JOHN VAROLI—Trump won’t scale back the empire. He is obsessed with American “greatness”, which means that the U.S. will continue to destabilize the international order, enhancing our status as a pariah nation. (Yes, most of the world hates us). Whoever wins the presidential race, the loser will be the human race.
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EDITOR—Joti Brar demolishes the carefully cultivated myth that bourgeois democracy and periodic elections can possibly improve the lot of the working class, or eventually hand over power to the actual producers instead of the (ever-fewer) billionaires. Topics: History of elections and electioneering in capitalist nations. Joti reviews the record of capitalism as far back as 1820 • Overproduction, the incurable illness of capitalism • Election time circus in the US • The looting of the Soviet Union could not solve global capitalism’s problems • Inexorable impoverishment of the vast majority of humanity under global capitalism. • Constant instability and war.
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FEMI AKOLAFE—o, we are not Russian bots and are not persuaded by Russian propaganda, even though I feel entitled to be swayed by whatever I choose.
It is the 500+ years of unremitting violence and destruction that people of the European Stock have inflicted on the rest of humanity that makes some of us cheer Putin as he struggles to end the hegemonic domination of the World by Westerners.
I am no expert on biology, much less on genetics, so I cannot offer opinions on what exactly makes people of European extraction find it impossible to live and let live. Why do they have an insatiable desire to dominate and control?
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EDITOR—The fall of Fascism, subsequent nationalizations, the entrance of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) into government, the rise of workers’ commissions, the mobilization of urban and rural protest, and land occupations held the world in thrall, if only for a short time. In the end, the corporatist bureaucratic state apparatus and its economic partners emerged renewed, chastened, and not unscathed. Chilcote singles out the durability and continuity of the state apparatus as a major factor in the prevailing hegemonic bloc and blames the fractiousness of the Left for failing to replace it. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the attempts to create a counter-hegemonic bloc paved the way for democratic, pluralistic politics in Portugal.
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RAINER SHEA—This damage won’t be enough to defeat China, nor the empire’s other next big opponent Iran; the coming war maneuvers will certainly backfire on the imperialists, like how it backfired when they picked a fight with Russia. The danger is in how many lives the hegemon may take during its collapse. There’s no doubt that the anti-imperialist united front will be able to subdue the hegemon, but in their desperate attempts to survive, the aggressors hope to bring a catastrophe larger than World War II. They’re already in place to take hundreds of thousands of more lives in Palestine, though Hamas has ensured that the plan for settling Gaza won’t be fulfilled.
