Where Do We Go From Here?

A good question, with no easy answer.

A friend of mine posed this question to me, in response to my post “War, What’s It Good For” which included a lengthy article from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research titled “All Wars End in Negotiations. So Will the War in Ukraine”.

A very brief answer to the question (I hope to develop this more thoroughly when I’m settled in my new home) requires that we understand the war in Ukraine (and also the genocidal war in Palestine, the growing conflict in the South Pacific, and the disastrous “civil” wars in Africa) in the context of the decline of US hegemony since the end of the Cold War. Everything is interconnected, and that connection is the interests of US capital.

As WWII ended in 1945, the US emerged as the dominant world hegemon in the economic, military and political spheres. Its position was captured by the phrase “The American Century”. Its dominance was based on a resurgent capitalist economy (the Great Depression and WWII having resulted in the “creative destruction of capital” worldwide) led by the one country whose “physical” capital had not been destroyed by the war. US economic dominance was backed up by its possession of the Atomic Bomb (and its apparent willingness to use it!) which ensured its military dominance.

Finally, as “the country” that defeated fascism (neglecting the massive contributions of the Soviet army and civilian partisans), the US laid claim to the political leadership through the founding of the United Nations, appropriately headquartered in New York.

This dominance was challenged briefly by the socialist countries, led by the Soviet Union and China, and some of the newly independent nations of the Global South, but US military power, backed by a still very productive economy and control of the international financial system, allowed it to emerge “victorious” in the late 1980s and again rule unchallenged for a time.

HOWEVER, the cost of maintaining its empire (in terms of devoting resources to unproductive investments, aka the military), combined with the declining rate of profit in its capital intensive economy (see Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty) opened the door for new economic competition, first in the form of competing developed capitalist nations of Europe and Japan and eventually from the BRICS nations.

The capitalist class in the US responded to these challenges in two ways. The first was to double down on the exploitation of the US working class. The US capitalists’ concessions to the working class in the post war period had been made possible by the US capitalist resurgence after WWII and had been made necessary by fear that US workers might turn to socialism absent material improvements in their lives. That same fear led to the creation of the Marshall Plan and the military alliance, NATO.

Starting in the late 1960s with the decline of US economic dominance as evidenced by stagflation and trade imbalances, capitalists brought out the big guns in the class struggle, going after unions and, in general, disciplining labor. They added an ideological aspect to their arsenal, neoliberalism, which played well in a hyper-individualistic American consumer society.

Strengthened at home, they also ramped up the Cold War to “bleed the Soviet economy dry” when the Soviets tried to compete with the US militarily. This was reflected in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban. The result, coupled with rise of a bureaucratic elite in the USSR, led to the collapse of the US’s main competitor and the return of the US to its hegemonic status in the early 1990s.

It turned out to be a pyrrhic victory as reflected in part by the US war in Afghanistan against the very same forces who had thwarted the Russians. While the US has been able to maintain its military dominance since the end of the Cold War through its “forever” wars and its nuclear build up, it came with a tremendous cost of lives around the world, a $1 trillion plus annual cost to American taxpayers, and the ever present danger of nuclear confrontation, its economic power has continued to erode.

At this point in time, we shouldn’t be fooled by the actions of tRump and his billionaire backers, particularly with regard to Ukraine. Winding down the war in Ukraine is part of the capitalists’ pivot towards containing China, which they see as a greater danger to US hegemony. The focus there is on Taiwan, which is a critical player in the global semiconductor industry, although China’s increasing ties throughout the Global South are also of concern.

So, to get back to the title of this post, where do we go from here? The answer I believe is that we need to be raising the demand that US government adopt a foreign policy that accepts the reality of a new multi-polar world, one which would allow it to drastically reduce military spending and redirect those resources to investments that will begin to meet the needs of the working class at home and abroad. A step in that direction would be negotiating settlements to both the genocidal war in Palestine and the US proxy war in Ukraine.

Can US capitalists accept such a change? I doubt it, since both political parties, representing two somewhat different sectors of the capitalist ruling class, are committed to repression at home and permanent war abroad. When it comes to funding the Pentagon, they trip over each other in their eagerness to pour more $$$ in the war machine and the military contractors. But progressives, by raising this alternate path, will further expose the designs of capital and the dangerous efforts to harness working class anger to support the interests of capital around the world can be mitigated.

For now.