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War, the police state, falling living standards, & the downward spiral of capitalism

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The sources of misery and violence that appear within communities, whether gangs, mental illness, domestic abuse, drugs, hate crimes, or mass shootings, are direct reflections of what the social order is designed to bring about. Capitalism's purpose is to create profits, which requires that the needs of the people be neglected. Because the conditions of the people are filled with unemployment, falling wages, underfunded public services, and hateful propaganda that reinforces the violence the system depends on, they respond by going on destructive paths. The system then locks them up, and points to their actions as proof that the heavy hand of the state is necessary for protecting society.

With a socioeconomic system that maintains itself in this way, by perpetually creating crises and then using them as excuses for maintaining its own rule, is it any wonder why civilization is now in a progressive state of decline? The long arc of capitalism is one where its crises become too big for it to manage, where the rate of profit falls, capital contracts, and the ruling class has to respond by engineering society's unraveling. The only way the bourgeoisie can stay in power while their system eats itself is by sacrificing ever-growing amounts of humanity and nature, deeming more and more of the world to be expendable. It's the ultimate capitalist catastrophe, and the forces of reaction are trying to exploit it in a proportionate fashion: by pointing to the growing chaos, and claiming the only solution is to discard the segments of the population that are judged to be the problem.

The war machine as a tool for controlled global collapse

American militarism is driving the world, including the U.S., into an unmitigated catastrophe. The consequences of the U.S. military's unparalleled greenhouse gas emissions are being felt in the current heat wave, which has so far killed thousands throughout Europe, is taking a steady stream of lives within the United States, and is exacerbating fires across Africa and Asia. Like with the pandemic, capitalism is finding ways to brush aside these realities of mass mortal risks to keep business running. In this sense, the system's own self-delusion is able to stave off total collapse in the economic sense. But as the death toll from both the virus and the climate crisis mounts, and as other stresses like the record refugee situation get worse, capital finds itself threatened on a more fundamental level. Its disregard for the increasingly dire conditions it's created can keep industry going, but only for so long; at a certain point the fundamental structures of civilization will give way. Which is the scenario that war-making during our era is about preempting.

If imperialism can render growing parts of the globe without functioning states, mired in conflicts that get perpetually renewed by ceaseless imperialist meddling, the disaster that is unfolding can stay within its control. When NATO bombed Libya into a failed state eleven years ago, and plunged the country into a civil war where slave markets could appear, it effectively accelerated the process towards collapse that global warming had already set Africa on. So is the purpose of Washington's current meddling throughout the horn of Africa, and an expanding number of other places in the formerly colonized world. By forcing a region into anarchy, Washington can prevent the countries in that region from building wealth on their own, which is a growing possibility as the global order transitions towards multipolarity. The imperialists seek to maintain control by any means necessary, even if that means destroying the states that are used to administer the functions of capital. That's the scorched-earth approach of Washington's global hybrid asymmetrical war against China.

When a country has been brought to this state, in which it's so thoroughly blown to pieces that it can fall neither into the Chinese nor U.S. bloc, there are still ways to draw capital from its crisis situation. Since the start of Libya's refugee crisis, the industry for keeping asylum seekers from reaching Europe has brought in billions in profits. It parallels how the U.S. prison-industrial complex has been profiting from detaining the migrants who've been forced to flee by U.S. Latin American coups.

But these means for building capital aren't neo-colonial, and if neo-colonialism goes extinct, imperialism will go along with it. In an unraveling civilization, capital's means for building itself increasingly consist of industries that feed off the destruction, such as private mercenary contractors, migrant detention-center builders, and law enforcement-surveillance providers. The industries that build up the actual productive forces, that make capital strong in the first place, are withering. You can't have an empire if your only relation to the formerly colonized countries is refugee policing and operations by military companies. You need to have colonies for extracting resources.

Faced with this shrinking of its neo-colonial market access, the U.S. empire is seeking to revitalize its capital and regain its lost market access by taking out the source of the multipolar shift: China. The proxy war in Ukraine is not just about providing arms contractors with fresh profits after last year's Afghanistan withdrawal, but about setting off what the empire hopes will be a domino effect of chaos across Eurasia. Washington couldn't care less about the safety of the Ukrainian people, whom it's plunged into a failed state and a civil conflict by carrying out a fascist coup. Washington sees Ukraine as a means to an end, which is weakening Russia to the point where Washington can break the country into several U.S.-controlled fascist states, same as the imperialists did in Yugoslavia. When Russia has been colonized by the West, China will no longer have its most important strategic ally, leaving it vulnerable to getting subdued.

Such is the ultimate goal of the new cold war the imperialists have instigated, that of destroying Washington's geopolitical rivals so that neo-colonialism can no longer be threatened by China's Belt and Road Initiative. It's why the policies of the neo-colonial regime in Sri Lanka, writes Vijay Prashad, "are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the U.S. and China, just as the old - but raw - vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed." The meddling the U.S. has been carrying out amid Sri Lanka's recent mass uprising, co-opting the demonstrations to bolster an agenda of further privatization and anti-Chinese militarism, is making for a proxy war effort that parallels the one in Ukraine. The empire is working to bring all willing countries into its conflict with the Chinese bloc, and to render stateless any countries that don't join in on this conflict.

Taiwan is another one of these comprador regimes that the imperialists have been using to advance their cold-war escalations. Last year, the U.S. doubled its military presence within the island. Then after Russia got provoked into intervening in Ukraine, the U.S. used Ukraine as a narrative stepping stone, and pivoted towards Taiwan. Washington's brazen treatment of Taiwan as an entity separate from China, culminating in a diplomatic visit to the island from Pelosi that even many of Pelosi's fellow imperialists have viewed as excessively risky, has brought the globe closer than ever to a third world war.

For now, the only material benefactors of the tensions are the arms contractors. The attempt to destabilize Russia is failing, and the BRI has gained too much credibility for the formerly colonized world to reject it. Imperialism's warmaking can't realistically carry out the Eurasian colonial expansion it hopes for, so capital has no choice but to continue contracting.

The police state's growing war against the U.S. empire's internal colonies

The reason why imperialism's attempts to reverse the decline of neo-colonialism will fail parallels the reason why social stability within U.S. borders will keep falling apart: capital's weakening is making it necessary to sacrifice growing amounts of the population in order for the system to survive. This dynamic is playing out both within the neo-colonies, and the imperial center. Neoliberalism, which is a project to engineer a controlled collapse of society so that wealth can be distributed upwards, has been driving down living standards in both the exploited and exploiting countries. The difference is that the collapse is further along in the exploited countries by default, since they were "underdeveloped" (or as Parenti called it over-exploited) before neoliberalism was adopted around fifty years ago. Naturally, the people of these countries are increasingly mobilizing for an end to neo-colonial control, and embracing the BRI as a welcome alternative to U.S. extractivism.

Synchronicities are to be found everywhere within this story, such as the parallel between the controlled collapse of Washington's cold-war destabilization meddling and the controlled collapse of neoliberalism. The deterioration of conditions in the core can be viewed as a miniature version of the intensifying over-exploitation that's been wrought upon the peripheries, with the cause of both being modern capitalism's free-market fundamentalism and austerity paradigm. And as the neo-colonies have especially suffered from neoliberalism's destructive impacts compared to the core, the racially oppressed peoples within the core have especially suffered compared to the settlers. The black, brown, and indigenous communities are U.S. imperialism's internal colonies, so they've been getting disproportionately harmed by these policies. In response to these growing contradictions within capitalism, the police and carceral state have been waging war against the internal colonies with increasing ferocity.

The racist impact of this repressive campaign can't be reduced to a simple narrative of class, in which these communities have been getting statistically targeted more solely due to them being statistically poorer than white communities. The data shows that poverty doesn't explain police racism; crime, despite being made more likely by poverty, has been found not to be the determining factor behind the rate of police presence (and therefore police brutality) within a given community. The real cause of the disproportionate amount of police encounters with nonwhites is racial bias within law enforcement. Because there are racial disparities between the people the criminal justice system targets even after racial differences in crime rates are factored in, the racially disproportionate rates of police altercations and incarceration can't mostly be explained by racial wealth disparities, nor by the consequent racial disparities in crime rates. The explanation is the white-supremacist culture that continues to prevail within the system.

None of this means race and class aren't directly intertwined. The racism of the carceral and police state can primarily be traced to racial prejudice rather than to a general classism, yet classism itself couldn't exist without racism. Racism is the tool that capitalism uses to justify colonizing certain peoples, and colonization is how capitalism can be kept going within its highest stage of development. So this war that the state is disproportionately waging against U.S. imperialism's internal colonies is another war to preserve capital. It's an internal version of imperialism, where the nations the empire has enslaved, forcibly annexed land from, and heavily exploited through immigrant labor are being ever more heavily repressed. This repression is done so that they'll be less likely to fight back, and take what's theirs. The ongoing existence of the United States is incompatible with a scenario where the people it's exploited to build its imperial wealth get reparations.

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Rainer Shea is writing articles that counter the propaganda of the capitalist/imperialist power establishment, and that help move us towards a socialist revolution. Donate to me on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

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