The systematic fact is that capitalism cannot be sustained without imperialist conquest. This is especially true in times of capitalist crisis, and the current juncture is probably posing the greatest historical crisis to the viability of US-led capitalism. Imperialism, with its proclivity for foreign interference, subversion and warmongering, is therefore currently at its highest point of need and manifestation for relieving the US-led stagnant economic order. That is what makes the present global situation disturbingly dangerous.
This structural connection between capitalism and imperialism was made cogently over a century ago by the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in his study Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin’s insights into the systematic economic and political causes of the First World War have stood the test of time, albeit censored from mainstream Western consciousness. Those insights on how capitalist crisis furnishes imperialist predation can be applied with equal cogency in explaining the origins of the Second World War and many other subsequent international conflicts, including the current rash of US-backed regime-change operations on different continents.
Lenin’s analysis accounts for why Washington has stepped up its addiction for regime change around the globe over the past decade since when the US-led capitalist order has become locked into a seemingly inextricable depression. As in previous times, war and imperialism are the only way for the system to alleviate its own destructive tendency for impasse. Little wonder, ironically, that one of the first acts of the Western-sponsored protesters in Kiev at the end of last year was to smash up statues commemorating VI Lenin.
What is taking place in Ukraine is consonant with the bigger historic dynamic that the US and its Western proxies have stepped up their drive for imperialism – everywhere.
Ultimately, the targets for Western capitalist designs are the two major perceived geopolitical rivals of Russia and China. Both these countries represent a block on unfettered Western expansionism in Eurasia and the Pacific.
In that regard, ominously, Ukraine may be seen as merely a beachhead for Western regime-change plans in Russia itself. With the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a global leader standing in the way of all-out Western naked aggression that «obstruction» has elevated Russia as a priority objective for Washington. This is fully consistent with renewed threats of militarism from the US towards Russia (and China) in the form of ballistic missile deployments along borders, nuclear weapons expansion (euphemistically called «upgrade») and the veiled doctrine of «first strike» capability.
Ukraine illustrates a chilling denouement of a political tendency that has been evolving in American imperialism over the past decade. To Wesley Clark’s infamous list of covert American regime change operations, the unspoken ultimate prize is becoming increasingly evident – Moscow.
In truth, however, it is not simply a case of the post-1945 American Cold War against Russia being resumed. The US-led global capitalist war on Russia goes back to the October Revolution of 1917. The onslaught on Soviet Russia by Nazi Germany was a Western covert plan to subjugate a vast territory that had become out of Western capitalism’s control. (The subject of a subsequent column.)
The neo-Nazi paramilitaries unleashed by the West to destabilize the Ukraine, and Russia, presently, resonate with an old, systematic agenda of Western imperialist regime change towards the East and elsewhere. There is nothing anomalous about the historical association of the Western capitalist ruling class and present-day fascist thuggery.
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