Transnational Classes

This comment was submitted to International Affairs in late September 2018 and returned within 48 hours with a note that the journal does not publish rejoinders. That the article I comment on can be published at all is testimony to the sorry state of the field of International Relations, which since 9/11 has slowly descended to what I call in my Discipline of Western Supremacy (Pluto Press 2014) an ‘embedded discipline’ serving the requirements of war preparation and demonisation of the ‘enemy’. To allow peer review I had to refer to my own Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War in the third person and I also tried to be as ‘academic’ as possible and did not refer to the ‘mercenary quality’ of this research (as I do in the book), although ERC funding of work of this quality tells it all.

What follows was written as a background document for the referendum on the blanket surveillance law in the Netherlands in March 2018 and part of a book project, ‘The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism’. I argue that surveillance is part of the ‘War on Terror’ complex, which in turn evolved as a ‘Strategy of Tension’ after the model best known from the Italian experience in the 1970s. There it served to prevent the Left, and the Communist Party in particular, from advancing further towards participation in government. After the state capitalist turn of China and the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR, the global wage-dependent but underemployed population grew to around 3 billion people of which one third inhabit fast-growing slums. Controlling this vast human mass became a core issue in managing the post-Cold War global political economy. The United States, profiting from its military pre-eminence, its role as the provider of the world’s reserve currency and enjoying the privilege of running permanent budget and current account deficits, from the 1970s worked with the emerging IT industry to establish a global security state grounded in ‘Total Information Awareness’. Based on this information advantage, global society is being kept in a state of tension by a range of intelligence activities targeting ‘demographic bulges’ in the reserve army of labour, even risking or provoking acts of violence against US/Western targets to allow armed control to be imposed. Mass surveillance and a spreading war after 2000 serve to stir the surplus population into activity and a domestic politics of fear has been deployed to win public support The Israeli-US NeoCon project of a War on Terror was revived after the Twin Towers attacks on 9/11, combining the attack on terrorists with pre-emptive war against ‘states supporting terror’. Ultimately the doctrine behind the global strategy of tension entails the explicit option and regular practice of targeted assassination of opponents.

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the outbreak of Covid-19 (the respiratory illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 corona virus) a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Within a short time-span, a large part of the world went into lockdown, forcing people into their homes, outlawing jogging or meeting others, etc., all supposedly to ensure their protection. In this piece I challenge this assumption. As with previous events signalling that the era of political compromise in the West was drawing to a close and a politics of fear ushered in instead (first the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, then the new Cold War with Russia, dramatised by the downing of Flight MH17), the way the event is being exploited for other purposes is far more important than the forensics of the event itself. In this case as in the two previous ones, the Atlantic ruling class that presided over the postwar liberal world order, is seizing an opportunity (not necessarily of its own making) to try and stem its loss of control at home and abroad. Soon after the epidemic began or, better: was proclaimed to be developing into one, draconic measures were taken completely out of proportion to the real threat to public health. Although apparently a worldwide phenomenon (e.g., India with 1,3 billion inhabitants, of whom some 7.2 million die of various cases each year, ordered a complete lockdown, although only around 10,000 people have been infected and 358 people have died of/with Covid-19 at the time of this writing), the epicentre of the response is the West, where the ruling classes have seized on the opportunity to try and radically reverse the trend towards 'populism' both in the streets and in the shape of maverick leaders like Trump. The vulnerability of contemporary capitalism and its combination of speculative money flows and the global spread of product chains, as well as the instability of the underlying social contract, is key here (Desai 2020). With the media and governments 1 Originally published on https://www.newcoldwar.org/health-emergency-or-seizure-of-power-the-political-economy-of-covid-19/ Thanks to Karel van Wolferen for key materials, and to Radhika Desai,

The Russian Revolution in this paper is analysed in the context of a conjuncture dominated by counter-revolution. Beginning with the repression of the 1850s, a process of permanent counterrevolution has become the over-determining trend of social-political history. The Russian Revolution was subject to several distinct aspects of this process. First, external counterrevolution, the attack on it from the outside. Whilst Anglo-America was the main bulwark organising it, the Nazi/fascist counterrevolution and invasion of the USSR was an example of counterrevolution run out of control and ending in a defeat in Europe hat was only overcome through a long and risky Cold War. Internal counterrevolution affected the Russian Revolution as part of a longer process of adjusting socialist theory to successive defeats. In the Soviet case, Socialism in One Country was the decisive mutation in this respect and must be viewed as the decisive component of the triumph of counterrevolution. After the war, Anglo-America adjusted the counterrevolutionary strategy to surgical excisions of socialist tendencies until the USSR, isolated and ideologically exhausted, collapsed. Even so several of its legacies contrinue to be relevant, notably the nationality policy and internationalism. Also, today’s information revolution casts a new light on the Soviet planning experience that must be studied now that capitalism is slipping into a systemic crisis.

This is Part I of a project jointly undertaken with Hector Reban and Max van der Werff after the author’s return from attending a conference MH17—The Quest for Justice, in Kuala Lumpur in August 2019. Many thanks to Mr. John Philpot, international criminal lawyer, for valuable comments.

This chapter lays out the initial global analytic framework for the study of transnational migration and  the research agenda and questions that accompanied this framework.  The global historical conjuncture has changed but many of the research questions remain relevant. Now we need new answers.

The paper aims to interpret the political situation in Poland after 2015 double elections in terms of non-Marxian historical materialism. According to presented interpretation the taking power by Law and Justice Party not only limits the scope of influence of the previous ruling party but can lead to significant redistribution of political power, economic profits and intellectual influence. In the last part of paper, the prognosis about future development of situation in Poland is proposed

Artykuł  ten  - w świetle założonej siatki pojęciowej nie-Marksowskiego materializmu historycznego - próbuje odpowiadzieć na następujące pytania:
- jaki jest sens społeczny dokonanej w 2015 zmiany politycznej w Polsce?
- czy wybory prezydenckie i parlamentarne oznaczają zmianę wyłącznie w  polu politycznym, czy też mogą doprowadzić do zmiany "antysystemowej" prowadzącej do redystrybucji wpływów intelektualnych i gospodarczych?
- jak w ogóle konceptualizować "system"? 
- jakie racje i interesy kryją się za sporem o skład  Trybunału Konstytucyjnego?
-  próba prognozy czyli jak rozwijać się będzię sytuacja polityczna w Polsce?