REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION in the DIALECTICS OF MULTIPOLARITY
I am sharing the text of my address this March 9 (Bangkok time) to the 5th HESTIA Conference, held at Thammasat University, Bangkok
REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION in the DIALECTICS OF MULTIPOLARITY
By Oliver Boyd-Barrett (BGSU, Ohio; CSUCI, California)
Good morning! I am honored by and deeply grateful for this opportunity to speak at the fifth annual Higher Education, Sociopolitical Trends, and International Affairs conference, on the theme of Regional Governance and the Asia-Pacific Balance of Power. I notice that the acronym HESTIA is also the name for the Greek goddess of the hearth, home, and hospitality, who always had to stay at home, tending the fireplace.
In the context of our conference, I would like to suggest that fire represents for us harmony, community, security, and truth, all these things underpinned by rationality and compassion.
I will argue that one of the most hopeful and significant demonstrations of the labor of HESTIA in our times is the rise of the Global South (or should I say the Global Majority?) and its institutional manifestations in various forms including, perhaps most topically, in the BRICS. While I want to talk to some extent about the BRICS, I do not mean to conflate the institution of the BRICS with the longer-term and more comprehensive reality of the emergence of the Global Majority as a force that can confront and compete with the current hegemonic order represented by the USA and its vassal states.
I will develop my idea that this emergence of the global majority represents a revolution in geopolitics, a turning on its head of the situation that prevailed following the end of World War Two. But also, that this is a revolution that almost from its birth (we could formally pinpoint the date of birth as 2006, the year of the foundation of the original BRIC or, less formally, from the accession of China to membership of the World Trade Organization in 2001) has provoked its own counterrevolution. Indeed, we could even argue that long before the institutionalization of the Global Majority in 2006, the current global Hegemon deliberately sought to contain this revolution in pre-emptive strategies of elite co-option, regime change, debt entrapment, destabilization, and economic segmentation. Such processes were ongoing from before, during and following the waves of independence of the 1950s and 1960s, and the bright but brief flame of the ideas of the New World Economic and Communication Order that surfaced in those times.
My argument is that the counterrevolution is currently being played out in or around or on the pretext of three major locations namely, Ukraine, Palestine, and Taiwan. In each of these locations, further, I will argue that the odds of success for the current Hegemon are not high. But I will also argue that even as the Hegemon’s odds of success fall, the dialectic potential for an outcome that is globally catastrophic is increased.
Of specific concern for China, I will note current intensification of disagreement at the highest levels of US governance between the Russia Hawks and the China Hawks, and consider whether the recent resignation from the State Department of prominent neocon Victoria Nuland is indicative of the elevation of the China Hawks to prominence such that US focus will shift towards a China First policy, particularly in the event of a victory for Donald Trump in November.
I will note now, in the event that time constraints do not permit me to return to this issue at length this morning, that the formal policy of the USA, instituted at the time of Nixon and Kissinger’s visit to China in 1972 is the One China policy, recognizing that the seat of government of the One China is Beijing and yet for decades the US or its proxies have supported what are described as “pro-democracy” movements in Taiwan, have provided military aid to Taiwan, have their own military forces and weapons in Taiwan, engage in formal meetings with Taiwanese politicians and talk openly of what they claim is the inevitability of a Taiwanese struggle for independence from China which the USA will actively support and protect, all within an overall, all-encompassing US policy of the containment of China, through the promotion of anti-China regimes in East and South East regimes, of military alliances with Australia, New Zealand and others that are designed to counter the spread of Chinese influence in the region, and in efforts worldwide (including Africa and the Middle East) to reduce the spread of Chinese influence, including its otherwise very effective Belt and Road initiative.
On the question of whether to use the term Global South as against that of Global Majority, I am inclined to Global Majority, on the basis, first, that the current membership of the BRICS as of January 1 2024 represents 3.5 billion people or 45% of the global total of 8.1 billion people (albeit only 28% of the global economy as conventionally measured in terms of GDP) and second, that there is every expectation that to the current membership of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE, and Saudi Arabia) there will be added in due course the populations of forty or more other countries that have already expressed interest in joining. The resulting aggregate will surely exceed 50% of the world’s population. The term Global South, on the other hand, misleadingly identifies the bloc of those countries that are not deeply affiliated with the US-led Collective West, with only the southern hemisphere.
A Revolution in Embryo
This is a revolution, a revolution symbolized by but not reducible to the membership of the BRICS. It is a revolution largely still in embryo, whose features are far from being fully defined.
The dangers to life in a globe that is ruled by an increasingly desperate, reckless, and unanchored Hegemon greatly inspire us to invest our hope, our humanity, in collective endeavors that exhibit rationality in the service of peace. But what do we know, really, of these new vessels to which we entrust our hope?
Amongst the features of the BRICS that require much greater definition (through global debate and discussion at every level and in every domain of society) are (1) the political mechanism of governance now and in the future that will establish its mutually-agreed norms of sovereignty, unity, balance (especially bearing in mind that by far the largest economy of the BRICS is that of China), executive and conceivably military force; (2) the economic characteristics of this body that will facilitate a non-western dominated network of trade and accumulation of wealth for its members, including issues of trading mechanisms and currencies, powers of raising capital and lending; and powers of taxation and revenue generation for the BRICS themselves; (3) the social and cultural characteristics of this body that can guarantee inclusive diversity and social justice, not least amongst digital platforms and the media of information and entertainment; (4) the interlinkages that will need to be established between a maturing order of the BRICS, a suitably reformed UN, and other existing international and transnational regulatory institutions, and the institutions - political, economic and cultural - of the collective West.
This revolution, the emergence and maturation of the Global Majority, of which the BRICS is a prominent symbol, grew to a significant extent in resistance against late 20th century western imperialism – the neoliberal phase of western imperialism - that we sometimes call “globalization.” The purpose of globalization was to create the opportune conditions – in terms of transfers of capital, labor and, to an extent, people - for Western capture of the wealth of the Global Majority, with the active participation and enthusiasm of the Global Majority itself. The underlying nature of this phase found dramatic representation in the Seattle Riots of 1999.
The Seattle Protests
Prior to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Seattle, their guiding flame had been lit a few years prior by the Zapatistas’ uprising in Chiapas against the imposition of NAFTA in 1994. The Seattle riots were a series of anti-globalization protests surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, when members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington on November 30, 1999.
In the words of Mark Engler writing in the Nation, on their twentieth anniversary in 2019, “50,000 protesters—union members, environmentalists, family farmers, indigenous rights activists, faith-based groups, and solidarity organizations—had converged on the city to confront global elites attending the ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization, or WTO. They criticized the organization for overriding public health and environmental protections passed at the local and national level, and they identified it as part of an economic model that trapped workers in a “race to the bottom” as capital moved in search of ever more exploitable labor.
In Seattle, 1999, a mass movement responded to the haughty arrogance of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 assertion that “there is no alternative” (it even has it own acronym, TINA) to capitalism, with the cry, in effect, “Yes, another world is possible.” Engler opines:
“At a moment when “there is no alternative” was at its peak, the 1999 Seattle protests insisted not only that worlds other than those envisioned by CEOs and neoliberal economists could exist—but also that these worlds are essential to our survival. That message has never been lost.”
The Asian Revolution
Away from the fields of Chiapas or the streets of Seattle, the neoliberal movement was, in the end, most effectively resisted, negotiated, and transformed by China in particular, but also by India such that significant excess accumulation of wealth was generated particularly from the 1990s onwards that have empowered the emergence of these economies from a state of relative subsistence to a status of active and equitable participation in global financial and trade markets on their own terms.
In 1999, it still was not obvious that within a few years both China and India, through unfashionable top-down dirigiste policies could make a plausible claim to have lifted several hundreds of millions of their citizens out of a state of subsistence poverty to something more closely resembling middle class comfort in the West. Only the size of these middle classes dwarfed the size of entire nations of the collective West, including the entire population of the USA.
Counterrevolution
The revolution that is represented by the political emergence of the countries of the Global Majority has sparked a counter-revolution – we can call it the neoconservative counterrevolution, a counterrevolution that unites the plutocratic governing classes of the collective West, a counterrevolution that is designed not so much to suppress the Global Majority as an economic force but to preserve the hegemony of the superpower, the unipolar power, of the USA and its allies or, should I say, its vassals.
The Unipolar Moment
The counter-revolution largely comes after the “unipolar moment” of US hegemony that we can say started with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and continued up until China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in year 2001. The major characteristics of this unipolar movement were as follows:
(1) Resort to retrogressive economic policies that enrich and embolden the already rich, accelerating the social reproduction of gross inequalities between countries, social classes, capital and labor, racial and ethnic groups, men and women
(2) In place of reliance on measures of “soft power,” the re-elevation of military threat and domination in defense of US hegemony. This tendency had already been demonstrated in the immediate response of the USA to the anticipated breakdown of the Soviet Union, by invading Panama in 1989, and killing thousands of its citizens (all in the name of decimating Panama’s military and assuring continuing de facto US control over the canal after 2000 when it supposedly reverted to Panama), and then in 1991 going to war against Saddam Hussein in the name of saving the tiny oil principality of Kuwait which had once had long-standing ties to Iraq and was granted independence by the British in 1961.
(3) Subsequent manifestations of the consequences of the unipolar moment included the Wolfowitz doctrine of full spectrum dominance formulated in the early 1990s and ratified by George Bush junior in 2002; US contributions to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, US policy deliberations ahead of what was forecast as a new Pearl Habor that might ennable the visions of the neocon think-tank, Project for a New American Century, founded in 1997, and its keynote policy statement, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, published in September 2000; the invasion and twenty year occupation of Afghanistan in 2001; the invasion and fifteen year occupation of Iraq in 2003; the dismantling of Libya in 2011; fomenting of Salafist confrontations against the government of Bashar Assad of Syria from at least 2011 (it would be more correct to note CIA and other US meddling in Syria from the 1950s onwards); electoral interference by the USA in the so-called Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the US-instigated, funded and abetted coup d-etat that took place on the Maidan of Kiev in 2013 to 2014.
(4) Almost anywhere in which it is seen to US advantage - the abrogation, often through regime change shenanigans, of the legislative and judicial independence of elected governments in favor of deep state hierarchies tied to established financial, corporate, plutocratic, military and in some cases royal elites; this tendency has built on strategies developed and perfected in the period of bi-polarity of the Cold War and through a century or more of interference in the affairs of Central and South America in application of the Monroe doctrine articulated in 1823 by US President James Monroe
(5) Firmer and more complex machineries of propaganda and perception management whose purpose is to manipulate and to align public consciousness with the goals of national elites: they include the privatization of intelligence and propaganda agencies so as to be less visible and less accountable; the bureaucratization of human rights evidence collection and witness identification; the algorithm-ization of information collection and dissemination to better flag unapproved content and to alter, re-frame, suppress or diminish its dissemination.
(6) These latter involve ever tighter Deep State control over mainstream media and over the platforms of both mainstream, social and so-called alternative media systems (as illustrated in the routine media silences imposed by British D-Notice or now the DSMA system of media complicity with Deep State agendas). The point to bear in mind is that wherever a medium acquires an established reputation for accuracy and critical independence it must become the holy grail for State propagandists to suborn, infiltrate and corrupt.
The Three Fronts of Counterrevolution
The counter-revolution is currently being fought by economic and military means at three major axes of combat (there is an infinite number of other potential axes of combat that can be ignited to purpose at almost any time). In each of these conflicts the basic trajectory is one of loss for the West and of shame for the incompetence of their political, economic, and military leaderships.
(1) The war between NATO and Russia to the last Ukrainian.
(2) The war between the US and China over Taiwan, over disputed ownership of islands in the South China Sea, and over trade tariffs; and
(3) US preservation of hegemonic control over the Middle East by supporting Israel’s Greater Israel Strategy; managing the fall-out from Saudi Arabi’s shift to BRICS; weakening Iran and its supposed support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis on the never-too-old-to-be-tired pretext of Iran’s empirically non-existent nuclear “threat” (as opposed to Israel’s very live nuclear threat).
In connection with each of these axes of combat I want to talk about media and Western propaganda of pretexts for war.
The Ukraine Front
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was anything but “unprovoked.” It was provoked by the collective West. How did the West “provoke” this war?
Western Provocation
We can ask, first, when did this war really start: 2004? 2014? 2022? With respect to 2014, we should note that the US provided the money for the Maidan, the US incited rebellion – the likes of Victoria Nuland, John McCain, and Joseph Biden streamed to Kiev to rouse the masses - the US planned who would take over after the coup, the US turned a blind eye to the Maidan massacres.
Assurances had been given Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not move further east after the reunification of Germany – an extraordinary and perhaps not a very wise concession by Gorbachev. From as early as 1995, a US embassy staffer in Moscow and future CIA Director William Burns, was warning of the negative consequences of NATO’s eastwards expansion and this was reinforced in 1997 by Boris Yeltsin.
Attempts by Russia to join NATO or to have its national interests properly acknowledged and respected by NATO were rebuffed. A statement of warning to the consequences of ignoring Russia was even more strongly reasserted by Putin in 2008.
NATO kept pushing further and further east to absorb all the Baltic and former East European powers; NATO announced its intention to prepare access to NATO of Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 (at the Bucharest summit).
Since 2008 the US has negotiated with former central and East European powers for the installment of an anti-missile defense shield – easily converted to offensive nuclear capability - which has been or is now in the process of being activated (Zelenskiy wanted Ukraine to be included).
Through its support for the coup d’etat of 2014, NATO threatened the Russian speakers or ethnic Russians of Ukraine throughout the country, particularly in Crimea and the Donbass, with proposals to regulate against Russian language media and uses of the Russian language.
US aid for continuing Ukrainian aggression against both Crimea and the Donbass after Ukraine lost its war with the Donbass in 2015 – as a result of which up to 14,000 citizens of the Donbass and Ukrainian forces lost their lives.
The US did nothing to pressure Ukraine into respecting the Minsk accords of 2014 and 2015 (and former German Chancellor Merkel and former Ukrainian president Poroshenko have confessed that they never intended to take the Minsk accords seriously).
US aid was largely responsible for the construction of Ukrainian fortifications along the edges of the Donbass in the period 2014-2022 that have enabled Ukraine, with diminishing results, to hold back Russia along the combat line, up until the present time.
The USA has partnered with Ukraine and with other NATO powers in the regular staging of highly threatening and aggressive military exercises along the Russian border.
In 2019, the RAND think tank issued a report, Extending Russia, that reviewed many of the ways, including exploiting Ukraine as a thorn in Russia’s side, of applying pressure on Russia that might expedite the fragmentation of the Russian Federation.
The Russian Response
How did Russia respond to the threats that it perceived? The Special Military Operation is a highly contained response to the threats posed by NATO against it. Its limited objectives were, originally: no NATO membership for Ukraine; a cap on the size of Ukrainian military forces; de-Nazification of Ukraine, integration of four strongly ethnic Russian oblasts (Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zapporizhzhia) into the Russian Federation. These terms could have been and were actually negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022, an early draft was signed by participating parties, and Russia withdraw its forces from around Kiev; but this peace initiative fell apart because Washington was not willing to negotiate; instead, through Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, Zelenskiy was advised to fight on and assured that NATO would supply it with all the means necessary. In some quarters the controversial atrocity of Bucha was used as a pretext for calling off negotiations; I believe the evidence more strongly implicates the SBU than Russian forces.
Consequences for the West
What were the consequences of this war for the West? Here we can talk of the doomed sanctions war against Russia, specific Russian individuals, Russian businesses, Russian art, and countries and other entities that do business with Russia.
Above all, in the energy sphere, the West initiated a policy of reducing its dependence on cheap Russian oil and gas and of capping the profitability of Russian energy sales. All of these measures have failed to reduce the boom in Russian energy sales (especially to China and to India but also, through pipelines, through LNG sales, through third party sales, to Europe.
The Russian economy has recovered and growing. It has become autonomous from the West. Europe’s economy is in stagnation or even in recession, and German industry is deindustrializing (at a time when China already accounts for 35% of global manufacturing). German manufacturers, unable to cope with the higher energy costs, are moving away, many of them to the USA.
The European manufacturing malaise has extended to weapons and weapons production. Not only has the provision of weapons to Ukraine significantly depleted European stocks of weapons, but its most upscale weapons systems in terms of tanks, artillery systems and air defense systems have been defrocked on the battlefield and pictures of burning Leopard II tanks along with US Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, and of destroyed Patriot missile defense systems have exposed the limitations of Western weapons generally. In the matter of shells, the USA and Europe together cannot provide sufficient 155 shells to meet Ukraine’s consumption needs, even less to compete with the numbers fired by Russian forces, and they cannot come anywhere near Russia in terms of shell production capability. A lot of these problems relate to the fashion of just-in-time western economics, and to the inability of the neoliberal western economics model to harmonize market-driven capitalism with older public service models of economy.
The US is benefitting from a significant rise of LNG sales to Europe and from the diminution of Europe as a competitor in world trade, but its weapons systems too have been found wanting; its armories are depleted; its political-economic model has been exposed as a scam to divert public taxpayer funds to the coffers of large corporations in the armaments and war economies.
All these considerations offer lessons for China as to the limitations of US manufacturing and weapons production; the weakness of a military industrial complex that is not sustained either by commensurate population resources or by recruitment strategies; by a system of alliances that fosters elite cooption and corruption rather than sustainable and mutually reinforcing patterns of defensive commitment in the public interest.
The Taiwan Front
Taiwan still belongs to China; China is still Taiwan’s major trade partner and source of wealth; China is still the foremost trading partner of many other countries of East Asia whom the West is trying to seduce into its own anti-China camp, which is the road to their impoverishment; Chinese and Taiwanese share deep bonds of language, culture and custom; it is debatable whether the interests even of the wealthier classes of Taiwan are best represented by the country’s system of democracy. Perhaps a major issue that should be preoccupying the world is not whether Taiwan’s ethnic Chinese should enjoy political and economic independence but whether the interests of the island’s 400,000 (of a total population of around 24 millions) indigenous citizens have sufficient voice.
The Israel Front
The first and main issue we are dealing with in the case of Israel (and, of course, Palestine), is the reality of the Middle East as the world’s most concentrated and durable source of fossil fuel and the interest of any would-be or actual hegemon in controlling not so much its own access to that resource, but the access of everyone else to it.
Israel has been described as a permanent US aircraft carrier to enable it to police the Middle East at relatively little expense. Whether Israel serves that purpose is open to contestation. Yes, it has nuclear weapons, but nuclear weapons are not tools of finesse in the business of policing and stability. There is an argument that Israel has become the tail that wags the dog, that through AIPAC and similar lobbying institutions, money for which essentially comes from US aid to Israel, Israel controls US Congressional policy on the Middle East to the advantage of Israel, and the advantages that Israel seeks are (a) redress of demographic challenges that favor the Arab population of Israel, through means of political and economic dominance through apartheid; and (b) a Greater Israel, that might encompass the West Bank, Lebanon, parts of Syria and Iraq, even Iran.
The paradox of the tail that wags the dog is that the tail is decidedly hubristic and unpleasant so that today we confront the ignominy of a moral collapse that is now too deep and too awful to hide as it has been hidden for the past seventy years, a regime collapse into fanaticism, and a military collapse of the IDF as a disciplined and effective fighting force and not a murderous bunch of thuggish reservists.
This then will bring us to the wars, both of its own making and those that will be forced upon it, that Israel still has to fight and will ultimately lose in Lebanon, and Syria, Iraq, Yemen and perhaps Iran. These wars will extend, that is to say, they will exhaust, Israel, a tiny country; they must, sooner or later, involve Russia in defense of its allies and in opposition to Israel; they may involve China which must assuredly identify its long-term interests as being supportive of the Arab world and North Africa and against Israel; they will place ever greater pressure on the Arab World to intervene in protection of the Palestinian people; they may even force the global community to demand a return to the events of 1948 and a reconfiguration of ideas about both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism.
The second dimension of the Israeli paradox is Iran. Iran was the USA’s first choice of policeman for the Middle East, from the time of the US and UK’s overthrow of liberal-nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, after which they installed or reinstated the Pahlavi dynasty, the Shah of Persia, and his secret police. Until faithful to historical dialectical, the Shah was chased out by the Islamist and, to some extent, if only temporarily, socialist, revolution of 1979. Iran is hated by the USA for upsetting the US chess board and for embarrassing President Carter with the hostage saga of 1979-1981. The Empire only knows that it must crush those who cross it. And Iran is hated by Israel which knows that Iran was once a better policeman for the USA, that Iran might conceivably one day return to US favor, that Iran is not an apartheid state, and that Israel knows it is best to hate anyone that the Empire hates. From this hatred has emerged the constant propagandistic fabrication that somehow it is Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons, that nonetheless is a “nuclear threat,” while Israel is not, or Islamist Pakistan is not, or India is not, a fabrication that has been used in a decades-old scam to keep the Iranian economy depressed through a constant stream of Western sanctions regimes. We need do no more than remember therefore the inevitability of historical dialectic. And in the BRICS, Iran may discover what form, exactly, the dialectic will take.
The Western counterrevolution to preserve its hegemony over the Middle East through its agency in Israel is failing as a result of the events of October 7 2023. Notwithstanding the falsehoods that Israeli authorities and western mainstream media have pepetrated concerning the facts of that day (e.g. that babies were beheaded, that women were raped, that none the killed were Israeli security forces) October 7 represents a fairly standard uprising against a long-standing oppressor by the forces of the oppressed. This has precipitated, first and foremost, an economic crisis for Israel. The crux is that Israel is suffering intense and possibly terminal economic damage from this war. By the end of the 2023, the value of the Israeli economy had fallen 20% year-on-year, and the value of the Gazan economy had fallen 80%. The country has lost up to 500,000 of its population who have fled the war, together with the business, employment and tax advantages these represent. Together with military mobilization, this flight will likely have badly impacted the advanced IT industry of Israel. Immigration has fallen by 70%. The crossing of workers over the border between Gaza and Israel has been closed off, so that there is no longer a source of cheap labor from Gaza for Israeli business, in particular for the Israeli construction business which until the war had depended on Gaza for 70% or more of its labor force. Israel is having to promote short-term labor immigration from countries like India, Sri Lanka and even Moldova. The Israeli government has to pay the salaries of hundred of thousands of reservists. It has to compensate businesses afflicted by mobilization in terms of losses of staff and trade. It has to pay compensation for direct and indirect damage to buildings (I assume this is in relation to Israeli owned property only). It has to subsidize housing costs for thousands of settlers dislocated from the northern border with Lebanon. The government will likely have to conscript from the Haredim, the ultra-holy, who until now have been exempted from military service.
The IDF will likely lose a war with Hezbollah, a war that nonetheless the political leadership is doing its best to provoke. Israel is not ready to fight a long war, especially a long war of attrition. It has always depended on US-style presumptions of air superiority. Now, in addition to everything else, Israel must contend with Houthi damage to Israeli-affiliated shipping in the Red Sea and Houthi missile attacks on IDF positions in Israel.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have argued that the emergence of the Global Majority is one of the greatest hopes of our times. It not a vacuous hope, but nor is it a sufficiently well defined, debated and promoted hope. The effort to flesh out the principal features of the BRICS in its soon-to-be-much-more-expanded form, to identify its internal contradictions and the mechanisms for their resolution to mutual satisfaction, is becoming ever more urgent. The ideologues of this revolution – and all revolutions need their ideologues - must deal with the counter-revolution that their own revolution has inspired. At the heart of each of the counter-revolutionary conflicts that I have discussed is at least one member of the BRICS: Russia, Iran, and China. Each of these has been the target of sustained hostile propaganda from an arrogant, deluded, and self-regarding collective West for hundreds of years. Conditions of war merely exacerbate existing imbalances of investment in propaganda. There is not a moment to lose in clarifying the real terms of the current conflict, the investments that have been made in our existing narratives, who has made them, for what or for whose purposes, and who benefits most from them.