This is the real significance of the disarray and confusion now visible in the councils of imperialism. The stench of decay is growing; the dissolution of world-capitalism's structures and institutions is profound and unstoppable and therefore it will be the proletariat which will increasingly make the political running, as the crisis continues to deepen and the inexorable decomposition of morbid capitalism, the gangrene which has already begun to kill off its extremities, accelerates. The malevolent heart of vampire-imperialism beats inside the Washington Beltway. Here are the arrogant institutions of imperial power. Here are the great services -- the dark forces -- of its increasingly-open criminal rule. From here will belch forth the foulest, hitherto unknown technologies of repression, control, assassination, genocide and global war waged by US imperialism against the whole of humankind, including the US working class which itself has suffered much under the iron heel.
For during the past two decades the US proletariat has experienced a decline in wage-levels and living standards with no precedent in US history. Now the politics of rotten imperialism will be torn to pieces by the same vast forces that are wracking the capitalist world system. The neoliberal-globalist politics of the past decade is already foundering as its theoretical models and practical policies come under increasingly bitter attack by the forces of the capitulationist-left (the NGOs, academics, labour unions and soft social-democrats mentioned earlier). Keynesian reformism is being feverishly dusted off, the long-discredited politics of social reforms and demand management being hurriedly refreshed in the face of a catastrophic world deflation which is already exposing the brittle, shallow foundations of post-war 'miracle' Japan. Vamped-up Keynesianism, as we have seen, would only propel world capitalism deeper into the historical impasse from which there is no escape anyway.
New cycles of capitalist growth, which can only be brief and local in any case, will only deepen the underlying contradictions between capitalist development and the environmental and resource-depletion costs which are the true source of the superprofits sucked by vampire imperialism from the material world which workers have to inhabit: the world of relentless exploitation and environmental degradation, with few of the promised compensations of consumerism.
But in any case, political incoherence in the face of uncontrollable crisis does not permit imperialism to implement any single sustainable restructuring process. Thus in opposition to the 'soft- face of reforms, there is already visible the hideous mask of outright, bloody repression. While the beleaguered elites argue matters out inside Washington's Beltway, the dark forces of US imperialism are already taking matters in their own hands. While the 'humanistic' reformers bleat, the CIA and the Pentagon plots. The conscience stricken reformers have now begun to issue their pleas to the IMF and the World Bank, arrogantly claiming for themselves the right to speak on behalf of the world's oppressed and exploited, wringing their hands and venting crocodile tears for the fate on millions of lives imperilled by their own greed -- for none have so benefited from the merciless exploitation of the working class as the milk fed priesthood of US culture, as the harlots of the US intelligentsia, including the so-called left intellectuals - and it is nothing else but their own skins and their comfortable lives that they fear losing and shed tears over.
Meanwhile the dark forces have begun their campaigns of assassination, torture, 'disappearances', political pressure, harassment and the like. And this is only the first claw of the monster lurking in the heart of imperialism.
There can be no illusions that imperialism will ever give up freely what cannot be torn from its death grip by force. If history teaches anything, it teaches this: imperialism knows no limits.
Imperialism will destroy the world sooner than surrender supremacy. The enemies of humankind and of all life on earth are already chafing at the bit, and they will be the first to sweep aside the bleating platoons of reformists blatherers. As the tides of class struggle rise and the fire of people's war meld together, imperialism will convert the politics of the neoliberal 'New World Order' into war. Secret war waged with all the unscrupulous, inhuman zeal of which the Pentagon and CIA are past masters: 'anti-insurgency' low-intensity operations designed to decapitate the proletariat by slaughtering its leaders. Proxy wars waged by the imperial satraps against one another, at Washington's behest. Irredentist and intercommunal wars fomented and instigated by the dark forces whose masters understand the vital importance of divide and rule and hope to save their skins by generalising a Hobbesian war of all against all, outside their own borders. Religious wars instigated by the fanatics who are often the sons and daughters of small tradespeople and the lower professions, and who seize on bigotry and xenophobia to vent the rising frustration and anger of the submerged masses, and thus guarantee their own leading positions within obscurantist theocracies which allow scope for massive personal corruption and the 'good life' for their leaders.
In the past two decades imperialism has shown its mastery of this politics, shunting petit-bourgeois political elites away from the developmental, anti-colonialist politics of the 50s and 60s and towards the most, brutal, inhumane and totally senseless forms of sectarian and intercommunal strife, which are always tolerated and supported by imperialism: even when states are declared 'pariah', such as Libya, Iraq and Iran, imperialism does nothing to damage their regimes and even goes out of its way to defend them, as US imperialism has always vigilantly defended its client, Saddam Hussein and his murderous Iraqi regime. Compare this with the fate accorded petit-bourgeois led anticolonial movements a few decades earlier. In Africa, Latin America and Asia, such states and leaderships were always surrounded, isolated, destabilised, and bled white in silent, mostly unreported wars.
The allegedly anti-imperialist regimes of the Middle East and elsewhere which are led by professional fanatics, soldiers of fortune or religious zealots, are as much the enemies of the people as are their secret imperial masters; they, like revanchist religious movements, including those castigated as 'terrorist' by imperialism, are roadblocks in the way of world revolution.
The imperialists never cease to meddle in the affairs of the neocolonies. US imperialism gave the green light to the Indian government of the right-wing religious BJP fanatics to detonate nuclear devices. They did not just turn a blind eye to the Indian tests, they permitted them, and the hollow White House sanctions rhetoric does not disguise the truth. The imperialists' objective was transparent. The Indian bomb is designed to warn both Islam and China. US imperialism is terrified of risen Islam; this was the whirlwind of jihad which the imperialists themselves encouraged and fostered, for if not Islam, then what else can the West Asian and Middle Eastern masses turn to? Only socialism, only communism, only Leninism. The imperialists did all they could to push Arab nationalism in obscurantist, theocratic directions in the 1950s and 1960s. World capitalism is dependent on Arab oil. This is the secret they dare not speak, although it shouts out its own name loudly enough. To safeguard oil supplies, imperialism has for many decades skilfully sought to create endless instability, local wars and geopolitical 'churning' throughout the Middle East. Now it has raised the stakes still higher, for an apocalyptic endgame approaches: it was time to give Hinduism its bomb, and to let Islam flex its nuclear muscles in the shape of Pakistani reciprocal tests.
Thus imperialism sets the stage for fascism in the neocolonies and for war between Islam, Hinduism and China.
At the same time, this unleashing of the dogs of war further evidences the disintegration of US hegemony, announced with such arrogant triumphalism only a few years ago as the Cold War ended. The global New World Order is giving way to its opposite -- a world of terrifying disorder in which vast forces have accumulated ready to crash down on humankind in apocalyptic landslides of terror, reaction and mass death at any moment.
Will such occasions come to pass?
A better question is how will they be avoided, given the deepening systemic disarray of hurrah-capitalism and geopolitical formations and political instances. Economic collapse is being chased by apocalyptic horsemen of eco-catastrophe, hunger, revolt and war. Globalism, neoliberalism, have collapsed almost as soon as they have been announced: the universal hegemony of the markets, a thin screen for rapacious finance capitalism, will dissolve away at the first cold blast of a general, world-wide slump and depression. US imperialism already knows that the choice is not between 'Keynesianism' on the one hand and globalism on the other. The choices are incalculably grimmer and starker.
Will the world war be confined to Asia and the Middle East, and fought to the death between imperialism's proxies: India, Pakistan, China? Or will the US game plan to cut the head off Asian resurgence by smashing down Chinese and Japanese capitalism, and by the threat of nuclear war, be only the prelude to a general war, a new and final world war?
For it must be said that allowing India to have nuclear weapons would be unthinkable if US imperialism did not face still more abysmal challenges. It is obvious to any competent observer of the world energy scene that capitalism's dependence on fossil fuels, primarily oil, is as great as ever. There are no substitutes which can allow capitalism to continue in anything like its present form, and the collapse of oil supplies will, in the BEST case, be the preliminary to not years but decades of turmoil and reconstruction within the world market. But oil is more scarce than is ever admitted, and the future energy scenarios now published by the US government are more fraudulent and full of barefaced lies and statistical manipulations than anything ever attributed to the mendacity of the Soviet Union. An unsustainable situation already exists with respect to energy supply.
It is absolutely clear that if world growth continued on the high trajectory evidenced before the 1997 Asian meltdown, then instead of the present glutted energy markets, an oil-famine was already a looming prospect as world oil production peaks and then inexorably declines. Peak production at present rates will occur in the next few years: far too short a time scale for crisis to be forestalled, even if any of the long touted 'alternatives' (cold fusion, nuclear power, photovoltaics etc.) came to fruition, but NONE of them has. Production is geared to cheap oil, even if there were alternatives it will take two decades at least to relaunch the world economy on a different energy path. But there are no alternatives.
Imperialism cannot permit the Chinese economy in particular to grow at 10 percent a year. Within a decade, such growth would create Chinese demand for oil equivalent to present day total world production! And if the Chinese growth engine dragged Asia in its wake, then demand would increase still further, but the truth is that world oil production is close to peaking and can never be doubled.
The Indian bomb is one of imperialism's answers to the Chinese threat. And it is more evidence of the unscalable historical impasse capitalism has entered.
World capitalism is in the early stages of its deepest crisis, embracing all spheres of society, culture and production, all social classes, states, nations and regions. The capitalist world has entered a cul-de-sac from which there can be no escape. The beast is writhing in its death-agony. Its politicians, apologists and strongmen have no viable renewal policies. Beneath the triumphal mask of hurrah-capitalism are the steel teeth of what the Russian communists call samoyezd -- cannibal -- capitalism. Behind the soft words and polite smiles of its salons and academies, where the liturgy of neoliberalism was crafted, with its talk of open markets, democracy and 'one-world' hides a policeman with a truncheon, and behind him are the torturers with their shock-batons. World capitalism is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Damned to economic meltdown, conflict and war if it fails to launch a new accumulation cycle and to jerk free of the fetters now dragging it down.
Damned to run into unassailable obstacles if it does recommence accumulation, for the energy and resource deficits which have dogged the world-system for more than two decades are now gigantic impediments to renewed growth.
The optimism of hurrah-capitalism is based on nothing more solid than the hypnotic repetition of mindless mantras: 'technology will find the solutions'; 'the Information Revolution will sweep all before it'; 'virtualisation and dematerialisation will solve its resource problems' and last and most baleful: There Is No Alternative.
For if the doomsayers are right, and continued growth is unsustainable, threatening the integrity of the biosphere on which all life depends, and if resource limits are insurmountable, then what IS the alternative to capitalism? What OTHER way from the impasse but the relentless pursuit of technology, and if this is so, then surely it is necessary -- however regrettable -- to allow the markets to work unimpeded, retiring old, energy inefficient, polluting capital, and concentrating capital in the imperial heartlands whose powerful science and technology complexes offer the only hope of survival, of feeding the next century's hungry masses, of leapfrogging over technical obstacles?
In a word, if generalised prosperity is impossible with existing technology -- and most now agree that it IS impossible to give the Asian masses, for instance, Western living standards -- then surely it makes sense to bow to the inevitable and acknowledge that the only hope for these billions of people, is to put their trust in the galvanic powers of western technology, and wait quietly for better times as capitalism refreshes its cornucopia-machinery. The present generations in the neocolonies will be sacrificed, true, but not for the benefit of the hardworking West, but for the sake of their own unborn generations.
It is necessary to tax from these people the wealth necessary to refuel the engines of innovation, strengthen and stabilise markets and western socio-economic systems, and prepare to 'reculer pour mieux sauter'. In any case, Socialism has been tried, has it not? Who seriously suggests that the example of planning Soviet-style offers anything other than monumental waste, bureaucratic corruption and stagnation, shortages, grey uniformity, lack of dynamism and economic vitality? If the problems are really so serious, who is better placed to solve them than the enlightened social theorists of Harvard, Yale and Oxbridge, or the powerful scientific enterprises of the metropoles? To throw away the unquestioned benefits of freedom and capitalist enterprise in pursuit of revolutionary will o'the wisps promoted by power-crazed sociopaths -- this is not sensible is it? What after all, does Communism mean, but gulags, queues and unfreedom, in the midst of terrible pollution and environmental disregard?
The mantras of capitalist apologetics will be heard until the moment the ship finally sinks and the waves close over their heads. First of all, it is capitalist science and technology, capitalist rapacity, and the vast overgrowth of surplus population ('the most general law of capitalism', as Marx called it) in the form of a colossal reserve army of labour, which has created the world we now live in. It was precisely the capitalist Green Revolution which triggered a second population explosion among the dispossessed of the world, in just the same way that the population of the first industrial countries exploded, as peasants were made landless and forced into the cities.
In fact there is no surplus population in any absolute sense: there is only a population which is surplus to capitalism's requirements. Nevertheless world population will double to more than 10 billion in the coming decades; and these new members of the world proletariat will not be satisfied with virtual food or dematerialised roads, cars, homes, schools, hospitals.
Crisis has its inescapable logic. It exhausts one potentiality for growth after another. And in the same way, the working class and its allies inevitably progress on a learning curve which contains as many troughs as peaks. Communism is not just one option among others. If that was the case, we should be wasting our time hoeing such a hard furrow. Communism is inevitable because capitalist crisis is inevitable. Nevertheless, its inevitability will only become transparent to the people when all the other options have been tried. That is just in the nature of things.
Left to itself capitalist crisis can only deepen, its contradictions become still more explosive. Nothing can stop the deepening of capitalist crisis or the sharpening of its contradictions; that may still not be so evident in the first class salons of the west, but in the barrios and megacities of the rest of the world, it is self-evident. The contradictions will continue to ripen, and setbacks and defeats suffered by the proletariat only intensify the process. That is the entire lesson of the fall of the socialist world and what followed: the sequel was not the end of history and the final triumph of the capitalist system, but a fantastic acceleration of the necrosis of the tissues and fibre of capitalist society, world-wide. And it is the lesson of the whole 250-year history of industrial capitalism, this Lazarus which has stumbled by many zigzags and deviations, and many unsuspected resurrections, into the present and final crisis.
We will have Communism -- because the alternative is barbarism and even the extinction of life.
Whatever hardship the Soviet people endured, besieged and hounded by the West and under the yoke of a Party which ceased to be Communist and degenerated into one of humankind's most corrupt institutions, nothing prepared the Soviet people for the holocaust of lives, hopes and living standards which capitalism has brought them. The only glimmer of hope in the nightmare visited on the world by capitalism, is the hope offered by socialism: the hope of a world without capitalism, without markets, without warring classes, and without a Sword of Damocles hanging always over our heads. This is the only future open to humanity. All other roads lead to ruin and despair. Only communism offers hope, only communism offers life.
Mark Jones