[News] We Know a Different World Will Be Born Out of This Mess
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Jan 25 11:53:05 EST 2024
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*We Know a Different World Will Be Born Out of This Mess: The Fourth
Newsletter (2024)*
Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and
Myths II’), 1975.
Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), /La naturaleza y los mitos II /(‘Nature and
Myths II’), 1975.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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‘The West is in danger’, warned
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Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei at this year’s World Economic
Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In his dangerously appealing
style
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Milei blamed ‘collectivism’ – that is, social welfare, taxes, and the
state – as the ‘root cause’ of the world’s problems, leading to
widespread impoverishment. The only way forward, Milei declared, is
through ‘free enterprise, capitalism, and economic freedom’. Milei’s
speech marked a return to the orthodoxy of Milton Friedman and the
Chicago Boys, who pushed forward an ideology of social cannibalism as
the basis for their neoliberal agenda. Since the 1970s, this scorched
earth policy has devasted much of the Global South through the
structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund, but
also created factory deserts in the West (what Donald Trump, in his
inauguration address in 2017, called
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the ‘American carnage’). Therein lies the confounding logic of the far
right: on the one side, calling for the billionaire class to dominate
society in their interest (which produces the social carnage) and then,
on the other side, inflaming the victims of said carnage to fight
against policies that would benefit them.
Milei is right in his overall judgment: the West /is/ in danger, but not
because of social democratic policies; it is in danger because of its
inability to come to terms with its slow demise as the dominating bloc
in the world.
>From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South
Insights (GSI) come two important texts on the changing global
landscape: a landmark study, /Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent
New Stage/
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and our seventy-second dossier, /The Churning of the World Order/
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(the dossier is an ‘executive summary’ of the study, so I will be
referring to them as if they were one text). We believe that this is the
most significant theoretical statement that our institute has made in
its eight-year history.
In both /Hyper-Imperialism/ and /The Churning of the World Order/ we
make four important points:
First, through a deep analysis of the concepts of the Global North and
the Global South, we show that the former acts as a bloc, while the
latter is merely a loose grouping. The Global North is led by the United
States, which has created several instruments to extend its authority
over the other countries in the bloc (many of which are historic
colonial powers and settler-colonial societies). These platforms include
the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (initially set up in 1941 between
the US and UK, the network has now expanded to Fourteen Eyes), the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949), and the Group of
Seven (G7, set up in 1974). Through these and other formations, the
United States and its political allies within the Global North are able
to exercise authority over their own countries and the countries of the
Global South.
In contrast, the countries of the Global South have historically been
much more disorganised, with some, looser alliances and linkages around
regional and political affiliations. The Global South has neither a
political centre nor an ideologically driven project.
The analysis in the texts is detailed, relying upon public databases and
databases built by GSI. The bottom line is that there is one world
system that is managed dangerously by an imperialist bloc. There are no
multiple imperialisms, no inter-imperialist conflict.
Mahmud al-Obaidi (Iraq), /Untitled/, 2008.
Second, the platforms of the Global North exercise power over the world
system through a number of vectors (military, financial, economic,
social, cultural) and through a range of instruments (NATO, the
International Monetary Fund, information systems). With the gradual
decline of the Global North’s control over the international financial
system, raw materials, technology, and science, this bloc mainly
exercises its power through military force and through the management of
information. In these texts, we do not go over the question of
information, although we have previously written
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about it and will take it up again in a study on digital sovereignty.
The focus of these texts is largely on military spending, where we show
that the US-led bloc accounts for 74.3% of world military spending and
that the US spends 12.6 times more than the world average on a per
capita basis (Israel, second to the US, spends 7.2 times above the per
capita world average). To put this into perspective, China accounts for
10% of world military spending and its per capita military spending is
22 times less than that of the United States.
Such enormous spending on the military is not innocent. Not only does it
come at the cost
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of social spending, the Global North’s military power is used to
threaten and intimidate countries, and – if they are disobedient – to
punish them with hellfire and brimstone. In 2022 alone, these
imperialist nations made 317 deployments of their military forces to
countries in the Global South. The highest number of these deployments
(31) were made to Mali, a nation strongly seeking sovereignty, and which
was the first of the Sahel states to stage popular-backed coups (2020
and 2021) and eject
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the French military from its territory (2022).
Between 1776 and 2019, the United States carried out at least 392
interventions worldwide, half of them between 1950 and 2019. This
includes the terrible, illegal war against Iraq in 2003 (at this year’s
WEF meeting, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani asked
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for Global North troops to leave Iraq). This vast military spending by
the Global North, led by the United States, reflects the militarisation
of its foreign policy. One of the little remarked aspects of this
militarisation is the development of a theory in both the United States
and United Kingdom of ‘defence diplomacy’ (as it was noted
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in the UK Ministry of Defence’s /Strategic Defence Review/ of 1998). In
the United States, strategic thinkers use
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the acronym DIME to reflect on the sources of national power (diplomacy,
informational, military, and economic).
Last year, the European Union and NATO – the institutions at the heart
of the Global North – jointly pledged
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to ‘mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they
political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the
benefit of our one billion citizens’. In case you did not catch it, that
power – mostly military power and military diplomacy – is not to serve
humanity, but to serve only /their/ ‘citizens’.
António Ole (Angola), The Maculusso Mural, 2014.
António Ole (Angola), /The Maculusso Mural/, 2014.
Third, Part IV of our /Hyper-Imperialism/ study is called ‘The West in
Decline’, and looks at the evidence for this trend from a perspective
that rejects Milei’s ‘the West is in danger’ fearmongering. The facts
show that since the start of the Third Great Depression
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the Global North has struggled to maintain its control over the world
economy; its instruments – monopolies over technology and raw materials,
as well as dominion over foreign direct investment – have fundamentally
eroded. When China surpassed the United States’ share of global
industrial output in 2004, the United States lost hegemony in production
(by 2022, the former held a 25.7% share versus the 9.7% held by the
latter). Given that the United States is now dependent on large scale
net capital imports, which reached $1 trillion in 2022, the US has
little internal capability to provide economic advantages to its Global
North or Global South allies. Owners of capital in the United States
have siphoned off their profits from the country’s exchequer creating
the economic conditions for the social carnage that afflicts the
country. The old political coalitions rooted around the two parties in
the United States are in flux, with no space within US political system
to develop a political project to exercise hegemony over the world
economy through legitimacy and consent. That is why the US-led Global
North resorts to force and intimidation, building its massive military
apparatus by increasing its own public debt (since there is little
domestic consensus to use that borrowing to build the infrastructure and
productive base of the country).
The root of the New Cold War
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imposed by the United States on China is that China has outpaced the
United States in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a
gradual decline. Every year since 1992, China has been a net exporter of
capital, this surplus of capital creation has made it possible to
finance international projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, now
ten years old.
El Meya (Algeria), /Les Moudjahidates/, 2021.
Fourth, we analyse the emergence of new organisations rooted in the
Global South, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), the
BRICS10 (2009), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter
(2021). These interregional platforms are in an embryonic stage, but
they provide evidence for the growth of a new regionalism and
multilateralism. Although these formations do not seek to operate as a
bloc to counter the Global North’s bloc, they reflect what we have
previously called a ‘new mood’ in the Global South. The new mood is
neither anti-imperialist nor anti-capitalist, but is shaped by four main
vectors:
* *Multilateralism and regionalism* centred on the creation of Global
South-anchored platforms for cooperation.
* *New modernisation* centred on constructing regional and continental
economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade
and reserves.
* *Sovereignty*, which would create barriers to Western intervention.
This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both
of which facilitate US intelligence interventions.
* *Reparations*, which would entail collective bargaining to
compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the
excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of
colonialism.
The analysis in these texts goes deep beneath the surface, providing a
historical materialist assessment of our present crises. Documents
produced by the institutions of the Global North, such as the WEF’s
/Global Risks/ report
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for 2024, provide a list of the dangers that we face (climate
catastrophe, social polarisation, economic downturns) but cannot explain
them. Our approach, we believe, provides a theory to understand these
perils as the outcome of the world system managed by the
hyper-imperialist bloc.
In thinking about these texts, my mind wandered to the work of the Iraqi
poet Buland al-Haydari (1926–1996). When all seemed futile, al-Haydari
wrote that ‘the sun will not rise’ and that ‘at the bottom of the house,
already dead, are the steps of my children, reduced to silence’. But
even then, when we ‘were without power’, there remains hope. His
civilisation drowns, but then ‘you arrived with the paddle’, he sings.
‘Such is the history of our yesterday, and its taste is bitterness’, he
concludes, ‘such is our slow walk, the procession of our dignity: our
only good until the hour when will rise, finally, a free paddle’.
That anticipation defines a classic by the Iranian poet Forough
Farrokhzad (1934–1967), ‘Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone’ (1966):
I’ve had a dream that someone is coming.
I’ve dreamt of a red star,
and my eyes lids keep twitching
and my shoes keep snapping to attention
and may I go blind
if I’m lying.
I’ve dreamt of that red star
when I wasn’t asleep.
Someone is coming,
someone is coming
someone better.
Warmly,
Vijay
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