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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March
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We are facing the transformation of the world order, which we have acknowledged after the USSR dissolution. However, the legend of the fall of communism itself is so false that it forces to consider the true origins of the current processes, without understanding which it is impossible to make even the most general predictions about the future.
Natural Evolution of Capitalism
First of all, the Soviet Union did not collapse, but was betrayed and sold by its leadership, interested in stealing the enormous wealth created by the Soviet state and joining the neoliberal globalist project that was already being implemented, and for which the USSR was a significant obstacle. Nevertheless, the processes we are talking about are much older than the Cold War and should be analysed in the perspective of the natural evolution of the capitalist system towards the unitary World-System (following Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology).
Within it, the hegemon’s role is not so much political leadership, but rather securing the interests of capital as a force that is independent and, in fact, superior to the interests of individual states.
Only the United States managed to achieve such a position on a global scale, but in subsequential hegemonic cycles the British Empire, the Netherlands and the Republic of Genoa (in competition with the Republic of Venice) used to play a similar role.
All of them pursued the interests of financial elites of a transnational nature (also in the period before modern ethnogenesis, i.e. 19th-20th centuries).
This scenario included both the invention of the modern understanding of nations and the pursuit of the decomposition of traditional, communitarian monarchies, like the Russian Empire.
Let’s remember that the Anglo-Saxon goals in striving to break out the Great War were not only to stop and weaken Germany and to break up and take over Turkey, together with the Middle East, but also to take control of Russia, a formally allied country. This last process was ongoing anyway as a result of the progress of capitalism in the Tsarist Empire, but Western capitalists were impatient. That brought to the February Revolution, one of the greatest misfortunes in Russian history, which ultimately turned against its perpetrators, along with the popular reaction in the form of the October Revolution and the struggle of the peoples of Russia against Western intervention.
Unexpected Obstacles
The USSR found itself temporarily outside the emerging World-System, almost as in the times of Ivan the Terrible, slowly establishing interactions, but without renouncing (for the time being) its own separate position outside the Core-Semi-Periphery-Periphery scheme.
Beyond the Soviets, however, global transformation was gathering pace. The so-called Versailles system, which was falsely described as aimed at consolidating peace, actually served exactly the opposite purpose. The weak and quarrelling nation-states created in Europe were supposed to be only an intermediate stage to the next phase: regional and, over time, global integration and unification.
And again, these processes were to be accelerated as a result of the world war, which, as it was hoped, would also solve the problem of the Soviet state.
There has been assumed, that if the USSR failed in the war, then could be directly included in the global project. Yet again, the Soviet nations surprised global planners by doing the impossible and winning the World War 2.
In this situation, as part of the strategic nuclear balance achieved immediately afterwards, it was decided to replace the direct attack with the competition of ideological discourse and the desire to weaken and, over time, take over the Eastern Bloc thanks to the expansion of liberal cultural hegemony.
The economic barriers were also weakening and, in fact, already in the 1960s and especially the 1970s, the USSR and its satellites were drawn into a whole series of connections with the World-System, despite formal, ideological hostility, becoming, if not directly part of it, then certainly interdependent contractor. At the same time, however, communist China managed to avoid such entanglement.
Temptation
Soviet entanglement was only growing, and the West’s ideological domination over the Eastern Bloc was becoming more and more visible, despite the latter’s obvious geopolitical successes, including effective beating off the neo-colonial imperialism in Asia, Africa and even on the American continent. However, the attractiveness of the Western lifestyle continued to grow not only among the ordinary people living in the real socialism countries, who have been deceived by American TV series, but above all in the communist leaders’ and apparatus officers’ eyes. They observed how in the USA and UK capital, acting through its hired actors, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, carried out a gigantic seizure of public property, commercialising, privatising and capitalising not only entire sectors of the economy, but even whole previously non-economic spheres of human life.
This program was extremely unfavourable particularly for the Western working class, but ultimately also for the middle class doomed to disintegration, however it turned out to be extremely tempting for Soviet and (post-)communist leaders. Eventually they decided not only to betray their own country and society, but also to sell out their allies from the Eastern Europe. It was the Soviets who sold the Eastern Europe to the West, not the opposite, and this is too rarely remembered not only in Warsaw, Bucharest or Prague, but especially in Moscow… Subsequently, some Soviet republics were also sold off as part of the same thieving transactions (and Yugoslavia was devastated), hence the current conflict in Ukraine should also be seen as a simple consequence of those devilish bargains.
Bifurcation
However, the current stage of global transformation is, of course, more than just eating what’s left of the Soyuz. If we understand that one of the possible ways of evolution of the World-System is to eliminate the intermediation of states in general, even the most powerful ones, then attempts to regain control and build a multipolar order at the geopolitical level have the nature of an anti-globalism reaction. Of course, other scenarios and interpretations are also possible. The US actions are aimed at defending a privileged position within the system, not so much against its opponents, but against competitor within it, that means currently against China.
China has all the data to become the next centre of the World-System, its economy and society are much better profiled to effectively participate in globalist processes, so the Western aggression against Russia is both a prevention against closer Sino-Russian cooperation and a kind of punishment for Moscow’s rejection of participation in the Western anti-Chinese alliance. Russia is therefore eliminated as the weaker one before the final clash of the West vs. China, just like the German Empire in the Great War, being not the main, but one of the equal war goals of the Anglo-Saxons acting in the interests of part of the global financière. The one that would fail if Beijing and Shanghai permanently replaced Wall Street and the City.
It’s Not Only About the War…
One thing should be emphasised, we do not talk about the war only, but about a global transition that covers all spheres of human life. The Russians are again resisting longer and more effectively than expected, but let’s note that, as before, this does not stop transformations in other parts of the World-System. On the contrary, thanks to the war in Ukraine, it was possible to accelerate such an important element of the globalist agenda as energy transformation. This, in turn, is not only an economic change, but also a civilizational one, significantly facilitating mechanisms such as functional immobilisation of significant part of humanity at a level exceeding what has been practiced during the COVID-19 lockdowns. It is also possible now to achieve an increasing scope of direct control and surveillance, not to mention censorship and growth of repressiveness, tantamount to the overt rejection of the liberal democracy appearances.
On the Wrong Side
From the dialectical perspective of course we understand, that in the Great War the Russian soldier did not realise that his main enemy was not the Germans and Austrians in the trenches opposite. During the revolution and Russian civil war, the Red Army man was not aware that being a revolutionary, he was also defending elements of the primordial tradition. In the Great Patriotic War, a Soviet soldier fought against Nazism, not knowing the concept of the World-System. Yet all these levels overlapped, leading us together to the current historical moment of another struggle.
Unfortunately, within this conflict most of those mobilised on the side of the West will fight against own most fundamental interests and needs. Especially in the case of Poland and other Eastern European countries, siding with the West, first within the early capitalist capital-commodity/development chains, and now within the World-System, has meant and means permanent peripheralisation, with periodic promotions to the sphere of semi-periphery at the best.
If Zero-Growth is chosen among the many available scenarios for the transformation of global capitalism, then the Eastern European myth of catching up with the developed West will finally end, and in the West social inequalities will only be systematically perpetuated, as we will face eternal stasis. In turn maintaining a model of capitalism similar to the current post-consumerism would require the replacement of the United States by China, which would have to take over the role of the World-System leading state. However, making this type of change may also become impossible without a war, if not a full-scale, then an economic one, massively destructive for the Western societies and again with the Europeans fighting against their own prospects if not for any improvements, then at least for not losing more.
To sum up, one of the most serious challenges to the Europeans in the face of global transition and regional conflicts is to understand that in the current geopolitical configuration, in the current state of cultural hegemony and with the current level of dominant ideological discourse – we are on the wrong side. And we want to harm ourselves even more.
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Konrad Rękas is a regular contributor to Global Research.
