by SAMIR AMIN
(From left to right) Businessman Donald Trump, boxing promoter Don King and television personality Barbara Walters on Dec. 12, 1987 PHOTO/Time
1. The recent election of Donald Trump after Brexit, the rise of fascist votes in Europe, but also and much better, the electoral victory of SYRIZA and the rise of Podemos are all manifestations of the depth of the crisis of the system of globalized neoliberalism. This system, which I have always considered unsustainable, is imploding before our eyes at its very heart. All attempts to save the system — to avoid the worst — by minor adjustments are doomed to failure.
The implosion of the system is not synonymous with advances on the path to building a truly better alternative for people: the autumn of capitalism does not coincide automatically with the spring of the peoples. A caesura separates them, which gives our epoch a dramatic tone conveying the gravest dangers. Nonetheless, the implosion — because it is inevitable — should be grasped precisely as the historic opportunity offered to people. It paves the way for possible advances towards the construction of the alternative, which comprises two indissociable components: (i) at the national level, the abandonment of the fundamental rules of liberal economic management for the benefit of popular-sovereign projects giving rise to social progress; (ii) at the international level, the construction of a system of negotiated polycentric globalization. Parallel advances on these two levels will become possible only if the political forces of the radical left conceive the strategy for them and succeed in mobilizing the popular classes to make progress toward their attainment. That is not the case now, as demonstrated by SYRIZA’s retreats, the ambiguities and confusions of the British and US votes, and the extreme timidity of the heirs of euro-communism.
2. The system in place in the countries of the historic imperialist triad (the United States, Western Europe, Japan) is based on the exercise of the absolute power of the national financial oligarchies concerned. They alone manage the whole of the national productive systems, having succeeded in reducing almost all small and medium-sized enterprises in agriculture, industry, and services to the status of subcontractors for the exclusive benefit of financial capital. These oligarchies alone manage the political systems inherited from bourgeois electoral and representative democracy, having succeeded in domesticating the right and left electoral political parties, at the price of eroding the legitimacy of the democratic practice concerned. These oligarchies alone control the propaganda apparatuses, having succeeded in reducing the directors of news organizations including public broadcasters to the status of media clergy in their exclusive service. None of these aspects of the dictatorship of the oligarchy is challenged by the social and political movements at work in the triad, especially not in the United States.
The oligarchies of the triad also try to extend their exclusive power to the entire planet by imposing a particular form of globalization: globalized liberalism. But here they face more resistance than there is in the societies of the triad, heirs and beneficiaries of the “advantages” of imperialist domination. For if the social ravages of liberalism are visible in the West, they are ten times worse in the peripheries of the system, to the point that few existing political regimes still seem legitimate in the eyes of their peoples. Fragile in the extreme, the comprador classes and states, which constitute the conveyor belts of domination by the triad’s collective imperialism, are therefore rightly regarded by the oligarchies of the centers as uncertain allies. The logic of the system then imposes militarization and the right of imperialism to intervene — including by war — in the countries of the South and the East. The oligarchies of the triad are all “hawks”; the NATO, the instrument of their permanent aggression, has thus become the most important institution of contemporary imperialism.
Proof of this aggressive option was given in the tone of President Barack Obama’s remarks during his last European tour (November 2016): to reassure European vassals about US commitment to the NATO. Obviously the organization is not presented as an instrument of aggression — which it is — but as the means of ensuring the “defense” of Europe. Threatened by whom?
First of all by Russia, we are told by the media clergy in place. The reality is different: Putin is criticized for not accepting the Euro-Nazi coup made in Kiev and the gangster government established in Georgia. He is to be compelled to do so by — beyond the economic sanctions — the threats of war made by Hillary Clinton.
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