This guy is a Trotskyite, but I often agree with his analysis of capitalism and US imperialism, which is 100% right on.
First of all, he is correct that the US was an imperialist country long before the Cold War and even before there was a Soviet Union. The Monroe Doctrine, still in effect today, was an imperialist policy. The US was actually a formal imperialist power around the turn on the century, and in a way, it still is now as the US retains colonies and refuses to free them as the UN has demanded.
Everything else he says is also right on.
The New “Cold War” Is The Same Old U.S. Imperialist War
by Steven Argue
Cartoon depicting the brutal and murderous U.S. colonization of the Philippines long before there was a Soviet Union.
As many in the U.S. today declare that Russian opposition to U.S. aggression in Ukraine and Syria are indicators of a new “cold war”, it is important to remember what the so-called “Cold War” was in the first place during the time of the USSR. Before the so-called “war on terror” there was the Persian Gulf War, and before there even was a Soviet Union there was “the war to end all wars”, “the white man’s burden”, and “manifest destiny”.
All of these were / are to justify one of the most bloodthirsty imperialist systems that has ever existed on the face of the Earth, that of U.S. imperialism. The fact that the U.S. used the existence of the Soviet Union to justify their blood thirsty imperialist wars, coups, and dictatorships in places like Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, etc. simply had nothing to do with any reality of an actual war between the USSR of the time and the USA. The so-called “cold war” was nothing but a hot U.S. imperialist war against the people of the world, a war that continues under different names.
Today, as usual, the USA is on a drive to overthrow every independent nation in the world. This has continued under Obama with his overthrow of elected governments of Ukraine and Honduras, putting a death squad government in power in Honduras and a murderous fascist junta in power in Kiev that includes open neo-Nazis who hate Ukraine’s national minorities, including Russians.
Likewise, Obama waged a bombing and proxy war in Libya that overthrew that country’s government, a government that committed the crime of spending some its oil money on providing everyone with free housing, education, and health care. This gave the Libyan people a far higher life expectancy than other oil rich countries in Africa ruled by U.S. backed dictators.
Likewise, the United States is currently trying to overthrow the elected capitalist government of Venezuela for similar “crimes” of disrupting total capitalist profit by spending oil money on the people. In Libya, the imperialists brought to power genocidal religious fanatics who committed ethnic cleansing against Black Africans, commits rampant torture and murder, and is allowing the imperialist oil companies to rob Libya of its natural resources unhindered by pesky spending on human needs. Likewise in Syria, the United States is giving weapons to genocidal religious fanatics that have slaughtered religious and ethnic minorities.
Russia is in the cross-hairs of U.S. imperialism today, in part for strongly opposing U.S. imperialist intervention in Syria and Ukraine.
Russia itself today is a weak capitalist country, but for the U.S. imperialists, it is not weak enough. An important adviser to the Obama administration is Brzezinski whose plans for Russia include economic isolation, regime change, and then breaking Russia into three pieces. Russia itself is not an imperialist power in any Marxist sense. Russia has more foreign direct investment coming into the country than going out. Likewise, Ukraine has had very little foreign direct investment from Russia and very large amounts coming in from the EU.
U.S. and EU imperialist strategy in the region has been to force a government on Ukraine that carries out IMF austerity and isolates Russia. They got this with the February coup along with a government that is likely to be friendly to imperialist exploitation of gas reserves through environmentally devastating fracking in western Ukraine.
Russia, on the other hand, is merely trying to maintain trading partners as the United States tries to isolate it and is not trying to dictate what sort of economies and austerity countries around them maintain. While United States imperialist policy is one of forcing austerity and privatization on countries, Russia has been equally capable of trading with countries that maintain planned socialist economies, to the benefit of the working class, like the planned socialist economy of Belarus. Meanwhile, such countries, like Belarus and Cuba, are under U.S.economic blockade because their planned socialist economies and independent governments prevent large amounts of foreign imperialist exploitation.
To the extent that Russia is now providing a small counterweight to blood thirsty and rapacious U.S. imperialism, the imperialists are building up NATO forces, pouring on lies similar to Bush’s lies of weapons of mass destruction, and speaking as if the so-called “cold war””is back. Yet, then and now, the so-called “cold war” has never been anything but a hot U.S. imperialist war against the people of the world.
- Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency