[News] Agenda 2021: Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/agenda-2021-resist-the-u-s-eu-nato-axis-of-domination/
Agenda
2021: Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination
by Ajamu Baraka <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cuxere/>- December 18,
2020
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The ascendancy of neoliberal forces to the executive branch of the U.S.
state represents a development that potentially will be even a more
dangerous period of aggression from the U.S. white supremacist settler
state and its white supremacist colonial European allies.

Why is this so? The primary agenda of the right-wing neoliberal forces
represented by the Biden Administration is to reassert U.S. global
leadership by reconsolidating a common U.S.-European capitalist program of
domination that was disrupted with the “America first” positions of the
Trump Administration.

The Biden Administration is animated by the belief that the objective logic
of overall Western hegemony is tied to finding a way for more effective
collaboration around a common imperialist agenda. This belief is shared by
Angela Merkel of Germany, and despite some contrary public declarations
from French President Macron on issue of European independence, Macron sees
an effective Western alliance as critical, even if it is under U.S.
leadership once again.

The racialist character if these appeals are obvious to those of us who
operate from a critical anti-colonialist frame that centers race and
violence as the essential elements of the rise of the Pan-European white
supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchal project. The commitment to
continued white colonial/capitalist global hegemonic dominance is clear.
Biden’s objective to revive a U.S. hegemonic role over the Western project
of collective domination must be seen as a race project.

Trump’s plan from the beginning of his administration was to complete the
Obama pivot to Asia, but those efforts were undermined by the domestic
political obstacles he faced in just trying to gain full control of the
Executive Branch. And while Trump was eventually successful in winning over
elements of the U.S. and European ruling classes to a more aggressive
stance against China, his short-sighted, erratic “America first” policies
and his inability to consolidate effective power over the U.S. state were a
destabilizing force for the continued hegemony of the Western
colonial/capitalist project.

The U.S.-EU unity project with its NATO military wing in the service of
collective imperialism and under U.S. leadership is the neoliberal
corrective strategy to Trump.

*Biden’s Intersectional Imperialism is Exposed*

Obama represented the last stage of what Gramsci called a passive
revolution where oppressive state mitigates the influence of antagonistic
groups through “gradual but continuous absorption.”

The U.S.-EU race and class project of unity adopted by the Biden
Administration will face serious political and economic challenges. The
clumsy attempt to utilize Obama’s soft power ideological mystifications in
the present circumstances of capitalist crisis together with a deep
legitimation crisis will result in abject failure by the Biden
administration on both the global and domestic levels.

First among the challenges facing the incoming administration is the
competing economic interests among Western capitalists. The abrogation of
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) with Iran by the Trump
Administration and the reimposition of sanctions that required economic
disengagement from Iran by many European firms, was a major fissure in the
Atlanta alliance.

The lost revenues by European firms as a result of economic disengagement
with Iran and the efforts to undermine the Russian NORD stream two pipeline
that alienated significant elements of German capital are just two of the
issues that will weigh on the trust factor in U.S. political leadership
going forward.

Moreover, there are two interrelated contradictions of this unity strategy
that the Northern neoliberal capitalist class must confront but will be
unable to resolve: first, the impact of the capitalist crisis exacerbated
by COVID that has unleashed forces disruptive to the capitalist order from
both the left and the right. And secondly, the attempt by the left and
social democratic movements and nations to develop, however tentatively,
from the obviously failed neoliberal capitalist model.

*The U.S.-EU Unity Process Requires a Countervailing Peoples Unity Process *

The strategic challenge for the left in Northern countries is countering
these efforts with a coherent anti-capitalist, internationalist,
anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist and pro-socialist popular
movements and structures.

But in the U.S. and Europe, that is easier said than done. Along with the
ideological and organizational fragmentation of the left, one of the main
issues that undermines the ability for the left to cohere in the U.S. and
Europe is the cultural and ideological influences of white supremacist
ideology.

The inability to reject the fiction of a “Europe” and its civilizational
superiority has thoroughly corrupted the worldviews and politics of Western
leftism. In the face of the U.S/EU/NATO attacks and subversion on Syria,
Libya to Venezuela and Bolivia, instead of anti-imperialist solidarity, the
left engaged in torturous abstract “discussions” around the merits and
mistakes made by these various Southern nations, not recognizing the
arrogant white supremacist positionality of that approach.

Anti-imperialist marginalization is reflective of the shift in the
consciousness not only of the public in various Western nations but of the
putative left as well. Even among Black liberationist forces in the U.S.,
who have traditionally had internationalism and anti-imperialism at the
center of their worldviews and politics, a strange U.S.-centrism has
emerged. This tendency along with an ironic embryonic racial chauvinism
that elevates a distinctive “African American” construction of so-called
global anti-blackness as an intractable ontological phenomenon, has created
serious ideological and political challenges for anti-imperialist
coalitional work.

Yet, those challenges must be met by African/Black left and left forces in
general. It is impossible for forces in the U.S. and Europe to avoid their
unique responsibilities situated at the center of the colonial empires, to
the peoples of the world who have the knee of collective imperialism on
their necks.

Bringing this discussion closer to the territory referred to as the United
States, anti-imperialism, and the struggle against U.S. chauvinism among
the left must be taken up as an area of struggle. For African/Black
revolutionaries, and indeed for the working and laboring classes, our gaze
must extend beyond our local and national realities. Not because those
realities are unimportant but because we are unable to understand local
realities without understanding the full constellation of class, race and
material forces that shape those structural realities nationally and
locally.

Mobilizing our forces to confront and defeat the Pan-European project is
not a call to abstractionism. The organizational challenge is to answer the
question of how does local work, that is, building a real, concrete
internationalism, look.

It is not enough to position ourselves in solidarity with the victims of
U.S. imperialism. The base-building work that we engage in must reflect
that mutual connection with the colonized.

That is why the Black internationalist stance is not some exotic addition
to radical organizing but must be seen as fundamental to our movement
building work. Understanding that we are immersed in a system of
exploitation and oppression that is global, even though it has local
manifestations, is critical for us to effectively address that perennial
task of determining “what must be done” to advance our forces.

Confronting that question of what is to be done has become even more
crucial today amid the irreversible decline of the capitalist order. And
while we commit to building a mass movement of the exploited and oppressed,
we must take account of some troubling developments over the last four
years.

The unveiling of the left patriots who were concerned with “our democracy”
and who enthusiastically propagated the talking points of neoliberalism
while remaining silent on U.S. imperialism, and entered the intra-bourgeois
class struggle as junior partners to neoliberal right, revealed once again
that if the left is not prepared to defeat whiteness and the U.S./EU/NATO
Axis of Domination, it will join as the tail to the neoliberal right in the
cross-class white supremacist fascist project led by neoliberals.

Our survival demands that we remain “woke” to that possibility and plan
accordingly.

*Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and
was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is
an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and
contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine. *
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