If Ukraine is allowed to join NATO, there will be NATO military bases and missiles on Ukrainian soil pointing at Russia’s largest cities. Russia will then be forced to spend more on defence than it does currently, which can only weaken the civilian economy and create secessionist tendencies within its republics.
The Patnaik-Harvey debate on ‘imperialism’ shows that most Marxism in the Anglo-American tradition is confused. You can download the transcript of the debate between Prabhat Patnaik and David Harvey here. In that debate, Patnaik quite explicitly advanced an argument that defined ‘imperialism’ as national exploitation, rather than class exploitation. How does ‘imperialism’ manifest itself?
Marxism was always split by the cold war. It was founded at a time when 30% of the world’s population either ruled over nations that were to some extent enslaved, or were at least politically independent. That part of the world, particularly Europe, produced Marxism, which embodied the subjectivity of the European working class. The ideology was universal, meaning that it attracted labouring classes from those enslaved nations.
What I think ‘imperialism’ means comes up a lot in conversations about Syria and other wars. My position is that the word was botched from the beginning because it did not identify the mechanisms by which nations exploit nations.
The US is threatening to label Taiwan a currency manipulator on the grounds that they are intentionally devaluing their currency, which is worsening the US trade deficit from the US perspective. The accusation doesn’t make sense anyway, given that the Taiwan dollar reached a “23-year high against the U.S. dollar” back in Jan.
Delhi, India: Raids have been conducted on the homes and offices of Newsclick editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha whose network does some of the best journalism in the country. These raids have been carried out by the Enforcement Directorate, which is controlled by Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. This is happening in a climate in which the Modi government and its influencers have been busy accusing anyone who supports the farmers protests of being ‘anti-national’…
How are the farmers protests in India related to India? As many of you will know, the one-way net-transfer of wealth from India to Britain amounted to $45 trillion USD. This plunder happened largely at the expense of the Indian farmer who paid taxes to the British colonial regime, which then used one-third of those taxes to purchase goods from India for export while pocketing the exchange earnings (read Utsa Patnaik’s piece
Before winning in 2016, Trump was the anti-war candidate *relative* to Hillary Clinton who wanted to impose a no-fly-zone over Syria, which could only necessitate shooting down Russian planes. By contrast, Trump was openly praising Russia for eliminating ISIS. Given the information available at that time, Trump was the lesser evil on foreign policy relative to Clinton, hands down.
The rise of China has prompted many US geostrategic thinkers over the past decade to talk about the degree to which another ‘world war’ is inevitable, including most recently Henry Kissinger, who warned that if the leaders of the US and China did not discuss the limits of their confrontation then world war would ensue.
This was written in the immediate aftermath of the Friday 26 June ASIO raids conducted against the homes of NSW parliamentarian Shaoquett Moselmane and his staffer John Zhang, which are the first to be carried out under the ‘foreign interference’ laws introduced in June 2018, ostensibly intended to prevent foreign governments from influencing our political affairs in ways detrimental to Australia’s national interest.
