Well burrowed, old mole!

I. Anniversaries      

     As the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall approaches we are called to reckon with the twentieth century and what it really meant. At the time when the wall fell, we were told that History had come to an end, that liberal democracy was the final term of human social evolution, that capitalism had triumphed, that there was no alternative, that markets had shown themselves as the only possible basis for organizing the human metabolism with nature. We were told that this event was demonstrative proof that anything other than capitalism doesn’t work.

          That was the immediacy of the moment, but now that 25 years have passed, we are called to think this through with a bit more depth. What was the real meaning of this event–the fall of the USSR and the GDR the dismantling of the soviet republics and so on. What did it mean? It was impossible to say at the time because the meaning of this was still in the future.  The meaning of this event would be the capstone of the 20th century. The meaning of this event would be the doorway into the 21st century.

         On  the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution, where will we be?  How will we answer to the tens of millions whose world-historical refutation of fascist irrationalism set the tone for the latter half of the twentieth century? Now we stand back with a bit of distance, with the accumulation of 25 years of action and reaction. We can now see how things stand and say with confidence: what happened in 1989 was the triumph of injustice over justice on a global scale. 

II. Imperialism

     There has been a feverish production of names for the system that we live under.  The bourgeois press has been busy producing words and phrases, up to and including a discourse on the impossibility of naming the system we live under. Hardt and Negri, along with many others, choose to say “empire,”  Guattari chooses to call it “integrated world capitalism,” still others will call it “technological society” or some variant of the technological motif–industry, information etc etc. Then there are those who speak of societies of control, of hyperindustrialism, totalitarianism and so on. Still others see it as a fundamental pathology of civilization and civilized life as such and so on. These names are ideological and dishonest–many are critical efforts devoted to an uncritical task–talking away the fact of imperialism.

     What we have is not empire, nor is it capitalism, nor is it civilization, nor is it globalization or its more cosmopolitan form mondalisation. The system we live under is full-blown imperialist capitalism with concentrated finance capital calling all the shots–the system that Lenin was talking about in his pamphlet on imperialism. As common as it has become in ‘enlightened’ bourgeois circles to give some kind of credit to Marx after the crisis of 2008, Lenin is the theorist of the type of capitalism that we actually live under and we act like he doesn’t even exist.