Cuba and Venezuela - The Nemeses of Imperialism
Transcript of Cuba and Venezuela - The Nemeses of Imperialism
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1The Nemeses of Imperialism
CUBAandVENEZUELA
The Nemeses of Imperialism
by
Frederic F. Clairmont
C I T I Z E N S I N T E R N A T I O N A L
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Cuba and Venezuela2
Published byCitizens International10 Jalan Masjid Negeri
11600 Pulau PinangMalaysia
2007
Printed byJutaprint
2, Solok Sungai Pinang 3Sungai Pinang
11600 Pulau PinangMalaysia
ISBN 978-983-3302-14-7
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3The Nemeses of Imperialism
FOREWORD
Frederic F. Clairmonts Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism
follows on from his earlier work, The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism:
The Making of the Economic Gulag*, as well as his later writings on Iraq, in
which the author demonstrated how the miring of the United States in the
Mesopotamian conflict heralded the decline and fall of the American
empire.
In this new work, Frederic Clairmont returns to a subject that he knows
particularly well, Latin America, and the conflictual and domineering
relationship that Washington has historically maintained with the region.
The author, with the aid of copious and irrefutable documentation, recalls
how under the leadership of Fidel Castro, Cuba a small country of 100
square kilometres and 11 million inhabitants has been able to maintain
a policy of resistance for almost 50 years, and engage in a trial of strength
with the United States, whose leaders were unable either to topple the
Cuban president, eliminate him, or modify the direction taken by the
Cuban revolution.
A third world war could have erupted in October 1962 because of
Washingtons objection to the installation in Cuba of Soviet nuclear
* Southbound Press and Third World Network, Penang, 1996.
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missiles whose function was primarily defensive and dissuasive: to prevent
a new invasion like that of Playa Giron (Bay of Pigs) in 1961, but this time
directly organized by the Americans, to overthrow the Cuban revolution.
Since 1960, the United States, despite the increasingly vigorous
opposition of the United Nations, has waged economic war against Cuba
and, unilaterally, imposed a devastating commercial blockade (augmented
in the 1990s by the Helms-Burton and Torricelli Acts, and again reinforced
by the Bush administration in May 2004). This impedes Cubas normal
development and hampers its economic growth, with tragic consequences
for the islands population.
Moreover, by means of the powerful Radio Marti and TV Marti based
in Florida, Washington conducts a permanent ideological and media war
against Havana, inundating Cuba with propaganda reminiscent of the
worst periods of the Cold War. The American authorities, sometimes
through front organizations such as the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED), an NGO set up by Ronald Reagan in 1983, finance
groups abroad that disseminate anti-Cuban propaganda. For example,
according to the US press agency Associated Press, in 2005 NED disbursed
$2.4 million among organizations in Europe campaigning for regime
change in Cuba. In addition, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), which is directly dependent on the US
Government, has provided more than $65 million since 1996 to mainly
Florida-based groups active against Cuba. Again, in May 2004 the Bush
administration set up a supplementary fund of $80 million to bolster
assistance to these groups.
Throughout the world dozens of journalists are paid to disseminate
information concocted against Cuba. Some of the money, however,
subsidizes terrorist organizations hostile to the Cuban regime, among
others Alpha-66 and Omega-7. Based in Florida where they have training
camps, they regularly send armed commandos, with the tacit complicity
of the American authorities, to carry out attacks and sabotage. Cuba is a
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5The Nemeses of Imperialism
country that has sustained an outstanding number of victims of violence
(almost 3,500 dead and 2,000 permanently handicapped) and that has
most suffered from terrorism over the past forty years.
In 2005, with total disdain for Cuban sovereignty, and considering the
island to be, so to speak, an internal matter, Washington unhesitatingly
appointed a Cuba Transition Coordinator, Mr Caleb McCarry (formerly
assigned to Afghanistan). On 10 July 2006, a report of the Commission
for Assistance to a Free Cuba, co-chaired by Secretary of State Condoleezza
Riceand Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutirrez, demanded that everything
be done to ensure that... the Castro regime's succession strategy does not
succeed.
Specifying that United States aid to their allies within the island such
persons as the American writer Ernest Hemingway in a quite different
context categorized as a fifth column would total more than 62.8
million, the document states that the sum should be delivered directly to
the dissidents, who will receive matrieland training. This constitutes
blatant meddling by a great power to destabilize a small country. It is also
a veritable kiss of death for the opposition since, as the president of the
Cuban parliament Ricardo Alarcn stressed: As long as this policy
continues, Cubans will become involved in plotting with the Americans
and accepting their money, and . . . no country I know of would not
categorize such an activity as a crime.
It is all the more criminal in that the American plan includes a
classified annex for reasons of national security to ensure its effective
implementation. As far as covert action is concerned, the history of
Latin America offers numerous examples from the Chile of Salvador
Allende to the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas. Let us not be nave. Indubitably
this is a question of covert war.
Despite American remorselessness and some 600 acts of aggression,
Cuba has never responded with violence. In 48 years not a single violent
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act instigated by Havana was recorded in the United States. On the contrary,
following the despicable attacks of 11 September 2001 on New York and
Washington, Fidel Castro declared: Their attitude towards us diminishes
in no way the profound pain we feel concerning the victims of the terrorist
attack of 11 September.
The Cuban diplomatic service is one of the most active in the world. In
the years 1960-80 the revolution buttressed guerillas in several Central
American (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua) and South American
(Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina) countries. The armed forces
it dispatched across the world took part in important military campaigns,
particularly in the wars in Ethiopia and Angola. Cuban intervention in
the latter country ended with the routing of the elite divisions of the
Republic of South Africa, undoubtedly speeding up the independence of
Namibia and the collapse of the racist apartheid regime, and paving the
way for the liberation of Nelson Mandela, who never misses an opportunity
to recall his friendship with Fidel Castro and his debt to the Cuban
revolution.
In the 1980s, Cuba assumed the leadership of the Non-Aligned
Movement and undertook an intensive international campaign for the
non-payment of the Latin American countries foreign debt. Following
the debacle of the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, however, the Cuban revolution experienced some
agonizing years, dubbed a Special Period, but nevertheless managed to
survive, much to the astonishment of most of its adversaries.
For the first time in its history, Cuba is no longer answerable to an
empire, neither to that of Spain, nor the United States, nor the Soviet
Union. It has embarked on a new kind of political life, to the left of the
international left, joining the vast offensive against neoliberalism and
globalization.
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7The Nemeses of Imperialism
In this new geopolitical context the Cuban revolution still remains,
thanks to its successes and despite its serious deficiencies (economic
problems, colossal bureaucratic incompetence, widespread small-scale
corruption, hardship of daily life, food shortages, power cuts, chronic lack
of transport, rationing, limitation of certain freedoms), an important model
for thousands of the deprived throughout the world. In many regions of
the globe men and women protest, struggle and sometimes die in attempts
to achieve some of the social gains that characterize the Cuban example.
This is strikingly true in Latin America where solidarity with Cuba and
recognition of the stature of Fidel Castro have never been so strong. Since
the electoral victory of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, the polls have
enabled the election (or re-election) of several candidates of the left: Nestor
Kirchner in Argentina, Lula da Silva in Brazil, Tabar Vazquez in Uruguay,
Martin Torrijos in Panama, Ren Prval in Haiti, Michelle Bachelet in
Chile, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Rafael
Correa in Ecuador. In Mexico in July 2006, only apparent fraud prevented
the representative of the left, Andrs Manuel Lopez Obrador, from
winning. (The margin was 0.56%!) And even in Colombia, where Alvaro
Uribe was re-elected in May 2006, the results obtained by the leftwing
candidates were remarkably strong.
Latin Americas situation is wholly unprecedented. It was not so long
ago that a military coup under whatever pretext (the most recent attempt
was in 2002 against President Hugo Chavez), or direct intervention by the
United States (the last was in Panama in December 1989 against Manuel
Noriega), would quickly have aborted any plan for economic and social
reform, even if supported by a majority of the electorate.
The author reminds us that democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala, Joao Goulart in Brazil, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic,
and Salvador Allende in Chile, to name the most noteworthy, were ousted
in 1954, 1964, 1965 and 1973 respectively, by military coups orchestrated
by the United States to prevent the introduction of structural reforms into
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non-egalitarian societies. Such reforms would have adversely affected the
interests of the United States and it being the era of the Cold War (1947-
1989) could have led to a modification of alliances that Washington
would not have tolerated.
In the geopolitical context of the time, the only leftwing experiment
that managed to survive was that of Cuba. But we know the price that was
paid. External pressure compelled Cuba to toughen its policies excessively.
For more than two decades it strove to overcome political isolation and
economic strangulation organized by the United States. To escape these
constraints it entered into a somewhat unnatural alliance with the remote
Soviet Union, whose sudden disappearance in 1991 brought in its wake
grave difficulties.
Except in the case of Cuba, all attempts to change the pattern of
ownership, or redistribute the continents wealth more equitably, were
brutally suppressed.
Why then should the United States accept today that which it rejected
for decades? How could a pinkish or scarlet wave now flow across so many
Latin American states without being broken as in the past? What has
changed?
In the first place, a major factor has been the failure in most of Latin
America of the sometimes radical neoliberal experiments of the 1990s. In
several countries such policies resulted in shameless pillage, massive
impoverishment of the middle and working classes, destruction of entire
sectors of national industry, and finally widespread social upheaval.
In Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Peru and in Argentina, veritable civil
insurrections succeeded in toppling presidents who, although
democratically elected, had, once in office, considered that they had a
blank cheque for the duration of their mandate to act as they pleased and
in some instances to ignore the programme they had offered to the
electorate.
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9The Nemeses of Imperialism
In this regard, the collapse in Argentina of the neoliberal policies of
Mr Carlos Menem in 1999, and the mass uprising of 21 December 2001
that forced the departure of President Fernando De La Rua, are in a way
the counterpart in Latin America of what the collapse of the Berlin Wall
on 9 November 1989 represented for Europeans, that is to say, the
permanent rejection of a dogmatic and arrogant model that ill-served the
population.
Another basic element is that since the Gulf War of 1991, and even
more so since 11 September 2001, the United States, godfather of the
region it regards as its backyard, has reoriented its geopolitical
preoccupations towards Iraq and the Near and Middle East, where oil and
its principal current enemies are to be found.
This diversion favoured the blossoming in Latin America of several
leftwing experiments, notably the Bolivarian revolution of President Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela, and doubtless spared them from being rapidly stifled
at birth. This was particularly fortunate for Caracas and Havana, who have
seen their new regional allies proliferating, allies with whom they have
increased their political and economic ties. Thus on 21 July 2006, at the
Mercosur summit in Cordoba (Argentina), Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez
signed an important commercial agreement with Mercosur member
countries, including Brazil and Argentina. In so doing they openly
challenged the American blockade and paid homage to a small country
like Cuba that for almost 50 years has refused to submit to the worldsmajor power. [Translated from the French by Carl Freeman]
Ignacio Ramonet
Ignacio Ramonet is the Director ofLe Monde Diplomatique, one of the founders
of ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid
Citizens) and a leading figure in the anti-neoliberal-globalization movement.
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11The Nemeses of Imperialism
D e d i c a t i o n
To the tens of thousands of young Cuban medical, educational
and other professional workers who irrepressibly continue to fling
themselves selflessly without respite into the war against disease,
poverty and illiteracy on a scale that has never been witnessed, not
only in Latin America but worldwide.
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Within the Revolution there is a place for
everyone; against the Revolution there is room for
none. This is a life-and-death struggle that can
only end with the death and destruction of the
Revolution or the counter-revolution.
Fidel Castro
I have lived in the belly of the beast and I know
its entrails.
Jose Marti
History does nothing, it possesses no immense
wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real
living man who does everything, who possesses and
fights.
Karl Marx
Freedom is a function of power.
Harold Joseph Laski
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13The Nemeses of ImperialismRecent Trends in Global Financial Flows
CUBA AND VENEZUELA:
The Nemeses of Imperialism
M
y reflections on the revolutionary processes now sweeping
through Latin America are based on researches and lengthy
discussions with many Latin American leaders and civil
servants that were initiated during my years as a senior economic affairs
officer in the United Nations, specifically the secretariat of the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). My sojourns
in Latin America in 2006 came at a crucial tipping point in the grim and
exploitation-ridden history of the region. What we are now seeing are the
convulsions of a region that is hungering for authentic freedom, extending
from the Mexican frontier to the southernmost extremity of Tierra del
Fuego. These mark the massive erosion of the imperial power of the US
oligarchy and its domesticated political quislings that have bled the region
since its countries acquired formal independence in the early part of the
19th century.
Despite the fact that US imperialism has butchered more than 655,000
Iraqi men, women and children, as The Lancetconfirms, it has lost the
colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The estimated cost of Bushsundeclared war of exterminism in Iraq against an innocent people will be
well over $1.2 trillion. It is one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated
against any people at any moment in history. Referring to the genocide of
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the peoples of Indochina in which 3 million were butchered, Martin Luther
King declared: He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as
he who helps to perpetuate evil. He who accepts evil without protesting
against it is really cooperating with evil. The peoples of Cuba and Venezuela
have now raised the ante: there is at present not only a mighty voice against
evil, but also an active combatant that has taken its struggle for
emancipation into the very backyard of imperialism. Although the
economic, political and military power of the US still prevails in Latin
America, it is fairly obvious that in this crucial region of revolutionary
change its overwhelming hegemonic control is rapidly ebbing.
This work is concerned primarily with the freedom struggle of two
still-poor nations against the evil of imperial carnage and pillage. It is a
struggle rooted in the choice of their masses to reject the dictates of
imperialism and advance on the broad highways of social justice and
dignity; this can be encapsulated in one word: socialism. What matters, as
we shall see, is that these fighting nations have not merely refused to
relinquish their sovereignty as free peoples and accept meekly the yoke ofthe colonial empire whose crimes have been touted under the most
mellifluous of high-sounding moral platitudes. Of primordial importance
is that these two oppressed peoples of colour have fought back successfully
in the battering of imperialism. The combined freedom forces led by
Cuban President Fidel Castro and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo
Chavez represent today leaving aside the heroic resistance of the people
of Iraq and, more recently, of Iran the most formidable nemeses everfaced by the now crumbling and moribund forces of empire.
This work first examines the consequences of the unstoppable
breakdown of American capitalism, of which its many layers of
indebtedness are but one facet. We then turn our attention to the
emergence of Cuba as a world power, and subsequently chart the course
taken in Venezuela by the leadership of Hugo Chavez that is forging ahead
under the banner of socialism of the 21st century. Cuba and Venezuelaremain the salient inspirers of the drive for freedom that is sweeping Latin
America.
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Fidel Castro
Cuba, the beacon of socialist freedom in the Americas, has not
merely survived but has successfully beaten back the half-century-
long annexationist onslaughts of the US corporate gulag. We have
no illusions, however, of the price that it has paid and continues to pay toretain its socialist gains. In the extended scale of human history there is
nothing remotely comparable to the unremitting savagery of the US
blockades, embargos and mass assassinations that have incessantly battered
the first socialist nation in the Americas since its liberation in 1959. In
but one year, 2006, the cost of the US embargo on Cuba which has time
and again been repudiated by the UN General Assembly was an estimated
$4 billion. The US is not alone. In this criminal conspiracy the US gulag
has been joined by the European bourgeoisie. The US has internationalized
the embargo, whose overriding goal let this be stressed is the liquidation
of socialism and the reimplantation of the US colonial order in Cuba.
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1 Barcelona, 2006. The biography was written by Ignacio Ramonet, the director
ofLe Monde Diplomatique.
The horrendous toll exacted by the embargo tells us much, for what it
highlights is the recognition by the US caste oligarchy that Cuba remains
one of the greatest ramparts for human freedom (a word that is
inconceivable in the lexicon of imperialism) in the Americas, hence the
compulsive lunge for its extermination. What is of importance, however,
as we shall see, is that the brightest firmament in the Americas has ceased
to be alone, and its spiritual aura is ramified throughout the region. We
must understand clearly that Venezuela, which has now emerged as one
of the leading powers in the Americas, is pursuing its own anti-imperialist
trajectory, indeed its own specific socialist trajectory.
One of the most elating stories in the odyssey of Hugo Chavez took
place during the April 2002 coup in Venezuela, when he was a prisoner of
the putschists in the island of Orchila. The role played by Fidel Castro at
this time was spelt out in his biography, Fidel Castro: Biografia a dos voces.1
He communicated to Chavez: Dont immolate yourself, Hugo. Dont
repeat the mistake of Allende. He was an isolated individual without the
support of a single soldier. A large part of the army is backing you. Do notresign. Do not relinquish power. The rest, as they say, is history, with
Chavez and his Fifth Republic Movement rapidly striding from one victory
to another.
Embargo is too mild a word to describe the barbarous, unrelenting
economic war waged by the US against Cuba, a small island nation with
11 million souls, for almost half a century. The dust had barely settled on
the triumphant revolution proclaimed on 1 January 1959 when the entireUS apparatus of counter-revolutionary state terrorism was unleashed. Let
us briefly glance at the first two years of its agonizing but immensely
creative existence. This was a barefaced attempt at ousting a government
whose ideals of social justice and freedom were incompatible with those
of the US caste oligarchy and its domestic Cuban puppets, the Batistianos.
It started with sabotage, targeted assassinations of revolutionary leaders,
and the infiltration of terrorists and highly trained killers, many of whom
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17The Nemeses of Imperialism
were the gunmen of the American Mafiosi, and hired mercenaries from
the Americas and Europe.
The US-bankrolled terror apparatus was engineered to turn the newlyliberated people of Cuba against the government and ultimately to smash
it. Hospitals, schools, kindergartens and retirement homes for the aged
were set on fire, their inmates butchered and wounded. B-26 bombers
using incendiary and phosphorous bombs were deployed to destroy
sugarcane, tobacco and vegetable plantations and irrigation and industrial
facilities. Piratical attacks hammered the nations coastal ports and fishing
boats. Poisons were stuffed into cigar boxes, time bombs deployed intheatres and shops. The big newspaper owners, most of whom were North
American capitalists, unleashed a hate campaign inciting readers to destroy
the regime, in much the same manner as the media moguls are doing in
Venezuela today. The Roman Catholic hierarchy dominated by pro-Franco
Spanish priests and the white-skinned oligarchy were among the most
vociferous conspirators in this ideological campaign. Keep in mind that
all of these crimes against humanity were perpetrated and sanctified inthe name of human rights and the preservation of property rights.
The gains of the revolution were under attack by highly trained
commandos armed with sophisticated weapons. Among their targets were
the young volunteers who went into the countryside in great numbers to
wipe out illiteracy. In March 1960, the French ship La Coubrewas sabotaged
in the port of Havana, with more than 100 dead and hundreds of wounded.
The major oil refinery in Havana was destroyed in April 1961. Such actscontinued in the ensuing years, the most perfidious of these being the
blowing up in 1976 of a Cuban airliner in Barbados airspace, killing 73
people. It was carried out by Cuban-born Venezuelan national Luis Posada
Carriles, an agent of the CIA. (The US government has till this day
adamantly refused to extradite him to Venezuela or Cuba so that he may
be prosecuted for this and other heinous crimes against humanity.) In
addition, the innumerable abortive attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro,which are revelatory of the reach of the state terror apparatus, have been
well documented over the years and hence will not be commented on
here.
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T
he emergence today of Cuba and Venezuela as major world actors
in the anti-imperialist front must be scrutinized in the context of
the wilting power of American imperialism. Indeed, context is
everything. The expanding world business cycle that lasted five years has
now turned, with the discernible fall in the growth of world gross domestic
product (GDP), trade and international capital flows. Since the end of
World War 2, the US dollar has been the worlds reserve currency. Almost
75% of primary commodities are denominated in dollars. The dollar is
the monetary unit in which international trade and financial accounts
are settled. However, this monetary bludgeon of American imperialism
has weakened with the march of time, and sharply so in 2006, with present
trends ominously indicating that the greenbacks value will continue to
shrink into the foreseeable future. Many central banks have already
switched from the dollar to the euro as a unit of account. The continuing
massive US trade and payments deficits must indubitably precipitate a
run on the dollar, triggering an international financial explosion. It can
never be overemphasized that the dollar, as the bloodiest of weapons in the
arsenal of the US gulag, is living off borrowed time and underpinned by
borrowed money. What is of central importance to our thesis is that the
current American business cycle is in its death throes. The dotcom bubble
has burst and the housing bubble has followed in its wake. The economic
and political implications of this are already ominous. In the not too long
run this will prove fatal for the survival of empire.
This is not synonymous with the death of capitalism, however, butwith an intensifying slowdown related to stagnation in production,
consumption, investment and real wages. I am not talking of the collapse
of capitalism and hence its obituary cannot as yet be written, nor requiems
sung to its inglorious past. I am talking of the US meltdown and its impact
on the rest of global capitalism, strikingly so for those addicted to the
American market for a sizeable segment of their export earnings. In the
case of China and the Asian region, they will inevitably be battered by themagnitude of the deceleration and the rising tidal waves of American
protectionism. As the repositories of US debt to a degree unprecedented
in the annals of financial history, their assets will simply be wiped out.
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19The Nemeses of Imperialism
This will be a slump whose power demonstrates a capacity to lurch at
devastating speed into a depression tsunami. Globalization is on the rocks.
The onslaughts against globalization are manifest in, among others, the
ignominious debacle of the World Trade Organization (WTO)s
deadlocked Doha Round of international trade negotiations, which
dramatizes the irrelevance of a WTO that had long basked under the
spurious slogan of a free multilateral trading system.
The downturn of the cycle is not impacting in the same way on all
social classes, however. This is so because one of the leading traits of capital
accumulation on a world scale is the law of unequal developmentmirrored in the divergent cyclicality of capital movements, profits, savings
and investment. We must also clearly understand that these trends and
movements are not isolated elements. They must be seen as part of the
process of capital accumulation in its historical dimensions as it unfolded
in the critical period of imperialisms gestation in the decades 1870-1914,
and the subsequent implosion that followed in the imperialist holocaust
of 1914-18.
The present downturn must not be likened to the Great Depression in
1929-32. Then, profits fell and so did wages. The contractionary forces at
work at present are unsynchronized. Simply to bandy about the overworked
clich of crisis leads us into a cul de sac. If there is a crisis, as there
clearly is, we must identify the gainers and the losers. In so doing we bring
to the fore the fundamental concepts of labour and capital whose interplay
constitutes the national and international class struggle.
According to the estimates of Forbes magazine, the number of
billionaires rocketed from 793 to 946 between 2006 and 2007, the space
of just one year. No less mind-boggling is the spiralling concentration of
this highest caste of hyper-rich, with more than half of them coming from
just three countries: the US (415), Germany (55) and Russia (53). For the
overwhelming majority of the worlds population of 6 billion, however,real incomes slumped or stagnated. The total wealth of the billionaire
masters of the globalizing corporate gulag hit $3.5 trillion. This is the
quintessence of the pickings of neoliberalism: a Himalayan figure that is
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49% larger than Chinas (2005) GDP. What was the origin of this boundless
accumulation and exponential income increase? It came from rampant
speculation in derivatives and currency markets, not from productive
investments that would have generated employment and wages in the
primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of the real economy. This in essence
is descriptive of the criminalization of global capitalism.
As a Financial Timesanalyst noted ironically: It has been a great time
to be a capitalist. All around the world profits have been rising as a
percentage of gross domestic product. According to the HSBC banking
group, UK profits were the highest in 2005 since records began in 1950.In the US, Japan and Euroland profits as a share of national income are at
historic highs. Corporate America has rocketed its share of national income
from 7% at the start of the cyclical recovery in 2001 to 15% in 2006, or an
annualized compound rate of 52%. However, to the extent that the
corporate behemoths enshrined in the Fortune500 have gained, others
have lost. According to the Bank for International Settlements, wages as a
percentage of national income fell from 60% in 1975 to around 55% in2006, with no possibility of reversal in the present configuration of the
worlds distribution of economic power.
Illustrative is the fate of American labour, whose real wages have steadily
shrunk over the last three decades. The real weekly wage of a typical
American worker in the middle of the income distribution fell by 4%
since the start of the cyclical recovery in 2001. (Total compensation, if we
take into consideration health and pension benefits, barely rose by slightlymore than 1% in real terms.) However, labour productivity rose by 18%
between 2000 and 2006. In short, more and more goods and services are
being produced with smaller and smaller labour inputs receiving falling
real wages. This is what we mean when we say that the cycle constituted a
wageless recovery. Or to put it another way, the working class is producing
more and more per unit of labour (thereby generating enhanced profits
for the capitalists) but receiving less and less. This is precisely what ismeant by the global acceleration of the exploitative process.
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21The Nemeses of Imperialism
The sham is exposed for what it always was: the gains in labour
productivity are not shared with labour but grabbed by the owners of
capital. This is a reality that exemplifies the nature of the exploited/exploiter
relationship that forms the matrix of capitalist social relations. Or better
still, a reality that depicts the dynamics of the class struggle. The Economist,
a publication owned by Big Capital and a virulent propagandist of
neoliberal globalization, departs from its byzantine neoliberal orthodoxy
when it is compelled to admit: [T]he usual argument in favour of
globalization that it will make more workers better off, with only a few
low-skilled workers losing out has not so far been borne out by the facts.
Most workers are being squeezed. Coming from the mouthpiece of Big
Capital, this is a confession of startling dimensions.
The reason why workers are being squeezed is that larger and larger
shares are being gobbled up by Big Capital. Let us be clear: the bleeding of
the world of labour is not a unique attribute of the Bush/Blair regimes. We
are dealing with the exploitative workings of the capitalist engine itself
and not the aberration of its political domestics. This is one of the crucialupshots of globalization. The headlong rush of the national bourgeoisie to
create national champions to secure ever-larger market shares and kill
off competition is commonplace, be it in Russia, China or the European
Union, and the tragic but highly successful blitz against the world of labour
is also a part of the crisis and the contradictions it spawns.
Neoliberalism, the ruling ideology of globalized capitalism, places
emphasis on privatization, deregulation and the unquestioned
hegemony of corporate capital. Its quintessential and undeviating
strategy is to penetrate where it wants and when it wants, and on conditions
dictated by its own political specificities. However, the current phase of
capitalism marks the approaching end of its ascendancy. Its institutional
handmaidens, the WTO, the World Bank and the International MonetaryFund (IMF), are in their death throes. Or if I should change the metaphor,
they are gasping in a raging sea of irrelevance. Venezuelas liquidity alone,
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i.e., its foreign exchange reserves combined with the funds that it is raising
in its domestic market, is immensely larger than the combined funds of
these dinosaurs, and growing exponentially. To this, of course, could also
be added the capital liquidity of the planned Bank of the South promoted
by Chavez.
The Washington Consensus, as the bourgeois press called it, is swilling
in the gutter, akin to the battering the US caste oligarchy experienced and
is experiencing in its four front wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and
Lebanon. (In the latter two I have not separated Israel from the US caste
oligarchy because their interests are harmoniously blended.) Inasmuchas globalization is synonymous with imperialism, what we are witnessing
is at once its dual debacle military and economic.
The government of the US gulag and its ruling class have appropriated
all the trimmings of formal democracy, but there it stops. The definition
of oligarchy given by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia spells out its
wider significance: Oligarchies are often controlled by a few powerful
families whose children are raised and mentored to be heirs of the power
of the oligarchy, often at some sort of expense to those governed. Seen in
this light, there is a politico-money oligarchy in the US, a country with one
of the highest levels of income inequality in the world and which proclaims
its antipathy to all democratizing forces Cuba and Venezuela are but
two sterling illustrations that choose an alternative development path.
Growth in inequality is not an aberration. It owes nothing to chance. Itstems from the drive of corporate power to accumulate. Accumulation
thus becomes the sole condition of survival; in the gripping epithet of
Marx: Accumulate, accumulate. That is Moses and the prophets.
Competition in all its varied manifestations is the pivot of the system. It is
an instrument of war in the battle for bigger and bigger market shares. It is
here that we see competition not as a thing of fixity and permanence, but
as an evolving historical reality that underpins the system. It is here thatwe see how, historically, competition kills competition; it is the spawning
ground of monopoly.
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23The Nemeses of Imperialism
This is the unfolding process of imperialism in which we study how
capitalisms relations of production are being engineered and reshaped.
This transformation becomes evident with a perusal not only of the rapidly
changing market capitalization and revenues of the 500 largest
multinational corporations in a given time span, but also of the profits of
individual capitalists. It is not surprising that the frantic pace of corporate
mergers and acquisitions, or better still the drive to concentration and
centralization of capital, has scaled heights unprecedented in capitalisms
history. The gains of this concentration of capital are appropriated by an
infinitesimal minority of mega-capitalists that include the likes of Bill
Gates, Warren Buffett, Lakshmi Mittal, etc., even as this same concentration
and centralization of capital has brought in its wake the liquidation of
millions of jobs. It is a movement that stems not only from the internal
dynamics of a corporation to maximize its profitability and liquidate its
competitors. It is also being propelled by national state apparatuses in
their headlong quest for the buildup of national champions.
The drive for corporate aggrandizement is synonymous withglobalization. This is true of all sectors. Consider the 10 major US
investment banks, with Citicorp a leader of the band. The search for overseas
acquisitions continues apace. The Mexican banking industry, for
example, has been gobbled up by foreign banks. Already 55% of the
earnings of the big 10 US investment banks come from outside the United
States. This phenomenon that conspicuously surfaced in the decades 1870-
1914 continues unabated. Even a liberal economist understands that thestage is set for a backlash. As Joseph Stiglitz pithily puts it: What is
remarkable about globalization is the disparity between its promise and
what has happened. Globalization seems to have unified so much of the
world against it. The word seems is wholly superfluous though. With
so many losers and so few winners, even the developed capitalist countries
are becoming rich countries with poor people.
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Neoliberalism of the American model may have been touted as the
solution to world poverty, but the reality is totally different. Neoliberal
orthodoxy, as Mica Panic of Cambridge University pinpoints in an
illuminating comparative study2, is traversing the wretched policy collapses
as it did in the inter-war period. The ideology of uninhibited laisser faireis
anathema to economic welfare. One statistic alone, revealed in a report by
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), serves to
encapsulate the horrendous inequalities engendered by neoliberalism
and the dismantling of the welfare state: A baby boy from a family in the
top 5% of the US income distribution will enjoy a lifespan 25% longer
than a boy born in the bottom 5%.
Let us cast a brief glance at the extent to which the protagonists of
American free-market orthodoxy who prattle on endlessly about human
rights have in fact scuttled these rights:
l The US is unique in being the only country in the developed
capitalist world that does not have a universal health system. According
to a study by the US Census Bureau, the number of people without
health insurance coverage climbed to 46.6 million in 2005. This was
15.9% of the total population, up 1.3 million over 2004.
l The US Census Bureau has also noted that there were 37 million
people living in poverty in 2005, or 12.6% of the total US population.
The poverty rates of Cleveland and Detroit were as high as 32.4% and
31.4% respectively, and nearly 1 out of 3 was living under the povertyline.
l According to a November 2006 report by the US Department of
Agriculture, 34.8 million Americans did not have enough financial
2 Mica Panic, Does Europe need neoliberal reforms?, Cambridge Journal of
Economics, Vol. 31, No. 1, January 2007. The author is a Keynesian socialdemocrat and his study is limited to the United States and the Nordic countries.
It is a useful comparative study of different models of development, but stops
short of being a critique of imperialism.
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25The Nemeses of Imperialism
resources to buy food. A survey of 23 US cities, including Chicago,
Boston and Los Angeles, by the US Conference of Mayors reported that
in 2006 requests for emergency food aid rose by 7% over 2005, with
74% of the cities registering an increase.
l A study of 173 countries with high, middle and low incomes
carried out by Harvard and McGill universities indicates that the US is
one of only five countries that do not guarantee some form of paid
maternity leave. (The other four are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and
Papua New Guinea.) Of the 173 countries, 137 provide paid annual
leave, but there is no US federal law to guarantee such leave. The countryalso has no federal law on maximum work-week length nor a limit on
mandatory overtime.
l Racism and all its corollaries are rampant. According to 2005
data released by the US Census Bureau in November 2006, average
yearly household income was $50,622 for whites as against $36,278 for
Hispanics and $30,940 for blacks. The income of whites was 64% more
than that of blacks and 40% more than that of Hispanics. According to
a US Department of Labour report, the unemployment rate was 8.6%
for blacks and 3.9% for whites. The same grim picture holds for ever-
widening disparities in education between whites and non-whites.
l According to a report issued by the US Department of Justice on
30 November 2006, nearly 2.2 million inmates were held in state and
federal prisons or county and municipal jails by the end of 2005.Although blacks account for 12.2% of the US population, they account
for 40% of all prisoners. The adult US correctional population,
including those on probation or parole, hit a high of more than 7
million men and women for the first time. About 3% of the US adult
population, or one in every 32 adults, were in the nations prisons and
jails or on probation or parole.
What these figures so graphically indicate is that the US is a failedsociety. It is precisely for this reason that Cuba and Venezuela have chosen
alternative, revolutionary paths that meet the highest standards of human
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Cuba and Venezuela26
dignity and justice. It is precisely for this reason also that their leadership
has been targeted for personal liquidation, for their designs for socialism
clash at every point of the compass with neoliberalism.
Since the late 1970s, the income of the richest 1% of the US population
has roughly doubled, and the income of the top 0.01% has risen by a factor
of five. Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez show that even if
capital gains from a rising stock market are excluded, in 2004 the real
income of the richest 1% of Americans surged by almost 12.5%. The
average real income of the bottom 99% of the population, however, rose
by barely over 1%. Other statisticians have also noted that growth bypassednot only the poor and the lower middle class but the upper middle class as
well. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution that
is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans gained only fractionally.
Paul Krugman of Princeton University is correct: the winners were those
that were already in the upper reaches of the economic stratosphere.
This is also clearly
brought out in the findings
of Doug Henwood, the
editor of Left Business
Observer, as seen in his
chart (right) on the Gini
index of the United States.
Income inequality, he
notes, pursuing its well-
established trend, rose in
2005 to the highest levels
in more than 70 years. The
index is the most
comprehensive measure-
ment of inequality. It is a
number between 0 and 1,
with 0 representing an
economy or social group
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27The Nemeses of Imperialism
whose members enjoy perfect income equality. In contrast, 1 represents
perfect inequality, with one individual gobbling up everything. The Gini
index for the United States was .469 in 2005 (as against Swedens .250, for
example), a staggering rise from its post-war nadir of .386 in 1968. This
movement continues its remorseless ascendancy.
A profile of New York City, the mecca of global capitalism, reveals the
morphology of its impoverishment. According to the New York Times(8
October 2006), the city has a population of 8 million. A fifth of these are
poor. One-third of all the children in the city under five are poor. This is
what some have labelled, employing an appropriate image, the deep riversof poverty flowing beneath the glittering surface of Wall Street. Indeed, it
is the barefaced image of American capitalism as a whole and its workings.
We must recall that when we use the metric of GDP we are dealing
with averages. It is thus misleading to contend that if one averaged the
income of Bill Gates and ones personal income, one would magically be
transformed into a multi-billionaire. The system of national accounting
is a useful instrument of analysis, but it fails, and indeed it is not designed,
to give us an insight into the nature of the class distribution of income.
Certainly, by the metrics of national accounts, the world economy has
grown. But who are the beneficiaries of this growth? The preceding
discussion on inequalities highlights the fact something not evident in
national GDP figures that the gainers are the rich, the super-rich and the
plutocracy enshrined in the uppermost niches of the multinational
corporation. But there is yet another facet of the national accounts that wemust examine to grasp the extent to which they are the objects of creative
manipulation. This was brought out when the Greek government found
itself 25% richer in 2006 because its national accounts were revised
upward to capture, according to its national-account creators, the most
lucrative and dynamic sectors of the Greek services industry: prostitution
and money laundering.
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W
e shall now shift our attention to the imbalances within the US
balance of payments. This will give us the insight necessary to
understand that the crisis of US imperialism has been affected
by the workings of the financial system. The current account of a countrys
balance of payments is the broadest measure of its balance of trade in
goods and services. The current-account deficit (CAD) is equal to the
trade deficit plus the cost of servicing the countrys net international asset
position (i.e., the net rent, interest and dividends owed to foreigners who
have invested their capital in domestic assets and securities). What the
evidence from the US balance of payments suggests is the alarming
worsening of the US net international investment position (NIIP) since
1985: from the worlds strongest asset position to the worlds largest liability
position. That is a downward shift from being the worlds biggest creditor
to being the worlds biggest debtor. A deficit is a debt that has to be either
repaid or repudiated. As deficits pile up year in year out, the cost of servicing
the NIIP climbs. The awesome implication of a CAD of over $1 trillion is
that the US must increasingly sell more of its assets to foreigners or slash
the stock of US assets held abroad.
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29The Nemeses of Imperialism
With interest rates climbing, the situation will become even more
perilous. The massive scale of the funding of the CAD, which ran at an
annual rate of over $1 trillion in the third quarter of 2006, requires $3.5
billion in capital inflows of fresh money every single business day of the
year. There is nothing fixed about this number. If lenders chose to restrict
or abscond from the capital markets, it would lead to an implosion of
interest rates kicking the greenback into a freefall.
The American external imbalances are a euphemism relating to the
central fact that the United States imports more than it exports. Over time
it has become the worlds leading debtor, owing hundreds of billions ofdollars to the likes of China, Japan and its other trading partners. This is
what we mean when we say that it is a giant living off borrowed time and
borrowed money. The United States has neither the will nor the wherewithal
to reimburse these debts. China has reason to be apprehensive of a dollar
meltdown and the financial debacle that will inevitably follow. It is this
which explains the massive shift from dollars to euros by the central banks
of China, Venezuela and Iran, among others. As it stands, China hasalready lost billions of dollars because of the systematic devaluation of the
dollar over the last four years, and is on course to losing even more.
The collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement (1971) offers us an
illustrative lesson. Then, as now, external imbalances revealed the fissures
within financial markets. The US government suspended the convertibility
of the dollar into gold and imposed a 10% tariff surcharge because other
countries dollar holdings escalated in relation to the US shrinking stockof gold. The old belief that the dollar was as good as gold was shattered.
Then, as now, the US balance-of-payments deficits led to an undermining
of confidence in the dollar.
The erosion of the balance of payments is but one vital aspect of the
current crisis bedevilling US finance capital. Although there may be a
pause in raising interest rates after 17 successive hikes, central bankersfiddling with interest rates is like doling out an aspirin tablet to an AIDS
patient. Misleading clichs like soft and hard landings are not only
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useless as guides to understanding the system but noxious devices to
stymie our rationality. The pursuit of monetary policy, whose scope of
effectiveness is narrowly circumscribed, is little more than a gimmick to
delude us into believing that the system can be corrected by manipulating
interest rates.
It is highly improbable that there will be any shrinkage in the external
imbalance of the US trade deficit in the short term. Appalling deficit
arithmetic unmasks the vicious circle in which US capitalism is quagmired.
With nominal imports of goods and services 57% more than exports, it is
apparent that exports will have to grow that much faster than imports justto hold the deficit constant.
Another factor that needs to be considered is the US loss of market
share, given the extent to which the US has outsourced production. One of
the prevailing myths is that a shrinking and enfeebled dollar will give a
boost to exports. Such a dollar devaluation, it is believed, would slash the
trade deficit, but the affirmation ignores the degree to which industrial
output is outsourced. The upshot is a cutback in US exports. US production
is increasingly being outsourced because of cheaper foreign labour.
Outsourcing affects both tradable and non-tradable sectors, as seen in the
evolution of both financial and non-financial services over the last 15
years.
There is little hope of US capitalism exporting its way out of its deficit
through dollar devaluation. The game of competitive devaluation, orbeggar-my-neighbour policy as Joan Robinson of Cambridge University
christened it in the 1930s, is a petty little game that can be played by all.
The US master class has been able, so far successfully, to exploit the world
by printing greenbacks without limit, extracting value from the dollars
hegemonic status. It is paying for imports with paper money by running
sustained current-account deficits. However, let us repeat what we have
already said: deficits are debts. Debts must be repaid (at compound interestrates) or repudiated.
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31The Nemeses of Imperialism
The deficit stems from a critical shortage of savings (see savings graphs
on p. 31). According to the US Department of Commerce, the economys
net national saving (which is the combined saving of individuals, the
government and the business sector net of depreciation) fell to an all-
time low of 0.9% of GDP. In short, the US must pull in money from
abroad to finance the deficit. The dollar has lost a third of its value vis--vis
the euro over the last two years (2004-2006) and yet during that interval
EU exports rose 20%. Even assuming there is a 30% or bigger revaluation
of the Chinese renminbi, which is highly implausible, it will not in any
way diminish the US external trade imbalance. Bashing China and raising
protectionist barriers against that country will not tackle the problem of
low saving rates. What it will do is boost the rate of inflation. Indeed, the
external deficit is only one segment of the US economic pathology.
Another segment, the federal budget deficit, is out of control like a drunk
hobbling from one lamppost to another.
The numbers and their growth tell the story. The disparity between the
worlds current-account surpluses and deficits highlights the parasitismof American capitalism. The US is living off the worlds savings, accounting
for 71% of the worlds deficits. This is perhaps one of the biggest differences
between British and American imperialism. In the heyday of British
imperialism straddling the Victorian and Edwardian ages from 1880 to
1914, Britain, basking in the glories of the sustained and successful pillage
of its empire, was able to run an annual current-account surplus of 5%.
The US empire, in contrast, now has an annual chronic and rising current-account deficit of 7%, which has been on the boil since the early 1980s.
The deficit sums are agonizingly huge, with not the remotest possibility
of a respite in sight. The sheer size and speed of the CADs growth during
the years 2000-2005 indicate the depth of the cataclysm. It swelled from
$415 billion to almost $900 billion, passing from 4% of GDP to around
7% in 2007. This is an annual compound rate of 14%, outstripping the
growth of national income by a factor of six.
We must consider not only the CAD at a given moment but also its
trajectory over time. The cumulative CAD already tops 50% of US GDP.
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On present trends, this could surge to 60-65% in just three years. It is not
only that this tempestuous growth cannot be sustained in the very short
run. It points to a currency collapse that will have serious reverberations
in international financial markets inasmuch as the dollar is still although
its power is rapidly wilting the paramount medium of exchange in these
markets. Moreover, this economic affliction is being exacerbated by the
confluence of high energy prices, mounting debt-servicing burdens,
negative personal saving rates, non-competitive export capabilities, and a
crumbling manufacturing and transport infrastructure. For how long
will a parasitical American capitalism be able to draw on the pool of world
savings? The year 2007 should give us an answer to that question.
The US aggregate domestic and foreign debts (household,
government and corporate) are around $41 trillion or about the
size of world GDP. US government payments to foreign holders of
this debt amount to $120 billion yearly. The handouts can no longer
come from the coffers of Asian central banks, including the main money
man China, or from the reserves of Venezuela, Russia or Iran. These
countries have rapidly been switching their reserve holdings to the euro,
gold and other assets.
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As long as the United States runs a near-zero net national saving rate,
it is perpetually doomed to run monstrously large current-account and
trade deficits. The net national saving rate is today lower than it was in the
peak year of the Great Depression in 1932. This leaves US capitalism with
the grim prospect of repudiating its debts as it did at Bretton Woods. It
bears repeating that US capitalism is parasitically sucking in 71% of the
worlds savings. The endgame is approaching, but the meltdown will not
occur from one day to the other. The inferences that must be drawn from
this are obvious. It is not only the cataclysmic tableau of a nation that is
irretrievably in debt, but one in which the debt hole that it has dug for itself
is getting bigger and bigger, and from which it will be insuperably difficult
to extricate itself.
The crisis in the US balance of payments that we have briefly scrutinized
is not an isolated phenomenon that can be abstracted from the universe of
capitalist accumulation. The pathology, the monstrous inequalities and
class iniquities of American capitalism are shared with all the other
national agents of global capitalism. The overriding characteristic ofinternational capitalism now is overproduction of all goods and services.
The cyclical boom of 2001-2006 is fizzling out.
The US growth engine is in a state of semi-paralysis. Job growth has
been running at 30-35% below average since 2001. More than 3.7 million
industrial jobs, according to the US Labour Department, were scrubbed
between 1998 and 2006. Is it surprising, then, that inflation-adjusted
spending growth is on the ropes? There are no countervailing forces. Thecrumbling of the US housing market or, better still, the bursting of the
speculative housing bubble is a terrible reminder that the implosion of
the dotcom bubble in 2001 is now being trailed by others, including,
notably, the market for financial derivatives that could explode at any
moment, as Mr Warren Buffett obsessively reminds us. (Let us not forget
that the size of the derivatives market now stands at $160 trillion or four
times as much as global GDP and is growing three times faster than theglobal economy.) The rise and fall of the housing market has already had
devastating repercussions on the structure of overall output and
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35The Nemeses of Imperialism
employment, and its adverse impacts are spilling over into the financial
markets.
The housing market had become a grand casino because it gave thehapless consumer the possibility of equity extraction, or converting
rising home values into cash through mortgage refinancing. The American
consumer is drowning in a sea of debt. Real personal consumption (2002-
2006) rocketed at a 4% average annual rate or almost three times as fast as
disposable income. Consumption was bankrolled by debt. This uninhibited
financial debauchery comes with a price. Neither corporate investment
nor exports are capable of growing at a pace to offset the housing slump.Indeed, the crash of the housing sector is a mirror image of the external
sector as foreign capital inflows into dollar-denominated assets stem from
the absence of labour-generated income savings. The spillover effects of a
post-bubble housing economy are everywhere in sight. Recall that the
unwinding of the speculative dotcom mania triggered the recession of
2000-01. Likewise, the spillover effects of the housing bubble (seen in
sub-prime mortgage lending) are characteristic of asset-dependenteconomies as they spawn an explosion of domestic demand that is not
matched, or complemented, by effective purchasing power of labours
gains.
Significantly, the industrial capacity of the United States has withered
and what remains of its huge industrial heritage, a legacy of the decades
1865-1914, is being swiftly offshored. Let us look at a specific case to
better comprehend the unfolding of this process. Electronic Data Systems,an American firm, is to speed up the shift of its workforce to India and
other low-cost centres. It is part of the offshoring wave at a time when the
pressure to boost productivity in the labour-intensive information
technology sector is rising. EDS plans to shift to low-cost centres half of its
workforce over the next couple of years. With armies of employees that
represent around two-thirds of their overall costs, and with Indian rivals
growing fast, the US companies that dominate the industry have intensifiedtheir focus on offshore hiring.
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On the domestic front we are confronted with the spectacle of desolation.
General Motors and Ford are a shadow of their earlier selves, with 80,000
workers slated for the axe. Daimler-Chrysler is on the auction block. The
shares of these blue-chip corporations that represented the apex of
American industrial supremacy have slid into the gutter of junk-bond
status. John Pickering, a stellar automotive engineer from Michigan,
accurately describes the debacle of the industry in words that represent its
epitaph: I was always proud to be an automotive engineer from my earliest
youth. Today our industry has been mangled. We are bankrupt and
demoralized. We are caught in the grips of an economic war that we have
lost. In much the same way as we lost the way in Iraq. Let us be honest with
ourselves. We have lost our independence. We are colonized. Our industry
is in the hands of foreigners. The only noise thats coming from us is the
death rattle. That savage depiction could not be more accurate. Detroit
presents today a spectacle of an industrial wasteland. We have come a
long way in the history of American capitalism since GMs boss Charlie
Wilson thundered: Whats good for America is good for GM, and whats
good for GM is good for America.
In short impressionistic brushstrokes I have portrayed the major lines
of the apoplexy of US capitalism. It is within this context of the implosion
of American imperialism that we shall be better positioned to evaluate the
strides made by socialist Cuba since the advent of the Special Period.
This period, entailed by the demolition of the Soviet Union, was marked
by harsh austerity. There were those who believed that a socialist Cubacould not survive. However, it has not only survived, but today enjoys the
highest standard of living at any time in its history, despite the most savage
embargo that has endured since the start of the revolution.
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37The Nemeses of Imperialism
Hastening the crumbling of imperialism is the revolutionary
upsurge in Latin America that is headed in an ever more militant
socialist direction as time rolls on. Latin America is not an
abstraction, but a region that has been reduced by the holocaust of imperial
capital to grinding poverty. The following set of figures tells the story. The
regions population is 561 million. As recent data from the UNs Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean indicates, it is blighted
with one of the worlds highest levels of inequality, with the richest 20%
having an income more than 20 times that of the poorest 20%; more than
135 million are without regular and basic health services; more than 150
million are without sanitary services; more than 80 million are without
regular water supplies; around 1 million have not been or been
incompletely vaccinated; there are over 3 million cases of malaria; and
the infant mortality rate stands at 2.1 per thousand. All this and much
more in a region designated as the free world by the masters of this
imperial holocaust.
This litany of human misery serves as the indispensable background
to understanding why the Cuban revolution stands out as one of the most
dazzling beacons of humanity. Cuba is an integral part of Latin America
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because of its colonial history, language, culture and the extent to which it
has been a victim of the most brutal and sustained powers of imperialist
pillage; but at this point in history it demarcates itself from the rest of the
continent as a result of its triumphant shift from Batistas despotism to
socialist construction, the first nation in the Americas to have made this
leap into freedom.
The texture of Cuban civilization is distinct from that of all other
nations. It is not only a socialist society but a unique socialist order. I have
closely followed the Cuban revolutionary experience since its exuberant
birth on 1 January 1959. Over the decades, I have never been separatedfrom its strivings and its exalted attainments, not least of which is the
absence of racialism. The racial mix in Cuba is 51% mulatto, 37% white
and 11% black. Under Cubas education system, which is ranked among
the best in the world by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), there are no private or religious schools or
exclusive schools that cater, as in pre-liberation Cuba, for the progeny of
the white-skinned elite. Education is free. Meals are provided free, as areschool uniforms.
All of this is of course more than a symbol of equality; it is proof that
Cuba has passed the test of civilization with flying colours. The economy,
growing by a robust 10% yearly over the last three years, according to the
national accounting metrics of the UN, has now attained the nirvana of
full employment, a treasured goal that eludes all in the capitalist galaxy.
The Cuban national accounts now include services, which marks adeparture from the earlier Soviet model, as Cuba has become a robust
exporter of medical, engineering and software services. It is no longer
dependent on sugar although that remains an important export alongside
nickel. Cubas brisk industrialization is evidenced in the exponential
growth of the biotechnology sector and its offshoot, the pharmaceutical
industry, a brainchild of the Comandante Fidel Castro which now accounts
for $900 million worth of exports. The sheer power of this massivetechnological complex is omnipresent but it would have been
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39The Nemeses of Imperialism
inconceivable without the educational revolution in the sciences over
successive decades, notably in physics, chemistry and mathematics.
Cubas industrial momentum and its overall harmonious and balanceddevelopment has been vastly boosted by several joint ventures with
Venezuela, China, Iran, Russia, Vietnam, Belarus, India and others, with
Cuba having over half of the equity. The pace of industrialization straddles
a staggering array of manufactured goods for both national and
international markets: refrigerators, air conditioners, automobile and
engineering goods, shoes, textiles and other products.
The cumulative cost of the US embargo, one of the longest and cruellest
in world history, is estimated at around $85 billion. However, the barbarity
of this embargo has failed to shake the foundations of this unique socialist
country. Indeed, in certain ways, the embargo has acted as a spur to Cubas
advance. What it has done is generate a leadership and a massively coherent
working class that has become steeled and creative, as a perfunctory visit
to the countrys sparkling industrial plants, mines and collective farm
projects would suggest.
The isolation of Cuba planned by the corporate-politico gulag has not
materialized. In the 2006 session of the UN General Assembly there were
only four countries that voted against the end of the embargo: the United
States and its three satraps, Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Nelson
Mandela was right on target when he said in his superb tribute to the
Comandante when the latter visited South Africa in the aftermath of itsliberation:
We and all of the peoples of the Free World are honoured to have you
here. And by the Free World we refer to the peoples whose blood has
been shed profusely to liquidate imperialism. Consider South Africa
as your land. We shall not forget the decisive role you played militarily
in destroying the South African army. You fought nobly, unstintingly
and shed your blood to ensure our freedom. Without you our freedomwould not have been consummated.
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To talk of Cubas isolation, as the Bush cabal continually does, is a
falsification of the record, like everything else that emanates from the
sewers of that administration. What we are seeing is not the isolation of
this socialist beacon but the extent to which Bush has become a
schizophrenic grovelling in a ghetto of his own creation. Indeed,
representatives of 126 nations attended the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) summit in Havana in September 2006. (There is also no point in
discussing one of the vilest of Bushs crimes, the Agenda for Freedom. It
is as stale as yesterdays bread, an echo of what we have heard over the
decades dressed up in a fancy set of clothes with a price tag of $80 million.)
Havana is now a world cultural metropolis for ballet, music and the
arts affordable to rank-and-file Cubans. What country in the so-called
developed capitalist world can say the same? Elitism has been dealt a
death blow in Cuba. It matters little what the Mafiosi in Miami and others
believe or say. They inhabit a different celestial orbit. Like schizophrenics
they have lost touch with reality. Their blindness and abysmal ignorance
and I have talked at length with many of them are self-imposed.
Regarding Cubas isolation, all I will add is that there are only two
countries in Latin America that do not have diplomatic relations with
Cuba: the banana republics of Costa Rica and El Salvador. The presence of
Cuba is almost universal. Thousands of Americans (who come via Jamaica
and Mexico) and Canadians are flowing into Cubas extraordinary health
clinics and centres for first-class medical treatment, in much the same
manner as the rich Arabs once flooded into Geneva, Switzerland. The keydifference between the two is a matter of price. Dozens of Americans on
scholarships are studying at Cubas institutions of higher learning, many
of them in the medical colleges.
Dozens of the rich and the super-rich have sent and are sending their
children to be educated in Cuba. This is not merely a matter of getting a
first-class education, although that is a vital component. No less importanta factor is the total absence of a criminal and drug culture, in contrast to
the majority of South American cities, which have become drug-infested,
violent, unlivable and polluted urban slums. The quality of life in Cuba
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41The Nemeses of Imperialism
stems from the very texture of what we may designate as Cuban civilization,
with a socialist ethos that lifts its health, educational and cultural facilities
to the worlds highest pinnacles. Few would disagree with the claims of a
Japanese ambassador that his children are getting the best education in
the world in Cuba. As one Cuban Ministry of Education official said:
The Latin American bourgeoisie are banging on our doors and are coming
in droves to get their children enrolled in our schools, and although we
charge them for our services, we cant entirely accommodate the influx.
Cubas achievements indeed, the word achievement is wholly
inadequate are one of the great triumphs of the revolution. It emergedfrom being the worlds biggest bordello and Mafiosi gambling paradise,
whose criminality moved hand in hand with mass poverty, to effect the
profoundest of social transitions. For example, there are few Cubans today
who are aware that Varadero Beach, with its wondrous white sands that are
marvelled at by tens of thousands of holiday makers, was once upon a
time the private retreat of the Du Pont de Nemours dynasty, masters of the
worlds biggest chemical corporation. This huge splendid area was reservedfor the exclusive use of the family and their friends. It had been grabbed
for a pittance by the dynasty in the aftermath of the American occupation
in 1898.
Among Cubas numerous other achievements, many recall the 120
Cuban medical volunteers who went to the earthquake-stricken areas of
Pakistan in the depths of the Himalayan winter. I refer also to the 20,000
medical volunteers who serve the impoverished barrios in Caracas and inthe hinterland of the Orinoco Delta, and with many of whom I had
illuminating discussions. I also saw the impact in the barrios of Cubas
software educational revolution Yo si puedo that has contributed to
illiteracy-eradication efforts in Venezuela and Bolivia and elsewhere. The
world knows about the tragedy of Chernobyl and the terrible radiation-
induced deaths that followed, but what is far less known is that despite the
austerity imposed by the Special Period, Cuba continued to treat over theyears thousands of children exposed to radiation with free medical care
and medication innovated by Cuban scientists.
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Cuba and Venezuela42
Cuban doctors doing volunteer service in other countries.
What has the cabal that rules Washington, or for that matter any
European country that boasts of its cultural attributes and its civilizing
mission, done to match these humanitarian achievements? We all know
the answer. The recent wanton annihilation of Lebanon, executed with its
Zionist henchman at an estimated cost of $14 billion, gives us a partial
picture of the politics of US exterminism, as do the 655,000 dead in Iraq.
By the same token, the meaningless nostrums of human rights and the
rule of law peddled by Washington can be dumped into the trashcan of
history. Indeed, the very march of US history, with its vicious colonial
past, repudiates the idea of human rights and the rule of law.
Like many millions, I was saddened by the affliction of Fidel Castro in
July 2006. I leave it to the likes of the vermin in Miami and others of their
species to, on hearing the news of his ill health, chant the fascist slogan that
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43The Nemeses of Imperialism
surfaced in Francos ranks in 1936: Viva la muerte. Although the
Comandantes recovery is now well underway, we ought not to forget that
we are all biological creatures with a beginning and an end, and are but
tenants on this earth. Nevertheless, the scale and scope of the Cuban
revolution is incomparably larger than any individual. Inherent in the
revolution is its sparkling capacity for renewal, innovation and, above all,
continuity of purpose.
What the US caste oligarchy fully understands, despite its persistent
uproar for demolishing the socialist order, is that Cuba is now militarily
secure. A military assault against Cuba, irrespective of whether it is byland, sea or air, will encounter a crushing response that will not be confined
to the nations shores, and thus not a replay of the aborted Bay of Pigs
invasion. Ignorant and callous though he is, Bush should not ignore the
declaration of Chavez at the Non-Aligned Movement: An attack against
Cuba is an attack against Venezuela. It will lead to a flow of blood including
Venezuelan blood because Cuba and Venezuela are blended in the struggle
against imperialism. It will be a horrendous war if the masters of theempire are so stupid as to unleash it. And I need hardly stress that it will be
a war that overspills the confines of Cuba. This is the acme of clear
revolutionary thinking and the boldest articulation of internationalism.
There are those simpletons who nourish the delusion that Cuba will
succumb to the fate of the Soviet Union, which was demolished in1991. However, it is worth noting that the Soviet Union did not die
in a moment of unexpected apoplexy. It succumbed to a degenerative
bureaucratic disease that had begun many years earlier. A disease incubated
by a leadership that lost contact with the masses and was subsequently
exploited by imperialism to carve up the Union. A perfunctory visit to
Cuba will amply confirm that this self-destructive Soviet ailment is
singularly absent in this nation that has never abandoned its socialistprinciples.
There are also those prophets of neoliberalism that are mouthing the
miracles of the market place and calling for the adoption of the Chinese
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model in Cuba. Or in Deng Xiaopings formula: To be rich is glorious.
There is nothing new or attractive in this formula. It is a putrid morsel of
bourgeois demagogy. It has its roots in 19th-century classical economic
liberalism. What is Dengs formula other than a resounding and
unvarnished exhortation for the restoration of the bourgeoisie and of
capitalism? What we are witnessing in China today is the war of opposed
classes, between the owners of the means of production and those whose
surplus labour has been expropriated. China has become a country with
highly unequal income distribution, comparable, as measured by the Gini
index, to the United States. Such is the reality of the prevailing Chinese
class struggle.
Let us look at two small southern territories that are part of China. I
will cite their experience to indicate the reasons why Cubas ethically
inspired leadership totally repudiates the repellent class nature of the
Chinese neoliberal model. (Such a policy choice is, however, by no means
incompatible with the strongest economic ties and cooperation at the
Party and other levels.)
Macao and Hong Kong are owned and dominated politically by at
most a dozen mega-capitalist families that are entrenched through
marriages, extended family connections and financial dealings. They are
the pristine embodiment of neoliberalism. Let us zoom in for a moment
on Macao. Once upon a time a murky, small-scale gambling den, it has
now escalated into the worlds biggest gambling market, outstripping the
profits of the legendary swindlers paradise that is the Las Vegas Strip inNevada. Central to our thinking is that capital and capitalism are never an
abstraction but are epitomized in the powers of individual capitalists.
Such is the case with Stanley Ho, billed as the worlds biggest casino tycoon,
who owns at least half of Macao. He generously doles out some of his
pickings to his cronies in the ruling political party and other officials in
recognition of their protection and services. Through Shun Tak Holdings,
his Hong Kong-listed company, he controls stakes in 16 casinos, Macaosdominant ferry company and helicopter service, its duty-free monopoly,
the territorys airport, its flag-carrier, its only short-range budget airline
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and many hotels. And, obviously, that is only a small part of his sprawling
big-money empire.
Is this, then, the Chinese model that the propagandists of neoliberalismintend to foist on Cuba? What these advocates are forgetting is that the
Cuba of old was the drug, prostitution and gambling paradise of the
Americas, ruled by the Mafia and policed by the Batista regime and the
masters of the American occupation. It was indeed a model of disease,
vice and capitalist decadence that has been liquidated.
There is of course no such thing as an irreversible historical process;
the Soviet Unions trajectory is confirmatory of retrogression. But I do
not believe and this is more than just an act of faith on my part that
revolutionary Cuba will swing into that orbit with or without the leadership
of the Comandante. What is important is not so much his physical presence
as his enduring legacy that reveals the profound democratic fusion of the
leadership and the working masses. To understand the nature and thrust
of the Cuban revolutionary movement, it is necessary to say a few brief
words about the dynamics of his teaching.
As a Marxist, to whom theory and practice are indissolubly linked, he
had read about and long reflected on the class nature of the state so
trenchantly formulated by Lenin in The State and Revolutionon the eve of
the October Revolution. The Comandantes grasp of the dynamics of
revolution its causes and reverberations stems not only from his
profound reading of the Marxist classics The 18th Brumaire of LouisBonaparteand The Civil War in Francebut also from his own revolutionary
practices that began with the unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks
in July 1953. His study of the state as an organ of repression moved in
tandem with his intense study of the evolution of the Cuban struggle for
independence from Spain that raged from 1868 to 1898 and the history of
the subsequent colonial American occupation from 1898 to its end in
1959. As a rigorous intellectual, he plunged, in his prison years followingMoncada and after, into a profound reflection of the role of the national
quislings and the compradors that enriched his understanding of their
imbrications with their im