AMERICAN STUDIES

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The empire feeds on oppression, exploitation, ignorance, and blood. It is impossible to dominate the planet with a unipolar world order if you don’t use violent force, and the threat of violent force, to uphold that world order. If you’re not strangling people at home and bombing people abroad, then you cannot have an oligarchic empire. Period.

The main rift you see on the leftmost end of the American political spectrum is between people who seek an end to the imperialist murder machine, and people who just want the imperialist murder machine to give them healthcare. The first group faces a very difficult uphill battle to get what it wants. The second group is just masturbating an impossible fantasy.

It is a myth that the pandemic devastated America. Other rich countries faced the same virus without mass unemployment, mile-long breadlines, and a soaring death toll. Those governments gave their citizens a basic income or subsidized payroll at the companies that employ them, on top of the universal single-payer health care they already provided. Our government passed a multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bailout and left working people to fend for themselves. Both parties were in on it, and the vote was nearly unanimous. The Democrats and Republicans exploited the greatest national crisis in generations to enrich their corporate donors.

A defining pattern has emerged in Biden’s governance. He promises popular progressive policies to much media fanfare, then quietly reneges while the corporate press turns a blind eye and falls silent. The result is an avalanche of revisionist propaganda and confusion that shields a reactionary administration and party.

Contrary to the Black capitalist myth, most Greenwood residents were low wage working people employed by whites and living in substandard housing. It was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District.

A brief but important reminder/warning from Luciana Bohne about the rapidly expanding repression of communist and populist ideas throughout the so-called “free West”.

There’s still a lot of confusion (much of it abetted by the capitalist world itself) about the true nature of the European Union (EU). In this post, The Finnish Bolshevik tackles that subject, while also re-examining the phenomenon of imperialism, in general, and the whys and wherefores of democratic centralism and key aspects of vanguardism.