By doubling down on Ukraine war aid, Biden has ensured America’s social decline & heightened class conflict
By doubling down on Ukraine war aid, Biden has ensured America’s social decline & heightened class conflict
Now that Biden has again committed to arming Ukraine, even after Russia’s Bakhmut victory has shown it to be impossible for Ukraine to prevail, America’s working class is confronted with a brutal reality. The reality that their government is willing to sacrifice their future for the sake of keeping the war machine running, and now has done this to its greatest degree so far. The significance of Washington’s Ukraine proxy war on class politics is unprecedented in the history of imperial wars. At no other point has it been this apparent that our leaders invest so much in the military not to protect the country’s people, but to generate profits for the business elites who truly control our government. Never before has an American war been this materially costly to the people in a way that’s so clearly traceable to the war effort, and for the sake of a military campaign that’s so obviously lacking in justification.
As soon as one learns the context behind Russia’s actions—that the U.S. installed a fascist coup regime in Ukraine, that this regime’s menacing racism prompted the country’s easterners to break away, and that the regime then shelled the easterners for exercising their sovereignty right—the fraudulence of Washington’s claim to be “countering Russian aggression” is undeniable. Russia is not the aggressor, it’s only taking away the tools that the actual aggressor Ukraine has for continuing to harm the Donbass Russian speakers. The perpetual cycle where the Ukrainian armed forces get revealed to either be collaborating with Nazis, or themselves wearing Nazi symbols, has created a wider awareness of the conflict’s true nature. As has Seymour Hersh’s report on how the U.S. orchestrated the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. It’s these kinds of revelations, shocking to those who’ve only so far been exposed to the imperialist media’s accounts of events, that lead more to find the truth: the Ukraine aid isn’t about protecting anyone. It’s all about advancing corporate interests.
By extension, the sanctions which have done so much damage to America’s own economy, and the neglect of domestic social spending that makes the vast military investments possible, are causing harm towards the U.S. proletariat for completely indefensible reasons. Working people are nothing but disposable tools for the imperialists, subjected to austerity because this is what’s needed to feed the profit machine. This applies to workers all around the globe, with the ones in the neo-colonies punished the most severely simply for existing within their class stratum. “During the second year of the pandemic (2021), 13 of the 15 IMF loan programmes required the countries that had taken loans from them to impose taxes on food and fuel and cut vital public services in order to service their debts,” writes Vijay Prashad about the relationship between global austerity and the new cold war. “The following year, China announced that it would waive 23 interest-free loans that it had given to 17 African countries. This decision reflects a long-term trend in China’s loan management, as the country is estimated to have forgiven between $45 million and $610 million in lending to the continent over the last two decades.”
This difference between how a socialist anti-imperialist government like China operates, and the extractive imbalance that comes from Washington’s model of acting, also exists in how these powers use their technological tools. In China, industry and high tech have been used to assist in an unprecedented anti-poverty project. In the USA, technologies like AI are only being used to further class exploitation, and drive more workers to the economy’s margins. Lenin wrote that “The possibility of reducing the cost of production and increasing profits by introducing technical improvements operates in the direction of change. But the tendency to stagnation and decay, which is characteristic of monopoly, continues to operate.” Because of this process of decline that’s fundamental to capitalism, the proletarians inevitably get sacrificed to keep profits up.
The liberal myth that’s used to rationalize the Biden administration’s policies says this technology will save the people from our crises, bringing prosperity to a declining society. This is a lie that’s obvious to everyone who continues to experience deteriorating living standards, however much technology advances. With the productive instruments that capitalism gave us, we gained the logistical ability to let every person on earth live in abundance. Then with automation, and now AI, we’ve gained the ability to not just make these people be prosperous, but also do so with either greatly reduced or nonexistent work hours. Yet these outcomes still haven’t materialized, and for many decades the capitalist world has instead been going backwards in terms of living conditions. In most places outside of China and Vietnam, where poverty has mainly been getting reduced for the last half-century, the amount of poor people has been overall increasing in both the core and peripheral countries.
This is because until those productive tools capitalism created are taken out of the control of the bourgeoisie, they won’t be used to their full capacities for materially bettering humanity. And as we’ve learned, they’ll instead be used to make even more people destitute. The same goes for the technologies that can be used to protect the environment. China has shown that these technologies—especially atomic energy after its recent innovations in safety—can be used to bring down emissions. But such successes will never be replicated under bourgeois rule.
Under our system in the core of imperialism, where capitalism’s central purpose is to wage war, these technologies are used not to better human beings but to destroy human beings. Nuclear is being used to send Ukraine depleted uranium, which will render the same lands and people Washington is supposedly trying to “defend” damaged in the long term. The Pentagon has been working with big tech both to use its AI tools for war, and to silence online voices that counter imperialism’s narratives. With American militarism, policing, surveillance, and censorship, the technologies that should be used for improving our lives are used to assist the machine. This is what liberalism is really about. It’s not a shield against a foreign “authoritarian” threat, it’s where the true threat towards freedom can be found. This has gotten clearer with the RESTRICT act, which would codify the fraudulent “foreign interference” criminal standard that the DOJ has applied to anti-imperialists.
The only way to reverse our social decline, and make today’s productive tools fulfill their full potential for developing society, is by overthrowing the capitalist state and creating a workers state. It’s also the only way to bring peace between our society, and Russia, China, and Washington’s other target countries. We must use the hypocrisies in liberalism which the Ukraine war has exposed to build the movement that represents this goal.
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Interesting commentary here, posted in my rant:
https://paulhaeder.substack.com/p/they-are-wired-differently
These ruined souls in USA, UK, EU, Isra-Hell, EuroTrashLandia, Klanada, and, many in Russia, may they all find a wall . . . .
Vladlen Chertinov, writer and journalist, former military commissar:
“On May 10, the Ukrainian side distributed two videos made from a drone. They depict the suicides of two Russian soldiers. On one, a fighter, who finds himself in a hopeless situation, blows himself up with a grenade, on the other, he shoots himself from a machine gun. What and who were these people thinking about before deciding to do something that strengthened their spirit? After all, they probably could have surrendered, but they chose death.
These shots now do not go out of my head when I see a peaceful life: cafes and restaurants crammed with visitors, crowds of fans going to Zenit, the smelt festival, posters inviting to concerts, and soon also Scarlet Sails. It feels like there are two Russias: one is dying at the front, and the other, as if nothing had happened, is enjoying life. The first dies for the second.
On May 13, I looked at the Internet poster and found out that in the remaining days of the month 62 musicals, 163 shows and 103 stand-ups will be held in St. Petersburg. It just doesn't fit in my brain.
Most of all, stand-ups achieve - performances in the style of the Comedy Club, when several bullies, as a rule, of mobilization age, laugh on stage, and their humor, as a rule, is below the belt, and even with drug addict overtones. "Black stand-up", "Stand-up top comedians", "Petersburg stand-up”, “Adult stand-up”, “Premium stand-up”, “Fresh stand-up”, when there is not enough imagination, just “Another stand-up” will do - their name is legion. And the audience during these stand-ups, sitting at the tables, eats and drinks something. In general, some joke with a blunt end, others neigh and guzzle. And others die. There is tragedy, and here is comedy.
From the above, I personally have associations with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Approximately on the same days when both of our nameless soldiers committed suicide in battle, the fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin was buried. All the media have been talking about it. The singer Pugacheva came to Russia, who, together with her husband Galkin (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), condemned the special operation, and in front of her at the funeral, the press secretary of the supreme commander in chief, leading this very special operation, bowed and kissed her hands. How can you put it all in your head? And ... combine in one country.
Then it turns out that our soldiers fight and die for this too. So that Pugacheva and Sobchak, spitting on Russia during the war, could return to it with impunity whenever they want. They are fighting for the same Yudashkin, holder of the Order of Honor and Order of Merit for the Fatherland, who, according to some reports, has not filed tax returns since 2015 and owes the state millions of rubles. But the state did not delicately disturb Yudashkin, and the press secretary of the president, Dmitry Peskov, personally came to his funeral.
They are fighting for the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who with impunity allowed the West to rob Russia of 300 billion dollars, and quietly withdraw the money of Western companies arrested in response from the country.
They are fighting for Sberbank, which after 2014 invested billions of dollars in Ukraine and indirectly financed the Armed Forces of Ukraine, while refusing to work in the Russian Crimea, and opened the first regional branch there only 14 months after the start of the SVO.
They are fighting for businessmen who drive up the price of bulletproof vests. For corruption in the defense industry, which continues even during the SVO, as recently announced by the head of the investigative committee, Bastrykin.
And this anti-list of those with whom our “Motherland begins” can be continued endlessly.
In my opinion, it is much more difficult for our soldiers today than for their grandfathers and great-grandfathers during the Great Patriotic War. Because they knew: behind them - the whole people, the whole huge country, "stand up for a mortal battle", turned into a single military camp. On the world and death is red. And today they die in loneliness and obscurity.
It is already clear that in recent years our government has made many serious mistakes that cost the country and people dearly. And the fact that today the government is deliberately lulling the people into a peaceful life, in my opinion, is another big mistake. Another loss of precious time, comparable to the Minsk agreements and the freezing of the Russian Spring in 2014.”
Request/ suggestion... I would like to have a convenient audio option. This is an easy way to do this. https://www.zamzar.com/convert/docx-to-mp3/ click on the headphone symbol at the top of the post/edit screen on substack after you make the file, takes only a minute or two.