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Biden’s Gaza problems are deeper than just being interrupted in public
(edition.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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What you're talking about is exemplified by Bush v Gore, when the Supreme Court decided the election it was Gore that happily conceded because he and Bush were just having a friendly competition. That was before the empire began its decline, what used to be collaboration between friendly rivals is turning into infighting. The partisanship we see is actually a side effect of deeper troubles.
Fundamentally disagree. The political theater is not showing a deep divide between agents. It is reflecting the deep divide between voters.
That's certainly still true to a degree, but the way the US's political system is set up means that the True Believers of the theater bullshit are now the ones getting elected. They get elected to city, county, and state level offices as well as the federal House. It hasn't gotten to the point where the brain rot has reached the Senate (yet), but every level below that is filled with up-and-comers who really believe the partisanship is real. The old guard of the empire is all in their 80s and dying off, these younger politicians are completely disconnected from realpolitik because they grew up in the neoliberal End of History. That's why we have shit like Texas having a showdown with the feds over the border lol
Transmission of empire happens in universities, in big business, and in the halls of power. The new guard has gone through that process just like their predecessors. That their behavior is more erratic, again, speaks to the psychology of the voters more than the psychology of the officials.
Their predecessors cut their teeth on the Cold War, this new cohort did so on the War on Terror. Rather than having experience competing with a world power, their only experience is in colonial management. It's like how the Zionist army only has experience managing the occupation and has no experience in actual warfare. They're ideologically similar, but their actual professional experiences are far different. Psychology is irrelevant imo
Even during the cold war the USA lost constantly. I don't think it's incompetence. I think guerilla warfare is simply superior. It's not like the USA was effect during the cold war. The USSR was famous for it's ability to hunt Western spies far more effectively than the reverse. The USSR defeated the most powerful Western army ever fielded while they were still trying to modernize their agriculture to stop the centuries-long cycle of famine. The USSR failed not because of the West but because of their own failures to manage reaction and revision in the party.
The cold war was colonial management. So I don't see why you think managing empire back then made our politicians strong but managing empire now has made them weak. You're over indexing on present-day failures and last generations successes. They were just as loony in the 70s as they are today, we just don't keep that stuff in the forefront.
The most significant and most important difference is global financialization and the outsourcing that came with it. The politicians from the 30s to the 70s had to manage domestic industry and the business leaders did too. Since the 70s, with new economic policies allowing freer movement of capital, more financialization and abstract derivatives, and then China identifying the economic angle to kill the empire, todays politicians have never had to deal with real productive forces. I don't think that makes them better or worse in this case. I think it makes them more prone to abstract thinking with fewer moments of contact with reality.
But both parties have that problem and it manifests not fundamentally as forgetting they are on the same team but rather deepening the contradictions inherent in the system through their domestic policy and rhetoric.
I must disagree. Reaction and revision in the party were consequences of Western actions taken against them. It wasn't some internal failure of the USSR that caused it to collapse, it was the Cold War and Western aggression. Back then, the West was actually a formidable colonial power - they weren't just managers, it was a shrewd and effective system of colonial conquest.
That's why the new imperial age with the War on Terror is different. Yes, the West lost battles before, but today they can't even present a unified front. Now other colonial actors and capital interests act in defiance of the empire to make their own rogue moves for power. Brexit, for example. I think this shows internal divisions within the empire and that this is reflected in partisanship. The material base has changed and this has changed the political superstructure, the voters didn't just choose to become partisan on their own. While you're right that much of this partisanship is coming from voters, the voters' partisanship is actually a reflection of the changing material interests of the ruling class coming into contradiction with each other.
You're right that this comes back to financialization but this, too, is a shift from conquest to management. They don't run real industrial forces, they manage imaginary money.
I think this is terribly mistaken. Reaction is inherent in any society undergoing change. It's not something imposed from the outside. There IS international reaction, but that reaction is based on the international community's relationship to the change. Kruschev represented the reactionary forces within Russia, not Western reactionaries. Revisionism in the USSR had nothing to do with the West and everything to do with the reactionary elements within the USSR that wanted to make socialism compatible with enterprise for profit and individual enrichment. It's completely naive to assume that all of the USSR was ideologically aligned and that the only reason the USSR went the way it did was because of the West.
It absolutely was.
The Cold War was the way that the US created pressures on the USSR without engaging them in nation-state war. The USSR needed to manage these pressures, and they failed to do so. The counter-revolutionaries within the USSR outmaneuvered the revolutionaries, and Stalin had no one to pass the torch to when he died. Kruschev launched the anti-Stalin campaign and from that point forward there was an attempt to build a new world power that allowed for private wealth accumulation and would compete with the West on economic and hard power grounds instead of ideological ones.
It still is. The problem isn't that the USA got soft from it's success. It's that there's no other empires to inherit from. The USA finished taking over for the others empires after WW2. That doesn't exist anymore. So the empire has been trying to figure out what to do, but there's no room to expand into anymore. This is the contradiction of achieving unipolarity through displacement - once you achieve it, you cannot maintain with displacement, and the only solution is for you yourself to be displaced by the next empire. The USA has been trying to figure out a new strategy for decades, and the blowback strategy (War on Terror) has been the most effective and promising it's come up with. You can call them soft for not coming up with an answer, but there's also the possibility that there is no answer to be found.
I don't think this is a mistake. The apparent divisions politically are really useful rhetorically. You can easily see this because there's clearly continuity in the USA's behavior, despite the appearances of lacking a united front. The way the USA prosecuted the proxy war in Ukraine is identical to how to it prosecuted other proxy wars, but this time they did while putting out an image of division. The image and the reality don't match up. The reality belies the continuity and consistency. The only conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the image is artifice.
What other colonial actors and capital interests are acting in defiance of empire? The international bourgeoisie is firmly in control of the empire. There are no wars between billionaires. And just to pre-empt the obvious - Russia and China are not colonial powers.
How is this defying empire? The UK participated in a project to create a European economic union and then backed out to protect some of its interests. In no way is this a defiance of empire.
It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.
The political superstructure hasn't changed at all towards polarization and partisanship. The superstructure changes that have happened have been about power projection through treaties and NGOs. The much larger superstructural changes have been the rise of BRICS, alternate currency trades, and the neutering of sanctions, all against empire.
They were manipulated into it through the propaganda arm of empire. The empire chose to make them extremely partisan. It serves the interests of empire.
You haven't shown any subgroups of the ruling class being in contradiction with each other. You keep pointing to the partisan divide, but they all party together, they send their kids to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they get donations from the same corporations, they vote together for everything the empire actually needs to survive. The Ds fucking obviated the filibuster last year to raise the debt ceiling, FFS. You're getting confused by the image of conflict. There's no real conflict within the ruling class. The contradiction is between the ruling class and the working class, and that contradiction is getting harder and harder to manage due to the changing material reality, which is itself a contradiction in that the bourgeoisie needed these changes to material reality for their own interests but the changes are making it harder to manage the class basis of society. The partisanship is yet another attempt to divide the working class against itself and defuse revolutionary potential. Is this going to result in some actual politicians reifying the narrative and living in a fantasy land? Yes. But that's not terribly important, and in fact, it would be really hard to tell the difference between someone who's a true believer and someone who's merely behaving in accordance with the conditions created by polarizing the working class.
Sure, but a fundamental cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and revisionism and outright anticommunism everywhere. While the USSR was already dealing with organic internal issues, the Cold War continually heaped more on top of that. Color Revolutions don't just happen because the revolution wasn't good enough, there are continual CIA injections of cash and propaganda and people.
It's both. Reactionary elements within the USSR were supported by the West.
These things are all true, but I think you're undervaluing the material forces at play during the Cold War. US dominance was a material outcome of its position after WWII, its extremely favorable geography, its rapid development from primitive accumulation and its continued internal colonization of Black and Indigenous people, and its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Revolutionaries weren't just outmaneuvered by counter-revolutionaries, but by the vast empire that they had supporting them.
This is a contradiction. If the USA has gotten soft, then it's not the formidable power it once was.
And it certainly has gotten soft. As I've said before, the current leadership consists of Cold War mummies and their sons who grew up in the End of History. I believe that the growth of BRICS and the push towards dedollarization, the ICJ ruling against Israel, countries pulling out of ECOWAS, the deal China made with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Iran, these are all signs of the empire's decline.
Trump ended US occupation of Afghanistan, and unlike Biden's fake withdraw from Iraq where he left the US's handpicked leader in place and left US troops behind, Trump actually just pulled all US troops out and surrendered Afghanistan back to the Taliban. Does that not strike you as a break of continuity? How about when Trump pulled out of the TPP, which promised to open up global markets even further to US capital? And how about this most recent obstruction of Ukraine funding or Texas blocking federal border patrol agents?
Please, I'm not a liberal, I'm well aware that Russia and China are not colonial powers. But I was talking about Brexit here:
By placing limits on the movement of capital between the UK and the rest of the EU. Capital needs to be able to flow freely within the imperial core to serve imperialist interests, and what the UK did runs counter to that. It also introduced coordination complications between the imperialist armed forces and forces the UK to muster up its own inferior military capabilities (i.e. a "citizen army") to make up for it.
Maybe you're right, but they didn't need to do that before.
Yeah I was getting ahead of myself. I think that's starting with them trying to make it illegal for Trump to run for office and Trump promising to jail his political opponents, but that could all be theater like you said.
See my previous examples of Afghanistan and the TPP and Brexit. These are outgrowths of partisanship that the empire manipulated people into, but now the blowback is setting in and this partisanship is starting to make empire management more difficult.
Fair.
How about the so-called "labor shortage", which is in direct contradiction with anti-immigrant/anti-refugee partisanship? The empire grows stronger when it can steal labor from other countries to come be superexploited in the imperial core and, for some reason, the partisan divide is pushing towards less immigration and less admittance of refugees. That's hard to explain except as blowback.
Or the contradiction between States barring foreign land investment and the need for the market value of land to perpetually increase?
Or the contradiction between starting a microchip tradewar with China and creating microchip shortages that harm business interests (a tradewar that accomplished nothing funnily enough, China is completely fine and only US businesses were impacted)
Then there's the Nordstream Pipeline, which was clearly sabotage meant to force the EU into a permanent war footing with Russia. Europe doesn't benefit from this at all, only the US does, and as a whole this also weakens the empire by weakening the Euro's purchasing power.
I think there are more contradictions within the ruling class than you give credence.
Maybe. Or maybe you're overly cynical.
This has been fun, but I think I've said my piece. You may have the last word.
It is true that a cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and anticommunism everywhere, but a cornerstone of any communist revolutionary state must be to be able to deal with it. However, I disagree that the color revolutions created revisionism. They did not bring Kruschev to power, they did not create Kruschev and his posse, nor their political positions.
So while reactionary elements in the Eastern Bloc were supported by the West, in the central committee during the days of Lenin and Stalin I don't think you'll find much evidence of it. The failure of the USSR was in the central committee and the ascendance of the counter revolutionaries who were motivated and powerful in their own right. The vast empire supporting them seemed to work at a distance, primarily creating external pressures, not internal ones. The empire made the USSR suffer economically, caused brain drain, caused the focus to be on proxy wars instead of domestic development. It's not like the situation in Iran in '53. The counter-revolutionaries in the USSR weren't backed directly by the CIA, they weren't brainwashed, they weren't directed.
My words were unclear. The USA has not gotten soft. It's just that the whole idea that it was a formidable power in WW2 is sort of just not true. The USSR defeated 80% of the Nazi forces, the rest of the Allies combined fought 20%, the USA only a portion of that. The rest of the US's "formidable power" was spent killing peasants, and they still lost to guerilla warfare. The Nazi army was the most advanced and powerful army the world had ever seen, not the USA army. The USA continues to operate the strongest spy network in the history of the world, it's still as strong or stronger than it was in those days. It's just that the material reality is that this strength is not enough and perhaps was never enough. The Western Europeans were already struggling with colonialism by the 1800s and had begun developing neocolonial superstructures long before the USA unseated them. Once the USA unseated them, the USA inherited a world where the development of advanced guerilla warfare was showing North Atlantic military strategy to be fundamentally incapable of sustainable occupation.
There's a huge difference between the empire getting soft and the periphery getting strong. Everything you're saying is evidence of the periphery getting stronger. You could propose the hypothesis that this is all the fault of the USA getting soft. I find that hypothesis underwhelming. It takes away agency from the periphery. The hypothesis I think has more evidence behind it is that the strength of the USA is now irrelevant in the face of the contradictions of empire. Neocolonialism and neoliberalism were attempts at solutions to those contradictions, but they don't seem to have worked out for the empire. I think the periphery has gotten better at analyzing the material conditions and are exploiting those conditions to finally turn the tide against empire. I would not characterize that as the USA going soft.
This didn't happen: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/10/13/trump-ordered-rapid-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-after-election-loss/
Instead, here's what we see: https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/ "The fact is, President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were both eager to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end what Biden referred to in his Aug. 16 speech as “America’s longest war.”"
Your belief in the conflict between the parties can only be formed by filtering out evidence like this. Which, not to blame you, is actually what most people do.
The TPP was never approved by Congress. Trump formally pulled it from the table. I don't have a full analysis on the whys and wherefores of the maneuvering here. Congress is mostly millionaires. They come together all the time for the interests of the rich. The fact that they didn't ratify the TPP tells me more about the flaws in the TPP than it does about the conflict between parties.
Obstruction of Ukraine funding is perfectly timed to fit the timeline of other proxy wars. The Ukrainian's don't have enough soldiers, the Russians have destroyed everything the West has given to Ukraine. It no longer serves the interest of the USA to keep the proxy war going, so it's Congress's job to stop it. If Biden and his cabinet stopped it, they would publicly have to take up a position the Ds are not willing to take publicly because it will cost them votes. So now its Congress's fault. The reality, however, is that this is continuous with the history of US proxy wars and quite frankly it's the only way the Ds could stop funding Ukraine if that's what they wanted to do. It seems that it's exactly what they want to do.
The UK doesn't want to be harmed, so they protected themselves. They aren't opposing the USA by doing it, not in any meaningful way, they're just following their profit motive and risk profiles. There's no chance the UK attempts to assert dominance of the empire nor that it attempts to undermine the empire in favor of the Axis of Resistance, and there's no chance it's going to ride it out alone without the support of the empire. What you see as a schism I see as merely bureaucracy.
They did, but differently. There was a time when one party was all about the working class and the other was not. There was a time when one party was all about industrialization and the other was not. The history is rife with sloganeering, minor rebellions, etc. I think you're correct that there's something distinct about its character today. I think your diagnosis is off. I think that the culture war is all that's left to them, and I think the nature of the culture war is that it is self-reinforcing, creating a runaway schism. But that schism is rhetorical and electoral for leadership, and personal, emotional, and moral for the populace. If the USA had a way out of the contradictions of empire, political energy would go towards that path, but I think we're seeing that the empire is trapped and all of that political energy has to go somewhere that is infinitely expansive - culture war.
I think this whole thing is being carefully managed. The timing of it is ridiculously obvious. It always needs to reach critical points at specific electoral windows that are too short for anything to actually happen but long enough for it to mobilize voters. It's a total choice whether Trump ends up in jail or not, and that choice is going to be made on the basis of the consequences for the maintenance of empire.
I just don't think TPP and Brexit make it more difficult to manage empire. Empire is more difficult to manage because BRICS, the BRI, Chinese debt forgiveness, and the productive capabilities of the periphery are all taking up the space the empire needs to inhabit.
This is part of the set of contradictions that go along with the labor aristocracy in empire. From a purely economic situation, they would just flood the nation with migrants and tank wages, but there would be revolt. The migrants would eventually revolt as well, developing solidarity with the working class, so we need jingoism against the migrants. Now we both need cheap labor and also can't have cheap labor. But the evidence of what I'm saying is here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/26/biden-urges-bipartisan-border-deal-00138206 Both parties want the same thing.
The rest of your contradictions are things I agree with. I just don't think it's the ruling class in contradiction with itself. Capitalists are all in on the US Dollar. Europe is primarily consumer market at this point. There will be rifts in the empire as European politicians attempt to stay in power by courting BRICS for energy and goods, but capital is going to stay with the US. This is because the USA is strong, not weak, but also because that strength cannot resolve these contradictions.
That's one to watch for sure. Balkanization of the USA points to some interesting conclusions. But this is long enough. Thanks for the chat.