I. Protracted and worsening crisis of global capitalism
In recent decades, the monopoly capitalists in various countries have been driven by the profit motive and competition to adopt new technology and bring new products into the market as a necessary way for capital expansion. The adoption of higher levels of technology has intensified the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation in the capitalist economy.
The monopoly bourgeoisie has used information technology and other new technologies to raise productivity and to accelerate profit making and capital accumulation by reducing the wages paid to the working class. It has also used the more efficient forms of transport and communications to accelerate the commerce in goods and services and to spread the ideology and propaganda of monopoly capitalism, usually packaged in petty-bourgeois language.
Faced with the recurrent and worsening crisis of overproduction and the tendency of the profit rate to fall, the monopoly bourgeoisie has used information technology to speed up financial transactions and generate all sorts of financial derivatives above the real economy. It has thus accelerated the extraction of superprofits and the accumulation of fictitious capital. It has promoted the financialization of the US and the other most advanced capitalist countries and the rise of the financial oligarchy sitting on top of the monopoly capitalist heap.
The neoliberal policy of “free market globalization” is concurrent with the rapid rise of technology and the recurrence of ever worsening economic and financial crises. It has brought the capitalist system to a far worse crisis than what has been described as stagflation in the 1970s. It has accelerated the accumulation and concentration of both productive and finance capital in the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the financial oligarchy.
Since the adoption of the neoliberal policy, which misrepresents monopoly capitalism as free market capitalism, the world capitalist system has been wracked by successive crises. But for a while until 2008, each crisis appeared remediable by further expansion of the money supply and heavy doses of credit at the level of the state, corporations and households. The world still has to see the full destructive effect of the accumulated derivatives worth more than US$600 trillion generated by banks and investment houses in recent decades.
It used to be said that all problems could be solved by helicoptering more money from the central banks and pouring it on the problem. Since the financial meltdown in 2008, it has become conspicuous that the abuse of finance capital to override the crisis of overproduction has limits and leads to a crisis comparable to that in the Great Depression. The limits have been exceeded by the public treasuries providing trillions of dollars (US$7.7 trillion in the US alone) to bail out the crisis-stricken banks and corporations and letting them raise profits on their balance sheets.
The bailouts have served to conjure at times the illusion of recovery in the financial markets even as production continues to stagnate and unemployment continues to rise at the very center of global capitalism. But the financial crisis arising from further borrowing has taken the form of enormous public deficits and public debt. This has been aggravated not only by the colossal amounts of bailout money for the banks and corporations but by the persistent tax cuts provided to the corporations and the wealthy and the rising bureaucratic and military expenditures even while social spending is reduced.
The response of the international banks and the imperialist states to the crisis of public deficits and debts is to impose austerity measures and cut social spending that shift the burden of the crisis to the people who are already suffering from high levels of unemployment, much reduced incomes and soaring prices of basic goods and services. The austerity measures have only served to worsen and deepen the economic crisis due to the dogmatic adherence to the neoliberal policy and the stubborn refusal to undertake fiscal measures to directly generate employment, revive demand and stimulate production. The imperialists have repeatedly made claims since 2009 that the global economy is on the way to recovery. Yet, the crisis persists and threatens to take another downturn. Even the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) which have fared better than the industrial powers during the crisis and were perceived as alternative engines of growth have already started to show signs of slowing down.
All imperialist countries are beset by the crisis of public deficit and debt and by falling value of currencies, especially the US dollar and the Euro. Like the Third World countries, they are chronically at the brink of default and bankruptcy but get temporary relief by taking new loans that sink them deeper into the debt trap. The imposition of austerity measures at the expense of the people has resulted in massive protests and social disorder in several imperialist states.
The grave economic and financial crises are pushing the imperialist powers to step up war production and to wage wars of aggression. Their objective is to stimulate production by the military-industrial complex and expand economic territory abroad through threats and wars of aggression. Since 2001, the US has spent more than US$4 trillion on wars of aggression, apart from huge expenditures on so-called homeland security.
Under the neoliberal economic policy regime and the persistent influence of the neoconservative military policy, the US and the NATO countries have unleashed wars of aggression at an increasingly rapid rate, including those in the Balkans, West Asia, Central Asia and Africa since the end of the Cold War in 1991. The main thrust of the wars is to seize markets and fields of investment, control sources and routes of oil and other natural resources and install puppet governments.
The reactionary political parties in the service of the monopoly capitalists promote jingoism and war hysteria and obfuscate the roots of the economic crisis by whipping up chauvinism, racism, religious bigotry and xenophobia against migrant workers, Muslims and immigrants. They use these reactionary currents to try to counter the anti-imperialist and socialist-oriented forces, which the crisis has caused to resurge. Thus, there is currently a tug of war between pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist forces in the industrial capitalist countries.
Nevertheless, the worsening economic and social conditions in the imperialist countries are steadily engendering mass protests among the people. Gigantic mass protest actions have broken out in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe. The Occupy movement has arisen in Wall Street and spread out to many cities in and beyond the US. The working class is becoming increasingly conscious of the need to engage in class struggle against the monopoly bourgeoisie that has long pressed them down. The subjective forces of the revolution have ample favorable conditions on which to grow in strength.
The already prolonged and ever worsening economic and financial crisis in the imperialist countries has a heavy adverse impact on the rest of the world in terms of reduced import orders and exports, decline of production and tightening of international credit. An economic depression has fallen upon the entire world, especially in the underdeveloped countries, which in turn recoils on the imperialist countries.
The imperialist powers, the foreign banks and corporations are extremely demanding on the client states. They impose ever more onerous terms of debt and use loans as leverage for taking over domestic public and private assets and plundering the natural resources of the country. The puppet governments yield to the monopoly firms their local capital assets, land and natural resources at dirt cheap prices.
The imperialist powers are more than ever prone to engage in military intervention and wars of aggression in order to acquire cheap sources of raw materials, markets, fields of investment and spheres of influence. The struggle among the imperialist powers for a redivision of the world is growing. The integration of China and Russia into the world capitalist system has cramped the space for mutual accommodation among the imperialist powers.
The conditions of economic depression and worsening exploitation have intensely aggrieved the people. Mass uprisings and political turmoil are surging to shake and topple the rulers and autocrats of the client states of the US and other imperialist powers. Conditions are ripe for revolutionary armed struggles in many countries and entire global regions.
The so-called Arab Spring has swept the Middle East and North Africa, with the masses demanding democratic changes, toppling despotic regimes and shaking others. Contrary to their hypocritical claims to democracy, the imperialist powers headed by the US are trying to redirect the people’s uprisings and install new puppets in certain countries and perpetuate puppet monarchies in other countries.
The revolutionary movements for national liberation and democracy are growing stronger in India, the Philippines, Kurdistan, Colombia and Nigeria. Where the imperialist powers have unleashed wars of aggression, the people are engaged in armed struggles, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Libya. Revolutionary parties in Asia, Africa and Latin America are preparing to wage armed revolution.
The US has announced the reduction of the number of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq but it retains strategic military bases in and around these countries. It seeks to concentrate on the Asia-Pacific region under what it declared to be the American Pacific Century. It considers increasing investments in the region as the key to its prosperity.It seeks to counter China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and has made clear its intention of maintaining and increasing military presence and missions in the Asia-Pacific despite planned defense spending cuts.
However, the US continues to be bogged down in the Middle East and North Africa. Aside from keeping permanent strategic military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its NATO allies have unleashed a vicious war of aggression on Libya, massacring 100,000 Libyans under the slogan of “humanitarian intervention”. Also under this pretext, they are increasingly getting embroiled militarily in such African countries as Sudan and Somalia and making war preparations against Syria and Iran.
At any rate, the US is trying to develop the Trans-Pacific Partnership on top of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and regional and bilateral trade agreements either to contain China or to continue to engage it and press for the dismantling of its state-owned enterprises which have made the Chinese economy more resilient than other monopoly capitalist economies in coping with the crisis of global capitalism.
The US openly regards China as its rising rival despite their close relations under the neoliberal policy and the US reliance on China in bringing the DPRK to the negotiating table with regard to the latter’s nuclear research and development program. The US does not cease to make war provocations against the DPRK, supply arms to Taiwan, stir up tensions over the Spratly islands issue and incite social unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang. Part of the US’ long-term interest and objectives in Africa is to contain and counter the steadily developing trade and diplomatic inroads of China in the continent.
China is wary of the US and has been active in building the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a forum for collective security against the US and NATO. It has also entered into bilateral and multilateral trade agreement with Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asian countries without the US. Since 2010, the BRICS countries have activated themselves as an economic bloc in order to counter the global dominance of the US-led alliance of imperialist powers.
In the Americas, more countries and their peoples are asserting their independence against US imperialist aggression and intervention. Thirty-three countries participated in the establishment of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) which aims to promote greater integration, cooperation and dialogue in the Americas minus the US and Canada. Widely perceived as an alternative to the US-dominated Organization of American States, the CELAC is described by its leaders as an attempt to reduce US intervention and promote the independence of the countries in the region.
China is in a position to cooperate with the Philippines in a program of national industrialization. But the US and Philippine governments seek to block such a possibility by generating tensions between China on one side and the Philippines and other countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) over the issue of the Spratly islands. The US seeks to manipulate the issue in order to justify the maintenance and enlargement of US military forces in the Philippines and restrain Sino-Philippine economic relations.
But no matter how hard the US tries to retain hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region, its efforts are undermined and weakened by its internal economic decline, its overextension over several regions of the world and the increasingly assertive forces for national independence and democracy in the region.
The US can no longer maintain an unchallenged hegemony as in the recent past when it strutted as the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A multipolar world has emerged. The peoples in various global regions are increasingly vigilant and militant against plunderous and aggressive US actions and activities.