Political Interest wrote:There is no realistic reason for the Americans to dislike Russia. In the old days Russia was a communist country and it made sense to oppose the Soviet Union on ideological grounds. Now there is absolutely no reason to be anti-Russian other than geopolitics and games of empire.
"Games of empire," that is to say imperialism, is inevitable as capitalism develops.
A hundred years ago there were those that stood up and said that if there was just one last push, one last change, then there could be an, "ultra-imperialism" that would be, "
a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race."
This is essentially the conclusion that Fukuyama came to when he declared an End of History that was just that. He continues to back peddle, saying that he's correct in the thesis declaring recently:
Fukuyama wrote:It's hard to see how we can be entering a new cold war when China and Russia have both happily accepted the capitalist half of the partnership between capitalism and democracy. (Mao and Stalin, by contrast, pursued self-defeating, autarkic economic policies.) The Chinese Communist Party's leadership recognizes that its legitimacy depends on continued breakneck growth. In Russia, the economic motivation for embracing capitalism is much more personal: Putin and much of the Russian elite have benefited enormously from their control of natural resources and other assets.
Democracy's only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism.
Because big powers with similar systems have never gone to war, and the idea of brown people with other ideas are what is what is preventing an end of history with a kind of ultra-imperialism.
Cut to a century ago when Lenin addressed brown people with other ideas in the context of empire:
Lenin wrote:In the United States, the imperialist war waged against Spain in 1898 stirred up the opposition of the “anti-imperialists”, the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy who declared this war to be “criminal”, regarded the annexation of foreign territories as a violation of the Constitution, declared that the treatment of Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipinos (the Americans promised him the independence of his country, but later landed troops and annexed it), was “jingo treachery”, and quoted the words of Lincoln: “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs others, it is no longer self-government; it is despotism.” [2] But as long, as all this criticism shrank from recognising the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the foundations of capitalism, while it shrank from joining the forces engendered by large-scale capitalism and its development-it remained a “pious wish”.
This is also the main attitude taken by Hobson in his critique of imperialism. Hobson anticipated Kautsky in protesting against the “inevitability of imperialism” argument, and in urging the necessity of “increasing the consuming capacity” of the people (under capitalism!). The petty-bourgeois point of view in the critique of imperialism, the omnipotence of the banks, the financial oligarchy, etc., is adopted by the authors I have often quoted, such as Agahd, A. Lansburgh, L. Eschwege, and among the French writers Victor Berard, author of a superficial book entitled England and Imperialism which appeared in 1900. All these authors, who make no claim to be Marxists, contrast imperialism with free competition and democracy, condemn the Baghdad railway scheme, which is leading to conflicts and war, utter “pious wishes” for peace, etc. This applies also to the compiler of international stock and share issue statistics, A. Neymarck, who, after calculating the thousands of millions of francs representing “international” securities, exclaimed in 1912: “Is it possible to believe that peace may be disturbed ... that, in the face of these enormous figures, anyone would risk starting a war?”
Such simple-mindedness on the part of the bourgeois economists is not surprising; moreover, it is in their interest to pretend to be so naive and to talk “seriously” about peace under imperialism.
...whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a “truce” in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.
Two World Wars, a near Third World War, countless imperialist actions by the United States, Britain, and France, Russian and Chinese projections of power later, and if we can just accept bourgeois peace in our hearts, perhaps imperialism will become a choice instead of a fact of capitalism.
The reason that the US and Russia haven't found a peace is because of capitalism, straight up. It's been true for at least a hundred years, and we need to accept that.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
- By skinster