By Max Fraad-Wolff and Richard Wolff
Red White and Broke: The Rise of Military Unilateralism
(Prepared for delivery at the International Marx Conference, University of
Paris, September 28, 2004)
Abstract:
Stock market collapse in early 2000 drove the US into recession and enormous
job losses. It shattered the hopes for better times among US workers who had
gained little from the late 1990s boom. They maintained consumption levels
only by borrowing and working more. Strained household finances and stressed
families exploded into mass depression, family violence, drug dependency and
rage. The new Bush regime faced a depressed economy and a pessimistic, desperate
working class. Abroad, Bush found that decades of neo-liberalism had turned
many into enemies of the US as its leader.
September 11, 2001, enabled a dramatic US policy shift aiming to solve
these problems. Deflecting blame for allowing the attack, Bush mobilized the
nation for revenge in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Dismissing collective capitalist
efforts at diplomatic globalization, the US switched to a new militarized unilaterialism:
endless war on “terror”. Dreams of global conquest and absolute
US supremacy became policy. Patriotic hysteria aimed to turn US workers’ growing
dissatisfaction against a new “enemy” – foreigners with different
religions, ethnicities, and an utterly mystifying dislike for American democracy – lest
they see Bush’s continuing domestic neo-liberalism as their enemy.
However, much of the world – including many US citizens - opposed
and criticized these policies. US workers might join them as their economic
and personal conditions continue to deteriorate. Thus Bush has proceeded to
demonize, isolate and silence such criticism. The Patriot Acts and Attorney
General Ashcroft work to reduce civil liberties. US fascism takes shape under
the banner of saving democracy.
The last quarter of the twentieth century was a period of extraordinary capitalist
prosperity in America. Five interconnected social changes combined to greatly
increase the surplus value available to business. First, the productivity of
labor rose exceptionally with the global installation of new computer and telecommunications
systems. Second, desperate third world economies dependent on exports of raw
materials and low value added industrial commodities offered them for less
and thereby lowered US corporations’ input costs. Third, the resurgence
of right-wing political organizations, movements, and parties successfully
lowered taxes on profits, deregulated capitalist enterprises, enhanced subsidies
to them, and weakened both labor unions and left movements. Fourth, the trend
of real wages was consistently downward with few, small, and short-lived exceptions.
This trend can be seen in the relatively more rapid rise of productivity as
against compensation.
Fifth, massive globe-straddling corporations expanded and consolidated their
mass media empires, enabling them to hide the enormous expansion of surplus
value from public understanding and debate. A blizzard of propaganda celebrated
a magical “new economy” of perpetual growth. Leading media relentlessly
promoted a quasi-religious fundamentalism insisting that efficiency gains would
pour endlessly from deregulated private enterprises interacting in deregulated
markets. Conventional wisdom demonized collectivist, socialist, labor, and
related critics of exploding surplus value accruing to a shrinking proportion
of the people. Progressive movements – depicted as an evil empire obstructing
progress, prosperity, and democracy - were dismissed as anachronistic and wrong-headed.
History, it was said, doomed them to inevitable failure. The collapse of the
USSR and other similar economic systems seemed to prove the non-viability of
alternatives to private capitalism and thereby intensified social movement
to the right. Mass resistance to such movement was painted and widely perceived
as episodic, local, and waning.
These 25 years had special consequences in the United States because of its
global leadership position. First, its stock markets became mechanisms of an
hysterical, historically unprecedented accumulation, concentration and centralization
of wealth. Second, the state undertook the long-deferred eradication of costly
social programs and mass public services forced on private capitalism by the
Great Depression and the Soviet alternative. The public programs and services – drains
on surplus value because they were partly paid for by taxes on profits - were
denounced as costly wastes of resources that could and should be diverted to
profitable use. Third, the state shifted its expenditures to a massive expansion
of global military supremacy. The goal was to guarantee “forever” that
no obstacle anywhere on the planet could undermine Pax Americana’s.
So long as all of these interdependent events proceeded reasonably smoothly,
no need arose for a basic shift away from the traditional US political apparatus.
The political duopoly operated by the two major parties continued to function
in the traditional manner. Dominant business interests continued to finance
this duopoly, since it fostered the environment most suitable to their objectives.
Media conglomerates defined and celebrated this political duopoly as the ultimate
form of democracy and the only means to secure prosperity and stability. Other
social groups such as labor unions, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants
competed (and sometimes allied) to secure some small portion of the profit
and prosperity. In its foreign policies, the US could proceed methodically
to expand its reach via global agreements conventionally negotiated, making
diplomatic compromises along the way.
The dawn of the new millennium, 2000, brought this unusual, relatively smooth
period of prosperity to an end. The US stock market bubble burst. The image
and promise of endlessly expanding prosperity collapsed. Unemployment grew
and recession returned. Deepening social wounds slashed by inequalities of
wealth, income, and power – among and within nations – could no
longer be hidden. Celebrations of capitalist globalization became increasingly
unsure of themselves and decreasingly effective with world audiences. Globalization
shifted from an historical inevitability guaranteeing prosperity for all to
an ever more contested and hated phenomenon blamed for mass immiseration. As
globalization’s chief booster and self-proclaimed leader, the US became
the focus of critique. The interdependent supports of the gilded 25 years began
to weaken and undermine one another. Multilateral economic agreements gave
way to regional blocs with mounting internecine conflict. Political movements
and national governments, fearing the fallout from a faltering globalization
and rising critical heat, began to search for new alliances and new strategies.
US hegemony – in the forms and modes which had served it so well
since 1975 – faced frightening challenges and prospects.
Inside the US, serious problems also loomed. The post-1975 explosion in surplus
value, based so crucially upon falling real wages and the decline in state-provided
social supports, would have dangerously reduced the standard of living of the
mass of US workers had they not responded in two ways. The US working class “coped” with
the threat represented by the capitalist boom after 1975 by (1) going into
debt on a scale never before seen in human history, and (2) by increasing the
number and the hours of family members doing paid labor. The immense burdens
on family life (divorce, family violence, parental-child alienation, etc.)
and on family finances (the drain of servicing mounting debt) of these working
class responses were tolerated within the framework of a “growing prosperity” environment.
Workers could at least hope that better times for them were coming. After the
stock market bubble burst and as the prospects of shared prosperity were decreasingly
credible, tolerance wore thin.
Amid such deteriorating foreign and domestic circumstances, the shaky (because
contested) new Bush presidency immediately confronted two major problems. First,
how could it restart and reinvigorate a US-led capitalist globalization given
the mounting resistance and criticism at home and abroad? Second, how could
it manage the growing economic problems of the mass of US workers becoming
increasingly frightened and angered by their deteriorating economic and personal
conditions? Enter the perfectly timed attacks of September 11, 2001.
Under other circumstances, the devastating incompetence (or worse) of intelligence
and military apparatuses to anticipate, prevent, or intercept four commercial
airplanes simultaneously diverted from their official flight plans for an hour
would likely have crippled if not destroyed the regime held responsible. Instead,
the Bush administration was able to turn disaster into advantage. The Administration
escaped blame for intelligence and military failures by a surge in militarism
that focused attention instead on “foreign enemies” and by instituting
a dramatic and fiercely patriotic “homeland security” apparatus.
Reaction to September 11 allowed the Bush regime to attempt a program long
advocated (but repeatedly blocked or deferred in previous decades) by the formerly
too extremist “neo-conservative” ideologues placed strategically
throughout the top layers of the government. This program aimed to solve foreign
and domestic problems that mushroomed as the stock market bubble burst thunderously
and ramified dangerously across the globe and inside the US.
The new program has two basic parts. The first is a massive reorganization,
revitalization and redirection of globalization. Its new form emerges as a
militarized American unilaterialism. This is justified on the grounds that
no other means exist to overcome the evil forces- terrorism- seeking to undermine
liberty and wealth. That is, the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq are “punishments” for
evil deeds and a warning/lesson to stop all other evildoers. More generally,
those attacks signal the end of the old globalization (associated with alliance
with “old Europe”) and the inauguration of the new.
The program’s second part focuses domestically on the mass of US workers.
They had not been able to participate in the capitalist boom of the 1990s – largely
because they owned few stocks. Instead, as their indebtedness mounted, family
and household strains neared crisis. Then, when their hopes for imminent relief
were dashed after early 2000, it became all to clear that their frustration
might turn into a politically powerful anger and rage possibly directed against
Bush and/or big business. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq thus represented
more than weapons of mass distraction from workers’ difficulties. They
were dramatic redefinitions of the “enemies” of workers hopes and
dreams of prosperity (or at least of escape from indebtedness and collapsing
families). The enemy is not an out-of-control bubble-prone capitalism; it is
not right-wing big-business control. It is rather a classic “other” defined
by its starkly different religion, strange ethnicities, poverty, and seemingly “lunatic” opposition
to the benefits of prosperity and democracy that American supremacy bestows
on all who submit. Against this enemy, foreign war and tough “homeland
security” are reasonable as well as urgent obligations for all true Americans.
Opponents of these programs - including groups as diverse as Muslims, the French,
and domestic critics of military unilaterialism, among others – all merge
into increasingly undifferentiated “enemies”. Because they are
not “with us,” Bush declares, they “are against us.”
The issue of fascism in the US thus arises. The Bush program of massive unilateral
military globalization is staggeringly expensive. It provokes growing reaction
around the world, measured in military losses, diplomatic reverses, and growing
rage. Coping with them is costly immediately and opens a vista to vast future
outlays. Given an already “downsized” US state, these costs require
either reduced outlays for social programs and supports or tax increases. Pursuing
such options risks serious domestic resistance even as US military unilaterialism
organizes growing resistance abroad. The “homeland security” apparatus
tries to close down domestic discussion, debate and criticism of that unilateralism.
Attorney General Ashcroft and the two Patriot Acts seek to terrorize dissenters
into silence. The Guantanamo prison complex offers a stark image of the future
for civil liberties. The media destruction of even mildly critical voices (Howard
Dean) adds another lesson to that taught by the extraordinary 2000 election.
The mobilization of an “embattled Christian nation” threatened
by Muslim or French (and by extension all foreign) “enemies” welds
all this together into a near dictatorial regime. The Democratic Party faces
hopeless electoral prospects so long as it is restricted to representing the
East and West coasts where the Bush program remains dubious and frightening
for many. Thus, it moves increasingly toward a “me too” imitation
of all but the harshest aspects of the Bush regime. This is the meaning of
the John Kerry (the decorated war veteran) candidacy against Bush.
Once upon a time, fascism arose as an explicit critique of democracy. The contribution
of the US to world politics today is to introduce fascism under the banner
of democracy and as the necessary means to defeat democracy’s enemies.