Bhabani Shankar Nayak
Various forms of crises, risks, and insecurities are intensifying, even as governing elites drum up patriotism, nationalism, and ethnic and religious unity to hide the failures of the ruling classes and their capitalist system with all its powers. Labour is more productive than ever before, yet it continues to face archaic forms of marginalization.
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Capitalism is accumulating greater in volume, size, and scope than at any point in history, but its inherent contradictions and embedded crises persist. The world produces more food than ever, yet food crises still exist in advanced capitalist societies. These capitalist contradictions continue to echo the early stages of capitalism’s own development—and they ultimately define the world today. How does capitalism survive despite all its embedded crises? It survives by manufacturing new forms of social, economic, political, and cultural crises, alongside imperialist conflicts and wars that pose direct physical threats to people’s lives and livelihoods. Fear serves as a tool to domesticate human life and labour. Imperialism, in turn, is a key instrument of capitalism—one that sustains the system by creating various forms of inequalities and the very conditions necessary for the exploitation of labour. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after World War II ushered in a new era of American imperialism.
The Moroccan and Suez Crises have effectively ended intra-imperialist rivalries among the colonial capitalist powers of Western Europe, consolidating US hegemony. This new imperial order not only absorbed old imperialist forces under American leadership but also built a new security infrastructure by mobilizing the military-industrial complex—an apparatus that manufactures not only weapons but also the conflicts necessary to sustain its global market. At the regional and local levels, it has fostered security states that serve as permanent customers for weapons of mass destruction, all in the name of national sovereignty and protection. From the partition of India to the Russian war on Ukraine, and from the American wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Pakistan and Iran to the East Asian economic crisis and successive global economic crises—all are products of imperialism.
Imperialist wars and interventions have neither defended human rights nor transplanted democracy; instead, they have produced conditions in which working people either die fighting in wars under the guise of nationalism or become refugees in their own lands. The ‘plundering of natural resources’; ‘the domestication of labour as a compliant rather than revolutionary force’; ‘the unquestionable hegemonic dominance of American imperialism’, backed by its European minions; and, finally, ‘unfettered profit for corporate capitalism ’—these constitute the four core objectives of American imperialism. To achieve them, it forges alliances with authoritarian, reactionary, and religious forces, aiming to curtail the conditions that nurture secular, scientific, and working-class consciousness—conditions that are indispensable for deepening democracy and expanding citizenship rights. Fundamentally speaking, American imperialism and its global capitalist projects are opposed to all forms of democracy and human freedom.
The revolutionary potential and collective power of working people pose a profound nightmare for imperialist and capitalist forces. In response, these imperialist forces and their media allies systematically divide populations along the lines of race, caste, gender, class, and sexuality—promoting hatred based on region, religion, and nationality. They actively manufacture narratives that frame ‘migrants, Muslims, and Marxists as the enemies within and anti-nationals,’ while portraying ‘national capitalist classes and regional bourgeoisies as the lesser evil.’ It is only working people who can ultimately defeat imperialism and capitalism. Every epoch in history is the history of working-class struggle. It may be delayed, but it can never be prevented from achieving victory.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
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