<div dir="ltr">
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<font size="1"><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/agenda-2021-resist-the-u-s-eu-nato-axis-of-domination/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/agenda-2021-resist-the-u-s-eu-nato-axis-of-domination/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Agenda 2021: Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination <br></h1>
<span class="gmail-post_author_intro">by</span> <span class="gmail-post_author"><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cuxere/" rel="nofollow">Ajamu Baraka</a></span>- December 18, 2020<br></div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The U.S.-EU unity project with its NATO military wing in the service of collective imperialism <s>and</s> under U.S. leadership is the neoliberal corrective strategy to Trump.</p>
<p><strong>Biden’s Intersectional Imperialism is Exposed</strong></p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The U.S.-EU Unity Process Requires a Countervailing Peoples Unity Process </strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Our survival demands that we remain “woke” to that possibility and plan accordingly.</p>
</div><p>
<em><strong>Ajamu Baraka</strong> 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. </em>
</p></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
</div>