Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Žižek: EU must create a new world order to stop Donald Trump
"In global economic terms, it’s war, so it’s time for radical measures. Europe should be aware that there is no return to the status quo."
12 Jun, 2018
Trump’s impulsive decisions,
such as his refusal to endorse the G7 declaration agreed upon in Quebec, are
not just expressions of his personal quirks. Instead, they are reactions to the
end of an era in the global economic system, reactions which are sustained by
an incorrect understanding of what is happening. However, Trump’s misguided
vision is nonetheless based on the correct insight that the existing global
system no longer works.
An economic cycle is coming to
an end, a cycle which began in the early 1970s, the time when what Yanis
Varoufakis calls the “Global Minotaur” was born, the monstrous engine
that was running the world economy from the early 1980s to 2008. The late 1960s
and the early 1970s were not just significant for the oil crisis and stagflation;
Nixon’s decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar was the sign of
a much more radical shift in the basic functioning of the capitalist system.
Indeed, by the end of the
1960’s, the US economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its
surpluses to Europe and Asia because its surpluses had mutated into deficits.
As a result, in 1971, the US government responded to this decline with an
audacious strategic move: instead of tackling the nation’s burgeoning deficits,
it decided to do the opposite, to boost deficits.
And who would pay for them?
The rest of the world!
Centre Stage
How? By means of a permanent
transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to
finance America’s deficits. And these deficits thus started to operate “like
a giant vacuum cleaner, absorbing other people’s surplus goods and capital.
While that ‘arrangement’ was
the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imaginable at a planetary scale,
nonetheless, it did give rise to something resembling global balance; an
international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade
flows capable of providing a semblance of stability and steady growth.
Powered by these deficits, the
world’s leading surplus economies (e.g. Germany, Japan and, later, China) kept
churning out the goods while America absorbed them. Almost 70% of the profits
made globally by these countries were then transferred back to the United
States, in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And what did Wall Street do
with it? It turned these capital inflows into direct investments, shares, new
financial instruments, new and old forms of loans etc,” as Varoufakis
noted in "Global Minotaur."
This growing negative trade
balance demonstrates that the US is the non-productive predator: in past
decades, it had to suck up a 1 billion dollars daily influx from other nations
to buy for its consumption and is, as such, the universal Keynesian consumer
that keeps the world economy running. (So much for the anti-Keynesian economic
ideology that seems to predominate today!)
This influx, which is
effectively like the tithe paid to Rome in Antiquity (or the gifts sacrificed
to Minotaur by Ancient Greeks), relies on a complex economic mechanism: the US
is "trusted” as the safe and stable center, so that all others,
from the oil producing Arab countries to Western Europe and Japan, and now even
China, invest their surplus profits in the US.
Friendly Division
Since this “trust” is
primarily ideological and military, not economic, the problem for the US is how
to justify its imperial role – and it manages this through a permanent state of
war.
For this reason, it had to
invent the “War on Terror,” offering itself as the universal
protector of all other “normal” (as opposed to “rogue”) states.
Thus the entire globe tends to function as a universal Sparta with its three
classes, now emerging as the First, Second, Third world: (1) the US as the
military-political-ideological power; (2) Europe and parts of Asia and Latin
America as the industrial-manufacturing region (crucial here are Germany and
Japan, long the world's leading exporters, plus, of course, now the rising
China); (3) the undeveloped rest, today's helots, those “left behind.” In
other words, global capitalism brought about a new general trend to oligarchy,
masked as the celebration of the diversity of cultures: equality and
universalism are more and more disappearing as actual political principles.
From 2008 on, this neo-Spartan
world system is breaking down. In Obama years, Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of
the Federal Reserve, gave another breath of life to this system: ruthlessly
exploiting the fact that the US dollar is the global currency, he financed
imports by massively printing money.
However, Trump has decided to
approach the problem in a different way: ignoring the delicate balance of the
global system, he focused on elements which may be presented as “injustice” for
the US: gigantic imports are reducing domestic jobs, etc. But what he decries
as “injustice” is part of a system which profited the US: the
Americans were effectively “robbing” the world by importing stuff and
paying for it by debts and printing money.
Inside Outside
No wonder Trump addresses Kim
Yong-un in far more friendlier terms than his big Western allies: here also,
extremes meet. With the disintegration of the system that dominated world trade
from 1970, the US is increasingly becoming the disruptor of world trade. In
contrast to 1945, the world doesn't need the US, it is the US which needs the
world. Two outcasts are thus meeting in Singapore: the excluded outcast (Kim)
and the outcast in the very fulcrum of the system.
Trump’s goal is to make trade
deals with single partners who can all be blackmailed into submission, so it is
of utmost importance that Europe acts as a unified economic and political
force. Full of dangers as this new situation is, it opens up a unique chance
for Europe: to engage itself in the formation of a new global economic system
that will no longer be dominated by US dollar as the global currency.
In global economic terms, it’s
war, so it’s time for radical measures. Europe should be aware that there is no
return to the status quo.
Instead, a truly new world
order is needed for Trump to get his comeuppance. And it is here that the
response of EU members and Canada is insufficient: instead of advocating a new
vision, they act as an offended party complaining that the US broke the
established rules.
Thus, in the last decade or
so, the EU more and more acts like the PLO ex-leader Yasser Arafat: about whom
it was said that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
As the immigrant crisis and
Catalonia, among other events prove, it’s probable that Europe will again miss
the chance.
Hakma Mousa is 108 and she wants to go home.
https://electronicintifada.net/
Hakma Attallah Mousa, is 108 years old. She's originally from the village of al-Sawafir al-Shamaliya, 30 kilometers from Gaza, where she now lives in a refugee camp.
"My mother was wounded when we were fleeing," Hakma recalled about what happened in 1948. "After we had packed some of our things and started to walk out of the village, she was shot. We carried her until we reached a hospital in Gaza City. A few weeks later, she died."
“We want to return, my son, back to our village, and we will,” she told our reporter. “We want to return to our homeland.”
The beautiful portrait of Hakma, above, is by Mohammed Asad.
Socialism 2018, July 5-8, Chicago
ANOTHER WORLD IS NECESSARY
https://socialismconference.org/
Socialism 2018 is a four-day conference bringing together hundreds of socialists and radical activists from around the country to take part in discussions about Marxism, working-class history, and the debates and strategies for organizing today.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Save the world--outsource all American government jobs to other countries
“Everybody in the world except US citizens should be allowed to vote and elect the American government”
–Slavoj Žižek
If the rest of the world could select the American government, then Republicans and corporate Democrats alike would lose their death-grip on America.
INSTALL PROGRESSIVES IN ALL US GOVERNMENT OFFICES!
The Democrats Out-Right the Right on North Korean Summit
JUNE 12, 2018
by AJAMU BARAKA
If more proof was needed to
persuade anyone that the Democrats are indeed a war party, it was provided when
Senator Chuck Schumer and other Democrat leaders in the Senate engaged in a
cynical stunt to stake out a position to the right of John Bolton on the summit
between Trump
and Kim Jong Un.
The Democrats asserted that
the planned summit could only be judged successful if the North Koreans agreed
to dismantle and remove all their nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,
end all production and enrichment of uranium, dismantle its nuclear weapons
infrastructure, and suspend ballistic missile tests.
Those demands would constitute
an unconditional surrender on the part of the North Korean leadership and will
not happen, and the Democrats know it.
But as problematic as those
demands are, here is the real problem that again demonstrates the bi-partisan
commitment to war that has been at the center of U.S. imperial policies: If
these are the outcomes that must be achieved for the meeting to be judged a
success, not only does it raise the bar beyond the level any serious person
believes possible, it gives the Trump administration the ideological cover to
move toward war. The inevitable failure to force the North Koreans to surrender
essentially forecloses all other options other than military conflict.
This is a reckless and cynical
game that provides more proof that neither party has the maturity and foresight
to lead.
Both capitalist parties
support the use and deployment of militarism, repression and war, but somehow –
even though the historic record reveals the opposite – the Democratic party has
managed to be perceived as less likely to support the war agenda than
Republicans. That perception must be challenged directly.
The Democrats have had a long
and sordid history connected to North Korea, and every other imperialist war
that the U.S. has waged since the end of the Second World War. It was the
policies of Democrat president Truman that divided the Korean peninsula and led
to the brutal colonial war waged by U.S. forces. Conflict with Korea was valuable
for Truman and his party advisors who were committed to re-militarizing the
U.S. economy, and they needed the justification that the Korean war gave them.
Truman tripled the military budget and established the framework for the
network of U.S foreign bases that would eventually cover the world over the
next few decades.
The bipartisan commitment to
full spectrum dominance continues with no real opposition from the Democratic
party-connected “resistance.” Even the Poor Peoples’ Campaign (PPC) that was
launched in May and purports to be an independent moral movement still dances
around the issue of naming the parties and interests responsible for the “moral
failures” of the U.S.
On the other hand, the
Revolutionary Action Committee, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,
the student- and youth-led anti-war movement and eventually Dr. King clearly
identified the bi-partisan commitment to the Vietnam war. What Dr. King and the
activists in the 1960s understood was that in order to be politically and
morally consistent, it was necessary to name the culprits and identify the
concrete geopolitical and economic interests driving the issue of war and
militarism.
Appeals to morality as an
element for popular mobilization against war can be useful. But such appeals
have little more impact than an online petition if they substitute vague
platitudes for substance and specificity.
So it was with the PPC’s week
of actions against war. Just a few days before the week began, a vote took
place in the House of Representatives to support yet another increase to the
military budget. In a vote of 351 to 66, the House of Representatives
authorized a significant hike to an incredible $717 billion a year.
And then just a few days after
the PPC’s week of action on militarism and war, the Democrats delivered their
reckless and opportunistic ultimatum to the Trump administration on North Korea
that could very conceivably lead to another illegal and immoral U.S. war.
Not calling the Democrats out
on their warmongering is itself immoral.
It is also quite clear that
vague moral appeals are not enough to delineate the interests of the capitalist
elites and their commitment to war as oppositional to those of working people
and the poor, who in the U.S. serve the moneyed interests as enlisted cannon
fodder.
The positions staked out by
the leadership of the Democratic party just confirmed what was already commonly
understood as the hegemonic positions among the majority in the foreign policy
establishment.
Objectively, there was never
much ideological space between the right-wing policies of Dick Cheney or John
Bolton and the neoliberal right-wing policies of Democratic party
policy-makers. The differences were always merely tactical and not strategic in
the sense that they all want the North Koreans to be supplicants.
Unfortunately, the general
public is the only sector confused about the intentions and interests of
elitist policy-makers, especially those elements of the public conditioned to
believe that the Democratic party is less belligerent and less committed to
militarism than the Republicans.
The fact is that the
Democratic party establishment is also firmly entrenched on the right.
Defeating the bi-partisan right must be the task for ourselves and for the
world.
That is why the peace,
anti-war and anti-imperialist forces must do the work to clear up that
confusion. The movement must declare without equivocation the position of the
Black Alliance for Peace: Not one drop of blood from the working class and poor
to defend the interests of the capitalist oligarchy.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)