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by ISMAEL
HOSSEIN-ZADEH
Many countries around
the world are plagued by all kinds of armed rebellions, economic sanctions,
civil wars, “democratic” coup d’états and/or wars of “regime change.” These
include Ukraine, Venezuela, Syria, Thailand, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt,
Yemen, Somalia and Lebanon. Even in the core capitalist countries the
overwhelming majority of citizens are subjected to brutal wars of economic
austerity.
While not new, social
convulsions seem to have become more numerous in recent years. They have become
especially more frequent since the mysterious 9-11 attacks on the World Trade
Center in 2001 and the 2008 financial collapse in the United States, which soon
led to similar financial implosions and economic crises in Europe and beyond.
Despite their many
differences, these social turbulences share two common features. The first is
that they are largely induced, nurtured and orchestrated from outside, that is,
by the United States and its allies—of course, in collaboration with their
class allies from inside. And the second is that, contrary to the
long-established historical pattern of social revolutions, where the desperate
and disenfranchised masses rebelled against the ruling elites, in most of the
recent struggles it is the elites that have instigated insurgencies and civil
wars against the masses. The two features are, of course, integrally
intertwined: essentially reflecting the shared interests and collaborative
schemes of the international plutocracies against the global 99%.
Fighting
to Make Austerity Economics Universal
The official
rationale (offered by the U.S. and its allies) that the goal of supporting
anti-government opposition forces in places such as Syria, Ukraine and
Venezuela is to spread democracy no longer holds any validity; it can easily be
dismissed as a harebrained pretext to export neoliberalism and spread austerity
economics. Abundant and irrefutable evidence shows that in places where the
majority of citizens voted for and elected governments that were not to the
liking of Western powers, these powers mobilized their local allies and hired all
kinds of mercenary forces in order to overthrow the duly elected governments,
thereby quashing the majority vote.
Such blatant
interventions to overturn the elections that resulted from the majority vote
include the promotion of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004 and 2014), Rose
Revolution in Georgia (2003), Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (2005), Tulip
Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005) and the Green Revolution in Iran (2009). They
also include the relentless agitation against the duly elected governments of
the late Hugo Chavez and now his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, as well
as the rejection (and effective annulment) of the duly elected Hamas government
in Palestine.
So, the real driving
forces behind wars of regime change need to be sought elsewhere; specifically,
in the imperatives of expansion and accumulation of capital on a global level.
Socialist, social-democratic, populist or nationalist leaders who do not
embrace neoliberal economic policies, and who may be wary of having their
markets wide open to unbridled foreign capital, would be targeted for
replacement with pliant leaders, or client states. This is, of course, not a
new explanation of economic imperialism; it is as old as the internationalization
of trade and investment.
What is relatively
new, and seems to be the main driving force behind the recent wars of regime
change, is that, as the U.S. and other major capitalist powers have lately
embarked on austerity economic policies at home they also expect and, indeed,
demand that other countries follow suit. In other words, it is no longer enough
for a country to open its markets to investment and trade with Western economic
powers. It seems equally important to these powers that that country also
dismantle its public welfare programs and implement austerity measures of
neoliberalism.
For example, after
resisting imperialist pressures for years, the late Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi
eventually relented in 1993, and granted major oil and other transnational
corporations of Western powers lucrative investment and trade deals. Under
pressure, he even dismantled his country’s nuclear technology altogether in the
hope that this would please them to “leave him” alone, so to speak. None of the
concessions he made, however, proved satisfactory to the U.S. and its allies,
as his regime was violently overthrown in 2011 and he was literally butchered
by the thuggish gangs that were trained and armed by Western powers.
Why? Because the U.S.
and its allies expected more; they wanted him to follow the economic guidelines of the “experts” of
global finance, that is, of the U.S. and European economic “advisors,” of the
International Monetary Fund and of the World Trade Organization—in short, to
dismantle his country’s rather robust state welfare programs and to restructure
its economy after the model of neoliberalism.
The criminal treatment
of al-Gaddafi can help explain why imperialist powers have also been scheming
to overthrow the populist/socialist regimes of the late Hugo Chavez and his
successor in Venezuela, of the Castro brothers in Cuba, of Rafael Correa Delgado in Ecuador, of Bashar
al-Assad in Syria and of Evo Morales in Bolivia. It also helps explain why they
overthrew the popularly elected nationalist governments of Mohammad Mossadeq in
Iran, of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, of Kusno Sukarno in Indonesia, of Salvador
Allende in Chile, of Sandinistas in Nicaragua, of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in
Haiti and of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras.
The imperialist agenda of overthrowing al-Gaddafi and other
“insubordinate” proponents of welfare state programs abroad is essentially part
of the same evil agenda of dismantling such programs at home. While the form,
the context and the means of destruction maybe different, the thrust of the
relentless attacks on the living conditions of the Libyan, Iranian, Venezuelan
or Cuban peoples are essentially the same as the equally brutal attacks on the
living conditions of the poor and working people in the US, UK, France and
other degenerate capitalist countries. In a subtle way they are all part of an
ongoing unilateral class warfare on a global scale. Whether they are carried
out by military means and bombardments or through the apparently “non-violent”
processes of judicial or legislative means does not make a substantial
difference as far as their impact on people’s lives and livelihoods is
concerned.
The powerful plutocratic establishment in the core capitalist countries
does not seem to feel comfortable to dismantle New Deal economics, Social
Democratic reforms and welfare state programs in these countries while people
in smaller, less-developed countries such as (al-Gaddafi’s) Libya, Venezuela or
Cuba enjoy strong, state-sponsored social safety net programs. Plutocracy’s
intolerance of “regimented” economies stems from a fear that strong
state-sponsored economic safety net programs elsewhere may serve as “bad” models
that could be demanded by citizens in the core capitalist countries.
In a moment of honesty, former U.S. President Harry Truman is reported as
having expressed (in 1947) the unstated mission of the United States to globalize
its economic system in the following words: “The whole world should adopt the
American system. The American system can survive in America only if it becomes
a world system” [1].
In a similar fashion,
Lord Cecil Rhodes, who conquered much of Africa for the British Empire, is reported
to have suggested during the heydays of the Empire that the simplest way to
achieve peace was for England to convert and add the rest of the world (except the
United States, Germany and few other Western powers of the time) to its
colonies.
The Mafia equivalent
of Truman’s or Rhodes’ statements would be something like this: “You do it our
way, or we break your leg.”
The mindset behind
Truman’s blunt statement that the rest of the world “should adopt the American
system” has indeed served as something akin to a sacred mission that has guided
the foreign policy of the United States ever since it supplanted the British
authority as the major world power.
It explains, for
example, the real and the main reason behind the Cold War hostilities between the
U.S. and its allies, on the one side, and the Soviet Union and its allies, on
the other. While the “threat of communism” has been the official rationale for
the start and escalation of those hostilities, there is convincing evidence
that not only Joseph Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union had no plans
to wage war against the United States or its allies but that, in fact, they
played a restraining role to contain independent revolutionary movements
worldwide. “It is often forgotten,” points out Sidney Lens, “that for a few
years after the war, he [Stalin] assumed an exceedingly moderate posture. . . .
His nation had lost 25 million people in the war, was desperately in need of
aid for rebuilding, and continued for a long time to nurture hopes of
coexistence. Far from being revolutionary, Stalin in those years put the damper
on revolution wherever he could” [2].To accommodate the United States and other
Western powers in the hope of peaceful coexistence, Stalin often advised, and
sometimes ordered, the pro-Moscow communist/leftist parties in Europe and
elsewhere in the world to refrain from revolutionary policies that might
jeopardize the hoped-for chances of coexistence.
The goal or mission
of converting other economies to the U.S.-style capitalism also helps explains why the United States has engaged in
so many military operations and engineered so many coup d’états and regime
changes around the world. The Federation of American Scientists has recorded a
list of U.S. foreign military engagements which shows that in the first decade
after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989-99) the U.S. engaged in 134 such
operations, the majority of which are altogether unknown to the American public
[3].
Global financial
elites change “unaccommodating” regimes not only in the less developed
countries but also in the core capitalist countries. They accomplish this not
so much by military means as by utilizing two very subtle but powerful means:
(a) artificial, money-driven elections, peddled as “democracy in action”; and
(b) powerful financial institutions and think tanks such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), central banks and bond/credit rating agencies like Moody’s,
Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Group. An unfavorable rating report by these
agencies on the credit status of a country can create havoc on that country’s
economic, financial and currency position in world markets, thereby dooming its
government to collapse and replacement. This is how during the ongoing
financial turbulence of recent years a number of governments have been changed
in places like Greece and Italy—no need for the traditional or military style
regime change, the “soft-power” financial coup d’état engineered by the IMF
and/or rating agencies would serve the purpose even more effectively.
Class War
on a Global Scale
As noted, all the
schemes and wars of regime change, whether by the traditional military means or
by the “soft” power of the global financial juggernaut, essentially represent
one thing: a disguised class war on a global level, a relentless worldwide
economic war by the one percent financial-economic oligarchy against the rest
of the world population.
Class struggle in an
economically-tiered society is of course not new. What is relatively new in the
recent years’ war of the 1% against the 99% is its escalated pace, its
widespread scale and its globally orchestrated character. While neoliberal
austerity attacks on the living conditions of the public in the core capitalist
countries began (formally) with the supply-side economics of President Ronald
Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher more than three decades ago, the
brutality of such attacks have become much more severe in the context of the current
financial/economic crisis, which began with the 2008 financial crash in the
United States.
Taking advantage of
the crash (as an economic shock therapy, as Naomi Klein put it), the
financial oligarchy and their proxies in the governments of the core capitalist
countries have been carrying out a systematic economic coup d’état against
the people the ravages of which include the following:
• Transfer of tens of
trillions of dollars from the public to the financial oligarchy through
merciless austerity cuts;
• Extensive
privatization of public assets and services, including irreplaceable historical
monuments, priceless cultural landmarks, and vital social services such as
healthcare, education and water supply;
• Substitution of
corporate/banking welfare policies for people’s welfare programs;
• Allocation of the
lion’s share of government’s monetary largesse (and of credit creation in
general) to speculative investment instead of real investment;
• Systematic
undermining of the retirement security of millions of workers (both white and
blue collar) and civil servants;
• Ever more blatant
control of economic and/or financial policies by the representatives of the
financial oligarchy.
Combined, these
policies have significantly aggravated the already lopsided income/wealth
distribution in these countries. The massive
cuts in social spending have resulted in an enormous transfer of economic
resources from the bottom up. The transfer has, indeed, more than made up for
the 2008 losses of the financial speculators. In the U.S., for example, the
wealthiest one percent now own 40 percent of the entire country's wealth; while
the bottom 80 percent own only seven percent. Likewise, the richest one percent
now take home 24 percent of the country's total income, compared to only nine
percent four decades ago [4].
This shows that, as
pointed out earlier, while neoliberal attacks on the 99% in the core capitalist
countries may not seem as violent as those raging, for example, in Venezuela,
Syria or Ukraine, the financial impact of such attacks on the living conditions
of the 99% is no less devastating.
Plutocrats
of the World Are United
Policies of regime
change are usually designed and carried out as collaborative schemes by
cross-border plutocracies, that is, by the financial oligarchies of the
imperialist countries in partnership with their native counterparts in the
less-developed countries.
In addition to constant behind-the-scenes strategizing, representatives
of transnational capital and their proxies in capitalist governments also routinely
meet at international conferences in order to synchronize their cross-border
business and financial policies—a major focus of which in recent years has been
to implement global austerity measures and entrench neoliberal policies
worldwide. These include the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the
World Bank and IMF annual meetings, the Periodic G20 meetings, the Aspen
Institutes Ideas Festival, The Bilderberg Group annual geopolitics forum, and
the Herb Allen’s Sun Valley gathering of media moguls—to name only a handful of
the many such international policy gatherings.
Through its global strategies and operations, transnational capital has
broken free from national constraints and commitments at home and successfully
shifted the correlation of class forces and
social alliances worldwide. Today’s elites of global capitalism “are becoming a
trans-global community of peers who have more in common with one another than
with their countrymen back home,” writes Chrystia Freeland, Global Editor of Reuters,
who travels with the elites to many parts of the world. “Whether they maintain
primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s
super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves,” she adds [5].
Implications
for Globalization from Below
What conclusions can the 99% draw from this? What can the working people
and other grassroots do to protect their jobs, their sources of livelihood,
their communities and their environment? What can communities of ordinary
people do to undermine the strategies of the global 1% that block
life-sustaining progressive social and economic reforms?
In the same fashion that, in their fight against the working people, the
elites of the international capitalist class are not bound by territoriality or
national boundaries, so does the working class need to coordinate its response
internationally.
A logical, first step deterrent to transnational capital’s strategy of blackmailing
labor and communities through threats such as destroying or exporting jobs by
moving their business elsewhere would be to remove the lures that induce plant
relocation, capital flight or outsourcing. Making labor costs of production
comparable on an international level would be crucial for this purpose. This
would entail taking the necessary steps toward the international establishment
of wage and benefits, that is, of labor cost parity within the same company and
the same trade, subject to (a) the cost of living, and (b) productivity in each
country.
A strategy of this sort would replace the current downward competition
between workers in various countries with coordinated bargaining and joint
policies for mutual interests and problem-solving on a global level. While this
may sound radical, it is not any more radical than what the transnational 1% is
doing: coordinating their anti-99% strategies on a global scale. If at an
earlier stage of capitalist development "workers of the world unite"
seemed an outlandish dream of the leading labor champion Karl Marx,
internationalization of capital, the abundance of material resources and
developments in technology, which has greatly facilitated cross-border
organizing and coordination of actions by the 99%, has now made that dream an urgent necessity.
As capital and labor are the cornerstones of capitalist production, their
respective organizations and institutions evolve more or less apace, over time
and space. Thus, when production was local, so was labor: carpenters,
shoemakers, bricklayers, and other craftsmen organized primarily in their local
communities. But as capitalist production became national, so did trade unions.
Now that capitalist production has become global, labor organizations too need to
become international in order to safeguard their and their communities’ rights
against the profit-driven whims of the footloose and fancy-free transnational
capital.
Many would argue that these are not propitious times to speak of radical
alternatives to capitalism. The present state of the sociopolitical landscape
of our societies appears to support such feelings of pessimism. The high levels
of unemployment in most countries of the world and the resulting international
labor rivalry, combined with the austerity offensive of neoliberalism on a
global level, have thrown the working class and other grassroots on the
defensive. The steady drift of the European socialist, Social Democratic, and
labor parties/governments toward the U.S.–style market economies and the
erosion of their traditional ideology, power, and prestige have led to workers’
confusion there. The collapse of the Soviet Union, however much some socialists
have always distanced themselves from that system, haunts the specter of
socialism, and is likely to do so for some time to come. These developments
have understandably led to workers' and other grassroots’ confusion and
disorientation globally.
None of these, however, mean that there is no way out of the status quo.
Capitalism is not only “destructive,” it is also “regenerative," as Karl
Marx put. As it captures world markets, universalizes the reign of capital, and
disrupts the living conditions for many, it simultaneously sows the seeds of
its own transformation. On the one hand, it creates common problems and shared
concerns for the majority of the world population; on the other, it creates the
material conditions and the technology that facilitate communication and
cooperation among this majority of world citizens for joint actions and
alternative solutions.
When the majority of world population, the global 99%, will come to the
realization and determination to actually appropriate and utilize the existing
technology and material resources for a better organization and management of
the world economy, no one can tell. But the potential and the long term
trajectory of global socioeconomic developments point in that direction. The
distance between now and then, between our immediate frustrations and the
superior but elusive civilization of our desire, can be traversed only if we
take the necessary steps toward that end [6].
References:
[1] As cited in Jan
Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization or Empire. New York and London: Routledge 2004, P. 131.
[2] The
Military-Industrial Complex, Kansas City, MO: Pilgrim Press and the
National Catholic Reporter 1970, p. 19.
[3] See Ismael
Hossein-zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism,
Palgrave-Macmillan 2006, p. 88.
[4] Henry Blodget, “America Today: 3 Million Overlords and 300 Million
Serfs,” Business Insider, April 10,
2013, available at: .
[5] “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” The
Atlantic, January–February 2011, available at: < http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/308343/>.
[6] For a detailed
discussion of this issue see Ismael Hossein-zadeh, Beyond Mainstream
Explanations of the Financial Crisis, Routledge (forthcoming, April 29, 2014),
Chapter 8.
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