including the Big Six of Canada :Royal Bank,
Bank of Montréal, etc., -Ed.), France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of
raw material by the trusts and the
financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with
bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international
cartels has begun. There are already
over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market
and divide it ‘amicably’ among
themselves – until war redivides
it. The export of capital, as distinct
from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly
characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial
political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world
(colonies) is completed.” [1]
“If we will
have indulged in almost two years of electoral entertainment and pathos just to
end up back where we were, only worse, with even more venomous gridlock in
Washington, it won’t just be emotionally depressing; we’ll really start to
decline as a nation. When we forfeit governing our country strategically at the
national level for this long, inevitably the roof will start to leak and the
floors will start to buckle. (…)
For
starters, this version of the Republican Party has to die. I don’t say that as a partisan. I say that as a citizen who believes that America
needs a healthy center-right party that offers more market-based solutions to
problems; keeps the pressure on for deregulation, freer trade and smaller
government; and is willing to compromise.
But today’s version of the G.O.P. is not such a problem-solving party.”[2]
Further,
Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, does not contribute to morally reinsure
most of the U.S. voters. However, “A day
after Mr. Trump defended himself at the second presidential debate for making
vulgar comments about women, amid a wave of polls showing an increasing lead
for Hillary Clinton, thousands of Trump supporters turned out with undimmed
fervor for the Republican nominee and optimism about his electoral respects.”[3]
“Yet Mr.
Trump himself, having been rejected in recent days by dozens of Republican
elected officials, has indicated that he will make any separation an
exceptionally messy and painful ordeal for the party. (…)
Even the
drastic step of denouncing Mr. Trump may not be enough to shield Republicans
from this unpopularity. In a conference
call on Tuesday with the Democratic caucus, Representative Ben Ray Lujan of New
Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said
that party polling found voters drawing scant distinction between Republicans
who endorsed Mr. Trump and those who abandoned him out of political expediency
according to people who participated in the call, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because it was supposed to be private.”[4]
As for
international tensions, several US personalities fear the worse. “Donald J. Trump
is of a radically different ilk and temperament from past presidents. If I were back in the launch chair, I would
have little faith in his judgment and would feel alienated if he were commander
in chief. I am not alone in this
view. A vast majority of current and
former launch officers in my circle of friends and acquaintances tell me they
feel the same.”[5]
“Republicans
across the US are struggling with whether to support or abandon Donald Trump
as they try to defend the party’ Senate
and House majorities, which have been
put at risk by the latest controversies surrounding the presidential
candidate. (…)
The
Republican infighting has distracted form revelations emerging from the leaked
emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman. Over the past five days, WikiLeaks has released more than
6,000 of Mr Podesta’s hacked emails, with the group claiming there are more
than 43,000 emails still to be released.(…)
The emails
have fanned tension between Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and supporters of Bernie
Sanders, her former rival for the Democratic nomination, who believe Mrs.
Clinton will not be as tough on Wall Street as she has claimed.
Yet several
bankers suggested the political climate had shifted to such an extent in recent
years that it would be hard to imagine Mrs. Clinton adopting a softer policy
towards Wall Street, given the new power of the Democratic Party’s anti-bank
faction, led by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.”[6]
“Our epoch,
the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature: it has simplified the class
antagonisms. 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. (…)
(And) the
executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[7]
“The
dictatorship of the proletariat arises not on the basis of the bourgeois order,
but in the process of the breaking up of this order after the overthrow of the
bourgeoisie, in the process of the expropriation of the landlords and
capitalists, in the process of the socialization of the principal instruments
and means of production, in the process of violent proletarian revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a
revolutionary power based on the use of force against the bourgeoisie. The state is a machine in the hands of the
ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies. In this
respect the dictatorship of the proletariat does not differ essentially
from the dictatorship of any other class, for the proletarian state is a
machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie.
But there is the substantial difference. This difference consists in the fact that all
hitherto existing class states have been dictatorships of an exploiting
minority over the exploited majority, whereas the dictatorship of the
proletariat is the dictatorship of the exploited majority over the exploiting
minority.”[8]
Since we
opened the door for Stalin, let us see what was thought about him by a different
source than Western’s main stream.
At that
time, “the Chinese Communist Party came up with one answer. They believed that
Khrushchev and his allies wanted to lead the USSR onto a sharply different political
trajectory than they believed it had taken under Stalin. We have briefly
alluded to some economic and political policies instituted under Khrushchev
that the CCP leadership saw as an abandonment of basic Marxist-Leninist
principles. (…)
The origins
of these policies, now identified with Khrushchev and his epigones Brezhnev and
the rest, lie in the immediate post-Stalin period, long before Khrushchev came
to dominate the Soviet leadership. In
fact many of them can be traced back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, the
‘late Stalin’ period.
It is difficult
to discern to what extent Stalin himself supported or opposed these
policies. In his last years he was less and less active politically. Periodically it seems as though Stalin did
try to assert a different path towards communism, - in his last book Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
(1952), for example, and at the 19th Party Congress in October
1952. Later, Mikoian wrote that Stalin’s
late views were ‘an incredibly leftist deviation’. But immediately Stalin died the ‘collective
leadership’ all agreed on dropping all mention of Stalin’s book and on dumping
the new system of Party governance.
Khrushchev
used his attack on Stalin and Beria as a weapon against the others in the
‘collective leadership’, especially Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich. This course was fraught with risk,
however. How could he have known that
they would not accuse him equally, or even more so? Part of the reason must have been that
Khrushchev was able to rely on allies like Pospelov , who helped him, ‘purge’ the archives of documentation of
his own participation in mass repressions.(…)
… At the very
end of a Central Committee Plenum, the post of First Secretary of the Party was
reinstated (until 1934 it had been called ‘General Secretary’) and Khrushchev
was elected to it. It is hard not to see this as the Party nomenklatura’s reward for ’their man.’”[9]
Yes,
Khrushchev was a moron and a rogue, and he is equal to Mr. Trump into this
regard. “We already knew that Trump,
apart from being a bigot, a liar and a xenophobe, was a sexist and a
misogynist, on record as viciously calling women pigs, dogs and slobs, rating
their bodies and making crude sexual references to his own daughter Ivanka. (…)
… The
Republican nominee bragged to a television personality while riding on a bus
that because he was a star he could do anything he wanted to a woman, including
‘grab her by the p—y’, went well beyond sexism and into sexual assault.”[10]
The crux of
the matter is not that Russia had politicians like Khrushchev, or that now US have
contenders like Trump or… Clinton; the fact is that no mass Communist Party can
now paves the way for the working class’s struggles (up and including
socialism); it is currently true in Russia and maybe worse in USA. For instance, working-class papers like Iskra (during the Tsarist era)
said: “We Russian Social-Democrats (that
took back ‘Communist s’ title following Marx in 1848 – the year of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, -Ed.)
must unite and direct all our efforts towards the formation of a strong party which
must struggle under the single banner of revolutionary Social Democracy. (…)
The
emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself. All the other classes of present-day society
stand for the preservation of the foundations of the existing economic system. The real emancipation of the working class requires
a social revolution – which is being prepared by the entire development of
capitalism – i.e. the abolition of private ownership of the means of
production, their conversion into public property, and the replacement of
capitalist production of commodities of articles by society as a whole, with
the object of ensuring full well-being and free, all-round development for all its
members.
We need
unification based on a strict singleness of principles which must be
consciously and firmly arrived at by all or by the vast majority of committees,
organizations, and groups, of intellectuals and workers, who act in varying
circumstances and under varying conditions and have sometimes achieved their
Social-Democratic convictions along the most diverse paths. (…)
The main
cause of the Party crisis is …the
wavering intellectual and petty-bourgeois elements, of which the worker’s party
had to rid itself; elements who joined
the working-class movement mainly in the hope of an early triumph of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution and could not stand up to a period of reaction. Their instability was revealed in theory… and
in tactics… as well as in Party organization. The class-conscious workers
repelled this instability, came out resolutely against the liquidators, and
began to take the management and guidance of the Party organizations into their
own hands.”[11]
Such is the
story of the Communist party of Québec, which absorbed hundreds of former members
deceived by the nationalist and social-democratic Parti québécois, that
initiated most of the policies in the Province of Québec for almost 30 years; and
many amongst those people were sadly confused by the reintroduction of
capitalism in Soviet Union. But, ce n’est que partie remise…
[1] Lenin,
V.I., Imperialism and the split in
socialism, Collected Works, vol. 23, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, page
1
[2] Friedman,
Thomas L., Can the U.S. really win the
election?, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 13,
2016, Front Page
[3] Wilkes-Barbe,
PA., Trump sliding? Die-hards don’t buy it, The New York
Times, International Edition, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page 5
[4] Burns,
Alexander; Martin, Jonathan, Republican
split may tilt states, The New York Times, International Edition, Thursday,
October 13, 2016, page 5
[5] Blair,
Bruce G., Trump and the nuclear keys, The New York Times, International
Edition, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page 16
[6] Weaver,
Courtney; McLannahan, Ben, Republicans in
Trump quandary, Financial Times, New York, Thursday 13 October 2016, page 2
[7] Marx, Karl;
Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the
Communist Party, Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1970; Reprinted in
the U.S.A., 2012, pages 26, 28
[8] Stalin, J.V.,
The foundations of Leninism, Foreign
Languages Press, Peking, 1975, pages 42-43
[9] Furr,
Grover, Khrushchev lied, Erythros
Press and Media, Kettering –Ohio-, 2011, page198-199
[10] Timson,
Judith, A key moment in fight against
sexism, Toronto Star, Thursday, October 13, 2016, page T5
[11] Lenin, On the organizational Principles of a
Proletarian Party, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1972,
pages 68-69, 88-89, 104-105, 187-188
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