By:Arturo YARISH

November, 2010

Courtesy of the author

Notes on the current political / economic transformation of the United States of America: A contribution to the analysis of the changing relation between the State and Corporate-Capital, and its implications for the future of democracy. What might it look like?

To paraphrase István Mészáros and Rosa Luxemburg: Beyond Capital and beyond democracy … Barbarism?

Views on a Long Narrow, National Debate on the Best Approach to World Domination.

The present range of explanations of the political transformation of states and their relations to Transnational Corporate-Capital, particularly with reference to the strategies for World domination by the United States of America (USamerica or USA), has clustered around two major interpretations of issues concerning national sovereignty and Imperialism. One, view emphasizes multilateral cooperation among various states in their efforts to form supra-national institutions of governance such as the World Trade Organization that are intended to mediate the broad interests of Transnational-Capital ; where as the second focuses on the unambiguous efforts of USamerican Unilateralists to maintain their dominant National position in shaping the future of world-wide, Neoliberal Corporate-Capitalism. While recognizing the distinctions in the two prevailing views, various analysts note points of convergence and significant conflict. Despite the differences in approaches the overarching reality of a dominating role of one or a coalition of a few states naturally raises the questions of sovereignty of the dominated states, the inherent threats to democracy and the resulting consequences for the dominated people throughout the world. .

Within the USamerican Ruling Class this long narrowly focused debate may be best described as a discussion of tactical differences on the enduring strategic objective of sustaining their National domination of resources, communications links and labor supplies essential to pursuing National-Imperialist goals. By the close of the First World War, the major division in the Ruling Class arguments had been reflected in the differences perceived between Woodrow Wilson’s general multilateral posture and Theodore Roosevelt’s aggressive unilateralist, “Big Stick” stance. Since the end of World War Two these two competing policies for USamerican regional and World domination have shifted between the narrow extremes of a single-state imperialist drive and the broader multi-state proposals for types of capitalist coalitions of shared domination. Since the 1990′s, the two competing Ruling Class points of view have been broadly represented by the difference in the tactics of the Neoliberal, Clintonian multilateralists and the unilateralist Neocons of the G.W. Bush administration. One might say that the two USamerican parties of Capitalism have their mirror reflections as the two wings of National-Imperialism.

Over the last Century the ebb and flow of debates and resulting tactics employed by the two main parties of USamerican Imperialism have been influenced by the objective conditions of relative, domestic and foreign, political-economic power relations and the contrasting opinions of how best to continue to move toward their primary goal of projecting and protecting their expanding “National Interests” on the global stage. Most recently the debate has reemerged at the center of present Republican Party which is most clearly expressed in the change of tone between the National Security Strategy (NSS) statements of the G.W. Bush Administration in 2002 www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssall.html   as compared with his Administration’s NSS statement presented in 2006, www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006 in which the second de-emphasizes but does not repudiate the strong Unilateralist attitude expressed in the NSS of 2002.  However, the tonal change within the space of four years of Republican rule recapitulates, in a compressed historical moment, the continuously meandering course of USamerican National tactics used to achieve the unwavering strategic goal of world dominance.

The historic parameters of the ongoing Ruling Class appraisal of the best approach to preserve and expand its presumed international hegemonic position may be cracking under the uncontrollable weight of broad, fast moving political-economic influences. Now that the cavalier assumptions made by successive USamerican rulers about the potentials for National expansion in a post Soviet World are coming up against an array of National and international economic and political limitations , neither the Neocon, Unilateralists’ grouped around the present Administration, nor the Clinton-Democrats advocating a return to a multilateral, international, power-sharing may any longer represent acceptable or viable tactical alternatives in relation to the present needs of Twenty First Century Corporate-Capitalist relations. If present boundaries of the conventional terms of the National Ruling Class debate have not yet been breached, their changing contours are showing increasingly perilous tendencies.

More dangerous tendencies may be glimpsed in two additional variations developing within the parameters of current debate. Tending closer to the multilateralist view is the notion that leaders of transnational capitalist institutions will call for the organization of a globalized state. This impression is grounded in the assumption that nationally based capitalists have gained sufficient power, flexibility and unity of purpose which will allow them to detach themselves from the political moorings provided by their host-states, that they will then use to construct a transnational state thus forming a type of “Capitalist International” or a supra-national organizational center devoted completely achieving presumed, shared corporate goals and objectives. This thesis assumes a large measure of mutual consent on many levels, while heavily discounting or completely ignoring the long history of inter-imperialist rivalry.

The second, contrasting scheme, growing out of the more aggressive Unilateralists’ imperialist thrust for world domination, most recently summarized in the Bush Doctrine declaring that the USA will not permit the emergence of rivals, should be viewed from the perspective of Corporate-capital’s continuing dependence on its host-state and the melding of corporate needs with established state institutions thus reinforcing the alliance of national and nationally domiciled, transnational capital with the state, consequently binding the Corporate-state relations in a National-imperialist project. While the multilateralist approach does not deny the use of force, it must rely on a high degree of consent among the cooperating states, whereas the unilateralists depend disproportionately on coercive means, largely the overwhelming demonstration of military force.

Despite the historic and systemic limitations to the long-term durability of either a multi-state, transnational-corporate, coalition or a sustained single-state drive for global dominance, the Capitalist content of corporate expansion in both forms  carry with it an institutional cultural bias for an authoritarian command style of action that will not tolerate democratic intrusion into its hierarchical  decision making processes. Thus we can anticipate that conflict between the corporate-capitalist command structure and the various national forms of democracy will be a constant point of conflict. Either the Single-Imperialist-State or a Multi-state, capitalist coalition will have to win the assent of national capitalists and the national populations or apply mix of coercive measures to intimidate the people targeted by their policies.

Although one may identify evidence of competing tendencies toward both poles, and simultaneously a mixing and blending of tactics, in the present context of the changing relationship of international economic forces, we must give weight in an analysis to the deep-seated, historically conditioned, economic and cultural national predispositions which point in the direction of continuing nationally based Imperialist ambition. www.monthlyreview.calorg/nakedimperialism.htm  Although the present economic conditions restricting USamerican national economic growth are currently limiting its continuing drive for international expansion, its escalating allocation of dwindling national resources for military activities abroad and  police state tactics at home are clear indicators that expansionist Corporate “National Interests” have and will continue to guide the National thrust toward world domination. In this context multi-state gestures become a tactical component of a Single or a National-State Imperialist strategy which will require increasing levels of intimidation and out-right repression at home and abroad.

Throughout the post World-War-Two period, the overall aim of USamerican foreign policy has been to maintain its position of power, privilege and dominant influence as the “leader” of the Capitalist zones for its own material ends. George Kennan’s pronouncement in the 1948 State Department Policy Planning Study 23, makes clear this central Nationalist objective when he stated that in order for the United States of America to continue holding “…50% of the world’s wealth… [our] real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…” econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/archives/000567.html  While the debate between the Unilateralists and Multilateralist will continue to accommodate the views of the transnationalists, the enduring National goal of unchallengeable supremacy with the aim of maintaining that “disparity”, as echoed in the G.W Bush’s National Security Strategy statements of 2002 and 2006, remains the guiding focus of USAmerican foreign and domestic policy. Although the multilateralist tone of the NSS statement of 2006 mutes the earlier aggressively hostile assertion of the right to make preemptive strikes, it does not reject them but merely shrouds them in multilateralist language at a moment when the Unilateralists face increasingly open international and domestic opposition. After the President’s declarations of nearly limitless executive powers were reinforced by the National Congress with the passage of the two Patriot Acts and the Military Commissions Act of 2006(MCA), we witnessed the legislative acceptance of the unprecedented arrogation of authoritarian powers by the National Executive Branch of government which reflects the corporate authoritarian mode necessary to directly command the National, Corporate-Capitalist, Imperialist agenda.  Although the outcome of the on-going quarrel between the two USamerican political parties of Corporate-Capital may mean the difference between the continuation of a murderous drive toward Imperialism and Imperialism Lite, or returning Iron Fist to the Velvet Glove, the clear goal is international economic and, when necessary, political domination.

Having shredded the tattered fabric of a fragile multilateralism and simultaneously dissolving the last remnants of international confidence and good will earlier extended toward the USA, the Unilateralist Neo-cons have also produced a national crisis of State. This State crisis presently being formed by the expansion of executive powers, undermining both the credibility and efficacy of  party governance and the separation of governmental powers, coinciding with the formation of a complex financial / economic crisis is now reflected in the National context of the inter-party debate which is changing the political contours of the process of meeting the insatiable needs of National and Transnational Capital. The Bush-Cheney Administration’s political gamble of asserting the near dictatorial powers of the Presidency can be seen as a reflection of fear and a preparation for the open use of force domestically and its expansion internationally. The increasing use of coercive economic and military methods by both wings USamerican Imperialism portends profound political changes in the relations of the State to “Civil Society”**.

To our assessment of the Ruling Class’ squabble, we must add our analysis of Capitalism’s many adjustments to repeated structural crises that have steadily increased corporate power and influence throughout the Twentieth Century. The periodic economic consolidations that expanded the corporate form of Capital’s organization and furthered its concentration have been resulting in radical changes in the norms of capitalist practices which have profoundly affected the political relations between the State and Capital in ways that go beyond classic economic notions concerning the separation of the political and economic spheres.

The cumulative effects of the carefully cultivated interplay between the State and Corporate-Capital have already taken corporate operations outside Classic Capitalist norms in ways that have brought Corporate-Capital to high levels of political prominence now influencing major transformations in State relations with Capital, and the relations of both with the National people resulting in what should be called State-Capitalism. The operations of the State and Corporate-Capital have never been as intimately entwined and both are turning their back on democracy.

I will argue on two interrelated levels that the current, objective economic and political needs of USamerican National and transnationalizing, corporate-capital will continue to depend on domestically organized political / military support for its world-wide expansion. I will argue further that its global economic interests require the solid social-political base of a consenting or at least a compliant national population for its methods of international capitalist economic exploitation. Furthermore, I stress that, as the authoritarian character and operational style of Corporate-Capital insinuates its culture of regimentation and conformism into the operations of the host state and subverts democratic practice, it reinforces the command processes of decision making, circumvents the practices and content of the remnants of popular democracy thus forcing the Constitutional State to conform to cultural norms and methods of the Corporate-State and by fusing the command process of capitalist methods to the command process of authoritarian state-governance, it creates an internal necessity for increasing coercion. Hence the consequences of the presently forming crisis are profound and far reaching: it is forming as a constitutional crisis made more complex and dangerous in the context of war-without-end in a rapidly weakening economy.

Writing companion articles under the umbrella title “A New Form of State”  in the September 2007 issue of Monthly Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 , Jean-Claude Paye and Michael E. Tigar , inform us that the process of developing  ”A System of Wholesale Denial of Rights ” in the USA and internationally is already well advanced. Based upon their studies of the  present efforts to expand powers of the office of the USamerican President, Paye and Tigar agree that  the combined effect of  recent  National legislation, presidential “signing statements” , executive orders and the passive acceptance by other cooperating states  ”…reveal a true imperial structure …” of a new ” … legal order…” portending far reaching consequences.**

At the moment that corporate command decision making methods are fully integrated with authoritarian governance practices, the door will be closed on the Ruling Class debate and the Militarized-Corporate-State will direct the Nationalist-Imperialist project for world domination.

Reflecting more fully on George Kennan’s advice that the USA must find ways to “…maintain [its post World-War-Two] “… position of disparity …” we should note that the statement also reveals the inherent weakness and the attendant perils of such a destabilizing National policy position. Capitalism cannot simply maintain the status quo, it must grow endlessly. The implications of a National strategy of infinite growth in a finite world, is unending National expansion. As if anticipating the entire trajectory of USamerican power projection from the end of World War Two to the present, George Kennan wrote in the same State Department Policy Planning Document of 1948, “The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” and, as if predicting the incessant violence of the long series of USAmerican Wars and destabilizing covert activities from the end of the Second World War to the present, he stressed that “The final answer might be an unpleasant one.” The implication of an endless expansionist goal of one nation not only defines its stance in relation to the all others but defines the relation of the state to its own people.

USAmerican Imperialism has Deep Roots and a Long Reach.

The entire history of the tightening bond between the USamerican Government and Capital must be set in the historical context of the account of the USA’s territorial expansion in every compass direction throughout all the Americas. The lengthy National-Imperialist drive dating from the first years of its War for National Independence continues into the present wars to secure its self-proclaimed, global “National Interests”. Motivated economically and supported politically, the National Capitalist expansion required and continues to require military force. While the slogans and tactics may have changed, the objectives have not. From its early expansion into the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys to its recent leap  into the Tigris/Euphrates Valley, the character of USamerican expansion shows the true face of the economic motives of political domination. Whether expanding cotton production with slave labor or attempting to control world-wide oil supplies with contract-soldiers for hire, this long easily documented, transcontinental and transoceanic endeavor to control the world’s resources and labor supplies has conditioned the formation of the Military-Corporate nexus that shapes the priorities of the Neoliberal project.

I argue that recognizing the long history of USamerican territorial expansion is merely a point of departure in a more comprehensive analysis of the melding of a long-refined interplay among powerful institutionalized economic and political forces that are shaping the relations between the National-State and the Corporate-state. As a preliminary attempt to more clearly appraise the outline of the well-advanced, political / economic changes that are mutating both the nature of Capital and the assumptions about its political relations to the state, I present this essay as an introduction to a broader inquiry into the present stage of Capitalism, the consequences it portends and the possible alternatives we may construct.

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But, First A Few Focus Questions 

• What are the basic needs that drive the National Ruling Class’ Imperialist project?
• How are the Rulers presently organizing for Corporate-Capitalist, domination?
• Are there systemic limitations to Corporate Global domination?
• Is the Corporate-Capitalist’ process already revealing its weaknesses and dangerous tendencies?
• Must the debate within the USA be confined to the right of the political spectrum?  What is necessary to shift the discussion and decision making process toward the Left?
• Can a Nationally oriented Left be co-opted into a National Imperialist project?
• Is all that was old new again? Will we live our past errors at more intensely dangerous levels?
• Is the Neoliberal imperialist project more than a Capitalist plan of world-wide economic rationalization of production?
• What are the Consequences of Neoliberal, Corporate-Capitalist expansion?

How should we, ordinary people, “the ruled”, respond?

• Can we study Capitalist expansion historically?
• Do Historic patterns exist?
• What mutations can we identify?
• What do the changes imply?
• Do we also think “There Is No Alternative”?
• Can we envision ALTERNATIVES which we, “the ruled” must construct?

Might USamerican, Neoliberal-Imperialism destroy Capitalism? Can we project the outcome? What are the consequences? Can we affect the outcome?

Although production and distribution of products and services for human need can be accomplished socially through democratic processes, the current trend toward corporate administrative control of our culture and economy is advancing rapidly.

The ensemble of the material forces of production is the least variable element in historical development: it is the one which at any given time can be ascertained and measured with mathematical exactitude and can therefore give rise to observations and criteria of an experimental character and thus to the reconstruction of a solid skeleton of the historical process. The variability of the ensemble of the material forces of production can also be measured, and one can establish with a fair degree of precision the point at which its development ceases to be merely quantitative and becomes qualitative. The ensemble of the material forces of production is at the same time a crystallization of all past history and the basis of present and future history: it is both a document and an active and actual propulsive force.

Antonio Gramsci,  Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ( SPN ) , 466.

Any comprehensive analysis of the present stage of Capitalism must, at minimum, address these interrelated issues and questions. At the very least, any thorough investigator must recognize that Neoliberalism has not leaped, sui generis, on to the World political-economic platform: it may be the most advanced form of Capitalism but Neoliberal Globalization is also Capitalism disrobed. Aggressive, arrogant and naked, in its present corporate manifestation, it projects its full military-economic power while revealing both the history of its most dangerous tendencies and its weaknesses. In its most mature form at its highest stage of power , sophistication , technical development and global reach , present day Capital discloses the history of all its growth , the refinement of its operational methods , its tactics and strategies of conquest , its deep political roots, its systemic strengths and weaknesses which can no longer be hidden from the analyst’s view. Through precise examination and thoughtful analysis, it yields to us the course of its own mutations and tendencies thus providing a guide to interventions from which we must construct programs of alternative social-economic development. Studied accurately in the present, the characteristic tendencies of the Capitalist mode of production become the living laboratory of practice for change. It is in the actual political, economic conditions of real, existing Capitalism today that we can best study its current practices as a basis for planning change. In this fundamental sense the term “There is no alternative” (TINA) is most accurate because there is no alternative reference to our analysis of Capital; there is no other route toward the construction of equitable social and economic alternatives except through the conditions presented by the real, existing Corporate-Capitalism. Multinational and Transnational Corporate-Capital is the given terrain on which any genuine possibility of social change must be constructed. If we deny this fundamental reality, we cut ourselves off from any effective social opening to create our future options.

Capitalism is rapidly changing. While its fundamental mode and relations of production are irreducible, the elite corporate mangers are presently maneuvering to escape the given environmental and market conditions of production by extending control through their internal, corporate methods of economic planning, wealth concentration and political pressure. In the process of creating an administratively and politically controlled Capitalism the corporate elite, the ruling organic intellectuals of Capitalist system, are in the process of breaching both the theoretical and operational framework of historic Capital and giving rise to a mutating form of a Corporate, administered  economy that carries profound implications for the character of the State. As the quantitative again rapidly becomes qualitative it is incumbent upon creative thinkers to estimate the direction of change and then shape the alternative processes.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Karl Marx, The 18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 15. 

Not even the mighty capitalists can make their history as they choose!

A comprehensive analysis of the material effects of Capitalist expansion should include an investigation into the broader ramifications of the current economic policy and practices that may go beyond the conscious planning of many capitalists. The systemic imperatives of capital accumulation call forth political tendencies that exceed conventional notions of politics and economics. Neoliberal economic planners focusing their primary efforts on maximizing returns on investments give little attention to the social consequences of their decisions: their concern is with preserving the social-economic relations of economic and political power. While they claim to ignore the social costs of their political-economic planning, they view the social issues as incidental obstructions to the larger goal of preserving the system and too often assume they can control all the variables. Increasingly focusing on the systemic need for constant economic growth, they strive to subordinate all other social needs and political principles to their central objective of accumulating profit.  Whether they may appear to be innovative or they mechanically repeat past practices, the Neocons and Neokeynesians craft the required blend of political and economic manipulations necessary to sustain the Capitalist methods of exploitation to achieve their objectives. Make no mistake the capitalist’s slogan is profits before people and their incessant pursuit of profit guides their Imperialist project

Neocons are not conservators: they are radical ideologues who claim to adhere to Classical Capitalist theory but, recognizing its limitations, seek to escape them through political means. While publicly promoting conventional notions of Classical Economic Theory, they subvert theory through practice to persevere privileges of power. Therefore, we must ask what vital elements of theory they claim to preserve which in practice they actively subvert, may signal outlines of dramatic economic change that will carry a far reaching political impact.

I will argue that while publicly embracing the tenets of classical theory, the Neoliberals’ macro-economic policies and corporate micro-economic practices are both directed toward overriding the confining rigors of theoretical and practical market mechanisms which they proclaim to revere, apply and protect. The Neoliberal project has already revealed the contradictions between Classical Theory and present practice which give priority to preserving the political process of accumulating wealth and the necessary political power to protect it.

In order to fully grasp the significance of the political-economic mutations forming the present historical moment, we must also examine the recent history of political interventions in relation to the expanding objectives of National and Transnational Capital. Above all, we should ask if the effects of global, Neoliberal planning will be confined to the economic sphere or can we expect that the corporate drive toward controlling economies under private ownership may, in addition, alter long-term cultural and political relations. In other words, will the corporate institutional necessity to control its economic environment, change the very nature of Capital and Capital’s relation to its Nation-State?

While mainstream economists may argue that the political and economic spheres of life are separate and should be independently studied, critical analysts cannot allow themselves the comfort of such distracting illusions. At the present stage of Corporate-Capitalist influence, in all branches of government, the orthodox assumption of the theoretical separation between economics and politics is shattered in the swirl of the rapidly revolving door between corporate and public offices. The deepening corporate influence in government, cultivated throughout the Twentieth Century, is a hallmark of Capital’s present relation with the State. Today the intimate relation between corporate and governmental leaders, who often exchange positions, is a key element in any analysis of the deepening relationship between Corporate-Capitalism and the forming authoritarian State. Logically, we should ask whether the systemic requirements of globally integrating Capitalist economies have resulted in modification in political relations that are profoundly altering the fundamental nature of Capitalism and simultaneously the nature of Corporate-Capitalism’s relationship to their host-state.

Capitalism today is not exactly what it was in the Nineteen Century, yet today as then it operates within a framework of irreducible systemic requirements, which can be analyzed and interpreted in their own terms. All trained social and economic analysts have some capacity to project trends within the normal operation of Capitalism but few anticipate its dramatic adjustments, fewer the formations of crises and too many abandon critical thinking to the notion that there is no alternative to the existing relationships of production. We must open our inquiry on to the full range of possibilities for radical change that Capital is capable of developing.

We are living through another dramatic period of sweeping politically motivated modifications germinating within Capitalism that may cause a serious break with its own past. Powerful capitalist themselves have been showing distinct signs of deep frustration with the confining mechanisms of Capitalist market relations. In their current effort to preserve the systemic process of wealth accumulation, they may be pushing through the limitations of market operations which, in the course of their long-term effort to establish politically determined economic controls, may be superseding the market limitations and forcing an irreconcilable historic change in the process of acquiring and exploiting the means of production.

It is the problem of the relations between the structure and the superstructure which must be accurately posed and resolved if the forces which are active in the history of a particular period are to be correctly analyzed and the relation between them determined…. From the reflection on these two principles, one can move on to develop a whole series of further principles of historical methodology.

Antonio Gramsci , SPN .pp.175-177

The Capitalist’s Strive to Control their Beast

The full history of business competition is marked by the consistent effort by capitalists to reduce, eliminate or control the uncertainties of market-mediated rivalry to ensure stability through predictability. The long wave of mergers, which is again accelerating the concentration of Capital in fewer hands, is perhaps the principle means of establishing non-market controls over economic variables. Corporate concentrations of wealth have eliminated lower level and horizontal threats from competitors while simultaneously pushing the competitive threat to higher, potentially more volatile levels.

At each stage of big business mergers, important social organizational practices were refined and political lessons learned. Through trail and error and the foresight of some, it became gradually more evident to corporate planners that each stage of economic consolidation required additional predictability of material acquisition production flows and sales. Each higher stage of corporate mergers required greater control over the vagaries of markets. Political-economic decisions made to smooth out irregularities through expanded controls gave rise to increasing needs for supplementary controls over all the operations of production and distribution. Higher levels of investment and the growing scale of production and service operations necessitate uninterrupted production inputs and predictable sales. Over the Post World-War-Two years, as corporations had regularly won political approval for larger concentrations of corporate assets based on arguments for improving operational efficiency of Capitalism by removing various social, natural and political impediments in order to reduce the disturbing influence of competitive markets, the nature of capitalism has been changing. Increasingly the internally administered economy of contemporary corporate production was complimented by the politically regulated market for all the factors of production: capital, labor and natural resources.

In each successive historical stage of the increasing national and international expansion and through repeated crises of wars and depressions politically approved, public administrative methods have also been employed to create regulatory processes to save Capital from its internal tendency to destroy itself. On the National and International level, from the formation of Central Banking networks to the Brenton Wood Agreements to the formation of the World Trade Organization, we find capitalists calling on government to protect the private accumulation of profit through legislation which then complements the internal administrative practices of corporate organization and operations.

During the massive mobilization throughout World War Two, corporate and government administrators learned the benefits of closely coordinated planning. Gaining increasing confidence in the relatively stable Postwar, growth years, many of the corporate elite began to publicly question the continuing need for close governmental intervention in and regulation of the economy.  Gradually regaining prestige lost during the depression years, capitalists became more openly assertive in calling for a reduced role of government in the economy.   Along with increasing concentration of corporate assets and rising self-assurance of their ability to control the economic variables, capitalists were joined by Neo-classical or neo-conservative economists, the Neoliberals, who argued that less governmental regulation, would improve economic development and growth. In the relatively stable economic environment of the expansive Cold War period, corporate power increased to a point that corporate-capitalists felt sufficient breadth and depth of economic and political influence that they could direct national macro-economic growth and development on their own. Proclaiming government regulation an obstacle to further growth and expansion they actively promoted a return to unregulated Markets.  Supported by Neo Classical economists such as Milton Freidman and conservative institutions such as the Hoover Institute they began arguing that the proper role of government in economic affairs should be limited to the background role of managing, for example, the national money supply. Through the Postwar years, especially since the 1970′s, the corporate elite reinforced by monetarist arguments for minimizing the government influence in the economic life of the USA and in other countries have called on governments to insure private sector control of Capital. Under their persistent demands for corporate “self-regulation” reinforced by the right-wing slogans calling for smaller government, corporate power in economics and politics increased.  With each new phase of governmental “deregulation” that insured the continuing accumulation of profit by capitalists and the expansion of touted corporate self-control, the corporate elite increased their political influence and, as they have reacquired economic power, the nature of the Capitalist System has changed. Emboldened at each expanded stage of corporate political-economic influence gained over the last half century, the internal administrators of corporate command systems have attempt to reproduce and extend their internal administrative methods of control into government.

Beginning from a critique of Depression-era, governmentally guided economic redevelopment plans; the neo-conservative proponents of deregulation have expanded their political and economic corporate power thus elevating corporate-capitalist priorities above the broader human needs of society. The long neo- conservative campaign over the past thirty years has not only resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth it has also resulted in   qualitative shift of political power to unelected minority of the corporate elite. A political coup d’ etat has already been successfully engineered.

Having also learned the benefits of coordinated governmental / corporate planning during the Second World War and through lengthy Cold War period, the two parties of Capital in the USA have competed to fashion the most favorable political conditions to shape and control the Capitalist process of accumulation and concentration. Neither party challenges the Capitalist system and both parties, increasingly dependent on corporate support; seek to manage the continuing process of Capitalist expansion which is essential to their political institutional lives, the continuing life of this particular economic mode of production and the uninterrupted flow of profit. In the name of reforming the Capitalist System, both the Democrats and the Republicans have accommodated corporate political priorities.

Two Political Parties One Common Goal

After Capturing state levers of administrative power, each party of Capital in the USA attempts to preserve the private accumulation process through one of two interrelated political accommodations of corporate needs: basically Republicans vest public trust and power in the private corporate elite to manage the capitalist process of wealth accumulation and concentration, while the Democrats tend toward a publicly regulated, administration of private capital accumulation. Both have shown an increasing tendency to give high level corporate managers public seats of power to administer the system consistent with the preferences of their constituencies’ views of the most effective approach to continuing private accumulation of profit through constant world-wide expansion. After wading through all the lofty pronouncements of why the United-Corporate-States of America are setting off deadly fire works all over their endless areas of “National Interests”, we come down to the core motivation of the need for National Capital to expand in order to accumulate increasing levels revenue so it will not die of its insatiable hunger for profit.

In each phase of corporate growth and the expansion of the Capitalist system as a whole, competition at higher corporate levels, across geographic regions enlarges the need for internal and external administrative controls. The internal corporate and the external governmental controllers attempt, with varying degrees of  friction, to cooperate  in order to maximize the national and international conditions necessary for steady general growth and minimize the most destructive conditions of competition. The accumulated knowledge and practices of internal corporate regulation of production and distribution has been complemented overtime by more integrated corporate-governmental coordination and cooperation.

Mutually supportive, private / public, macro-economic, coordination to achieve national goals may be best illustrated by the intimate relations between the military planners and their corporate military suppliers. The operational relationship between the command process of military planning, preparations and procurement and the corporate command production process come together in the “Military Industrial Complex” of mutual need and economic, functional complementarities that go beyond simple fulfillment of equipment orders. The style of corporate operations finds its organizational counterpart in the military command system. Through their operational activities they identify the corresponding similarities in their organizational structures that become reciprocally informative in a broad practical process which is linked economically and gradually becomes expressed culturally. The hierarchical structure of military command finds its reflection in the historic capitalist top-down control methods which have been reciprocally reinforced through a regular, practical cross-institutional educational process. Today as corporate power is projected across international boundaries by transnational and multinational corporate commanders their expanding interests are protected through close coordination with the National, military power structure throughout the geographic field of destruction. The similarity of style, blend in a mutually supporting symbiosis of purpose and economic need, integrating the two related spheres economically, politically and culturally.  In this sense the ruling, Corporate-Capitalist elite can think of no alternative: for them it is TINA or Socialism but a beast of a different genre may be information.

Do Economic Policies and Practices affect culture? Can we also project those effects? Can we change them?

Many probing analysts on the critical left and among the seriously skeptical mainstream writers have been looking for what is new in Capital’s most recent mutations. While I do not argue against their search for the new, I encourage us to also look at the historical patterns of well-established capitalist counter-cyclical practices for directional indicators of change in order to draw the lines of continuity that past practices, successes and errors too, now bring into play. In order to arrive at a crucial point of understanding the mature economic-cultural symbiosis resulting from the amalgamation of Corporate-Capital and the military cooperation, we need to reexamine Capital’s recent transitions historically and ask ourselves which earlier strategies of Capital’s adjustments are being modified to meet the challenges and consequences of the latest wave of over-production and the falling rate of profit that sway the economic bias toward Military and Corporate political-economic fusion.

While the Neoliberals are currently locked into refining their type of Neo-classical monetarist strategies for counter cyclical economic stimulus, they are also Neokeynesian, deficit-demand strategists, at their core. As they enthusiastically promote the myths and slogans of the self-regulating mechanisms of an unfettered market to maintain the public illusions of classic, competitive Capitalism, they also meticulously attempt to extend administrative controls into every sphere of public, private economic and social life. Although they publicly decry the malicious effects of big government, they have consistently created the conditions for the immense growth of unregulated Big Corporate-Capital that is rapidly falling into an expanding and deepening economic crisis. While we are now suffering the latest institutional tweaks of the Capitalist system that are intended to relieve the Liquidity Crisis of 2007 and rebuild public confidence, it is the Capitalist mode of production in its most advanced form that is crumpling under its own weight and  to which we need apply our analytical tools.

In its present corporate form, Capital needs and demands many types of governmental support to control the economic and social conditions of present- day Capitalist production because it cannot tolerate unpredictable intrusions of disruptive variables. While the long-enduring cultivated myths of the free market and consumer sovereignty are elevated to a level of economic-religious beliefs for public consumption, the actual administrators of Corporate-Capital seek maximum, real material control of their political and economic environment. The historic regulatory role of national central banks is just one important example of private / public institutional controls over markets.

It is at times of economic crisis that the regulators pull more furiously at the tenuously connected levers of macro-economic control that they appear most helpless. Steeped in their own classical notions, believing in their own myths, they become dangerous. As the most important macro-economic controls fail to yield anticipated results in time of crises, they too show that they have lost faith in the presumed impartial meditations of the invisible, god-like-redeeming hand in the market and reach for political levers of institutional controls over the monster they feed but cannot completely tame.

The past as a guide to the present

In the historic case of the Great Depression of the 1930′s we should recall that it was the failure of classical economists to control the economic slide which gave rise to the broad acceptance of Keynesian demand-stimulation model of direct, state intervention. While we may label the economic recovery model implemented in the USA, Social Keynesianism, state intervention in 1920′s Italy and shortly after in Nazi Germany presaged the present course of economic stimulation and stabilization in the USA known today as Military-Keynesianism. Most economists agree that military spending pulled the USAmerican economy out the Great Depression and, since that time, domestic arms production, expanding international arms sales, deployment and use have repeatedly buoyed the National economy through every post World-War-Two economic crisis. Capitalists learned this lesson well.

It would be short sighted of any serious political-economic analyst, especially the most progressively minded, to limit his or her analysis to the economic consequences of the increasing USamerican macro-economic dependence on military production as merely an economic variable that needs correction. Such a limited interpretation of the economic importance of military spending would lead to badly needed reforms but leave aside the important analysis of the cultural consequences of these intimately interdependent, institutional relations. While we may at times see minor reductions in the USamerican military budget, the reductions will be very insignificant and worse leave in tact the Corporate-Military economic / cultural nexus. The stability and expansion of the USA’s National economy has become dependent on corporate production for military destruction.

When a half century ago , President Eisenhower linked the deepening military-economic connection to the civilian industrial sector, in his well known comments on the Military-Industrial Complex, few grasped its long-range, social significance. Put in national, economic structural terms, a cycle of social / economic reliance has formed a political-economic dependency which now is integrally systemic and linked to the continuing process of Capital accumulation and its protection. The National and international social implications of the militarization of the USamerican economy are becoming increasingly clear but we need to fully evaluate the broader political-cultural relationship of the forming military-corporate-state in order to project its full consequences.

At the close the Second World War the USA stood at the peak of its National economic power and international prestige which it almost immediately used to launch the next phase of its National plan for political-economic expansion under the various slogans of containing Communism. Then like today, flush with exuberance of having defeated major enemies, the ruling elites turned against former allies to create new pretexts for wars of economic expansion. The formula has not changed as new threats are invented to ignite domestic fears that prepare public acceptance of another escalation of military-corporate expansion put forward in the name of National Interests as a cover for Corporate-Capitalist aggression.

Again we should reflect thoughtfully on the portentous words of the prominent “Liberal”, State Department planner, George Kennan, which plainly outlined Post-War USamerican National objectives.

We (The USA) have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population….Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain the position of disparity…. To do so our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives….We should cease to talk about vague and …unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.

Clearly, as early as 1948, even National liberal planners recognized that democratic principles, fundamental human rights and improved living standards were all considered expendable objectives in the drive for National-imperialist, economic expansion.

Corporate-Capitalism needs War: We, the people –”the ruled”- need peace to survive and build alternatives!

More than a half century after these policies were formulated the full weight of their meaning is now becoming clear to ordinary working people. In order for the USamerican Capitalist economy to continue appropriating fifty percent of the World’s resources, for the general maintenance of social peace inside the “Fortress State” of the “One Remaining Super Power”, it has to continue developing and deploying a costly arsenal of the most advanced instruments of domestic and international intimidation. However, to sustain military production at levels necessary for continuing global expansion they also recognize that expenditures necessary to maintain social peace would have to be reduced. The planners then knew as early as1948 that neither higher living standards nor democracy were compatible with the goals of the growing Corporate-Military-Imperialist-State.

The ebb and follow of capitalist corporate expansion from the end of the Second World War to the present open-ended wars for USamerican domination of world-wide oil reserves and the necessary transportation routes, not only summarizes the intimate relation of National Corporate-Capitalism with the State-military power, it is the résumé of two interrelated, extremely destructive tendencies of the military-corporate nexus meditated through the Capitalist relations of production.

The present stage of Capitalist international aggression requires increasing military expenditures to sustain its growth which then will consume increasing portions of Capital’s surplus. Domestic Capital, including nationally headquartered transnational capital, evidently requires the force of military coercion to protect its financial invasions abroad. The increasing portion of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) consumed by the Military is resulting in a type  industrial cannibalism. In effect the Military economy is consuming the domestic economy. Recognizing the need to maintain social peace at some minimum level of passivity, the Neoliberals hope to escape this internecine dilemma by developing and projecting a military might sufficient to acquire and secure uninterrupted access to the world’s strategic resources and then, after taking what may be needed to secure its national dominance, rationing the remaining portion to their dependent client-states. This effort may be seen in the extreme military attempt to control Mid-East Oil.

This is clearly not a “Free Market” “operation. In order for the military-state to grow the corporate state must grow faster. However, under the current circumstances of the emergence of other industrial economies in Euro-Asia , Asia and potentially throughout Latin America, separations from and challenges to USamerican economic hegemony can be anticipated to increase. The economic re-stabilization of Russia, the powerful emergence of Chinese Capitalism and the rapid industrialization of India, will tend to close economic options for USamerican Capitalist expansion. In this post Soviet period we will see National capitalists challenging the expansion of other Capitalist States.

Following on the Neocons military failure to dominate Middle East oil producing regions and the yet-to-be-calculated consequences of increasing regional resentment, we can expect a future realignment of relations that will reduce USamerican corporate access to the Earth’s natural resource reserves. Thus we can expect an increase in the military costs just to maintain the status quo. In the present conjuncture formed by delicate and deepening imbalances in the USamerican domestic economy, the increasing financial and military expense of securing strategic resources, and growing obstacles to its expansion in the international economic sphere, one can notice many political economic options closing. Even the option for expanded military operations may be proscribed under the rising patterns of international political and economic resistance.

The Neocons’, Neoliberal financial strategies for international corporate expansion with military support are also limiting the choices for future National economic growth and the necessary international expansion which sustains it. As the military economy consumes greater proportions of the domestic economy and creates increasing international animosity toward predatory USamerican Corporate-Capitalism, we can expect that other Capitalist countries will compete more vigorously in many areas of USamerican domination.  An outstanding example of the emerging Intra-capitalist rivalry directly in the Americas, is China’s expanding search for raw materials and product markets in Latin America. While many and varied challenges may come from other Capitalist Countries, the recent reassertion of political-economic independence of some South American Nations such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador may also have the potential for further limiting the investment options of USamerican Capital.

By sustaining an aggressive debt-driven, economic-military expansion through the post World-War-Two Years, combined with domestic deindustrialization and the overtly belligerent USamerican international expansion, the Neoliberals have seriously reduced the range of corporate and military options in the World. The major military initiatives of the present administration have more completely revealed the main points of weakness in the Military-Corporate strategies that are further limiting the range of financial speculation.

The USA has been seriously wounded. Even before launching the threatened wider regional war, the Military-Keynesian strategies are now showing sever strains in three interrelated National spheres of life: reduced domestic social services, rising inflationary pressures and the broadening popular rejection of the Neo-con’s War-Economy. The interrelated political-economic strategy of consumer-debt expansion as a method of sustaining the domestic economy combined with an import policy of low-cost goods and low-cost migrant labor supported by a soft or weak dollar policy accompanied by a rising National public debt now form a synergy of negative interactions which may not be easily controlled in an political atmosphere of spreading popular discontent.

The Drag of the Debt

As with any national, debt-dominated, fiscal policy, repayment is predicated on the assumption of paying the current debt with cheaper or devalued currency in the future, which is an inherently inflationary policy. Up until the debt explosion of the past thirty years and the de-industrialization of the USamerican economy, the combined effect of relatively high interest rates, the continued general acceptance of the USAmerican Dollar, (usad), as the currency of international trade, the world-wide military presence and reach of USamerican armed forces were sufficient to sustain the relatively fluid equilibrium based upon the general acceptance of USamerican leadership. The lingering Post World-War-Two, international capitalist consensus on various notions of mutual interest in an economic/cultural way of life helped to sustain confidence in or wishful thinking about the stability of the usad as a reliable measure of international exchange and store of relatively stable monetary value.

At the very moment that  USA-Capital investment opportunities are more constrained, its financial flexibility and influence is currently being limited by three simultaneously converging problems rising out of the, Neo-liberal monetary strategy to stimulate the domestic economy and provide liquidity for increased foreign investments : the increased difficulty of expanding public or private debt, a potentially explosive inflation , and the inability of the USA Central Bank  to prevent the growing international rejection of the usad.

The Crisis Forms

The convergence of three additional, interrelated political-economic trends is now undermining international confidence in the USAmerican domestic economy and its international economic presence. These three interrelated tendencies can be summarized under the failing National monetarist and fiscal stimulus policy of Military-Keynesianism which is increasingly aggravated by the long-term downward shift of the tax burden and the consequent upward shift of income and wealth distribution. The spreading negative effects of the monetary problems which have been supercharged by the aggressive expansion of debt and financial speculation all now appear to be in crisis.

Every interconnected phase of the Military-Corporate expansion program appears to be reaching extreme limits at about the same time. The huge international float of usad’s cannot be redeemed, the cost of war is draining the domestic economy; consumers are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their debt supported lifestyles and, as the equity value of homes continue to decline, lay-offs will increase and consumer spending will drop further. Additional counter-cyclical, military spending is further constrained by rising popular resistance to the USamerican War in the Middle East and the massive accumulated war debt. Although governmental social expenditures as a portion of the National budget have already been reduced, the huge National debt cannot be expanded sufficiently to stimulate the domestic economy, and following on the de-industrialization and the deepening depression in housing market, few economic stimulus options remain.

Beyond Monetary Management

Here, it is important to note, with emphasis, that the Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank, (The Fed) or the Central Bank of the USA, steeped in monetary theory and fastened with a huge domestic and international debt-supervision problem, are now trying to manage the impending financial chaos with the only lever of economic adjustment left to them, the interest rate. If The Fed raises the short term interest rates too high in an effort to control the gathering forces of inflation, they will plunge the housing market into a depression that will bring the rest of the economy into the vortex. If they lower interest rates too much further, they will accelerate the flight from the usad which is already rapidly advancing and thus cause the value of the usad to plunge deeper. Clearly, USAmerican Military- Keynesianism is entering a dangerously volatile period of economic stagnation and increasing social resistance but the monetarists seem helpless to change course. At minimum “Stagflation” (a stagnating economy with high rates of inflation) is again a real threat.

The Neo-Liberal Corporate-Capitalist gamble is reaching its limits. The Military-Corporate domestic, stimulus policy based upon unrestrained, international expansion is coming up against the limits of its short-sighted adventurism which is merging into a domestic and international political-economic fiasco of major proportions. With classic fiscal and monetary, remedial tactics tightly constrained at the moment that the military options are closing, domestic Corporate-Capital and its transnational satellites seem to have few options beyond retrenchment and reorganization.

What next?

Seriously constrained, if not crippled by their political leaders’ ineptitude, we can anticipate that the ruling elite will go into a new period of consolidation and re-evaluation. The National Capitalist, ruling elite from the social liberals to the internationally oriented corporate leadership, unilateralists and multilateralist, will assess their options to resume international investing and military expansion at the earliest possible date. Both parties of National Capital seem to have reached a consensus on international economic domination. While the domestic and international strategies will be further refined, we can expect that their push toward economic domination of product, labor and resource markets will continue:  Capital cannot deny itself constant growth.  Expansion is absolutely essential for Capitalism to continue to exist. USamerican, National Capital and its transnational extensions have evidently reached a critical structural, fiscal and monetary impasse. It must grow or become something other than a Capitalist system of its present national and international economic character and dimensions.

Without the capacity to expand the National economy through either the Military or Social Keynesian fiscal mechanisms or through the conventional monetary methods, the present level of military or corporate production cannot be sustained. If USamerican Capitalism has entered the no-growth stage, as increasingly indicated by precipitous declines in key economic sectors such as the housing market troubles broadening into the financial markets, the need to produce the means of destruction will again be its only viable path through the confines of the stagnant state. Furthermore, if the USA can no longer serve as the world’s consumer of last resort or as the world’s secure investment depository of last resort, the present stage Casino Capitalism, the intensified financialization of international corporate speculation, will also contract and funds available for continued expansion of the consumer or the military economy will disappear. Today, as on the eve the Great Depression, the financial bubble is deflating. The illusion of unlimited debt-propelled expansion may be reaching its current limits. Simultaneously, in very close succession, every form of debt leveraged speculation is under increasing threat of severe contraction: hedge funds, the mortgage market, the corporate leveraged buy-outs and the international debt all weigh heavily on a shrinking base of badly eroded national production. The debt financed Military-Corporate expansion is threatening the collapse of Casino Capitalism of the hyper-financialized economy.

We are approaching a historic turning point in the management of Capital that may be equal to the dramatic political economic readjustments following the Great Depression. While the long Neoliberal regression into pre-depression fantasy Capitalism of the 1920′s may be presently on the same course of entering a greater depression, there is no guarantee that the pathway today, through the rapidly accumulating economic debris, will be a revival of Social Keynesianism.

What should be very clear is that the cultural life cycle of nostalgic notions of the competitive market mediation of all exchange relations is ending under the corporate imperative for maximum administrative control. If the USamerican economy enters, another period of sharper economic contraction, as many economic indicators show, and the Neoliberals again reach out for the political levers of administrative methods to stimulate the economy through military spending, their actions may lead to the dissolution of Capitalism itself. Without a broad popular political reawakening reminiscent of the 1930′s, the near-term domestic battle most likely will be confined to squabbling between the Corporate Capitalists who will either offer a limited but improved domestic social program and those who will attempt to control social unrest with all the instruments of police-state repression. At this point we can rule out any return to the mythical yester-year of competitive capitalism. The goal of both parties of Capital is to preserve a directed and intensified system of domestic and international resource and labor exploitation.

Since the nascent form of small business competition had been broken in the vice-grip of corporate takeovers, mergers and buy-outs, the corporations have been refining the entrepreneurial command process into expanded, managerial command networks  that cannot tolerate any form of domestic or international interference which is why Capital has developed new demands for regulated, corporate controlled,  international expansion under the leadership of the Supra-national administrative institutions such as the World Trade Organization. Through the last thirty years of the aggressive promotion of brutalizing Neoliberal economic “restructuring” policies, the authoritarian, corporate managerial form of the capitalist mode of production has come to dominate almost every major phase of social and economic life. As corporate capitalists strive to create or refine intercontinental, institutional structures for administering its world-wide operations, they confirm to the world that the long held myth of competitive “free enterprise” market capitalism is a quaint old notion, fading rapidly from reality. Corporate-capitalism has superseded its idealized, competitive form and present conditions will not allow a return. Under the circumstances of the expanding political-economic crisis, Corporate-capital will move forcefully to attempt direct, administrative control of the economy. The process is well advanced.

The formation of Totalitarian Corporate-Capital: beyond Fordism

As Corporate-Capital extends its political influence into the legislative, executive, judicial spheres of government and mobilizes the material forces of state economic and military power to sustain itself, we must position our analysis of these rapidly advancing social / political tendencies in the context of the corporate need to control the material forces of production as a totalizing culture. Within the given social relations of capitalist production, as corporations try to control the conditions under which they function through administrative means in order escape the system’s self-destructive tendencies, Corporate-Capital, unchecked, may pass into the terrifying zone of Fascism.

In its current phase of global expansion one of Capitalism’s emblematic traits is the increasing systemic integration of military and corporate methods used to bring almost every phase of social and economic life into its markets resulting in the increasing commodification of nature, objects and ideas. The present Corporate-Capitalist strategy is to make private all that happens to remain social, to occupy every public space and every environmental niche, assisted by the looming presence of military force.

The thrust of WTO rules on privatizing the biosphere is the clearest indicator that relatively new Administrative-Capitalist rule-making norms are intended to mediate all social relations through corporate, managed markets. Under the vaunted, self-serving claim that private business practices are more efficient than socially-regulated, publicly-controlled, economic activities, the corporate agenda based on privatization of the entire biosphere, natural resources and products of human production, now combining in its most all-embracing assault on human sensibilities, summarizes the Corporate need for all-encompassing, privately managed, military supported, controls in all spheres of the human environment. Perhaps the most extreme examples in our time has been  Bechtel’s effort to control of the Bolivian water supply and efforts of other corporations such as Monsanto to control the seeds of life. We should anticipate that a voluntary reform of armed Capitalism will not be on the corporate agenda. As people every where struggle to take back political power, under the conditions of the forming crisis, Corporate-Capital will try to extend its trajectory of consolidation and control though the available means of state power.

The Nation-State, the Corporate-Capitalist-State and Beyond

Recently, we should note that as economic power and influence has withered; administrative political power has been asserted more forcefully. Since the beginning of the first G.W. Bush Administration faced an impending economic decline, political force under the guise of National Security wrapped in secrecy, has been persistently increased.  In the present authoritarian milieu, we can observe the evident outlines of profound, Corporate-Capitalist influences in domestic and international policies and practices that reveal an extension of its controlling modes of operations in many public spheres of life.  For example, the increasing demands for corporate and government secrecy and immunity from prosecutions are attempts to shield the forming Corporate-State from public scrutiny. In the present period of declining USamerican power and political influence in the world, we are gradually learning through the accumulating evidence of public and private corporate corruption the real meaning and purpose of the administration’s claim of “executive privilege” and secrecy. Questionable elections results , widespread official dishonesty , official manipulation of the information to negate scientific evidence and to promote unending war, high levels official lying,  economic mismanagement, indifference to wide-spread suffering,  invasion of personal privacy, patent disregard for domestic and international law, all wrapped in the administration’s claims for ultra-secrecy claimed to be necessary to provide for National Security are just a small, the most ostensible, sampling of official grab for unprecedented levels of power that fully reflect the corporate notions of “management’s prerogatives” now increasingly assumed by corporate dominated government. Taken together they all point clearly to the official disregard for historically developed legal standards, social practices and sensibilities of human decency but, more dangerously, they represent the blunt use of power and unabashed deception to achieve the controls necessary to impose an unrestrained, authoritarian, corporate regimen on the entire society. In the context of the Right-wing Republican efforts to proclaim the all powerful “Unitary Presidency” or an “Imperial Presidency”, we are compelled to inquire into the nature and character of the forming state.

Turning our attention to the “National Security and Homeland Presidential Directive (NSPD-51 & HSPD-20) signed by President George W. Bush on May 9 th 2007, we learn from the report in the Chattanoogan that upon declaring a “catastrophic emergency”…”the President can declare to the office of the presidency power usually assumed by dictators to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over”. http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_107907.asp The implications of consolidating all the powers of government in the executive are frighteningly clear: a USamerican Dictatorship aimed at centrally managing and coordinating all levels of state, local and national governmental activities. This Presidential directive promulgated at a moment of rising political criticism, declining public-approval ratings and accumulating economic problems, closely follow on the January Report of the United Kingdom’s projection of world-wide social, political and economic tendencies over the coming thirty years.

In the June 2007 issue of Monthly Review, the editors presented a summary of the January 2007 report of the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Center of the UK Ministry of Defense, titled “Global Strategic Trends, 2007-2036″. First highlighting the environmental and economic, structural weaknesses of Global Capitalism and its possible consequences such as a return to “great power rivalry”, stagnation of the USamerican economy, “the continuing decline of U.S. hegemony”, a possible “financial meltdown” and “a return to unilateralism by a major (unspecified) state”, it then turns its attention to the probability of wide spread domestic and international “social insurgencies” of the “middle class proletariat”. At the end of their “Notes” the Monthly Review editors write that “Ultimately there is only one enemy according to the UK Ministry of Defense: the mass of the population both at home and abroad. With one percent of the world’s population controlling approximately forty percent of the world’s wealth it is not surprising that the few exceptionally wealthy “rulers” may look upon the many more “ruled” as a potentially dangerous threat.

The editor’s concise summary of the report is followed by three related articles written by the internationally renowned analysts: William K.Tabb, Noam Chomsky and James M. Cypher. The titles of their articles alone, individually and taken as a unit ,: “Wage Stagnation and the U.S. Working Class” by Tabb,” Imminent Crises” by Chomsky and “From Military Keynesianism to Global-Neoliberal Militarism” by Cypher, highlight the major elements of the forming social-economic conjuncture. Broadly, Chomsky makes the important point that the United States of America has been and continues to practice economic protectionism behind a veil of “free trade” slogans ; Cypher  stresses that the real objective of the neoconservative foreign intervention policies is the “…interest-based use of force characteristic of capitalism : to access , to control resources , to dominate markets, and to ensure stability of relationships that facilitate the functioning of the U.S. economy .”, while Tabb rounds out the big picture by observing that “Imperialism is the other side of an economy that is not producing adequate civilian jobs …”. Emphasizing the Capitalist’s growing need for control at every level of the domestic and international economy, all three analysts broadly concur with Chomsky’s view; to quote Chomsky again “…the common enemy of democracy and development is neoliberalism.

The data, ideas and arguments presented by these three perceptive analysts’, point clearly to the formation of an authoritarian state or a coalition of leading authoritarian states. The application of “…interest based …force …” increasingly used domestically and internationally, to control people who are publicly challenging the consequences of capitalist expansion will require increased secrecy. I propose to attempt a preliminary synthesis of their analyses and interpretations for readers’ critical review.

Our Darker Past Revisited? All that we thought old may be new again.

Reflecting fully on the implications of the arguments presented in the articles of each author cited immediately above, I take my point of departure from James Petras’ suggestion that a new variation of Mercantilism may be in the design stage and I add that this formation is completely consistent with present efforts to control trade under the so called “free trade” agreements. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14832.htm   Petras makes a major contribution to the discussion through his interpretation of both structural mutations and the contingencies of the present political conjuncture. In my opinion the studies of all four critical scholars point to the formation of a dictatorial, Corporate-State as the organizational base for a continuing drive toward Single-State or National-Imperialist world domination. Where Richard Vogel called on all of us to recognize, in his article on the controlled movement and allocation of Mexican workers, titled “Transient Servitude” published by Monthly Review in January 2007, that this may be the “…battle of our lives” , I intend to take up his cry, position it in the context of the existing authoritarian, corporate-military nexus and the dominant political Neoliberal tendencies toward Capitalist privatization and argue further that, if the current trend of the USA’s military reinforced, economic-domination is not checked we will see the solid formation of Fascism in the USA with horrific consequences for the victims all over the world.

Shredding the Social Contract “…to insure stability of …”Corporate-Capitalism

In the present political-economic atmosphere of rapidly declining government credibility, increasing economic hardships, rising popular discontent with the accumulating social and economic costs of Neoliberal military adventurism, the threat of dictatorial political control designed to contain or suppress mounting social unrest in order to more freely pursue an aggressive military drive for National domination of key resource zones should not be discounted. The preparation of repressive police state measures takes many forms.

Writing for Common Dreams on July 22, 2007 , Heather Wokush , in her article “Under the Radar: Ten Warning Signs for Today”: reports that , “On July 17(2007) the White House quietly announced an Executive Order entitled ” ‘ “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” Among other developments, it gives Bush the power to “block” or bring under government administrative control, the property of people in the USA found to “pose a significant risk of committing an act of violence which might undermine “political reform in Iraq.”

Peering more deeply into the darkening pall of rapidly expanding government policies and practices intended to frighten and intimidate USamericans into compliance with its unlimited-war tactic for world domination, we need to take a closer look at key elements of the “New State” thesis presented by Paye and Tigar (Monthly Review, Vol.59, No, 4, September 2007,). By arguing that recent legislation supporting the President’s arbitrary application of assumed executive powers have blurred”… the distinction between enemy and criminal”…Paye notes that the effect of law and executive orders,”… merges external sovereignty with internal sovereignty…” as a result forming the legal structure for “…the imperial jurisdictional authority of the United States.” Therefore he continues,” [the] MCA, (Military Commissions Act) carries out a transformation in the organization of the state by putting an end to the formal separation of powers. [as it] creates a purely subjective law that it places in the hands of the executive authority.” [which] “…reintegrates pure violence into a legal context that becomes the basis of a new political order that, in turn, permanently grants the president the powers of a judge.” Once joined to the self-assigned powers of the executive directives, NSPD-51 and HSPD-20, noted earlier, in which the President openly declares to himself the power of ALL three Branches of the government, one must agree with Paye’s concluding comment that together they constitute   “…a good beginning for the establishment of an imperial state.”

Concurring with Paye, Tigar writing in the same number of Monthly Review under the title “A System of Wholesale Denial of Rights”, briefly reviews the joint effect of two landmark cases:Cherokee Nation and Dred Scott to highlight the interrelated history of USamerican imperialist ideology and the “…exclusion of ‘subject peoples’ from any access to forums in which they might assert their rights.” through which he then shows the historical judicial links of these two cases to the current denial of conventional legal rights to “enemy combatants” and the current projection of imperialist power . Continuing Tigar then notes that: “The common thread that runs through …” the Supreme Court decisions in the”… Cherokee Nation and Dred Scott and the enemy combatant characterization of which Paye writes is the complete exclusion of claims for justice from any possibility of discussion.” In effect Paye and Tigar argue that the denial of claims to justice places certain people, arbitrarily selected, out side the constitutional protections of law.

Pessimistically, Tigar argues further that the combined effect of the MCA, the Detainee Treatment Act and recent executive orders, echo the logic of Slavery- Era judicial thinking that dilutes or negates many constitutionally guaranteed, judicially reinforced legal protections of the accused. While my compressed summary can only serve as mere introduction to their exceptionally valuable work, I must note for my readers, that Paye and Tigar go on to alert us to a broader range and variety of executive attacks on long-held and broadly respected legal rights. We cannot ignore the profound implications of the illuminating research and arguments presented by Paye and Tigar. When their readers fully grasp their, insider/outsider thesis and link it to Tigar’s brief review of how the USamerican government has created categories of people who have no rights but at the same time include them in the National administrative jurisdiction of an all powerful executive, we can more easily understand the formation of the Imperial Presidency and the consequences of its potential global reach.

Arguing that the radically reactionary changes introduced by executive fiat, supported legislatively and in judicial review, these two authors stress that “…the administration has unilaterally abrogated the social contract…” and with the support of the legislative and judicial branches has formed the legal structure of the imperial state. With the Executive office controlling these expanded and largely unchallenged dictatorial powers, Paye argues further in his conclusion, “[the] objective of this administration is to apply to the whole population the procedures that allow it to seize foreigners, torture them and keep them in detention at its sole discretion”. As a result individuals of any country summarily accused of being an enemy of the State can be secretly imprisoned and held indefinitely based upon capricious orders of an unchecked executive. Thus we regress from the “Man in the Iron Mask” to the modern day image of the Man or Woman in the Black-hooded Mask.

Evidently the present administration deeply fears the rising tide of popular protests against many of the accumulating problems associated with its economic mismanagement, political corruption and military aggression, and now intends to choke protest through pressure tactics to achieve compliance. Failing to convince the USamerican population with fear tactics, the present Administration more boldly introduces legal forms of intimidation and the methods of coercion.  From the extremes of out-right physical pain and mental agony, invasions of privacy to the formation of the privatized, domestic prison-state and a growing private, corporate-mercenary, contract  armies, all the salient features of dictatorial controls are becoming visible. Although we have not yet returned to levels of wide-spread, state-organized violence inside the Walled borders of the USA, reminiscent of Twentieth Century European and recent Latin American fascist regimens, it should be clear to all of us that the legal rationale forming the institutional framework for the USamerican dictatorial, Imperial-State is being consciously constructed in an effort to control the anticipated National and International insurgency.

There are Two Right Wings of the Corporate State

While the present Republican administration overtly or covertly demonstrates its preference for coercion, the Democrats mute the use of force by implying their willingness to calm domestic uneasiness by promoting a National social agenda designed to reduce the most grievous social / economic damage inflicted by the long Neoliberal political-economic program. While a major reversal of the deep inequities of income and wealth distribution that have been forced on people over the past thirty years of domestic and international privatization schemes are overdue, the Democrat’s promises of some small measure of relief must also ultimately be based on a continuing plan of National expansion of the USamerican Empire. An expanded domestic Welfare-State program, a return to Social Keynesianism, will be dependent on the continuing National exploitation of the world’s resources and labor. We can, therefore, anticipate that, while the Iron Fist may also be returned to the Velvet Glove and the extraordinary executive powers may not be used, Presidents from either party of Corporate-State Imperialism will not voluntarily repudiate them.

Thinking the Unthinkable…Thinking Beyond Capital

The key to maintaining domestic social peace through relieving current domestic economic pressures will require some form of continuing international economic exploitation. Almost any economic expansion plan will be costly but one interim, regional geopolitical maneuver may represent the least-cost option in the short run that sets the stage for more aggressive Imperialist adventures in the future. Think of the almost inconceivable challenges posed by the intersection of Neo-Mercantilism with Neo-Fascism. Some will be curiously skeptical but we can predict that the majority of casual readers and many Citizens and residents of the USA will be completely incredulous and dismissive. The majority of USamericans instilled with collective notions of their national democratic heritage would be astounded by a corporate-state plan to dominate and administer regional or global economics but we should consider that a state managed mercantile trade scheme is quite compatible with non-democratic forms of governance. The incipient form of managed international trade favorable to the USA already exists under the NAFTA and CAFTA agreements, while corporate-military-state has been developing continuously through various trends for at least Seventy years.

Recall, in 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote the words “It Can’t Happen Here”. Yet, his fictional account of USamerican Fascism resonates more plainly with compelling urgency in our thoughts today. In that same period General Smedley Butler testified in the Congress of the USA on an attempted fascist coup which he was to lead with a private army of a half million men. coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/butler.html .Soon after in 1944, Henry Wallace, Vice President of the USA, writing at the request of the New York Times, presented the early outlines of Fascism in the USA. www.truthout.org/docs_03/082103F.shtml   Approximately forty years later in 1980′s Bertram Gross explained, in his copious study “Friendly Fascism” how far advanced the fascist economic program had developed by the time of the Reagan Administration. www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_B Gross.html  It can’t happen here?

Bi-partisan Consensus on Corporate-State-Capitalism? Oh No?… “It Can’t Happen Here”!

Certainly one may note elements of Fascism in the United States of America but as Bertram Gross argued in “Friendly Fascism” and as Tom Hartmann underscored in his more recent article posted on the Common Dreams web site on 28 August 2006, in “Reclaiming The Issues: Islamic or Republican Fascism?”, the most salient features of Italian and German (Nazi) fascism may not be recognizable. Fascism in the USA, is not marching in wearing a Brown Shirt carrying  a Swastika banner , it is taking its form from deep-rooted, corporate-economic tendencies and developing out of the logical operational extensions of its own internal Capitalist imperatives for production controls sustained through many layers of conformity to well established corporate criteria. As Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s Minister of Public Education and self-described philosopher of Fascism, wrote, “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

Toward Greater control and conformity

The roots of modern social conformism, a necessary precondition for the formation of fascism, run deep in the patterns of the socially regimented methods of Capitalist production. The long history of the formulation of laws to accommodate the needs of rapidly advancing capitalist methods, from its earliest days, conditioned the social environment necessary for the continuation of Capitalist operations.  From the Enclosure Acts through the  vagrancy laws, along with their extremely harsh penalties, the power of the state was used to prepare the way for the styles of production being developed along with inventions and innovations that were facilitating the increasing rationalization of capitalist production through the First, Second and now perhaps yet another “Industrial Revolution”. Each phase of its modern development has entailed changes in social behaviors and the reorganization of entire societies. Since its earliest days capitalists steadily pursued specific  methodological strategies to achieve the systemically required levels of social control, based on conformity of all types: conformity of production standards based on uniform, interchangeable parts and interchangeable people influenced  worker behavior, discipline and practices aligned to the organization of closely integrated production and distribution systems, which gradually became linked  regionally, nationally and now internationally based upon a globally integrated policy of pitiless exploitation. As the corporate modes of operation were established, refined and standardized they too called forth specific social patterns compatible with the exigencies of the basic mode of production. In each successive historical stage of Capital’s expansion and mutations business owners and mangers made great efforts to control the entire array of social and material variables required to develop uninterrupted production schedules and distribution networks. Through periods of growth or contractions, capitalists have attempted to use their increasing influence to create the social conditions and shape individual behaviors most favorable to their economic needs. Whether sweeping away other competitors, controlling natural resource zones or trying to gain power over or destroy unions, the corporate elite have consistently pursued the political-economic avenues of power to remove all social and political obstacles to its fundamental systemic necessities.

Capitalist production methods have always required increasing levels of compliance and control, to achieve the predictability needed to insure the highest rate of profitable return on any investment. The central imperative of profit maximization throughout Capital’s history engendered an obvious tendency toward the increasing control of all economic variables. Any potential disturbances to the unrestricted flow of the basic factors of production: Capital, Labor and resources, or disturbances in the markets where these production factors are bought and sold, have been seen as a constant potential threat to the uninterrupted acquisition of material and labor necessary for predictable production schedules and product distribution. In each periodic phase of Capital’s mutations real flesh-and-blood capitalists make every effort to overcome, control or remove political, social and economic impediments to their goal of maximizing profit.

Throughout this historical process, while they have repeatedly proclaimed public regulations of the market mechanisms to be unnatural intrusions on corporate power and prerogatives to administer their own economic environment, Capitalist have consistently called on power of government to help them control the social variables. Corporate leaders and their political allies characterize government interference in the private sphere of  business practices  as unwarranted, unnecessary and unnatural interventions into the purported self-regulating mechanisms of the Capitalist system, until of course , the moment of one of many  self-induced systemic breakdowns.

While the myths of the Golden Age of “Free Market Capitalism” are continuously glorified for public consumption, the indisputable, contrasting reality is found in the capitalists’ incessant efforts to use their political and administrative levers of power to manage every human and material variable in the production process. Since the end of World War Two, the tightening concentrations of corporate combinations nationally and internationally required meticulously coordinated production and marketing net works bringing together dependable flows of information and materials arriving and departing internationally linked offices and factories in many distant locations.  Planning centers were increasingly connected to production sites, often electronically linked to far flung assembly plants which form tightly integrated production and distribution grids that call for continuously monitored and controlled movement of funds, material, labor and products at every point along the expanding production-distribution web. Among all the production variables, labor, the working power of men and women, too often children, have been the least tractable.

Through each phase of increasing militarization of the domestic USamerican society the benefits of closely coordinated, highly regimented war production were learned and rarely forgotten by the corporate elite who, especially after the Second World War, increasingly occupied key logistical administrative positions in government and corporate planning offices. The simple logic of planned and coordinated corporate-production processes synchronize comfortably with the traditional, hierarchical, military-echelons of command.  When President Eisenhower spoke of his apprehension of the formation of the Military-Industrial Complex, he may not have fully appreciated the deeper and broader cultural implications of the bonding of military regimen to its civilian corporate-command counterpart. Neither the corporate control of production nor the conduct of military command admits democratic processes. Both demand obedience by subordinates to the direction of authority. Both the military and corporate bosses require that all assigned personnel strictly follow received orders. The similarities of the regimented processes of multinational production and the conduct of international warfare form a symbiosis of needs, styles and myths that have been shaping an intimately militarized-Capitalist cultural nexus. While the patriotic verve animating war-time production might not easily be sustain though the interwar periods, a mix of fear factors, rewards and punishments have been shown to sustain worker productivity..

The Bonding Process

Across the long, USamerican history of transcontinental and international economic expansion its growing need for military reinforcement engendered increasing degrees of mutual cooperation and inter-dependency. Liberally seasoned with appeals to patriotic sentiments and the cultivation of constant fear of some threatening other, the Military-Corporate bond was threatened.  Repeatedly conditioned through every phase of corporate growth at each stage of capitalist industrial expansion through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, we observe the closer integration of corporate and military activities reaching periodic peaks at moments of inter-imperialist rivalry usually culminating in wars too numerous to mention. The linking of war making capacity to capitalist production techniques rose to new heights of intimacy among all the World War Two Combatants on all sides of the conflicts. While corporate leaders learned the importance of government planning, they also learned that to plan reliably they needed predicable flows of all the factors of production including the labor variable which could be  facilitated by their national military forces.

Following the Second World War the macro-economic benefits of planned war-production were quickly generalized and became integral, stabilizing elements of national economic planning. In particular the National Military of the USA and its compliant clients in other nations became the most dependable purchasers of war making products. The developing relations between military procurement and international corporate expansion, linked to domestic economic stability, became abundantly clear. Each time National consumer spending lagged; the military would find a need for new trucks, planes, guns and other supplies. In each successive economic recession since the end of World War Two, new enemies were discovered or invented at home and abroad and industrial production of military equipment was increased. The conjured fear-factor of enemies lurking everywhere has proven sufficient to mobilize public funds for private Capitalist gain. The Demand for the instruments of war since 1945 seemed to be insatiable and the growing material symbiosis fostered an operational bond giving rise to cultural norms that develop into popularized mythology.

The myth of corporate efficiency, under the direction of the civilian corporate command process also synchronized well with corresponding myths of the effectiveness of military command. Ignoring cost overruns, production delays and poor quality equipment, until recently corporate boasts of on-time delivery matched the propaganda of “precision bombing”, now called “surgical bombing”. Although occasionally contradicted by the untimely revelations of equipment failures, the myths gained currency as the world’s most powerful military is continuously supplied by the world’s largest corporate complex. Corporate organization, with its deep roots in the unitary capitalist command process of production, replicates and compliments the command structure of military culture. The fabled notion of military might as the overriding mediator of political conflict also combines with and supports the predatory transnational corporate capacity to launch over-powering capital invasions. Though each escalating level of macro-economic instability during the post World-War-Two economic contractions in the USA, military purchases, in preparation for wars, increased, thus giving Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” a painfully  explicit context which is no where more graphically demonstrated than in the corporate scramble for war contracts preferentially granted to privileged USamerican Capitalists in Iraq. transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english25/materials/schumpeter.html

Today, Transnational Capital’s need for closely coordinated military protection to enforce its demands for unrestricted investment is not only extending the intimate material relations between the National military and corporate-capital but it is fostering a mutually supportive, authoritarian cultural standard of command based upon the direct use of force or its threatened use domestically and internationally. As the repressive apparatus of the police-state expands to control possible domestic interference in the conduct of corporate business, internationally, the National military forces of the USA are deployed to secure and control the regions of strategically important natural resources, and distribution channels for labor, material products, and capitalist financial operations. As people in other nations resist the intrusion of Capital in its various forms, costly military force is more readily applied to a greater of lesser degree. The extensive USamerican overt military operations and covert destabilizing campaigns in or near economically important locations have resulted in a nearly global USamerican military presence that takes on a character of world-wide domination. Evidently globalizing Capital requires a globalized repression racket. As Smedley Butler said, he was nothing but a gangster for Capitalism. Through this process, Capital’s military arm became the enforcer of corporate economic aggression. The present circumstances of international, global dominance by the World’s most powerful military state begs the question of what type of National-Imperialist-state is in formation.  .

The Past Revisited?

In tight, well-argued articles www.counterpunch.org/ petras09052006.html, www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/jul01petras.htm (many more to be found on the James Petras web site) James Petras clearly sets out the Neo-con’s version of the Neo-liberal strategy for USamerican Empire building over the coming decade and beyond. Extending Harry Magdoff’s arguments, well established in his Imperialism without Colonies, as convincingly reinforced by John Bellamy Foster in Naked Imperialism, Petras underscores two major points made by both Magdoff and Foster that the all-out attempt to shift wealth and income from the poor and the middle income population of the USA over the last three decades was intended to provide the financial liquidly essential for more aggressive Direct Foreign Investment abroad. While clearly identifying the Neo-cons’ strategies for reducing domestic incomes of the vast majority of working people and increasing the costs of domestic social programs including attempts to privatize Social Security as ways of mobilizing financial liquidity and concentrating it in the hands of the already super rich, Petras adds a logical extension to Magdoff’s argument by introducing the idea of a new type of Mercantilism becoming a policy objective of USamerican designers of intercontinental domination. In light of recent revelations of a USamerican led North American Union(NAU) www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=North_American_Union and it’s supporting “Security and Prosperity Partnership” (SPP) www.spp.gov/, the suggestion of a reversion to an updated form of mercantilist trade practices is completely in line with the present thrust toward a more closely integrated, corporate control of the economies on the North American Continent thus taking NAFTA and CAFTA one long, all-embracing  step further.

As critical analysts we should not be too quick to dismiss the possibility of a reversion to an earlier imperialist strategy and keep an eye out for its leading indicators. Although one might argue that Monopoly Capital, in its latest hyper-financialized form, has long ago superseded its earlier mercantile practices of merchant capitalism, Corporate-Capitalism often retains the functional vestiges of its early stages in its new more sophisticated organizational structures. As present technology has allowed for the development and deployment of more innovative investment strategies and instruments, at the same time corporate conglomeration through mergers has brought production companies under the control of banking institutions while some production companies have developed internal financial units all of which facilitate closer integration of investment, production and distribution networks. As we have painfully learned from historical experience, the periodic crises of Capitalism do not lead in a straight line in any one direction. Therefore, in the current accelerating crisis we should be alert to the potential for regression in a mutated form. The increasing corporate tendency toward tightening managed-control of all inputs and the clear trend toward regional economic domination supported by a globally positioned military, hold all the indicators of State assisted, corporate-control integrated with military managed procurement that would have the early Spanish and British mercantilists turn in their graves with envy.

The operational needs of giant multinational and transnational capital have three irreducible and unavoidable conditions of production and distribution: the regular procurement of low cost materials, cheap labor and uninterrupted sales of products at increasing rates of profit. Translated into the specific concrete terms of managed markets for labor and material resources, Capital in any form at any size must constantly strive to gain and, to the best of its ability, control the production inputs, their marketing outlets and all the lines of communications that connect them. Today as both the scale and international character of corporate production grows; the flow of inputs must be regularized.

Under the objective terms of increasing international economic competition forcing the long decline of USamerican economic domination of world-wide production, from its post WWII high of about 60% to a current low of about 23%, it is not surprising that we are witnessing the increasing use of military force as an instrument of USamerican Capital’s economic penetration in resource-rich regions and the migrant labor supply zones. Presently in our period of predatory-finance capital there appears to have formed a closer relationship between expanding  militarization of the domestic and international economy and the aspirations of investing institutions that mobilize funds for expanding Direct Foreign Investment by National and Transnational Corporate-Capital. The intermediate term effects of predatory investing abroad, backed-up by ever present threat of punitive military action has until recently combined to stimulate the USamerican  domestic economy in at least three important interrelated ways: military spending has supplemented domestic consumption, further concentrated the accumulation of wealth and mobilized the reflux of US dollars through the fear-factor.

Continuing military aggression abroad accompanied by the further contraction of the domestic economy resulting in rising rates of domestic poverty may also prompt increasing social repression at home. At the very moment that the Ruling Class needs broad-based public consent for its long-term, imperialist project, rising social and economic insecurities are engendering countervailing social apprehensions that are eroding public support for wars for corporate expansion. The deepening domestic and international economic stagnation resulting in rapidly declining home sales and prices, shrinking or disappearing pensions, increasing health care costs accompanied by reduced services, merge to increase insecurity at home that further erodes the base for consensual support for sustaining imperialist adventures.

The consequences of planned reduction of domestic social spending have been anticipated by increasing the means and methods of coercion and control of the domestic population. The immense transfers of wealth and income used to increase military and police state spending is another means to support a more forceful Military Keynesianism project.  Having abandoned the policy of “Guns and Butter” of the Vietnam War period, the only policy instruments remaining as lower-level, social rewards and incomes are eroded is the use of various methods of distraction, such as entertainment, and increasing repression of potentially rising popular dissent.

It is becoming increasingly evident to more people throughout the USA that the social / welfare needs of the National population are being abandoned. The cumulative effects of privatization in general, unremitting attacks on organized labor, reduced spending for the health, education and general welfare needs of the domestic population resulting in the massive transfer of wealth from the middle to the top income strata through tax reductions for the super rich has the effect of transferring the national wealth from those most in need to those who need no more. The use of the wealth and income transferred from the lower 80 percent of the Working Families of the USA to the upper 1, that is one percent, of the richest families, as reported by Jack Rasmus in his article published in Z Magazine, February 2007, has the effect of placing the direct cost of Imperialist adventures on those who will be forced to fight and pay in blood, lower incomes and higher taxes for the future wars of conquest that will repress us all.

While the current rate of wealth and income transfers from the lower income levels of USamerican Working families to the richest one percent may be reaching its political limits at Trillion USAmerican Dollars a year, www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Feb2007/rasmus0207.html , www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/May2007/rasmus 0507.html a change in the national political balance of power between the two wings of USamerican Capitalist-Imperialism, will mark little more than a modest adjustment to income distribution that will not significantly affect the present concentration wealth needed to continue Foreign Direct investment. Petras is probably correct to project that future fiscal and monetary adjustments will have the effect of ameliorating the most extreme domestic social / economic strains but we should recognize that the range of economic flexibility is narrow and narrowing. The present level of massive public and private debt has foreclosed many Social Keynesian options.

In the context of intensifying economic challenges to USamerican domination of world resources, markets, and the evident limitations of its awesome military power, we should give careful consideration to Petra’s view that a new form of mercantilism could emerge as tactical pathway to temporarily supply the resources necessary to sustain domestic consumption at a level sufficient to maintain passive popular compliance with a continuing program to consolidate USamerican power on the North American Continent.  While we have not yet arrived at the historically conditioned stage of another great grab for colonies comparable to the Imperialist frenzy that occurred in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, we are certainly observing the redevelopment of economic “spheres of influence” through the rules of the WTO and the practices of the IMF and World Bank. The combined effect of the economic and financial dependence of other nominally independent states, reinforced by the strategic positioning of USamerican Military forces encouraging and enforcing bilateral treaties, may presently obviate the need for direct, costly colonial domination but should inter-imperialist rivalry increase through an extended period of economic contraction, a renewal of direct challenges to acquire colonies may retrace that recent history of Imperialism.

In the intervening period as the corporate-capitalists of many nations jockey for advantageous positions, individually and at times cooperatively, we can anticipate that the maneuvering will bring National corporate interests into conflict and, depending on the perceived levels of relative power, tendencies toward cooperation or conflict will turn on the political perceptions conditioned by the objective relations of internal and external strength. One crucial element of projecting and protecting international power will be a county’s ability to buy domestic peace and popular acquiescence. The neo-mercantilist scheme inherent in the USamerican initiative to form the North American Union can be seen as an effort to secure access to strategic resources on the Continent with the objective of gaining some minimally necessary degree of broader international popular consent for an expanded hemispheric rule by the USA.

The moment is rife with contradiction yet in the present context of increasing international competition combined with economic stagnation in its National domestic economy; the USamerican capitalists may recognize a less costly detour in promoting a State-Corporate controlled Mercantilist Trade Zone on the North American Continent. To continue paying for domestic, social peace USamerican Corporate Capital may see in a NAU a way to reduce military expenditures in order to modestly expand social spending as one method of supporting continuing Corporate-Military led global economic expansion.

At the present stage of the international crisis of Capital, the ongoing need to seek investment outlets necessitates increasing military presence to secure raw materials, markets for products and the control of labor flows. In the current phase of potentially long-term, system-wide, economic stagnation, Capital is again attempting to resolve the surplus absorption problem through military expenditures supporting Foreign Direct Investment. The funds required for the expansion of these interrelated adventures can now only be mobilized from three major sources: domestic and international borrowing which seems to have surpassed the saturation point, continuing wealth and income transfers to the super rich through tax policies while constricting social services and reducing general wage levels. Domestically each of these strategies is facing increasing popular resistance. Thus if Petras is correct, a neo-mercantilist oriented plan for North American Union may be a lower cost, transitional option to sustain military supported corporate economic expansion.

Incongruously, however, two recent announcements by President Bush and the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, appear to indicate that the present Administration in Washington is preparing for growing resistance to its expansionist plans by increasing, not reducing, military spending in anticipation of wider regional wars with more formidable opponents. According to Reuters on 22 October this year G. W. Bush called for a nearly two hundred billion usad increase in current military spending while the New York Times reported on the same day that Admiral Mullen in a Pentagon interview presented his case for a long-term increase in Military budgets.  When one recalls that the plan for a North American Union is an initiative of the Bush Administration, one can only conclude from these calls for increases in current and future military appropriations that this Administration is preparing to underwrite its tactical approach to economic domination by increasing its military might. When we further consider that any opponent of USamerican expansion is deemed to be an enemy, it becomes clear that current Administration is not counting on a totally smooth transition through any of its imperialist projects. While the use of force is held at the ready and its current cost at the officially calculated four percent of GDP is already draining the domestic economy, the effects of increases of military expenditure portend further reductions in domestic social spending.

Here in lays the dilemma for the ruling elite: continuing the imperialist expansion without provoking a broader domestic and perhaps continent-wide social reaction.  Without international economic expansion, domestic economic contraction in the USA will lead to more demonstrations of social discontent and perhaps to the “social insurgency” anticipated in the UK Defense Ministry report. Never-the-less, we should also note that a scaled down Neoliberal Corporate-Military plan for political-economic integration of North America might allow, under present conditions, a modest expansion of social spending which may temporarily calm anxieties growing among the people of all three affected countries . While a political overture to the configuration of a North American Union formed by an economic merger of Canada, The United States of America and The United State of Mexico may suggest a non-violent transition to continental political-economic integration, the recent proposals for increases in military spending indicate that the option of employing armed force is being prepared . Again it is now becoming increasingly evident, as in our recent history, economic plans are conceived in military terms.

Now that the USA has gained almost unrestricted access to North American resources and labor supplies, a move toward political union, while facing popular resistance in all three countries, especially if labor is denied free cross-border movement, will not resolve the domestic problems but simply spread them out over a wider geographical area. We can anticipate that the resulting expansion of continental-wide debt and mounting unemployment will increase the potential for   spreading any budding social insurgency across a broader field of economic exploitation. In the present context of the Militarize-Walled Frontiers and announced plans for increasing military budgets, the plan for a North American Union  should be seen as an executive policy initiative for Corporate-Capitals’ managed control of Continent-wide industrial production which clearly anticipates popular opposition. As both the military-command, corporate-capital  strive to continue the private appropriation of public spaces, resources and control labor power through its  authoritarian methods, it is almost a forgone conclusion that increased military force will be needed. The expanded and intensified means of social controls required by the internal corporate command process will also more quickly diffuse the corporate cultural norms of industrialize regimentation throughout the society. The totalizing cultural influence of USamerican Armed-Corporate-Capital, regionally and internationally, will more rapidly accelerate its top-down control of working families in the USA and throughout the Americas unless true popular resistance soon develops and that could form the conditions for the social insurgency anticipated by the UK Ministry of Defense document quoted above. The cost of consolidating USAmerican domination of the North American Continent is therefore also potentially very high. While a democratizing component may be added to the executive initiative forming the NAU, at this moment the executive command approach sustained by the recently announced increasing military expenditures appears to reject the possibility of popular participation in the regional economic consolidation project.

The Neo-mercantilist aim of the current trade agreements is already very obvious but the objective USamerican Capitalist goal of sustaining the “…the position of disparity …” argued by George Keenan in 1948, is more difficult today yet more necessary for supporting the overall USamerican Imperialist project than it has been since the end of the Cold War. While it is highly unlikely that the United States of America can expand its present rate of consuming the world’s resources, it is also realistic to assume that the current rate of its National consumption of world resources cannot be contracted without increasing domestic and regional discontent. In fact a plan for a NAU under militarized, corporate control will have the effect of reducing general wage levels throughout the North American Continent.  While the Neo-Mercantilist  plan cannot provide sufficient resources for the continued expansion of USAmerican domestic consumption, less so for all the working families of the entire Continent , if accompanied by a National agenda of controlling workers’ income through a migrant, guest-worker program, the resulting two-tiered worker status will increase labor competition for fewer jobs that will most likely cause a  deflationary cycle that could serve as a powerful transitional economic force to coerce the long term reduction of wages throughout the planned North American Mercantilist Zone. We should have no illusions about the reason why instruments of militarized police-state force are being simultaneously prepared.

 Neo-Mercantilism joined to Industrial Feudalism?

USAmerican Corporate-Capitalism, under the current strains of the rising military costs of empire, and in the context of forming a North American Union show a tendency toward the development of a type of industrial feudalism which when supported by mercantilist trade practices and expanded cross-border, labor controls can easily lead to industrial servitude. As the dominant regional economic-military power, the USamerican State is presently attempting to secure control over North American labor supplies, resources and markets through regional trade agreements that are designed to allocate and distribute, workers and resources to meet the production requirements of transnational corporate capital throughout the North America by administering the movement of labor and resources through controlled transportation routes. As convincingly argued by Richard Vogel in his revealing articles “The NAFTA Corridors” (Monthly Review No.8, February 2006) and its companion piece “Transient Servitude”(Monthly Review No.8, January 2007) planned guest worker programs, prearranged to supply workers with short-term visas, to regional production zones will create a controlled labor force mainly dependent for employment in mostly non-unionized corporations which will result in a form of industrial servitude. The proposed guest workers programs will pit nationally based labor forces directly against each other and drive wages lower by increasing workers competition for jobs throughout the controlled continental labor zones. Unchecked, the corporate domination, regulation and enforcement of the political and economic conditions of employment will form the specific conditions of Industrial feudalism. A concomitant redeployment of enhanced public and increasingly privatized police and contract military forces monitoring regional, cross-border labor flows will escalate the formation of police-state control that will reduce “free” labor to servants of corporate capital.

The tendencies of this political-cultural, economic process is already very clear: the political administrative control over market operations complement the internal corporate command process which reflects the military command structure and operations that binds them in mutual support of the accumulation and concentration of profit.

The quintessential Corporate-State, the Colossus of the North, seems to be entering a critical political-economic impasse which may be characterized as the formation of a crisis of historic proportions shaped by the cumulative effects of years of political miscalculation, fiscal and monetary manipulation , resulting in severely restricted international monetary and military options, all made increasingly complicated by a political crisis of credibility which is made more precarious  by the domestic opposition’s inability to move decisively. These conditions, now aggravated by the political-military brinksmanship of the present USamerican Administration are thus merging to shape the political-economic directions that will go beyond Capital and beyond democracy.

As the political–economic crisis intensifies, the institutionalized authoritarian corporate tendency to administratively control economic variables will gather a greater momentum toward the formation of Feudal type industrialism through the corporate-administered, militarized-command economy.  The resulting corporate industrial feudal rule will be the New Fascism.

WHOSE “GLOBLIZIATION” WILL IT BE?

The first element (of politics) is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and lead… (We must ask) is it (our) intention that there should always be rulers and ruled…? Antoino Gramscs, (SPN). p.144.

In the present conjuncture we, all the other ordinary working people of the world, have a growing space to form a political opening in which to develop social and economic alternatives. The concentrating crisis of Capitalism, especially the intensifying USamerican Corporate-Capitalist crisis, presents us with a historical occasion to quickly accomplish two related tasks: make the necessary accurate analysis of our present situation upon which we then formulate and coordinate alternative strategies. We have entered a propitious period in which we have the opportunity and obligation to carefully examine and critically evaluate the unfolding trends of Twenty First Century Capitalism as it suffers the internal convulsions of its inborn limitations. Those restrictions again present the world’s people with potentially very grave dangers but also a vast opportunity for positive social change. If we, the little people, “the ruled”, do not occupy the political space, it will be filled by forces, over which, we have no control.

While Capital will be forced to retrace the history of its past practices which may include the typical National-expansionist, Fascist option, those of us who can envision democratically guided, social-economic alternatives, face an open field of varied possibilities. We are not bound by our past but can inform our future decisions based upon our own rich, multifaceted Working-Class History. This contrasting reality is the most dangerous threat to the continuation of Capitalism. Now as in ,1910 ,1917, 1948 and 1959, following the great social revolutionary experiments, Capitalists, every where, fear and prepare for the future threats that will restrict their continuing access to cheap labor, natural resources and sales zones. As they celebrated the end of the “communist” threats to their expansion, they, especially the ruling elite of the Capitalist Colossus of the USA, took careful note of the many other points of potential resistance to its militarized economic aggression. As the editors of Monthly Review note, the proletariat of all stripes is now seen as the enemy because we, the ruled, present natural and historically developed human needs that constantly lay just, social claims and challenges to the insatiable greed of Capital.

On one side the capitalists are constantly under threat by other capitalists but capitalists tend to manage their differences, within their system through administered forms of cooperation, to avoid totally savaging each other too frequently. As the Washington Consensus is eroded and USAmerican hegemony is rejected, new dangers form on the horizon. Short of a massively destructive general war among the Capitalist competitors, we must focus our study and an alternative program on the most likely adjustments that will be made within the framework of real, existing Corporate-Capitalism.

In our analysis we need not assume that we are examining a completely new formation. The Capitalist mode of production has reached a very mature state of highly sophisticated operational innovations but its goals and methods are not new. Although we are at a more mature and, pervasive stage of technological improvement and global reach, Capitalism itself is not necessarily stronger. In fact it appears to be much weaker. Certainly USamerican Capital is not relatively stronger today than it was at the end of World War Two. Like the Wizard of OZ it stands far smaller behind a fearsome but enfeebled image of force. Corporate Capital can no longer create; it has entered the volatile stage out of which it can only grow by destroying: yes, destroying people, their accumulated work and our natural environment. As USamerican Capitalists face increasing opposition to planned private expansion, their Nationalist-Imperialist threat grows. If the communist threat has been eliminated, only four major threats to USamerican Corporate Capitalist expansion remain: Systemic break-down, limits of the natural environment, challenges from other Capitalists’ greed and workers needs. Presently facing all of these formidable obstacles, to continuing expansion, the USamerican Imperialist drive becomes increasing dangerous.

Let us, “the ruled”, keep clear in our minds we can organize production to fulfill human needs through a socially oriented democratic processes. By attempting to organize production for human need democratically, all of us together, become the central threat to the corporate tendency to privatize control of all of our social relations: in our communities, in our schools, in our work places, in our play places: thus in our current period of economic contraction, our fundamental social human needs stand in direct opposition to corporate expansion.

At this dangerously confrontational stage, Capital approaches its internal nemesis, the stagnant state: no growth, then contraction. In the stagnant state prior to severe economic convulsion, capitalists and we, the ruled, fully understand the current meaning of Joseph Schumpeter’s comments on “creative destruction”. Ranging in practice from wars that destroy material in order to replace it to “built-in obsolescence”, Capital creates problems just to make money correcting them. Tobacco products may be the political-economic metaphor of our time. The corporate profits made from the growing production of life-threatening carcinogens set in motion an expanding series of profit oriented production to solve problems that need not have been created.  Capital too may have reached the cancerous stage of its own destruction but we can be sure that there remains plenty of destructive potential in the mutating omnivorous beast.

An interim Assessment

The relations of both internal and external political/economic forces will influence the direction of political tendencies. The proletariat of all types must again make itself a vital social political force. If the USAmerican domestic population remains passive, an opening on to an alternative political terrain favorable to social and economic justice on a national scale is not a possibility. A return to a scaled down Social Keynesianism or Welfare-State Capitalism as a Left-lead National program is not likely unless the Unions aggressively and independently organize in their work places and in the neighborhoods where their members live. Failing these opportunities, two dangerous options remain. The Multilateralist secure a Democratic Party-led,  congressional effort gaining sufficient Republican support for a return to a balanced Corporate-Capitalist approach of a  ”Guns and Butter” program calming domestic fears while making the necessary adjustments to military expenditures to support a modified replay of the “Good Neighbor Policy” on a global or at least on a continental scale. Thus the Iron Fist will be returned to the velvet glove and the USA returns to a slower, corporate driven Imperialist expansion based upon the consolidation of the Corporate-State Administration of Capitalist culture. Or, the Unilateralist Neo-cons continue to press the military options.

The Ruling Class’ bi-party consensus on world-wide, if not inter-planetary, domination should be clear: the specific tactics of their bi-partisan approach raise the remaining questions but we can also project the differences, the trajectory of possible out-comes and potential points of intervention. We can anticipate that the international and domestic political-economic crisis will broaden and deepen and with it increasing  popular unrest perhaps leading to, “social insurgencies” of the  “middle class proletariat”, not to mention the rest of the proletariat. While the issues directly related to the War in Iraq and the expanding war throughout the Middle East, now targeting Iran, and its immediate domestic consequences are of paramount concern in many USamerican voters’ minds, the broader ramifications and longer term consequences may not be as evident as their most salient manifestations.

Today the ruling elites’ flexibility in developing any of the conventional economic stimulus options will be much more limited than in the 1930′s. The economy is operating at a much higher employment rate, National public and private debt rate is much higher and less controllable, the domestic savings rate is negligible, and social expectations are different and even unrealistic.  With the level of political organization among working families at its post World-War-Two low point, the Rulers may see the production of fear and the increased use of force as reasonable option to control the domestic population as the basis on which to resume international expansion.

Whatever the out-come of the debate between the two major USAmerican Parties of Corporate-Capitalism on the maintenance and expansion of economic domination, we, “the ruled”, can be sure that sustaining such an ambitious National-Imperialist project will require the power of the State to mobilize the economic resources and physical strength of the ordinary working families to fight the wars for military-corporate world-wide domination.

We have options we but must again learn how to develop and exercise them … I offer this essay as a modest contribution to that vital discussion.

It is the problem of relations between structure and superstructure which must be accurately posed and resolved if the forces which are active in the history of a particular period are to be correctly analyzed and the relation between them determined. Two principles must orient the discussion: 1) that no society sets itself tasks for whose accomplishments the necessary and sufficient conditions do not either already exist or are not at least beginning to emerge and develop; 2) that no society breaks down and can be replaced until it has first developed all the forms of life which are implicit in its internal relations:”

Antonio Gramsci , SPN , 177.

No matter how accurate our analysis and interpretation of the historical process may be, it is merely the starting point of injecting the vitality of human agency in to the political scene.

** I will elaborate this point further on in this essay.

Arturo Yarish is a former USA union representative. As an activist, he promotes the mutual recognition between workers on both sides of the Rio Grande to devise a combined struggle. This essay was written in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in November 2007. The author has submitted it to Tlaxcala as a contribution to the debate.