The Breakdown of U.S. Hegemony & the Struggle for Workers Power

https://iclfi.org/pubs/wv/1181/forum

Hi, comrades. Welcome to this forum of the Spartacist League/U.S., U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

I think it’s clear to everyone that the world is at a major turning point. The 30-odd years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism to East Europe have been marked by the hegemony of U.S. imperialism over the world’s economy and international politics. That whole period has been one of relative stability when measured on the scale of world history. But we can see that the world is now undergoing profound changes. U.S. hegemony has been breaking down, and that circumstance is the underlying cause of the growing economic and political instability in the world. The crisis caused by the imperialists’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the Near East are clear indicators of this shift.

As working people internationally are faced with the disastrous consequences of imperialist rule, their situation cries out for revolutionary leadership. But the working class is disarmed and disoriented. Everywhere it is led by bureaucrats and traitors who have brought about defeat after defeat. The program we adopted at our Eighth International Conference responds to the main problems that have confronted the left and workers movement in the post-Soviet period. It provides a Marxist analysis of that period and charts a revolutionary path for working-class struggles today.

The triumph of U.S. imperialism in the Cold War against the Soviet Union signaled a shift in the world situation, and correspondingly liberalism became the dominant ideology. What I want to show in this presentation is that it is the capitulation of the leaders of the workers movement and the left groups to this liberal world order that has resulted in the disarmed, weakened state in which the workers movement finds itself today.

For anyone who wants to fight for the cause of the working class today, it is absolutely necessary to assimilate the lessons of the post-Soviet period, to reject the failed politics that have characterized the left in this period and to effect a complete split with liberal politics.

The Liberal World Order

The feverish liberal triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was expressed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, for whom it represented the “end of history.” For the imperialists, there was no question: With U.S. victory in the Cold War, liberal democracy had demonstrated once and for all its superiority over “communist totalitarianism.”

How to explain in a Marxist way the exceptional stability that followed the counterrevolution? The answer is to be found in the overwhelming dominance of U.S. imperialism as well as the opening up of vast new markets to penetration by finance capital. Rather than fight each other for the new markets, the imperialist powers—the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Japan—worked together to jointly exploit the new opportunities. The former workers states in East Europe provided rich pickings. The most important of the previously untapped markets, however, was China, which opened up to imperialist capital investment while maintaining the foundations of a collectivized economy. This process—the expansion of finance capital into every part of the world—is what became known as globalization. It is what gave a new lease on life to imperialism.

U.S. hegemony and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that liberalism—the dominant ideology of the parasitic American ruling class—became the dominant ideology worldwide. Communism was dead, so liberal democracy was the model to which all countries should aspire. The role of liberalism therefore was to provide a justification for U.S. imperialist hegemony and the untrammeled spread of finance capital. The domination of U.S. finance capital and the weakened position of the working class are what give the post-Soviet period its reactionary character.

In the U.S., Bill Clinton represented a sharp shift in the Democratic Party. The “New Democrats” consciously severed any association with the earlier “New Deal” posture, distancing themselves from the unions, the left and black people. In his 1992 campaign, Clinton made this clear by supporting the death penalty, denouncing rapper Sister Souljah in the aftermath of the Rodney King uprising and pushing the end of welfare. From NAFTA to investment in China to the massive expansion of the tech industry, the Clinton administration was the face of unfettered neoliberalism.

Concomitantly, AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney personified a shift in labor and its support for neoliberalism. He endorsed liberal values and appealed to women and blacks, but rejected old-school trade-union struggle: strikes continued to decline and trade unions shrank under his reign. He protested in Seattle in 1999 for human-rights imperialism. In tandem with the unions being thrown back, black rights were thrown back, and segregation increased. But it was contradictory. Black household income markedly increased throughout the 1990s, while the situation for younger, non-college educated blacks became much worse.

The consequences of globalization impelled social protest movements around the world. There were movements against austerity, against racism, against war. All of those problems are the product of imperialism in today’s world and they do have to be fought. But to be successful, a fight against them has to be a fight against the imperialist system itself. The leaders of the protest movements that emerged refused to do that—they were against austerity and inequality, but hailed the European Union; they fought racism in partnership with Nike and Adidas; they fought war while supporting Democratic war-makers. Liberal opposition to austerity, racism and war is not only impotent but reactionary in that it deflects struggle away from the only means of combating those ills: mobilizing the working class to fight in its own interests with complete political independence from the liberals.

As for the supposedly Marxist left, they hailed all of these liberal movements, seeking to push them more to the left while giving them a Marxoid cover. In the end, the liberals did not become Marxists but the so-called Marxists became liberals. By protesting war and racism without a program to overthrow imperialism, these opportunists were essentially just demanding that the liberals adhere more consistently to their own liberal principles.

Furthermore, the bulk of the left had cheered on counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc, thus sharing responsibility for the very event that enabled the globalization they were now protesting. The ICL opposed these counterrevolutions, unlike the now-defunct International Socialist Organization, which was a part of every liberal protest movement from the anti-globalization protests to the “Anybody But Bush” protests against the Iraq War. Their parent group notoriously proclaimed concerning the Soviet Union: “Communism has collapsed…. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing.” They rallied behind Obama in 2008 before liquidating into the DSA in 2019, taking their liquidation into liberalism to its logical conclusion.

The task of communists in the post-Soviet world was to intervene into these various mass struggles and push them forward by fighting for a break with the liberal leaders and program. Fighting for a break was—and still is—the only way to cohere a Marxist pole and guide the class struggle in a revolutionary direction against imperialism.

Globalization

Globalization was a reactionary development in world history because what drove it was the interests of the U.S. ruling class. But the offshoring of jobs to other countries, where a higher rate of profit can be extracted, has led to the gutting of U.S. industry—the source of U.S. power. Deindustrialization, crumbling infrastructure, explosion of housing prices, all show the parasitical character of capitalism.

The industrialization of neocolonial countries resulted in increased competition with U.S. industries, while creating a powerful proletariat in those countries. But it also reinforced the dependence of neocolonial countries on the financial whims of the imperialist powers. And now, the very conditions created by globalization are undermining U.S. hegemony. For example, the explosive development of China led to enormous profits for the U.S. and other imperialists, but it’s precisely China’s rise that today presents the U.S. with the challenge of a powerful rival. This was the subject of the entire recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.

The central myth of globalization—that the liberal world order leads to gradual social and economic progress—was exploded with a vengeance with the 2008 financial crisis. Working people, especially black and Latino people, went bankrupt, having purchased houses whose value plummeted by taking out loans they couldn’t pay off. The economic “recovery” was achieved on the backs of the working people, many of whom eventually found employment in the non-union “gig” economy. Meanwhile the cost of education, health care and housing became increasingly unaffordable—personal debt skyrocketed. 2008 is a taste of what the liberal order has in store for the future, as the next financial disaster is being prepared.

U.S. imperialism is a wounded beast. It remains the hegemonic power in the world and will seek to make everyone else pay for the consequences of its own decline. It will certainly fight to restore its position—by further squeezing the population at home and the neocolonies abroad—and will do so either by doubling down on its liberal course or through some right-wing reactionary response.

The imperialists have sought to compensate for economic decline through speculation and printing money. But as the dollar bill claims, “In God We Trust,” the only thing holding up your bill is God and the U.S. Army. All the stocks and shares and bonds—the wealth that exists on paper—bear little relation to the actual productive capacities of the world economy. This is a ticking time bomb that presages enormous economic collapse. The only way out is for the working class to take hold of the political and economic reins of society and reorganize the economy in a rational way.

Globalization is reactionary because, driven by the parasitic U.S. finance capitalists, it is a fetter on the further development of the productive forces and a brake on human progress. But all the various movements that arose in opposition to globalization were bankrupt—they attacked only the worst features of imperialism while remaining within the framework of the very system that produces those excrescences. Once again, we see that to go forward requires a complete break with the liberal ideology of the bourgeoisie.

Liberal Movements, Offshoring and the Union Tops

We’ve seen that an anti-globalization movement grew up in opposition to the consequences of the new liberal order. There was a great deal of anger among workers in the imperialist centers against “offshoring”—that is, capitalists transferring production on a large scale from one country to another, where the rate of profit is more favorable. This led to the slashing of jobs in one place and production at a higher rate of exploitation in another. Workers’ anger, correctly channeled, could have been the starting point to push back against the offensive of finance capital, unifying workers across borders in a common struggle against the imperialist ruling class. But what was the response of the leaders of the workers movement?

Both heads of the AFL-CIO in the 1990s, Lane Kirkland and John Sweeney, deplored the offshoring of jobs while embracing U.S. imperialism, but there were slight differences. Kirkland, a long-time Cold Warrior, was an old-school trade unionist fervently opposed to NAFTA on a chauvinist basis. He directly clashed with Clinton about it. Sweeney, on the other hand, worked closely with Bill Clinton and was on the advisory commission that endorsed Clinton’s free-trade initiatives for the WTO that were protested in Seattle in 1999.

Sweeney himself ended up at the Seattle protests, protesting China’s admission into the WTO without “labor standards,” saying: “It’s disgustingly hypocritical of the Clinton administration to pledge to put a human face on the global economy while prostrating itself in pursuit of a trade deal with a rogue nation.” That is, he is criticizing Clinton for not being sufficiently neoliberal and not sufficiently supporting human-rights imperialism. Sweeney’s posture reflected the liberal shift in the labor movement in that period, while being qualitatively similar to Kirkland’s. Both supported U.S. imperialism and scapegoated workers in those countries where U.S. jobs were being moved, but they went about it differently. In each case, they deflected workers’ anger away from those really responsible—the U.S. ruling class.

From the ICL to the ISO and Workers World, the left denounced the protectionist chauvinism spouted by the AFL-CIO. But the left did not provide a program to defend jobs and working conditions. This meant being a left echo of the Bushes and the Clintons, who were also denouncing protectionism and nativism to justify U.S. foreign expansion. At bottom, the response of the left to offshoring was a liberal one, accepting the idea that fighting job losses in the imperialist countries necessarily comes at the expense of workers in the Third World. The exact opposite is true.

A real fight for jobs and conditions in the U.S. would have been an objective blow against the imperialists, strengthening workers in the Third World and in the imperialist heartlands, furthering the common struggle against imperialism. The impotence of the union leaders and the left to confront globalization was precisely the expression of their support to the liberal world order. This is what pushes millions of workers toward populist demagogues, such as Trump.

The task of socialists is to chart a path of struggle to advance the interests of the working class as a whole, a fight that necessitates a split with all the opportunist misleaders. A fight in defense of jobs and for jobs for all was critical. Against layoffs, it was necessary to wage defensive struggles, including strikes, plant occupations, organizing the unorganized into the trade unions and cross-border struggles with workers in the affected countries.

Decline of the New World Order, Rise of Anti-Establishment Opposition

The 2007 credit bubble was the high point of the liberal world order. The subsequent economic crisis marked a major turning point, as the dynamics contributing to stability and economic growth—that is, increased world trade, growth in productivity, political and geopolitical consensus—broke down and reversed. The 2008 crisis did not end the post-Soviet era, but it accelerated the trends undermining it. Millions of job losses and evictions, followed by a wave of austerity, created deep political discontent. For the first time since the 1990s, major political movements emerged that attacked key pillars of the post-Soviet consensus.

In the U.S., the 2008 economic crisis was a disaster for working people. Millions were disappointed by Obama and the Democrats, who did little beyond bail out the banks while working people confronted disaster. Trump’s chauvinism and populism appealed to a layer of workers and the petty bourgeoisie who were fed up with the liberals. His racist bombast offered a scapegoat for their economic anxieties. His vulgarity toward his political opponents found resonance with those who were devastated by the Democrats and were sick of the Washington Establishment. Trump cussed them out, and it was easy to identify with that.

The liberals blame racism and the rise of right-wing reaction on the Trump movement, but this obscures how liberalism itself is at the root of the problem. What has given rise to right-wing reaction was years of neoliberal attacks, reinforced by the 2008 crisis. The social decay inherent in the imperialist epoch can only be overcome by a class-independent fight against both wings of the imperialist bourgeoisie, which is responsible for the degraded conditions of black people and workers. For workers, making a political bloc with the liberal wing of capitalism only assures that there will be no actual fight against Trump or against racial oppression. What was necessary in 2016 was to build a communist movement against Trump.

Post-Obama social conditions also gave rise to a polarization within the Democratic Party between its “progressive” and “Establishment” wings. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton didn’t even pretend to offer crumbs to the masses, who had been crushed under years of her party’s rule. The program of the “progressive” Democrats like Bernie Sanders and the DSA’s Squad was to make a better electoral case for the Democratic Party to “fight Trump.”

To see this, let’s look at the left wing of the DSA. Many claim to be for communism and revolution. But their way to achieve it is to have a mass social-democratic party to pass reforms in Congress. To be an electoral force, they think it is necessary to be in a bloc with the right wing of the DSA, which wants to stay in the Democratic Party, in order to use the Democratic ticket to reach more of a mass audience. So, the DSA left, even though many of them don’t want to support the Democrats, do support them by maintaining their unity with the DSA right.

Just like Sanders abandoning “Medicare for All,” the DSA’s reformism leads it to sacrifice radical demands in order to maintain unity with the liberal wing of the ruling class under the pretext of “fighting the right.” The only way to achieve any real reforms is to fight against the interests of the entire imperialist ruling class. This requires a break with liberal gradualism and a fight for an independent workers party, a revolutionary party, built in total opposition to both liberals and conservatives.

Reforms like free, quality health care and education, affordable housing and decent jobs will require a fight to end black oppression. The question of black oppression touches on every aspect in this society. It is the main way the U.S. imperialists prop up their rule—by keeping black people forcibly segregated at the bottom of society and polarizing the proletariat along racial lines. The struggle of the entire working class for its emancipation from capitalist wage slavery is impossible without fighting against the racial segregation and special oppression of black people and for their integration into society on an equal basis.

The purpose of our campaign to “open the police archives” is to point a way forward for the struggle against police brutality and black oppression and rebuild the black movement that ran aground under BLM’s failed liberal program. The left has abdicated leadership to the liberals by refusing to put forward a counterposed road right now to get out of the impasse and expose the bankruptcy of BLM liberalism. Opening the police archives is something that could be done by any politician who is really on the side of black people, but the liberal politicians will not cross the red line of state secrecy. This campaign is thus intended to drive a wedge between black militants and their current leadership by showing that a break with liberalism is needed to advance the black struggle (see page 3).

War in Ukraine and U.S. Imperialism

As the U.S.-dominated world order cracks, liberals and the bulk of the left in the West rally to its defense as the staunchest supporters of Ukraine and Zelensky, ready to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in direct defiance of the U.S. is by far the biggest military challenge yet to U.S. hegemony. The stakes are very high for the balance of power in Europe and internationally, with the U.S. adamant about remaining on top.

The war, provoked by the expansion of NATO and the EU to the very borders of Russia, is fundamentally about who gets to plunder Ukraine. A win for the Zelensky government will not liberate the Ukrainian people but will further enslave them to NATO and the EU and increase the oppression of the Russian minority there. For Marxists, the only progressive outcome to this war between two equally reactionary capitalist regimes is for Russian and Ukrainian workers and soldiers to fraternize and turn it into civil wars against the capitalist rulers in both countries. That’s the meaning of our slogan “turn the guns around”—which was the slogan of the Bolsheviks in the interimperialist slaughter of World War I.

Many of those who claim to be socialist, though, shamelessly tail the liberals and support Ukraine in some way. For instance, Left Voice echoes the pacifists, calling for “Russian troops out of Ukraine, as well as demanding NATO out of Eastern Europe” (19 March). The pacifists who demand the withdrawal of the Russian army align themselves with NATO, while empty appeals to “stop the war” simply amount to calling on the very imperialists who provoked the conflict to broker a cease-fire. This, in turn, will only sow the seeds of a new war.

What’s needed is a program of class struggle against U.S. imperialism as part of a broader strategy to win the class war. But the fake left and the union bureaucracy, in tailing liberalism, are also tailing the most pro-Ukraine, most strongly pro-“imperialist status quo” force on earth: the Democrats. As living conditions here continue to deteriorate, the U.S. population is coming to resent more and more the massive amount of money being thrown at Ukraine. But rather than giving leadership to this sentiment and building a communist antiwar movement, the left abandons the terrain to the right: The only major force opposing funding for Ukraine is the Republicans.

China

Another major challenge to U.S. hegemony is the rise of China. Because the Chinese state is based on a revolution that expropriated the capitalists and its economy is no longer in their hands, the imperialists hate it. Any independent working-class policy toward China has to begin from the understanding that it is in the direct interest of our class to defend China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. Those leftists who refuse to defend China are taking a side with their own imperialist rulers and betraying the interests of the world working class.

The defense of China is also undermined—and the workers state itself deformed—by the rule of a bureaucratic caste, the leadership of the Communist Party (CPC). It suppresses the proletariat, fosters inequalities and rejects international revolution, fueling social, economic and military threats to the workers state.

Having encouraged the growth of a powerful domestic capitalist class on the mainland, the CPC proclaims that this class has a role in building “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” But this class, which rests on the exploitation of the Chinese proletariat, cannot be anything but a deadly enemy of workers state power.

The Trotskyist defense of the workers state is therefore based not on supporting the CPC’s policies but on the struggle for proletarian political revolution led by an authentically Leninist party to overthrow this anti-socialist ruling clique and institute the rule of workers councils.

Some on the left promote the CPC as a progressive force. But China’s impressive development is built on a foundation of sand: “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Its big contradiction is that the stronger it gets, the more it undermines the very condition that facilitated its rise—globalization under U.S. hegemony. A showdown with U.S. imperialism is inevitable. But instead of rallying the international proletariat for that struggle, the CPC leadership pushes notions of “economic interdependence,” “multilateralism” and “win-win” cooperation as a means of averting conflict. For more than a decade, the U.S. imperialists have been ramping up the pressure on China economically and militarily and that has increased tensions, including over Taiwan.

Only world revolution can defeat imperialism, and that requires doing everything to strengthen the position of the international working class at the expense of the imperialists. But the entire strategy of the Chinese Stalinists is based on conciliating imperialism! From being a key pillar in the U.S.-dominated world order to propping up bourgeois regimes throughout the Third World and imposing debt on developing countries, the Chinese Stalinists represent a mighty obstacle to world revolution. And the reason for that is that the bureaucracy fears revolution like the plague: A workers uprising would sweep away the corrupt, venal Chinese leadership along with the capitalist regimes of the region. Those who preach reliance on the CPC to push back imperialism are promoting a treacherous program, which ultimately aids the imperialists.

The Fight for Revolutionary Leadership—Reforge the Fourth International!

Faced with colossal challenges, the working class everywhere is disoriented and politically enfeebled by a treacherous, opportunist leadership that is fundamentally committed to the defense of the capitalist status quo. This is the product of more than three decades of accommodation of and capitulation to the liberal world order following counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. I have sought to show how liberalism is a reactionary ideology used to justify the “peaceful” subjugation of the toilers of the whole planet by U.S. finance capital and how Marxism provides the only road to working-class emancipation. The inescapable conclusion is that the main task of revolutionaries right now is to fight to bring about a complete break with liberalism.

The ICL is dedicated to doing just that as central to the reforging of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution. We have made a political reckoning with our failures of the past three decades. This reckoning is codified in our International Conference documents in the current issue of Spartacist. Our task now is to implement the lessons, to go forward to building the party that the working class so desperately needs.

I urge you to study the lessons we have laid out and hope that you will play a part in the struggle to forge a revolutionary party. The tasks are enormous—there’s no room and no time for opportunism or sectarianism. We are determined to succeed. Forward to the reforging of the Fourth International!