Trump finally lost. This is a medical fact [aka scientific fact – ed]. The Democrats will expel Trump from the White House on January 20th at the inauguration of Biden or, somehow managing to pull off impeachment, earlier — the question is technical and completely unprincipled. Another thing is to think about the reasons that made this coup possible. And we are witnessing a coup – brazen, large-scale and, alas, successful.
So why didn’t the system of checks and balances that successfully kept the American state from such a power grab work? After all, the case is not the only one. Such attempts have already taken place, but then the system coped. What went wrong today?
Most experts on this issue agree that the fault lies in the lack of determination of Trump as a leader, who ignored Lenin’s recommendation in the first place “to take bridges, train stations, telephone and telegraph”.
Leading americanists disagree with them. The political and social structure of the state and society over the ocean is too different from Europe, especially from Russia in the time of Vladimir Ilyich. There are simply no necessary “bridges and train stations”.
In principle, each of the parties is right in its own way, but they both do not take into account what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital and Lenin’s conclusion – “Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism” – on its basis. With one small correction. Having reached the imperial stage, the capitalist system of the economy did not stop. The “end of history” has not come.
Global processes do not stop at all. They are only being transformed to meet new external and internal conditions. What we are accustomed to call a democratic state is in reality an instrument of self-organisation in bourgeois society. It is the bourgeois, this is the first key factor.
All these divisions of branches and the separation of legislators from executors, historically, did not arise from scratch. They are the result of the desire of the largest representatives of the “rich class” to ensure an optimal balance for themselves between the security of their personal fortunes and the ability to get rich further on behalf of society.
It is naive to think that “everything is decided by the people”. It is also naive to believe that this system was invented by capitalists. It is enough to recall the “shouters” who were hired for money by “golden belts” in medieval Novgorod. To shout decisions on important “general” issues in their favour at the people’s assembly.
This is neither good nor bad, it is just a dry historical fact. No matter how rich the individual “fat cats” were, they could not oppose themselves to the rest of society, so to speak, in one person. Therefore, first of all, group interests were decisive.
And since different groups even within the same territory, same market and same one of its niches at that time were “in marketable quantity”, they needed to ensure a balance as a guarantee of protection against the usurpation of power in favour of one narrow group of people.
This is precisely where the need for public written law arose, the obligation to observe bureaucratic normalising rituals and strictly follow the traditions legitimised by the “public decision of society” through elections, ballots and referendums.
For the same reason, any attempt to circumvent the “system of checks and balances”, called usurpation, was considered absolutely unacceptable. With an arbitrarily wide range of divergence of interests between individual groups, they very quickly united against the usurper. Just so they don’t end up on the chopping block one day.
Whether it was good for the common people is a separate question. It was good for them then. It doesn’t matter who exactly gets the official right to build a bridge or lay a road. He will hire workers anyway. Which eventually led the masses to believe in the separation of business from politics. No matter who exactly turned out to be the president or mayor, the formalised system continued to function according to the same rules.
Imperialism here was only the result of a natural process of capital consolidation, concerned with gaining protection from a stronger neighbor. Only no longer inside the city shop or industry guild, but outside it — in a neighboring state.
But even at the imperialist stage within the empire, the principle of competition between different (this is the second crucial point) groups of “capitalists” remained unchanged. They all needed a strong state in exactly the same degree. Both as a source of orders, and as a guarantor of stable predictability of the rules of the game (in the broad sense of the word — from economic to social), and as a tool for capturing new territories that can become markets primarily for “their” capitalists.
In the sense of national, i.e., belonging (recognising their belonging) to a particular empire. It should be remembered that the concept of a nation arose only in the process of forming a bourgeois state. Before the nations, as a community of passport holders of a particular state, did not exist. There were only nationalities in a narrow ethnic (blood) sense.
At this point, it is necessary to emphasise the third fundamentally important point. Even a strong centralised state, which had reached the state of an empire, despite the considerable resources under its control, occupied a rather small place in the overall scale of economic relations. It only established uniform rules and monitored their implementation, as well as the preservation of borders. Its own direct orders financed “from the treasury” amounted to 7-9% of the total GDP, if we speak in terms familiar today.
Therefore, business did not particularly climb into the structure of the state. It was enough only to “make friends with the right people” to a good extent. And strictly monitor compliance with the balance of power opportunities of competitors within the framework of the above-mentioned “second principle”.
It should be noted that they “watched” well and dealt with upstarts very harshly. For those who are interested, I recommend reading the fascinating story of John Rockefeller’s attempt to concentrate the entire world oil production and oil trade in his hands. In 1878, Standard Oil controlled, according to various sources, from 85% to 90% of the enterprises engaged in oil refining.
But even as an official billionaire – even at those prices, today his fortune would be estimated at $2.5-3.1 trillion (for reference, as of December 2020, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has only 188 billion, second place is occupied by Jeff Bezos with 184 billion) – Rockefeller could not stop the division of Standard Oil into seven independent parts by the decision of the US Supreme Court in 1911.
Precisely because he tried to violate the same “second principle”. Too much capital concentrated in one hand became a direct threat to the system of the bourgeois “democratic” state.
On a slightly smaller scale and adjusted for the results of the Second World War, but for the same reason, the German chemical conglomerate I. G. Farben, founded in 1925, was cut up.
Speaking about imperialism as the highest form of capitalism, Vladimir Ilyich was generally right, but he wrote his conclusions at the initial stage of the process, when bourgeois empires were just beginning to take shape. Therefore, the classic of Marxism missed an important detail. Public social and economic processes, having reached a peak, do not stop.
They either fall apart under the pressure of accumulated internal contradictions with degradation to the previous level of socio-economic organisation of society, or continue to move on, transforming into the next form. It seemed to Lenin that communism should become it, but life went differently.
Everything broke down as a result of the Second World War, which many historians rightly consider the second act of the First War, often referred to as “imperialist”. Too many global unresolved issues remained after it, which were then supposed to be possible only by force of arms.
As was noted above, empires arise as a result of the unification of the national bourgeoisie for the purpose of expanding the borders of the economic space under its control. Although after 1945 on the periphery of the “civilised world” key players still tried to “finish the game”, in general, the impossibility of extensive expansion became clear at the Yalta conference of the “Big Three”.
All this long digression into history is necessary to understand that, finally formed by the mid-1960s, imperialism reached a key turning point, the consequences of which led to the “Trump phenomenon” in 2016.
Anyone who has played monopoly knows that the game is clearly divided into three stages: colonisation, consolidation and monopolisation. First, players buy up everything they can reach. Then they begin a complex exchange of assets, so that in the end there are two of the largest monsters, which bring the game to the ruin of one of them.
So, by the mid-1960s, the stage of colonisation of the world bourgeois capitalist economy was over. A period of consolidation has begun. This is clearly seen in the size of the largest companies’ businesses and the reduction in the number of competitors within individual industries. For example, if in the 1930s in the United States there were more than 30 independent aircraft manufacturers, then in 1952 there were only 9. But in a year they produced about 11,000 military and 4,000 civilian aircraft.
And any consolidation depends on money. To grow only on your own means to lose out to those who expand on borrowed money. Thus, in the 70s, capitalism, which had reached its highest stage, began to transform from overwhelmingly industrial to predominantly financial. Money began to make money directly, degrading the importance of the intermediate stage of commodity production.
And to do this at a rate far exceeding the growth rate of industrial production. As a result, by August 2019, the total capitalisation of the 100 largest manufacturing companies in the world reached $21 trillion, and the total volume of purely bank “paper” assets, including derivatives (derivatives of all types), already in 2009 exceeded 600 trillion. Moreover, only four banks owned 95.9% of this “securities”: JP Morgan Chase, Cirtigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. For reference, the expenditure part of the US federal budget for 2020 amounted to 4.7 trillion.
Thus, today three fundamental principles of the bourgeois state have been violated at once.
First, it has ceased to be bourgeois. The four banks mentioned above are owned by less than 2,000 people. Well, as they are in control, they have more or less significant blocks of shares. While “everything is decided” by about 566 existing billionaires in America.
And even from them not all have a share in, for example, Bank of America. For example, Trump is also a billionaire, but the Signature bank recently forcibly closed all his accounts. In short, this American (more broadly, western, including European) society remained bourgeois only nominally.
Secondly, the state has ceased to be competitive. As, however, and the economy, too. In the US, civil aircraft are produced only by Boeing, military – it and General Dynamics. Rocket giant – there is only one. Internet search engine – only one. Social network – only one. 73% of US adults use YouTube. There are formally two manufacturers of mass operating systems, but the dominant position is occupied by Microsoft, if we talk about desktops and laptops, and Google, if we talk about smartphones and tablets. And so on.
So the complex system of checks and balances in the state mechanism is no longer needed. Within themselves, they formed it on the basis of mutual exchange of business shares and the division of markets. And there it works easier, faster and more efficiently than the state one.
And most importantly, it lacks the concept of a mass voter in the form of citizens “from the street”, to whom it is necessary to report and to whose opinion it is necessary to listen, “so as not to fly out of office at the next election”.
Third, the imperialist framework is already too tight for them. For example, the US population is 335 million people, and the YouTube audience exceeds 2 billion. America accounts for only 15% of its traffic. Only 33% of popular YouTube videos are in English, and there is only content in 80 different languages. Because the platform is used by residents of 92 countries.
In some of them, YouTube is the main source of video content. In particular, in India, it is used by 93% of viewers. And most importantly, 70% of what people watch there is determined by the platform’s own recommendation algorithm.
Or take Twitter. Active users are 330 million per month, and people who read it without creating an account — another 500 million. Google’s share in the global search query market is 70.6% (2 trillion queries per year). The closest competitors: Bing – 13.2%; Baidu – 11.77% and Yahoo – 2.3%. And that’s all.
When they talk about the deep state (for example, in the US), they actually mean this narrow circle of people who own monopolies in their segments (including in the world) and have money more than two orders of magnitude higher than the level of not only their own state, but also the entire collective west combined.
And thanks to the specifics of the structure of the bourgeois democratic state, they really have “everything captured” in this system. And this also did not happen just yesterday. Charles Wilson’s famous phrase – what is good for General Motors is good for America – was uttered on January 15th 1953, when the Senate Committee on Military Affairs was discussing his candidacy for the post of Secretary of Defence of the US.
Only at that time GM had more than 26 serious competitors in America, and today there are only two of them — Ford and Chrysler. And even then, if you understand the web of mutual exchange of shares, rights, developments and other assets, there the devil himself will break his leg in the question of who belongs to whom.
What else is important: money for the functioning of the economy is also printed by a narrow inter-group of 12 private banks that call themselves the Federal Reserve System. I emphasise, private. The most even the President of America can do is politely ask their leadership for something. And it is not at all a fact that they will agree to satisfy his request.
In general, globalism is the next stage of capitalism after imperialism, characterised by the fact that they simply do not need the institution of the state for later life. “Rednecks” can defiantly walk around the streets with machine guns as much as they want, but they will still go to retail chains for food, to Google or YouTube for entertainment, and they will continue to pay for it with pieces of paper issued by the Federal Reserve, which also often borrow from the same Citigroup.
And now it’s time to think about the answer to the original question about Trump’s fundamental mistake. If we discard the husk invented by his image makers, what did Donald try to do?
For some reason, he decided that if he jumped out of the snuffbox, dashed into the Oval Office and loudly slammed his slipper on the polished table top by the window overlooking the beautiful lawn, then the entire globalist, long-transnational financial hydra described above, which had grown to an incredible size, would shudder and run like a submissive herd to somehow ram into the fatally tight framework of the imperialist model of the state of the middle of the last century. Because the popularly elected president ordered it.
No, the Americanists are absolutely right: it is absolutely useless to “take” bridges, post offices and railway stations with telegraphs. It was necessary to capture the most important thing — money. Starting with the nationalisation of the Fed, then continuing with the assets of banks and financial companies, and ending with a complete and unconditional ban on any lobbying, as a fundamental phenomenon.
But for this one motto about “MAGA” and a red baseball cap from the very beginning was absolutely not enough. It was already necessary to have a convinced and determined personnel reserve of supporters to create their own cheka and detachments of “revolutionary sailors”. Ideally, it is still possible to attract at least half of the most combat-ready units of the army to your side. To have this before, and not to hope to get all this as a result of pathetic speeches on Twitter after the election.
Therefore, it turned out that over the past four years in the US, not a corporate coup d’etat was developing. There, two new bourgeois revolutions met at once – one was globalist, and the other was reactionary, aimed at returning to the “old imperial times”.
With the difference that the globalists already had the necessary tools and resources to implement their project, while the conservatives did not have them. And it was not possible to rely on the state mechanism due to the excessive scale of its rottenness.
We can say that Trump lost because he did not want to bring his country to the revolution and the associated big blood. And in his own way, he’s even right. Nowhere and never in history has such a thing happened without massive bloodshed.
During the four years of the American Civil War (1861-1865), the total military losses alone amounted to 664,900 people, or 2.1% of the country’s population at that time. And this is not counting the “loss” of about 3 million more people as a result of hunger, disease and banditry, which became a consequence of the fighting.
If the same proportion, adjusted for modern specifics, is transferred to the present, then the price of the Second Civil War in America can be up to 25-30 million human lives. So whether Donald Trump was wrong, who did not dare to step “on the revolutionary path” – let everyone decide for themselves.
However, no matter how monstrous it may sound, now it is absolutely unimportant. The globalists won. And they will still destroy the American state. And not only the American one. Maybe it will be less blood spilled, but they will still break lives there – it is most likely comparable, because 70 million people who voted for Trump simply “under new values” can not be reformatted.
But for Russia, it is just the right time to draw conclusions from all of the above. Because “these wolves”, when they think that they are firmly established at home, will go under themselves to reshape the rest of the world, including Europe and us.
Since the analysis turned out to be already long, a separate material will be devoted to a detailed layout and justification. Here I will give only concise final conclusions.
To prevent this from happening in Russia, we should not cut the tops, but the roots. The demolition of the state is carried out by the globalists through the emotional buildup of a pre-atomised, maximally divided into rigidly opposing “all against all” groups on whatever grounds. From ideological and cultural to dreamy, ethnic and gender. Therefore, it is necessary to combine censorship with the formation of one’s own national idea, which unites a crowd of individuals into a social society.
It should be recognised that the basis of society is always the unity of views on the basic cultural and moral and ethical value imperatives. And with this, to put it mildly, we are not very good yet.
Further, in a relatively short time, a radical reorganisation of the banking and financial system is necessary. Ideally, based on the technology of cryptocurrencies. Here, a good example is the system implemented in China on the basis of crypto-yuan. When citizens and businesses open accounts not in private banks, but directly in the central bank. Fortunately, modern communications and the development of computer technology allow this to be implemented relatively simply.
So that other private banks have only a technical role to “represent” the central bank in everyday operations, such as processing documents for opening accounts. However, this task is also quite solvable with the help of mobile applications. A scheme with self-employed people has started working – those wishing to go nowhere in public places do not need to go anywhere for the registration of such a status.
Aleksandr Zapolskis
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