Friday, July 2, 2010

City of sorrow, city of illogic

Is it symbolic that wheels of buses, service sector crush worker and students, one required to run wheels of production and the other one is a budding part for production or governance? Is it symbolic of an economy that while hundreds of hours are lost in logjam in capital streets speeding buses
run over labour force and possible labour
force? Farooque Chowdhury asks


A BLACK flag of sorrow and grief has now been unfurled over the lead coloured sky of the capital Dhaka. Deaths came in rows. Buildings bowed. Fire razed homes. Cracks crackled bold appearing buildings. All these reflect an economy and a superstructure. The economy serves as base of the superstructure that gets mirrored and manifested in aspects of life. Culture is an essential part of the superstructure, and [in]consideration to human life and super attention to mechanisms of ensuring highest and quickest possible profit are parts of culture.
   A mother lost her only son as a student was crushed under wheels days ago. A factory worker had the same fate. What happened to the family of the worker? Has not a poor family’s sliding down to pauperdom been ensured? Another girl student paid price of living in this city with her life. What will be the answer forwarded by this city to the parents? Indifference? Inconsideration? A lumpen-reality does not care to provide answers to the questions of life and death. It only searches quickest possible profit; it even turns Persians in Marathon for highest possible profit. Love and sorrow are unknown to this lumpen-culture, a culture without mooring, a culture that feeds only plunder and death.
   How many lives the wheels in this city take annually? Is that number higher than the average annual death toll by flood in this land of dying rivers? Are the lives lost, save love, not even carry any value to the economy? Then, does the economy not care human lives for even regeneration of capital? Then, the capital appears outside the orbit of capitals: manufacturing capital, industrial capital, interest capital, finance capital, etc. Does it depend on only varieties of speculations including speculation with human life and even speculation with its own existence?
   A bit of different imperative would have made it aware of own interest that would have pushed it to effective efforts to streamline traffic management. An economy depending upon speed, not on stalemate on streets, does not require more than three decades to designing a smooth mobility on streets. Rome required roads. Rome built roads. Vikings’ vessels provided them speed. Speed was their need. There is at least one economy that needs speed money to fend off red tape. Speed money, essentially bribe, was legalised by that economy.
   Is it symbolic that wheels of buses, service sector crush worker and students, one required to run wheels of production and the other one is a budding part for production or governance? Is it symbolic of an economy that while hundreds of hours are lost in logjam in capital streets speeding buses run over labour force and possible labour force? Only the involved economy can supply the answer. But in absence of any demand there will not be its supply as supply without demand will diminish profit.
   So the culture that the economy breeds shows a lively exhibition of mangoes in the capital city that was inaugurated by one of the leading poets while, according to press report, at least a commoner died rescuing humans from raging fire in the city and the grief stricken city and the country was passing days with the sad memories of inferno-deaths in the same city, and the country observed a day of national mourning. Does it smell Nero? Does it reflect an indifferent elite mind? Only a lumpen-reality can market an appropriate answer. Let’s try to forget the pungent memories of death of commoners. What’s the use-value or market-value of making heart heavy with those sad stories? Let’s look at the towering hopes, building blocks for major investment, buildings changing the skyline of the city. But…
   Buildings, at least a few, betrayed. They cheated their creators, loveless to their creations. They symbolically unmasked the dynamics of decadence, decay in many spheres and layers. The trust those creators needed to market their service and product was breached by the bowed down, tilted, and cracked buildings, proud product of efficient salesmanship. Were only the creators cheated by exposed reality? Has not collusion, if any, been exposed? Shall the dead, the sufferers create these and similar questions? A lumpen-reality, a reality incapable to comprehend even own interest, best knows the answers. Or, the reality, it may happen, is incapable of providing the response. Or, the reality does not care to answer as it is confident of its all-influencing, all-trading capacity.
   But reality revolves. Breach of trust transcendences to base, and turns things bad for trustees. Seemingly silent state of mind surges to sound and fury. Breached trust fuels that fury. That will be a dangerous development.
   Reality, on occasions, cheats cheat, swindles swindler, unmasks masks. Those are clumsy moments of reality. Breach of trust puts power to those moments. Bowed and cracked buildings may initiate the process, a process almost impossible to understand by the involved, a limitation imposed on them by their very acts, the acts considered craftsmanship.
   Is this illogic? Or, is this illogic has its own logic, logic of exposing indifference to human needs, to decadence? All the sufferers are not poor. An important portion of apprehending-to-be-sufferers are well off, at least not dwelling in ramshackle homes. They, the new occupants of high-rise buildings, by money affiliation and cultural affinity, are closer to the creators of cracked structures. They are far away from the slum dwellers. A sense of breach of trust in this group provides no logic to interests involved in high-rise structures. It may be a crack in class alliance.
   Economy shapes cities. Its dwelling pattern, transit arrangement, spending spree of a section and quenching the last spirits of life for survival by the rest cannot outgrow its economy. Manoeuvre for luxury or thirst for bare minimum of life does not cross limits imposed by the economy. This stands opposite to ecology. A better living condition is dreamed by all. But it is enjoyed by an extreme-few. The rest suffers. Contradictions get a colony, and illogic illustrates throughout social setting. Prevailing facts of life grind lives of millions to meaningless miniscule. This produces uncared living places devoid of condition for life’s survival. But the poor live there, survive there till death spreads shroud of silence over their, unsung and unmentioned if not die in large number, dead bodies. They pay taxes. They toil most. They produce tangible. But they occupy least. Time does not allow them to enjoy fresh air in parks. Roads are not safer for them. Narrow alleys that connect their homes are often narrow enough that does not allow carry dead bodies or sick easily. Many of those have not seen sun for many years. Transit to and from work place is costly for them. Their transit system is deplorable. Their workplace is not comfortable. The amount they pay for water and energy is higher than the amount paid by the well off. Accidents and callous living condition take their lives most. Everyone knows these facts. But none cares for them till they turn to sheer numbers: dead and wounded. They ceaselessly create surplus value as that is their only path to keep alive dream for a decent life. But their share to accesses of life and living are negligible. Illogic thus dominates. The reality of hardship is not only for the poor. The near-poor, the lower- and middle-middle class, swell the rank of sufferers. This is not a lifetime hardship. It is a generations-long hardship.
   Then, accidents bring death to them. Pressing reality, a reality of inhuman existence, does not permit them to ponder the unveiled realities of life, to reflect the crushing cruel truth. It is an existence devoid of human existence, a murmur of life without decency and joy, a reality of illogic carved with knives of indifference. And, the depth of indifference goes down to the level of cruelty.
   Then, a city of sorrow and illogic is illuminated by hollow lights of advertisements, marketing luxuries, essentially out of reach of the commoners, the majority of the city dwellers. A list of products that try to allure customers will tale a portion of the dominating illogical reality.
   Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socioeconomic issues. Micro Credit Myth Manufactured is one of his edited books.

This editorial published in The New Age, Daily Newspaper, Bangladesh, http://www.newagebd.com/2010/jun/08/edit.html 

The Greek gust

Problems with unity of capitals have been exposed by the Greece tension. Seeds of a European crisis are there in the Greek crisis as other governments adopt similar measures. The Greek crisis is an indicator of the situation in a number of European countries. After Greece, a number of countries are waiting to take their turns, writes Farooque Chowdhury

THE current turmoil in Greece shows that economy and politics does not reside in air-tight chambers despite a few local pundits’ regretful propagation at times: ‘Politics has infiltrated economy.’ Reality stands as opposite witness to the sorrowful propaganda of those pundits, and shows that neither economy is devoid of politics nor politics is devoid of economy. The two tied and twisted together influence each other and all in society. The stormy wind with deaths, fire and riot now blowing over Greece once again is the evidence as were the related events and incidents since the ‘great financial crisis’ stared on speculators’ face that economy shapes, among others, political developments.
   The gust has also jettisoned the wisdom of calling the period the ‘great stabilisation’ as The Economist hoped on December 17, 2009 (actually, The Economist said of the year in which the global economy suffered, not of a period). The protests and riot through the streets of Athens made the stock market tumble in Europe and America sending the euro to a fresh one-year low. Persistent worries have overwhelmed the financial world that Europe’s debt crisis would spread.
   Developments, tragic and dramatic, in the land of the Olympus show ‘things’ are not moving smoothly to the dreamland of ‘great stabilisation’. People in Athens tried to storm parliament building, and set on fire bank building as they were protesting the Greek government announced austerity measures including freezes in public sector salaries, cuts in civil service pensions, the abolition of 13th and 14th month salary payments, a guaranteed bonus, and higher sales taxes. Three deaths followed.
   The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and London Times, photographs show naval officers joined protest march along with civil servants, rubbish collectors, pensioners, public sector workers, hospital employees, teachers, building workers, journalists and many others, as they began strike Tuesday. The nationwide general strike on Wednesday turned to violent riot. People fought police. Working people assembled in front of the Greece-mark Acropolis and unfurled banners in front of the Parthenon in Athens inscribed with a call: ‘Peoples of Europe Rise Up.’
   ‘Popular anger will rattle imperialist organisations,’ said a Greek MP. Demonstrators in front of parliament waved banners marked ‘Tax the rich’. They shouted: ‘Never! We will never pay for the EU and the IMF!’ ‘We’ve lost everything overnight,’ said a 56-year old teacher. ‘I’m begging them not to take my earnings. I’ve worked 30 years for this money.’ Another teacher carried a crucifix with the image of an owl on it to symbolise the death of education in Greece. Ministries, tax offices, schools, hospitals and public services were shut down for the rally. Analysts have predicted that more strikes would be held later in the month, and it is the ‘beginning of a long hot summer of social unrest.’
   Multi-trillion-dollar public cash and guarantees, the biggest, broadest and fastest government response in history, spread over teetering banks appeared saviour of the world financial system. Latvia, Ireland and a few more went to the brink of collapse. Despite a seeming recovering appearance the inner core is fragile and full with seeds of volatility: ‘sovereign-debt crises (a Greek default?) to reckless protectionism (American tariffs against China’s ‘unfair’ currency, say). More likely is a plethora of lesser problems,’ … including ‘short-sighted fiscal decisions (a financial-transactions tax) to strikes over pay cuts,’ as The Economist pointed out (‘The Great Stabilisation’, December 17, 2009). These appear like underbelly. The main trouble spot – stagnation, recession, and financialisation – are there. Greece also had problems with trade.
   Greece, now in the dock of the present world system, is accused of a corrupt and bloated public sector, a budget deficit of 13 per cent and public debt of 125 per cent of GDP, an economy void of competitiveness, high rate of underemployment, unreliable or near to manipulated statistics, education in need of reform. But the problem is not only limited within the realm of public finances. It goes far beyond. Standard & Poor’s downgrading Greek debt to junk status, or below investment grade shook markets a few days back.
   The German cabinet approved up to 22.4 billion euros in loans for Greece over three years. The stake behind the loan was bigger than Greece. It is not only for saving Greece. It is also for saving euro. It tells about the state of German capital. Headline of an article (run by MRzine) by Heiner Flassbeck, director of the Division on Globalisation and Development Strategies at UNCTAD, and former deputy finance minister of Germany at the beginning of the European Monetary Union was: ‘The Greek Tragedy and the European Crisis, Made in Germany’. German presence or absence carries significance. Chancellor Angela Merkel said: ‘It is about underpinning the stability of the euro.’ The International Monetary Fund and other EU countries approved a 110 billion-euro rescue plan for Greece, now at the centre of European politics, which made the financial markets continue its speculation on the rescue package.
   Greece has shown the inner-weakness of the 27-state group – European Union, and a sceptic cloud has been spread on the success of the euro. Timothy Heritage wrote in The New York Times (May 3): ‘The unity of the European Union is being sorely tested by a debt crisis in Greece and by the economic fragility of other countries. … Gloomy predictions suggest that the Union is in perpetual decline…’ This is in essence the failure of the capitals concerned to galvanise political, economic and monetary union, and this in turn shows: competitions between these capitals champion. Germany, now Europe’s most powerful state and the continent’s biggest economy, has increasingly been criticised.
   The ‘great financial crisis’ has already exposed competitions between selfish capitals. Even, capitals within border are not free from competition sometimes. Nowadays there are talks on ‘German euro-nationalism’, ‘a new kind of German economic unilateralism’, ‘a German Europe’. These inner-voices tell inner-yearnings of sections of capitals.
   The issues being raised – Germany has to be more European or Europe has to live within means – are not the real issues. The issues are capitals’ choice and preference, capitals’ rivalry, one competition feeding the other. It is being told of the Paris-Berlin disagreement that it is a clash of culture between ‘a federal Germany with its Prussian attachment to rules and a republican France with its tradition of state intervention and a more Mediterranean attitude toward public debt.’ But the fact is rivalry between two econo-political elites representing interests of two competing capitals. It is old. In 2004, the tug over a takeover by Siemens of Alstom, the French train maker was witnessed. The differences over economic governance, central bank independence and budgetary discipline, the so-called French view of ‘budgetary, financial and currency stability is a means to an end’, and the Germans seeing ‘it is an end in itself’ are reflections of competing interests.
   Problems with unity of capitals have been exposed by the Greece tension. Seeds of a European crisis are there in the Greek crisis as other governments adopt similar measures. The Greek crisis is an indicator of the situation in a number of European countries.  After Greece, a number of countries are waiting to take their turns.
   A new Greek summer now going to dominate Europe has implications for countries dependent on export to the continent.
   Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socio-economic issues. The Age of Crisis is his latest book.

This editorial taken form The New Age, http://www.newagebd.com/2010/may/07/edit.html 

Climate crisis and an isle lost


CLIMATE crisis has resolved, as a news report said, competing claims by two countries over an isle in a bay near an ocean. Climate crisis creators deserve thanks! They should claim it! They should claim a laurel for strengthening regional peace! The climate criminals have helped avert a source of future tension between two friendly neighbors! Criminals are not always criminals. Isn’t it? But what the climate crisis criminals is creating for the world? None knows! Everyone knows. A few learned souls know while us the rest swallow sweet stories: to be or not to be.
There awaits a may be or may not be story. A leading Dhaka daily assured a few weeks ago: Bangladesh doobchhe naa, Bangladesh is not submerging! It was not a story of building castles in the air, but of sand dunes stretching hands towards sea, of denying dangerous sea-level rise. It was a lead story, assuring news for a country counting days in the face of fuming sea. It was a story with far-reaching implications, implications mainly for a nation that is striving to face a changing coastline, implications in the areas of agriculture and assistance, in the domains of demography and development, in the spheres of society and survival strategy, and many more. And, it is not an exceptional story. Similar stories and analyses are sold, distorted conclusions are sold on the basis of an incident of irregular scientific data, an exaggeration is capitalised to deny a coming catastrophe. But, truth is true. Fact is factual. Facts are seldom distorted also. But a fine facade of fallacy cannot hide a planetary catastrophe looming over billions.
The already mentioned news-story despatched in the later part of March said: For about three decades two countries have argued over control of a tiny rock island. But now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island is gone. It has been completely submerged. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols. ‘What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking has been resolved by global warming,’ said an oceanographer. Another nearby island submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland, while almost half of another island is underwater. At least 10 other islands in the area are at risk as well.
The paragraphs above are neither to discuss the disputed island nor the claims and counterclaims nor the relations between two countries nor the not-submerging-analysis. There are authorities to check and recheck, to confirm or to deny. The isle story is just a reference point to climate crisis. Some other news-story could have cited some other similar incident from some other region. These lines are for referring to climate crisis not even being now denied by a section of powerful capital, with deeper vested interests, with shrewd brains to lobby, with stronger arms to manipulate.
Whatever happens, whether an isle gets lost or not, whether part of a country doobook – naa doobook, submerges or not, climate crisis is there, the mean sea level will rise, a great migration is in the offing, economies are going to take brunt of a planetary crisis to the level never experienced by this earth system, life on this now-not-so-green-planet is in peril, the mother earth is facing a future unknown. The coming climate conflicts and incidents have no parallel in the annals of this earth. The unfolding scenario also carries threats to and opportunities for capital. With a stagnant world economy for decades a section of capital finds rays of hope for investment in emerging climate crisis market.
Chief executive officers of 83 leading US companies including some of the US largest electric power, renewable oil, bioproducts, airline, manufacturing, and clean tech like Exelon, Virgin America, NRG Energy, eBay and PG&E, in a letter to President Obama and members of Congress urged to quickly enact comprehensive climate and energy legislation that would increase US competitiveness. They said: the US was falling behind in the clean energy race. The letter called for legislation that would unleash innovation and drive economic growth. It said: ‘[T]oday’s uncertainty surrounding energy and climate regulation is hindering the large-scale actions that American businesses are poised to make. We need strong policies and clear market signals that … reward companies that innovate. It is time …to embrace this policy as the promising economic opportunity that will empower … American entrepreneurship to lead the way.’ The CEOs ‘need the certainty of clear rules and strong policies’ that helps invest. They hoped that through ‘strong climate and energy policies’ they would ‘emerge stronger.’ As the US is searching ways to promote economic growth, and improve energy and national security, a section of capital considers that ‘smart, sensible energy and climate policies can and should be part of the solution,’ and ‘this opportunity’ should be recognised and made a reality. In October 2009, business leaders from 150 companies from 30 states across the US met government officials and Congress members to plead passage of comprehensive energy and climate legislation. They joined We Can Lead, a coalition that advocates, among others, strong energy and climate legislation to unleash US investment, restore US competitiveness and provide for economic and national security.
Capital’s other drives are there also for accumulation from climate crisis market. But it is not free from competitions from within. Rather, competition is characteristic of it. Competitions are resolved through conflicts and compromises. The Copenhagen climate conference conceived a compromise, a compromise among the warring climate forces in a world undemocratic, a compromise exposing political wills and non-wills of the most powerful countries, and the victim was, as Chavez said in Copenhagen, ‘the crushed countries, as if a train ran over us in history.’ The powerful countries’ political will was not to compromise self-interest in exchange of peoples’ interest, the part related to political non-will. Peoples’ interest states, as Chavez quoted in Copenhagen the French author Hervé Kempf: ‘We cannot reduce global material consumption if we don’t make the powerful go down several levels, and if we don’t combat inequality. [And, we say:] “Consume less and share better.”’
Today’s climate crisis is related to inequality: seven per cent richest persons are responsible for 50 per cent of emissions, and the poorest 50 per cent accounts for only seven per cent of emissions. The richest are not concerned with the poor and hungry. The richest don’t compromise their high carbon emitting lifestyle. Their dream, as Chavez quoted the great liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, is ‘seeking happiness through material accumulation and of endless progress, using for this science and technology with which they can exploit without limits all the resources of the earth.’ Their all-out thrust is to materialise this dream at the cost of this planet, and the private road to that dream world has drawn the class line of the climate crisis, a class line with opposing forces in hostile positions.
Economy and environment, economy and ecology, and economy and climate space are inseparable, and these are inseparable from politics, a sphere always pregnant with class difference. These links are inviolable. The development, and as a whole the economic model that dominates today’s world and fattens the climate crisis moves along the class line: unequal distribution, high carbon emission by the absolute minority, harder life for the energy-poor, absence of the majority’s participation, in real sense instead of a showcase, in economics, that in turn takes political character, decision making impossible. One fuels the others, one is essential for the rest. This aggravates the climate crisis reality, a reality in essence the same from the metropolis of the world system to the emerging economies with their rising nouveau rich to the poor economies dominated by plundering lumpen capital: burn non-renewable energy as much as needed for luxurious lifestyle, deforest and encroach public property under the guise of economic upward journey, precisely, encroach, burn, destroy. This influences, at core, people’s endeavour for a democracy, the democratic movement as people lose control and right over public property, as people’s voices are muzzled down by the plundering masters, as people are dispersed from their domain, as they lose survival space. The global climate crisis reality is not less cruel: a global system ever-thirsty for non-renewable resources leading to subversions, wars, and invasions, and ultimately crippling people’s effort to build a peaceful and prosperous life. Climate crisis not only deeply and gravely, but also irreversibly impacts lives of common people, especially those primarily depending on nature and environment including farmers, fishers, and persons relying on forest and marine resources. Ordinary persons’ spaces for livelihood get narrowed down as plunderers and encroachers intrude and skim the public property including forests and rivers. This act of trespass and plundering increases pressures on climate already under crisis. Geopolitics, and ruling elites’ relationship with the world system, impacts on, and makes difficult, sometimes impossible people’s capacity to cope with climate crisis. Appeasements are made and bargaining positions are compromised in exchange of ruling elites’ interests. Recent incidents in climate diplomacy bear evidences to the appeasements with, and sale-offs, to climate imperialism. Elitist approach to climate crisis and people’s approach are fundamentally different. These aspects have made the climate crisis issue an integral part of programme for democratic struggle. The pressing climate situation thus makes it an imperative to include climate-related demands in the programme for democratic struggle.
This reality provides a backdrop to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, to be held in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba from April 19 to 22, the UN Mother Earth Day. The historic conference to be hosted by the Plurinational State of Bolivia is expected to be attended by more than 10,000 people along with government representatives from more than 50 countries. Considered as alternative people’s conference on the climate issue it will seek to advance an international referendum on climate crisis as The Guardian considers that Bolivia is not prepared to ‘betray its people.’ Democracy makes betraying people impossible. Democracy, direct participation of people in an atmosphere free from vested interest influence, is one of the tools for facing climate catastrophe. The crisis cannot be faced without mobilising people and their participation, a task of democratic struggle. No sphere, from local to global, should be devoid of democracy. ‘The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy,’ said Bolivia’s United Nations ambassador Pablo Solon, a key organiser of the summit. Bill McKibben, author of the first book about global warming The End of Nature, and founder of 350.org wrote (carried by Huffington Post) of the Bolivia conference: ‘[I]t’s … a People’s Summit, free from the kind of corporate interference that helped sink the Copenhagen conference….Thank heaven, then, for the nations like Bolivia willing to work … (instead of lock normal people out of the hall, as the UN did in Copenhagen).’ ‘This is a fight between’, he continued, ‘human beings on the one hand, and physics and chemistry on the other—and physics and chemistry don’t really bargain. …We don’t have all the time in the world—we don’t, in fact, have a moment to spare….Our message is…: if we can get to work, so can our lawmakers…. That process begins in April in Bolivia. The world’s leaders haven’t led, so we’re going to have to lead for them. It’s going to be a fight, and it’s on now.’ All democratic struggles, struggles opposed to climate imperialism, share this fight as peoples’ fight for a better life cannot be betrayed, and isles, humanity’s survival space, cannot be lost. It is the urgent task, the foremost task.
The urgency for saving humanity, a task democratic struggle cannot forsake, was pronounced by Chavez in the climate conference hall in Copenhagen: ‘It’s up to us, raising the banners of Christ, Mohammed, equality, love, justice, humanity, the true and most profound humanism. If we don’t do it, the most wonderful creation of the universe, the human being, will disappear, it will disappear….We are capable of not making this Earth the tomb of humanity. Let us make this earth a heaven, a heaven of life, of peace, peace and brotherhood for all humanity, for the human species.’
Farooque Chowdhury contributes articles on socio-economic issues. The Age of Crisis is his latest book.

This editorial published in Bangladeshi Daily "NEW AGE", April 13, 2010

Prague Pact

Another START, a non-start in practice, has been produced in Prague.

The Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty II (START II) would reduce the redundant nuke arms of the US and Russia and would also provide scope to increase nuclear arms. Both the countries would loose nothing from their actual nuclear firepower as there will be practically no reductions.

The treaty limits the number of warheads at 1,550, deployed delivery vehicles (DV) at 700 and non-deployed DVs at 100. The number of Russian DVs is below 700 and their number, as well as that of warheads, will significantly fall as a series of missiles have passed their expiry date. Those will be removed from combat duty in the next few years. Russia has to increase production of ballistic missiles, a Russian defense journal editor said, if it plans to maintain parity with the US under this treaty. The US only has to keep the number of its DVs at the existing level. He said : The treaty's authors have misled the public by counting one bomber as one warhead: it is common knowledge that both American and Russian bombers are capable of carrying six or more cruise missiles, each of which is equipped with one nuclear warhead. So, Lula questioned: “If we are talking about deactivating the warheads that are already beyond the expiration dates, what's the point? I have a medicine cabinet at home, too, out of which I chuck what has expired. Either we talk about disarmament seriously, or we cannot allow a group of countries to be armed to the teeth while others are disarmed.” (Conversation with Juan Luis Cebrián, a journalist. The article was published by El PaÃs and the translated version, by Yoshie Furuhashi, was run by MRzine)

START II offers face saving veil to the two countries ahead of a May review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as it requires that acknowledged nuclear powers must conduct constant negotiations on the reduction of their nuclear arms and their total elimination. The new treaty also eliminates a number of arguments advanced by Iran.

The pre- and post-START II signing days were charged with rising rivalry. The START II is not the real agenda. A different agenda is in a chest there in this competition ridden world breeding conflict. The Christian Science Monitor editorial board observed: “Arms control begins with conflict control.” But conflict control is not even beyond horizon. Increasing competition for the control of the dwindling strategic resources including the peak oil reality are escalating militarization around the globe where MNCs are major players-in-shadow in dramas in conflict, ethnic riots and civil wars.

The START II saw Kyrgyzstan cloud the great game field of central Asia and Afghanistan. Flights were diverted from Manas US base in Kyrgyzstan to Kuwait, and NATO informed suspension of Afghan supply flights from Manas. Russia sent paratroopers to its airbase in Kyrgyzstan and the deputy leader of the Kyrgyz interim government told that the Manas base was “not justified.” Kazakhstan wooed the US with offer of base and military over-flights to war-torn Afghanistan.

Russian air defense systems were planned for China as they signed military agreement. Medvedev said: Israeli attack on Iran might lead to nuclear conflict. The Russian military cautioned: US, Israeli attack on Iran would be unacceptable. A news report said that the US would retain 90 nukes on Iran border.

The Iceland volcanic ash “hovering over an uncertain Europe” appeared symbolic. Georgian territorial waters in the Black Sea is already flowing with tension. A US frigate went to Georgia's territorial waters to take part in exercises with the Georgians. Georgia is having a strategic partnership treaty with the US while the US provides economic and military support to Georgia. Moscow has pledges to help Abkhazia and South Ossetia and they grant each other the right to set up military bases in their respective territories. A new arms race is apprehended to be triggered by the US plan for full European missile shield as US officials assured their friends that the new START would not affect the plan, and NATO pressed Europe for more defense spending. It was reported that American troops would be arriving in Poland this year. Russia cautioned that it would pull out of the START II in case of new threat while Washington has made it clear that the agreement is not at the expense of its neoNATO allies. Now, the significance of the new START is clear in the daylight of coming summer.

Europe has some more fertile soil for enmity. NATO has expanded to new territories: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Three of these countries border Russia. Camp Bondsteel and Camp Monteith in Kosovo are two largest US overseas military bases constructed since the US’ Vietnam War. The entire Balkans region is now virtually a NATO territory. There is the Adriatic-5 Group planned for using the Balkans as a NATO forward base with eyes on the so-called Broader Middle East and the Caucasus. The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative has strengthened NATO position from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Persian Gulf by increased military cooperation between the Mediterranean Dialogue - Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia - and the Gulf Cooperation partners.

The cold Arctic is getting hot with the increasing militarization by the US and Russia. China is also silently charting the Arctic depths. With unfolding competition new strategic and tactical positions are being planned there. An arms race between Colombia and Venezuela is gaining momentum.

These incidents with conflicting interests provide a lively backdrop to the START II, and the increasing tension in almost financialized globalization makes the new treaty a mockery with peace.

Farooque Chowdhury, a free lancer from Dhaka, contributes on socio-economic issues.
Micro Credit, myth manufactured is one of his edited books.
The Age of Crisis is his latest book.

After the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, What Next?

Interview with John Bellamy Foster by Farooque Chowdhury. JB Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and the author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) -- both from Monthly Review Press. This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review. The interview was completed on January 26, 2010.

Farooque Chowdhury(FC): Is capital's primary engagement with speculation, under what you have called the "monopoly-finance capital" of today, evidence of capital's degeneration? Does capitalism in rich economies such as the United States have a dwindling capacity to produce commodities? Does this put the survival of productive capital in question? Similarly, does the state's intervention to bail out the capital mean that the extraction of increased surplus value from the workers is possible in this phase only with active state intervention to keep the process going? If yes, is this a further sign of decadence? Is capital, through this process, ultimately undermining the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of working people? John Bellamy Foster (JBF): The question of economic decadence under monopoly-finance capital is complex, since it is more about the social relations than the social forces of production. If by such decadence you actually mean "a dwindling capacity to produce commodities" then I would say definitely not. The system's productivity, and its capacity to produce commodities of all kinds, keeps on expanding. Indeed, there is a growing gap between the economic potential to produce and actual production. The important thing to understand is that the limits of the system under monopoly capital -- and this is still true of monopoly-finance capital -- lies not in too little but rather in too much productive capacity in relation to effective demand, visible in saturated markets. Investment demand is hindered by the existence of large amounts of excess capacity: it makes no sense to invest in new plant and equipment, if very large proportions of existing plant and equipment are standing idle. "The tragedy of investment," Michael Kalecki wrote in his Theory of Economic Dynamics, "is that it is useful." This tragedy can be traced to a system with such a systematically distorted distribution of income and wealth that it regularly generates vast surpluses to reinvest, while the potential of absorbing these surpluses is obstructed by the fact that investment is not normally self-propelling and is dependent on consumption or final demand. This is particularly a problem for mature, monopolistic economies where productive capacity has been built up throughout the society as a result of a long process of industrialization and is superabundant. Hence, accumulation becomes stop-and-go, constantly coming up against the limits of overproduction, overaccumulation, and overcapacity. Where a kind of economic decadence definitely enters in is in the means that monopoly capital (or monopoly-finance capital) uses to counter this stop-and-go accumulation process. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capitalin 1966 that the chief means that the system had of expanding the enormous and growing surplus (value) it generated was waste in its various forms: particularly, military spending, the sales effort, and speculative finance. Although each of these forms of effective-demand generation through the promotion of economic (and social and environmental) waste remains operative today, military spending (even with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) and the sales effort are insufficient at present to counter the stagnationary forces of the system, and consequently the economy has become increasingly dependent on financialization (mounting speculation leveraged by debt) to keep it going. A system that requires such irrational forms of expenditure in order to grow is a system that exhibits an enormous impetus to decadence and destruction. With deepening economic crisis tendencies and the rapid accelerating of planetary ecological crisis we are certainly facing what could be called the "degeneration" of an entire social order. The role of the state in supporting the accumulation of private capital is of course the source of all sorts of social and economic contradictions, whether it is related to spending on the U.S. war machine, aimed at imperial ends (but also subsidizing private capital), or in the form of bailouts of large financial and non-financial corporations. The long-term financialization of the economy, or the phase of monopoly-finance capital, as I have called it, depends on the central banks and the other organs of state finance such as the treasury departments of states being prepared to provide at a moment's notice liquidity and capital as "lenders of last resort." In the current crisis, the U.S. state provided trillions of dollars in capital infusions and various subsidies and guarantees to the banks. The toxic wastes of banks were "swapped" for liquid assets at taxpayer risk. As a result, a little over a year after the financial system was on the brink of complete collapse, bank profits are ostensibly up (though this is partly a mirage because of state relaxation on the rules for reporting profits) and bankers are walking off with enormous bonuses. Needless to say, this is occurring at the same time that the U.S. population is experiencing more than 10 percent official unemployment and approaching 20 percent real unemployment. Everywhere wages are dropping, people are losing their homes, poverty levels are up. And it is in this overall context that financial capital is once again celebrating its expanding wealth. Under these circumstances, the working class in the United States (and in the other advanced capitalist states as well) has every reason to be critical of a state that operates invariably in the ruling class interest. In this respect, it should be noted, nothing has changed under the Obama administration. Since the costs of the bailout (which amounts to socializing the losses of the most important financial entities) ultimately fall on the working population and are used to justify cutting costs in social services across the society, you are perfectly right in saying that the state in this crisis (and more generally) has become a means of increasing the effective rate of surplus value (exploitation) in the society as a whole. Meanwhile, the absence of a strong left and the stranglehold of right-wing corporate media constantly push working people in reactionary directions, making the state itself rather than the capitalist class, which controls it, the primary culprit. The ruling class and its state -- not just in the United States but also in the entire advanced capitalist world -- have no answer to economic stagnation but renewed financialization. So fast is finance growing at present while the "real economy" (i.e. production) is in shambles that fears are expressed in the financial press every day of the development of a gargantuan bubble that will burst sooner rather than later. It would be hard to imagine a more irrational and exploitative system within the framework of a so-called "free economy." FC: Are not current mainstream statements on a stagnating economy nullifying the generations-old position of orthodox economic thought and confirming the analysis that Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Fred Magdoff, and you were putting forward all along? And, is not this an evidence of the correctness of the methodology applied by all of you in analyzing capitalist economy? JBF: Yes, there is some irony in the fact that the mainstream has finally come to embrace the issue of economic stagnation. On January 2nd, the Washington Postran an article that said: "But beyond these dramatic ups and downs [of the economy] lies an even more sobering reality: long-term economic stagnation." I recall that sometime in the late 1980s, in New York, I mentioned to Sweezy that there were increasing complaints from radical political economists that Monthly Review was being too repetitive in its continually beating away at the stagnation tendency and that some left economists doubted the correctness of this view. He replied with a gleam in his eye, "Well, then we will have to just repeat it more. They'll find out." Magdoff and Sweezy said something similar in the introduction to Stagnation and the Financial Explosion, where they replied to those who doubted the reality of stagnation by stating: "There is a temptation to say: just wait and see, you'll find out soon enough. Unless backed up by actual experience, explanations often matter very little." But they did not stop there, of course, but went on and did their best to explain the nature of the problem. At about the same time (in 1988 or 1989), the MR editors (Magdoff and Sweezy) were sharply criticized in an article in Science and Society as "bubble theorists" for their emphasis on developing finanicalization and financial bubbles. They were not, however, deterred by this at all. It was simply a question of continuing to focus on the empirical tendencies and what they said about the real contradictions for the system. I believe that anyone today who was to look back, not just at Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, but also at the five books that Magdoff and Sweezy did on the developing contradictions of the U.S. economy, based on their Monthly Review articles -- The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism(1972), The End of Prosperity(1977), The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism(1981), Stagnation and the Financial Crisis(1987), and The Irreversible Crisis(1988) -- would find it difficult not to be impressed. In contrast to nearly all other running commentaries on current economic developments over the last half-century, theirs is not dated, but points on every page to the very fault lines that are now widening before our eyes. Add to that the series of short articles that Sweezy did in the 1990s, particularly "The Triumph of Financial Capital" (1994), "Economic Reminiscences" (1995), and "More (or Less) on Globalization" (1997), and one has a critical argument that is far ahead of today's mainstream analyses in understanding the contradictions in which we are now caught. If this reflects a superior methodology, it is not so much one of technique but of critique. As John Cassidy has stated in his book How Markets Fail(2009) the ability of Sweezy and Hyman Minsky "to see, well before many mainstream economists, that a new model of financially driven capitalism had emerged" was due to "their highly developed critical faculties." In Sweezy's case, this arose out of a historical materialist frame of analysis and an acute sense of "the present as history." During the period 2000-2006, when I was coeditor of Monthly Review, along with Harry Magdoff and, for most of this time, Robert McChesney, we continued to push this critical economic analysis forward, based on further empirical enquiries. (Fred Magdoff too played a major role in this research.) Aside from addressing stagnation itself (and the question of job stagnation) we focused primarily on the two main bubbles of this period: the New Economy (or high tech) bubble and the housing bubble. From this we developed a more general analysis of financialization as a secular trend (arising in response to stagnation in production), building, in particular, on Sweezy's explorations in his last few years. We first began to look specifically at the contradictions in household debt in 2000, took account of the housing bubble itself and its danger of bursting in 2002-2003, and analyzed the problem thoroughly, including the household mortgage problem and subprime lending in 2006, in articles that later went into The Great Financial Crisis (2009) by Fred Magdoff and myself. Naturally, we missed some details of what was to transpire but the larger picture was clear. Michael Yates, whose economic writings for MR were also crucial in this process, has since coauthored with Fred Magdoff The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (2009). In many ways there was nothing remarkable about this tradition of inquiry. It required only close attention to what was in fact happening and a critical-historical framework of political-economic analysis arising from Marx, Kalecki, Keynes, and Sweezy. What is extraordinary, however is that reality has finally forced its way into the mainstream, making it give way in its ideology and recognize the economic stagnation that is now too apparent to deny. FC: The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans making more than $138,000 each year earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living below or near the poverty line in 2008, according to the census figures coming from the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007. Poverty in the United States jumped to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high. Use of food stamps jumped 13 percent last year to nearly 9.8 million U.S. households. The number of poor residents increased in many U.S. communities. Howard Davidowitz, the veteran retail industry consultant and chairman, Davidowitz & Associates, said in mid-February, 2009 that Americans' standard of living was undergoing a "permanent change" as a result of negative wealth effects of an $8 trillion from declining home values, a $10 trillion from weakened capital markets, and a $14 trillion consumer debt load. The U.S. Labor Department said in early-November (2009) that productivity surged at a 9.5 percent annual rate, the quickest pace since the third quarter of 2003. Increased productivity is reducing necessary labor time and widening the surplus labor time as companies squeeze out more from workers in the time of widespread unemployment. Do these changes signify intensified class war by capital against labor? JBF: From a long-run perspective, a one-sided class war from above, directed at workers, has been developing in the United States since the 1970s. We usually give this class war nowadays the name "neoliberalism," since it takes the form of a return to classical liberal notions of competition, survival of the fittest, and a self-regulating market. The goal has been to weaken or break unions, remove state supports for the poor, cut back on social services generally, push down real wages, free up capital movements, etc. Jesse Jackson, I believe, was to call this "Robin Hood in Reverse" in his famous 1984 presidential campaign. Neoliberalism, which also had its international aspect of course (in what we call neoliberal globalization), was in fact capital's response to the stagnation of the system and marked as well the whole shift toward financialization. For decades we have gotten used to capital introducing more repressive measures with each passing year. Part of this was to squeeze out additional surplus (or cash flow) that could feed the speculative beast. With the deepening of stagnation and severe financial crisis the expectation is that this class struggle from above will become even more intense. There is simply no other way for capital at present. With slow growth profit levels can only be maintained by redistribution. If the pie is a given size, in other words, the only way you get a bigger slice is by taking from someone else. Capital insists on its normal "rate of return," so everyone else gets a smaller slice. It is important to recognize that the United States has perhaps the strongest ruling class in history. The wealth and power of those on the top relative to those on the bottom is immense, even in a rich society that purports at least to have democratic foundations. We can see this in the fact that in 2007 the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States (the so-called Forbes 400) had a combined wealth approximately equal to the bottom half of the population, 150 million people. In such circumstances of concentrated power, in which a plutocracy rules the society, there are of course enormous opportunities to pass the costs of a crisis on to the underlying population. Already this is happening on a much bigger scale in the present crisis, with falling real wages, cutbacks in government spending at the state and local levels, unpaid furloughs, intensified work, etc. The productivity of the remaining workers, who are being forced to work harder, is going up. Yet, the gains of this increased productivity are not going to the workers. There are no crumbs to be had. They are all going to the corporations who are experiencing falling unit labor costs: the product of rising productivity coupled with stagnant, indeed falling, real wages. This means widening profit margins for firms. FC: What are the effects of the financial crisis on the structure of class power and the class struggle? Does the collapse of the financial institutions of the system signify an inner weakness of the system and of the class that owns the system? Is there a rift within the ruling elite over the political responses to the crisis of monopoly-finance capital? JBF: One of the big class-related questions associated with financialization, quite apart from the financial crisis itself, is to what extent financial capital has moved into the dominant position within the U.S. capitalist class. This is of course a difficult question to answer. Hannah Holleman and I decided to take up this question by looking at data on the Forbes 400 over time, building on an article that James Petras and Christian Davenport did for Monthly Review in 1990. Using a fairly rigorous methodology, based on Forbes 400 data, we discovered that that while in 1982 the percentage of Forbes 400 capitalists with their main source of wealth in the financial industry was 9 percent (24 percent for finance plus real estate), by 2007 this had soared to 27.3 percent (34 percent for finance plus real estate). Over the same period the percentage of the Forbes 400 obtaining their wealth predominantly from the manufacturing sector fell from 15.3 percent in 1982 to 9.5 percent in 2007. Although the capitalist class as a whole is much larger than the Forbes 400, which only accounts for about 7 percent of the wealth of the top 1 percent of wealth holders, there can be little doubt that this, as the elite within the elite, represents the trend for the U.S. capitalist class as a whole. (Our article, entitled "The Financialization of the Capitalist Class" is in a book in honor of James Petras, edited by Henry Veltmeryer and published by Brill, entitled Imperialism, Crisis and Class Struggle -- forthcoming, I believe, in April 2010.) One might expect increasing conflicts to have emerged between industrial and financial capital in these circumstances. But this doesn't seem to have occurred. In fact, manufacturing and other sectors in production appear to have been progressively financialized, with their own financial arms, so that the distinction between nonfinancial and financial corporations and interests is increasingly blurred. This shift toward finance within the capitalist class is of course a reflection of the relative growth of financial profits during this whole period and the general phenomenon of financialization, i.e. the shift in the center of gravity of the economy to finance. It means that financial capital more and more calls the shots and is more fully ensconced as the headquarters of the system. We can see this in the financial crisis itself. The economic-financial crisis can be traced to stagnation. But the bursting of the household bubble was an amplifying factor and soon became the center of a perfect storm of financial crisis and worsening economic conditions. Out of this, financial capital appears to have emerged in many ways stronger, with the remaining big banks more powerful than ever. Twenty years ago the ten largest financial institutions in the United States owned 10 percent of all financial industry assets; now they own 60 percent. They are truly too big to be allowed to fail. If stagnation is centered in production, the economy is more and more dependent on the financial balloon to lift it off the ground. Yet, the balloon deflates periodically with disastrous results. This is the paradox of monopoly-finance capital. FC: There is report that financial speculation bosses took up top posts in the U.S. government, and top public servants have joined finance speculation houses, with some having a foot in both. McClatchy in months-long investigation found "Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws." Now, according to McClatchy, Goldman has taken the "new role" of "taking away people's homes." While Goldman Sachs Group was peddling more than $40 billion in securities in 2006 and '07, it "never told the buyers that it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting." Facts are now being exposed that at least "one of the Wall Street's proudest and most prestigious firms helped create a market for junk mortgages . . . that's cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes." There are reports of inside trading, corruption, etc. Senator Dick Durbin told a Chicago radio station in late April that banks are "still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." Do these revelations show: (a) the improper, undemocratic, unruly, rogue, corrupt, hypocritical, brutal, ugly face of dominating capital that always propagates, like its religion, rule of democracy, law, accountability, and many other fine-sounding terms; (b) private property is appropriating private property; (c) intense competition between parts of the concerned capital; and (d) capital's command over dominating politics? JBF: Well, the greed and one might say corruption -- though it is hard to determine where corruption begins and ends in a society where everyone is supposed to grab whatever they can by virtually any means they can, as long as this is not definitely designated as illegal -- are so pervasive as to be beyond comprehension. This, as you say, leads to all sorts of brutal, ugly, undemocratic, inhumane aspects. This is a doubly and triply alienated society. People are alienated from humanity, from their own class, often from their own family. As the fictional character Gordon Gekko said in Oliver Stone's film Wall Street,"Greed is Good." In October 2009, Brian Griffiths, adviser to Goldman Sachs International declared with a straight face at the pulpit in St. Paul's Cathedral in London: "The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is a recognition of self-interest." When I read that I was speechless. In attempt to defend outrageous bonuses as rewards for no less outrageous profits fed by public bailouts, bankers are going out of their way to tell us that that inequality is the basis of moral community, social prosperity, and religious faith, while hundreds of millions, even billions, of people around the world languish in abject poverty, degradation, and alienation. Juan Cole of Informed Comment pointed out on January 13, in response to the earthquake in Haiti, that the latest round of bank bonuses of the biggest banks in the U.S. was many times the GDP of Haiti. If the banks (taking into consideration only Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan) offered a reasonable share, say half of their current yearly bonuses, to Haiti, it would be more than 100 times the foreign aid that the United States normally gives to Haiti in a year, about equal to all the foreign aid given out annually by the United States to the entire world. There is no doubt that the top economic advisers in the Obama administration are almost all linked directly to Wall Street, and to Goldman Sachs in particular. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Obama's chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, both worked under Clinton's first Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who was employed for twenty-six years by Goldman Sachs (after the Clinton administration Rubin became director and senior counselor at Citigroup). Geithner was close to Sanford Weill, previous head of Citigroup. Summers received $5.2 million in compensation from a hedge fund in 2008 as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street corporations. None of this was a surprise. During the election campaign Obama surrounded himself with top Wall Street figures. This was a key element in the financial support for his campaign and also in his acceptability as a candidate to the U.S. ruling class. It was particularly important in terms of the financial crisis. The moment he was elected he redoubled the federal government's efforts to bail out financial capital, with only minor, rhetorical, criticisms of capital in the process. A very good article on this, entitled "The Quiet Coup" was published by Simon Johnson in the Atlantic in May 2009. FC: The U.S. budget gap reached 10 percent of GDP in fiscal 2009. Unless hard decisions on cutting spending or raising taxes are taken, some economists warned, the deficit carries seeds of another economic crisis. Is there any relationship between stagnation, dominance of the monopoly-finance capital, and the increasing budget deficit? JBF: In Keynesian terms, budget deficits are not at all times bad. It is of course important for the U.S. government, along with other national governments, to run a budget deficit in the context of the current crisis, and it makes economic sense. The priority under these circumstances is to get the economy going again and employ people. The federal government should be spending more, not less, on jobs, which means, under present circumstances, a big deficit. Yet, deficits are a problem for the system in various ways. Under monopoly-finance capital it can't live without them and it can't live with them. This is a growing contradiction of the system. Deficits are of course related not just to the size of spending in relation to revenue but also to what the government is spending on. In the United States in 2007, 4 percent of GDP ($553 billion) was spent on the military, according to the usually quoted acknowledged figures. This of course helped prop the economy by soaking up excess capacity, but it also meant expanding budget deficits. Much of this in the current period is related to fighting the wars of aggression and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to these acknowledged figures, the U.S. is spending almost as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. But real U.S. spending, based on government data, including hidden military expenditures, was $1 trillion in 2007, over 7 percent of GDP. Actual military spending as a percentage of federal spending (minus transfer payments) was in excess of 50 percent in 2007. Obviously, then, this is where the bulk of the deficit comes from. Of the remainder of the federal budget minus transfer payments, a very large portion goes to direct and indirect subsidies to capital. Only a relatively small portion of U.S. government spending is thus devoted to support for the population. Right now, the deficit is expanding enormously as a result of the successive bailouts of financial capital and capital in general. The costs of this of course fall on the general public. As Marx observed in Capital, "The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is -- the national debt." FC: What are the economic roots of the "War on Terrorism"? Why, in other words, is the United States now directly engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan? Is it only related to oil, and other strategic resources, and retaining hegemony over these strategic resources? Or, along with these, are there also causes having roots in imperialism's body-socio-politic? How is this related to inter-imperialist rivalry between advanced capitalist states? Has peak oil entered in to further complicate the story that you told in your 2006 book Naked Imperialism? JBF: The so-called "War on Terrorism" is a misnomer. One can't have war on terrorists the way one can on nation states, as if a handful of scattered groups and individuals constitute a war opponent for the most powerful military force in history. In fact, such an objective, even if we were to take it seriously, quickly mutates into a war against whole peoples and nations, feeding imperial aspirations, which are always there. True there are real terrorists, guerrilla fighters, opponents of the United States, in the countries that Washington is struggling to control by means of militarism and imperialism. But here we come to a chicken and egg issue. To what extent are the terrorists (real or so-called) themselves the product of the prior assertion of U.S. imperial power and ambitions? On why the United States has devoted so many resources of late to controlling this region of the world, one cannot avoid what in foreign policy circles is euphemistically referred to as its "vital strategic resources" -- namely oil and natural gas. As Alan Greenspan said in his book The Age of Turbulence: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." The war in Afghanistan can of course be connected more directly to "terrorism," or more precisely a terrorist falling out: a terrorist movement created by the CIA as a weapon in the U.S. system of imperial terror (and its combat with the Soviets), which then resulted in blowback, as Washington's former allies refused to accept growing U.S. dominance in the Middle East and struck back with the very terrorist methods that they had been taught. But the real issues lie not with terrorism but with the objectives that led to U.S. involvement in the region in the first place: the new Great Game. These objectives can all be explained in geopolitical terms: "containing" (i.e. surrounding) Russia and Iran; controlling Central Asian natural gas and oil (and their pipelines); restricting Chinese access to the region; further enveloping the adjacent Middle East in U.S. power; asserting control over South Asia, particularly Pakistan, but also India. Afghanistan has been understood since the days of the British Empire to be a loose stone at a point where major civilizations converge. U.S. strategic planners like to look at maps. Afghanistan borders the unstable petroleum states in Central Asia (formerly part of the Soviet Union), Iran, Pakistan, and even China. For the imperial mind, it is therefore of great strategic significance. The United States could not have even considered expansion into this region while the Soviet Union was at its height. Now it is viewed as one of the key strategic regions left open by the Soviet collapse, and the United States has been struggling to secure it ever since (indeed struggle over this region played a key role in the Soviet collapse). The degree to which imperialist views are openly paraded in the United States should not be underestimated. One prominent U.S. writer, a regular contributor to the Atlantic, Robert Kaplan, glorifies U.S. militarism and imperialism in the following way in his book Imperial Grunts: "By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice." Such "appropriation of the earth" is indeed what it is all about. In this respect, though the United States is not all alone, it also has the support of its junior allies with NATO. There is little doubt at this point that the world is controlled by the "triad" (sometimes called "the international community") of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan. In this, Richard Haass, formerly of the Bush administration, now head of the Council of Foreign Advisers, tells us, the United States plays the role of the sheriff, Britain is its deputy, and the rest of the triad makes up the posse. At times of course, the posse would like to depose the sheriff, and they object when the sheriff and the deputy ride off without their prior consent to lynch populations, as with the George W. Bush administration and Tony Blair's Labour Party. But mostly they work together, giving an air of unity. There is no doubt that this system of imperial control is becoming tighter, that the triad is becoming more unified, as a result of the rise of competing powers elsewhere, particularly China. Inter-imperialist rivalries exist within the triad, but they are largely in abeyance, and they together control financial, technological, and military power -- and, primarily as a result of the U.S. empire, world resource flows. It is hegemony over the triad that has become the main means through which the United States seeks today to maintain its larger global hegemony despite its stagnant economic growth and waning status. One recent development was France's giving up of the Gaulist strategy of a separate military. This meant tighter welding together of NATO, which under U.S. leadership is expanding its global role and directly challenging the United Nations' peacekeeping role. Peak oil, which no one in positions of economic, political, and military power now doubts (the debate is about whether it is coming soon or sooner), has tended to drive these points home, making it clear to both the sheriff and the posse how important it is to control the major world, geographical center of crude oil reserves. The financial crisis has placed a strain on the structure of U.S. world power, visible for example in signs of Japanese ruling class rapprochement with China, and the lowered voice in international affairs of the greatly weakened U.S. "deputy" Britain. FC: In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, is the United States still in a position to unilaterally decide global economic, environmental, political, and geopolitical issues? And, is the world still U.S.-centric? What about the dream of a "New American Century" now? JBF: I was interested in an article, "An Empire at Risk," that Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard wrote for Newsweek (December 7, 2009). Ferguson is a British historian of imperialism and finance who moved to the United States. He has specialized in rehabilitating (and promoting) British and U.S. imperialism. Ferguson trades on his British perspective and takes as a basis for all of his writings on imperialism that the British were a lot better at running their world capitalist empire than the United States is at running its. He claims that the United States is Janus-faced, confused and generally inept on the subject of empire. As a result of its own origins as a colony, it has never been entirely comfortable with imperialism and thus does it, but does it badly. There is no imperial educated elite trained specifically to run the empire. The British, in comparison, were true imperial masters. Ferguson has made a whole career of this, which sells well in elite circles in the United States, and has contributed to his being one of the highest-priced, most vocal U.S.-based historians. He was a particularly strong proponent of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (see my Naked Imperialism). He is also a financial historian, author of The Ascent of Money, and trades on the glories of financial capitalism. In his piece "Empire at Risk" in Newsweek, Ferguson argues that the U.S. financial crisis is generating a U.S. fiscal crisis, as the government seeks to bail out Wall Street, and that this fiscal crisis is endangering the long-term future of the U.S. empire. Ferguson says, comparing the fiscal situation today to 1942, that "We are, it seems, having the fiscal policy of a world war, without the [world] war." (He notes that the United States is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq but claims this is of relatively little fiscal significance.) He worried that Obama's decision over whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan (which Ferguson strongly supported) was being affected by this fiscal crisis, thereby threatening the U.S. empire. He shouldn't have worried too much. Obama sent the additional soldiers to war and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize at the same time. And U.S. imperialism seems more aggressive than ever, threatening Iran. Still, Ferguson says that the empire is being jeopardized as a result of the fiscal effects of the Wall Street bailout, which he also supports. What does he think should be done? He suggests that the main targets should be Medicaid and Social Security, which he claims are increasingly "unfunded liabilities." The implication is that these social programs need to be cut back for the sake of the U.S. empire. Americans, he implies, should be willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the empire. There is no doubt that Ferguson is right in some regards. The U.S. empire is unstable and at risk. The long-term threat to the hegemony of the dollar represented by growing financial instability is real. Empire angst is one of the dominant issues in the centers of power in the United States today. The United States is more and more in the position of a wounded elephant -- wounded but more dangerous as a result. The "New American Century" is uncertain. But this is given as the reason for a more, not less, active imperialist stance. This hasn't changed under Obama, who is expanding the war in Afghanistan while not withdrawing from Iraq; building seven new military bases in Columbia, next door to Venezuela and Ecuador; supporting the coup plotters in Honduras; and squeezing Iran. FC: What are the reasons behind the disputes/disagreements in the climate crisis diplomacy? What role should the people-oriented ecological movements play in the post-Copenhagen chapter in climate crisis diplomacy? Is there a possibility that the climate crisis will lead organizations related to people, including peasants and fishermen, to take a stronger anti-imperialist position? Do the people-oriented ecological movements carry seeds that ultimately turn into movements against elites whose lifestyle thrives on squandering public resources? JBF: That the Copenhagen climate negotiations would be a failure was well known in advance of the summit. Washington set the stage for failure by producing legislation in the House that was "worse than nothing" -- as James Hansen, the leading U.S. climatologist, put it -- and then with the Senate refusing to go forward with even that. Washington's position internationally on climate change has been to do little, to reject legally-binding agreements on emissions reductions, and to promote almost total reliance on cap and trade (i.e. carbon emissions trading). The advanced capitalist states, even Europe which has gone the furthest, have not managed to reduce emissions in the almost twenty years since the Kyoto Process began. Indeed, emissions in the rich countries taken as a whole have continued to rise rapidly, particularly in the United States and Japan. The emerging economies, such as China and India, are also not taking the problem seriously enough, although it is easy to see why these states think leadership should come from the advanced capitalist countries, with their historic responsibility and their much higher per capita emissions. Contraction and convergence based on equal per capital emissions globally, which is the only rational international response, is not even on the table, due to what we could call the whole structure of ecological imperialism. Meanwhile, the climate problem (and the environmental problem as a whole) is getting far worse. In terms of climate diplomacy the one bright spot right now is Evo Morales' call for climate talks in Bolivia, which is an attempt to promote a world ecological solution starting from a global South (and indigenous) perspective. As always, the problem with radical change leads to the question of agency. In Monthly Review we have long argued that the most revolutionary forces in the world emanate from the third world -- and that in a sense this is where Marx's "proletariat" in its most alienated sense is now to be found. In my January 2010 article in MR entitled "Why Ecological Revolution?" I floated the idea of an "environmental proletariat." To repeat what I said there: Looking at this today, I think it is conceivable that the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of ecological revolution is to be found in the third world masses most directly in line to be hit first by the impending disasters. Today the ecological frontline is to be found in the inhabitants of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta and of the low-lying fertile coast area of the Indian Ocean and China Sea -- the state of Kerala in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. They, too, as in the case of Marx's proletariat, have nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert (or adapt to) disaster. In fact, with the universal spread of capitalist social relations and the commodity form, the world proletariat and the masses most exposed to sea level rise -- for example, the low-lying delta of the Pearl River and the Guangdong industrial region from Shenzhen to Guangzhou -- sometimes overlap. This, then, potentially constitutes the global epicenter of a new environmental proletariat. In Bolivia we see the rise of an indigenous-based environmental and socialist movement, which has responded to growing environmental conflicts: water conflicts, coca conflicts, hydrocarbon conflicts. The fact that Bolivia's socialist president Evo Morales is now perhaps the strongest international voice for world climate stabilization is a product of new material conditions and relations. It seems possible that such an environmental proletariat (which I would argue is not antagonistic to Marx and Engels's classic notion of the proletariat -- but that is a different story for a different time) could emerge as a major revolutionary force. This would not exclude, as you say, the role of peasants and fishing communities in such change. Of course one might say that this smacks of pure fantasy; that there are few indications of this at present. Here, though, I think people are too inclined to generalize on past material conditions, without sufficient attention to the way in which material conditions are rapidly changing. Science now tells us that the world is undergoing an intense period of climate change, which will alter conditions of material production and material environmental conditions generally. Even if we were able to slow down the rate of climate change (and this is a necessity for the planet and its inhabitants), it is now too late to stop very serious changes from occurring. When I was in Vietnam recently there was a lot of discussion of the sea level rise and how it is already beginning to affect the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City. Droughts seem to be spreading globally. Both floods and water shortages are growing problems in the Andes due to melting glaciers. The world's rice crop appears especially vulnerable to climate change. And we are at only the beginning of an accelerating problem (which environmentally goes beyond climate change itself). Moreover, the hardest hit, both because of geography and due to the lack of economic resources, are likely to be the populations of the third world, who are already superexploited. I believe that people will be driven to more intense struggles as a result. Thus out of these conditions we may see something like an environmental proletariat emerge worldwide. Surely, these worsening environmental conditions are going to make the "wretched of the earth" more acutely aware -- as you suggest -- of the lavish squandering of resources by ruling elites and classes. However, you use the word "inevitable." I don't think there is anything that could be called inevitable about the kinds of possibilities I am describing. Necessary, yes, but not inevitable. There is no certainty. Humanity has to struggle for its freedom and for a sustainable relation to the earth. Marx talked about the "common ruin of the contending classes," i.e. barbarism, as a possible outcome. Not only is this a possible result of the current capitalist civilization, I think that the environmental problem suggests that it may very well be the most likely result. All existing trends point in that direction. An actual environmental collapse (by which we mean the collapse of world ecosystems and civilization) is not, in my view, a road to socialism. It is a road to barbarism, even extinction. The point is to effect a radical change of course of world society, which could only occur by revolts from below. It may seem far-fetched and overly optimistic at this point to think this possible, but revolutionaries are usually optimists. Where human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny. I do believe that hundreds of millions of people will be drawn into the defense of the planet, in the process of defending their homes and their local environments. How could they not be? The only real defense in these circumstances is a revolutionary one, which recognizes that the issue is the mode of production, our metabolic relation to the earth. FC: How is the "renewal of the classic concept of political economy (with its class perspective)," as you told Mike Whitney, to be made? How could we effect a changed in perspective, from "economics" to political economy? You said, in the interview with MRZine (on your book Naked Imperialism), that we were seeing the "end of any possibility for a 'rational capitalism'." Has not that end been confirmed after the Great Financial Crisis? Then, what is the alternative path? You also noted in your interview with Whitney: In this "historical moment . . . radical forces have the possibility of moving forward." How far are there signs of this forward movement since the Great Financial Crisis? JBF: Here we are moving back to the advanced capitalist context, and the social changes possible as a result of the Great Financial Crisis. I do think that things have changed in the sense that the economic ideology of the system has been fractured. In the wake of this crisis, there is much less reference to such absurd notions as the "free market economy" or the "self-regulating market" as realities, or to globalization as a system. Protesters in Europe have moved from simply attacking neoliberal policy; in the streets there is an increasing recognition that capitalism itself is the problem. "Anti-globalization" has been replaced much more by "anti-capitalism." The economics profession is rightly held up to scorn. There has been a big move toward political-economic discussions; to the recognition that the economy does not exist as a self-contained, market entity, moving by way of the "invisible hand," but that it is a class-based and class-directed system, rooted in exploitation within production, and overseen by the state. At the same time, there is a popular politicization of economic issues. You hear now, even in the conservative United States, such issues as nationalization of the banks, taxing bankers, redistributing wealth to the population, controls on what the Federal Reserve can do, the need to have massive New Deal-style job programs, aid to distressed homeowners, and so on. This is a big step because the economy was so sacrosanct, so beyond political reach, in the heyday of neoliberalism. It suggests a break in the tight ideological control of the system. Having said all of this, though, the situation remains grim. Ideologically, the system is moving into high gear to explain that this was a Great Recession, but still only a recession, and that everything will soon get back to normal. So most people, even those desperate at the bottom, simply cling to that hope of change around the corner. Organized labor confronted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and double-digit unemployment has shown itself to be devoid of initiatives and concerned more about organizing its own orderly retreat than figuring out how to advance. It is still operating under a "business union" ethos based on some kind of mythical social contract with capital that -- to the extent that it was ever a reality -- disappeared long ago. Does this mean that there won't be a popular mutiny from below in the present hard times? It is too early to tell. I think that once it penetrates to those at the bottom of the economic pyramid that this is not just a temporary situation that will go away with the financial crisis and the recession, but that the reality is one of deepening, long-term economic stagnation, then it is conceivable that we will see all sorts of protests and a growing organized radical response in the United States along with the rest of the advanced capitalist world. Parallels with the 1930s are somewhat misleading, since nowadays the whole "structural crisis of capital" as Istv�n M�sz�ros calls it, is even more serious, and demands more radical solutions. As Grace Lee Boggs has suggested, organized labor is weak and co-opted. The struggle this time might have to rely more on communities. Ultimately, we need something like an organized environmental proletariat in the United States too, which combines revolts within production with revolts associated with diminishing community and environmental conditions. The dream of a "rational capitalism," as I suggested years ago in my article, "The End of Rational Capitalism," was associated particularly with Keynesianism and social democracy (what you might call social liberalism in its U.S. version). The historical period of such social democracy/social liberalism has now waned. If things look particularly bleak for the left in the United States at the moment, it is because social liberals dominate in the Democratic Party. They want to couple virtually unqualified support for capital with a mildly affirmative government (and token regulation of industry) that also provides minimal welfare services and the like (a far cry even from social democracy). They want capitalist growth but without its necessary accoutrements: class war, poverty, racism, sexism, crises, unemployment, inequality, financial excesses, etc. They also are in favor of a "kinder and gentler" imperialism, which means less direct intervention and more "counterinsurgency." Obama, who exemplifies the pro-capital, pro-finance, social liberal, mild welfarist, "benign imperialist" positions, has been undermined by the end of the possibility of a social democratic alternative and the consequent growth of the right. This has led just in the last week to the shift of Edward Kennedy's old seat in the U.S. Senate to the Republicans, something that almost no one thought possible. All of this has to do with the two-party system in the United States, which continually works against any progressive-radical solutions and seeks to enlist the working class in one bourgeois project or the other. All of which is to say that material conditions are never enough. What is required is the development of an organized radical revolt from below, and anything like that is still missing in the core capitalist nations, and especially the United States. That doesn't mean that it won't happen -- and the shift may occur when we hardly expect it. But it will be a huge struggle. Indeed, the main impetus for revolt will come from outside the United States, as a result of struggles in other parts of the world, and from the added fissures that this creates in the United States -- the center of the imperialist world system -- itself. Near the end of the film Burn! by Gillo Pontecorvo, the revolutionary leader Jose Delores is quoted by one of his followers as saying (as I recall): "It is better to know where you are going and not know how, than to know how and not know where." The question where we are going in late capitalist society is seldom truly asked -- the insistence is simply on the fact that we know how to go (i.e. via capital and the market). But it should be clear to anyone who thinks about it that we are headed as a result of these very relations of productionin the wrong direction: toward greater inequality and greater social and environmental destruction, indeed toward ecological collapse. Even the so-called "development" taking place in part of the global South is clearly the wrong kind of development since it is rooted in deep inequality and cannot be sustained. It is based to a large extent on the idea that the mythical golden age of capitalism can be recaptured (even made better) and globalized; that with economic expansion all things become possible. It should be clear to anyone who looks at the current crisis of capitalism as a system -- evident in deepening global economic and ecological contradictions -- that this is a great delusion. Where we must go, even if we don't know yet the mechanics of how to get there, is evident: the creation of a world of substantive equality and sustainability with the earth. This is the real historic struggle of humanity, which we must now finally embrace or risk our own extinction.