By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*
In the last ten years, the USA has entered its deepest institutional crisis
Gabriel Garcia Márquez glimpsed Simon Bolívar in his incessant search for a land of freedom, but already lost between enemies and the inevitable loss of his cognition, thus trapped in “his labyrinth”, the general lost a large part of his historical glimpse. It seems bad to compare General Simon Bolívar and his historical importance to Latin America and use him to visualize the current loss of cognition of the American Empire, but the metaphorical use seemed interesting to me.
The objective of this text is to briefly analyze the electoral process and the American institutional crisis in three acts. The comparative construction of a labyrinth appears when looking at the Empire's possible solutions: a frenetic continuity of wars and the inevitability, in our view, of a fascist project. The first act will give rise to the context of the crisis of US imperialism; the second will deal with the advancement of the dispute between the new international blocs, especially the new Eurasian bloc (China and Russia) and the weakening of the dollar; Finally, the third act will deal with the limits of liberal democracy and the fascist and warmongering risks.
The prolonged crisis of the empire
The USA emerged from the Second World War as a global power, imperial in the Leninist sense, that is, control of global flows of capital, technological base and organization of the military system. The rivalry with the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) occurred curiously in all three fields, even though in the case of the Soviet Union it was a hybrid economic form (Real Socialism).[I]
The USSR enabled investment flows (fixed and circulating capital) to a group of countries, as well as a technological base and military structure (the Warsaw Pact). We could say, with a certain degree of accuracy, that the US/USSR dispute was a total dispute with permanent repercussions on the economic reorganization of central and peripheral capitalism.[ii]
The defeat of the USSR was thus a severe blow to any project to mitigate the most critical bourgeois relations. So much so that it was only with the end of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 1991 that the definitive advance of the neoliberal creed was observed.[iii]
Even with its victory over real Socialism, the price paid by US imperialism was high. To overcome the Soviet Union, it was necessary to recompose European capitalism and former rivals to be replaced in the capitalist competitive dispute, especially Germany and Japan. As well as establishing a bridge with Revolutionary China (Henry Kissinger reestablished ties with China in 1976). Here the aim was to isolate the USSR. Little did they know that they would recreate the ancient dragon.
The American decline occurred gradually and still occurs slowly, due to the almost monopolistic control of “world money” and the forces of value transfer from the capitalist periphery to the imperial center and, also, due to the last technological cycle under its control, the cycle of “big tech“, which, in our view, is coming to an end and will probably inaugurate a new and fratricidal technological and military race.
The new dispute between economic and social blocs
Eric Hobsbawm (2012, p. 479) noted that Russia, whether as a tsarist empire or in the form of the Soviet Union had been a “great power since the XNUMXth century, its disintegration had left a void between Trieste and Vladivostok”. From the English historian's reading, it seems clear that the historical period of a fragile Russia would be very short and that power relations would soon be established that would resume conflict between Moscow and the forces of US imperialism. In fact, after the end of the USSR, a strong ideological and economic siege was imposed, including seeking to dismantle the Russian Federation, as was done with the former Yugoslavia, at the cost of bombings that practically destroyed Belgrade.
During the 1990s, the so-called “principle of the new American century” was introduced, an attempt to continue the peace signed after the Second World War around American nuclear power, but the permanence of Russian questioning, even after the suffering defeat of the Cold War. , made the scenario always critical for American military capitalism. In the framework after the 1990s, six elements are important to be visualized and treated:
(i) The affirmation of the dollar as world currency. The financial system established in Breton Woods had already been in decline since the mid-1960s, but international commercial arrangements and American economic power kept the dollar as the main reference in exchanges, including due to the absence of any alternative monetary institution.
The dollar as a transaction currency provides the US with important advantages, four of which are notable: (a) the power of “seigneurship”, which implies gains from controlling the currency and which are appropriated directly by the US Treasury; (b) advantage in incorporating financial instruments for systemic control and regulation, the main one being the Swift System, which controls movements and flows between currencies; (c) exchange parity gains; (d) nominal basis for issuing US treasury bonds, a key factor in fiscal financing and organizer of the double deficit (fiscal and commercial).[iv]
The aspect that interests us here refers to the transactional cost in dollars, due to the three elements above, which encourages several countries to review or adopt new options. It is clear that this US monetary power weakens in accordance with the other aspects that we will deal with. A key side point was that this monetary power and production of fiscal and trade deficits also triggered increasing deindustrialization in the US, something we will return to later.
(ii) No other rival military power. This point appears with a post-Vietnam War shadow and had several critical episodes. The main one was the unsuccessful attempt to dismantle the Russian Army, something that led to a strong reaction from the Eurasian Bear in 2007 with its intervention in the conflict in Syria and, subsequently, the retaking of Crimea. In 2018, the Russians revealed that they had technological mastery of hypersonic missiles with technology superior to that of the USA and NATO.[v]
The US military intervention capacity places heavy pressure on its budget, with an average rate exceeding 5% of GDP, partly financed with public debt, which establishes the contours of the fiscal crisis. It is difficult for an imperial power to maintain itself for long with such high war expenses, even though part of this financing comes from transfers from the capitalist periphery to the center.
(iii) Control over world trade structures. The center of US financing, in addition to the first point already discussed, was its control over the structure of world trade, which involved two interconnected aspects: control over multilateral institutions (WTO, World Bank and IMF) and, also, over imposition mechanisms and control of global financing interest rates. Something important and illustrative was the “Volker shock” which sharply raised interest rates and redirected loan flows towards the center, combined with the financial collapse of the periphery. This architecture can no longer be maintained and the main reason is the rise of China and the Eurasian bloc.
(iv) Reproductive globalization of capital. Changes in the 1980s and 1990s led to a race for “lower wages”. The logic of capital was and is for a higher rate of exploration and stimulation of an increase in the rate of profit, one of the consequences was “global outsourcing” and industrial decentralization mainly towards Asia.
China carries out a different strategy, firstly capturing the relevant industrial flows, establishing large export production platforms/cities for the capitalist center and, at the same time, implementing a planned and accurate technological strategy of “catch up“, with enormous success in the use of expansionary fiscal policies, alongside a merely cosmetic adoption of the formula of exchange rate appreciation and monetary restriction of the “Washington Consensus”.
The result was economic growth rates above 10% on average for almost three decades (1980/2010), only attenuating, to average rates around 5% per year in the period 2010/2020. As a result of this, a major front of international dispute between US imperialism and a new and gigantic global “player” was established.[vi]
(v) Free financial flow. The free financial flow was mainly aimed at the periphery of the system, with Brazil, for example, being one of these central ports for speculation and rentier gain. Again, in this case, China did not fall for the chant and the result of the controls that the State imposed in the case of the Asian country was the strengthening of local banks and enormous capacity for productive reinvestment, which led China to become the largest industrial base on the planet. and establish its own globalization plan, the so-called “New Silk Road”.
(vi) Minimum social state. The figure of a State without social intervention was one of the results of the central ideological duo of neoliberalism: Hayek and Friedman. The problem since then has been the increase in social inequality and enormous concentration of income, one of the consequences, in addition to deindustrialization, was the reinforcement of the ideological discourse against migrants, the increase in xenophobia and the use of these ideological fallacies by neoliberalism and fascism.
Three consequences of this situation result: (a) the confirmation of the decline of the dollar and the growing fiscal crisis in the USA; (b) the emergence of an alternative superblock: both militarily (Russia), commercially (China), and technologically (Russia and China) and; (c) the strengthening of xenophobic discourse within the USA and Europe.
The labyrinth
In the last ten years, the USA has entered its deepest institutional crisis. Episodes during the Obama administration already highlighted the difficulties of two-party liberal democracy, one of these episodes was the enormous difficulty in voting on the budget required by the executive, something that caused US bonds to be questioned, posing a serious risk to the Empire's fiscal regime.
American liberal institutionality was established shortly after the Civil War (1860/1865), supported by a strong interaction of interests of the four main groups of the bourgeoisie (industrial, agrarian, commercial, financial). The bipartisan logic (although there are other parties, but with an insignificant capacity for influence) rests on a consensus around the State as a social form of control and management of the common interests of the bourgeoisie, using here Friedrich Engels' formula.[vii]
The factors already exposed for the reorganization of the American economic pattern had a severe influence on its state capacity to manage internal social inequalities. It is worth noting that the North American State is going through three types of crisis: the fiscal crisis due to the pattern of military spending; the crisis of political representation, with a high loss of recognition of the two parties in the system and, finally, a crisis of leadership, with an absence of charismatic and purposeful personalities.
The fiscal crisis dates back to the 1970s, with the weakening of the productive base (tax-paying) and the strengthening of neoliberal rentism (non-tax-paying) leading to a growing dependence on the seigniorage power of the dollar and the non-profit debt system. reproductive[viii]. A key aspect in the current cycle refers to the search for gains and assets via “accumulation through dispossession”, imposing new rounds of wealth transfer from the capitalist periphery to the center, without any type of national project possible in contrast.
It is precisely this structural situation that makes Democrats and Republicans very similar. The prospect of continued wars (to guarantee profitability for warmongering capital), the pressure on different countries, including European ones, to guarantee income transfer flows to the USA, including the use of terrorist sabotage (Nord Stream is an example); illegal expropriation of funds from countries classified, by the American bourgeoisie, as “dangerous countries” (Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea); spoliative use of economic sanctions, in the case of Russia, for example, the heaviest economic sanctions and expropriation of sovereign wealth funds were applied.[ix]
To this set of piracy legitimized by the order of the imperialist system is added the dependent subordination of a varied set of countries whose bourgeoisies consensually transfer wealth in the form of interest payments, expatriate profits and dispossession of local assets, all of which is the result of high exploitation of their populations. The Brazilian case is an excellent example of this, whether with extortionate interest payments on public debt (the second largest in the world), or privatization and transfer of public assets to international funds (Black Rock, for example). Thus, we observe that there is no noticeable difference between Democrats and Republicans, even considering a repulsive figure like Donald Trump.
The American capitalist empire finds itself in a labyrinth, like Garcia Márquez's character. The labyrinth is so complex that it seems to prolong the fainting of its prisoner, the consequence will be long agony and existential risks not only for the American people, but for all humanity.
*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UFPA. Author, among other books, of Agenda of debates and theoretical challenges: the trajectory of dependency and the limits of Brazilian peripheral capitalism and its regional constraints (Paka-Tatu).
References
David Harvey. Neoliberalism: history and implications. Sao Paulo: Loyola Editions, 2008.
Eric Hobsbawm. Age of Extremes: the brief 1914th century (1991-XNUMX). São Paulo: Company of letters, 2012.
Ernest Mandel. late capitalism. So Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1985.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The general in his labyrinth. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2019.
Istvan Mészáros. Totality. In: BOTTOMORE, T. (editor). Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1988.
James O'Connor. The fiscal crisis of the State. Transaction Publishers, New Jersey (2002).
José Luís Fiori (organizer). the american power. Petrópolis: Voices, 2004.
José Raimundo B. Trindade. Critique of the Political Economy of Public Debt and the Credit System: a Marxist approach🇧🇷 Curitiba: CRV, 2017.
Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira. Formation of the American Empire. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2005.
Michael Moffitt. The world's money. Rio de Janeiro: Peace and land, 1985.
Paul Sweezy. Socialism. In: BOTTOMORE, T. (editor). Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1988.
Yanis Varoufakis. The Global Minotaur: The True Origin of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the Economy. São Paulo: Literary Autonomy, 2017.
Notes
[I] According to Paul Sweezy (1988, p. 319), the notion of “real socialism” initially appears in the propositions of Rudolf Bahro, in the book “The alternative for a critique of real socialism”. It refers to the model that was established in the former USSR after the “new economic policy” and was consolidated in the “Stalinist” regime.
[ii] The notion of totality expresses a historical condition that defines the different social epochs, considering their central actors and conflicts. Mészáros (1988, p. 381) defines social totality in Marxist theory as “a structured and historically determined general complex. It exists in and through multiple mediations and transitions by which its specific and complex parts – that is, the 'partial wholes' – are related to each other, in a series of interrelations and reciprocal determinations that constantly vary and change.”
[iii] You can find excellent reports on the above facts in Hobsbawm (2012); Mandel (1985); Harvey (2008) and Varoufakis (2017).
[iv] Four good reading recommendations are Fiori (2004), Moffit (1985), Trindade (2017) and Varoufakis (2017).
[v] Check out Fiori on this website: https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/que-horas-sao-no-relogio-de-guerra-da-otan/
[vi] For an excellent unconventional analysis of Chinese economic performance, check out Michel Roberts' recently published website: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/07/24/chinas-third-plenum/
[vii] Regarding American institutional and military formation, it is worth checking out Bandeira (2005).
[viii] On the history of the American fiscal crisis, the classic Marxist work is by James O'Connor: “The fiscal crisis of the State”. Check out the text we published on this website: https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/rigidez-fiscal/
[ix] Check: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/San%C3%A7%C3%B5es_internacionais_durante_a_Guerra_Russo-Ucraniana.
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