Bulletins and News Discussion from February 3rd to February 9th, 2025 - Fuhrer Failsons

Image is of Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute a week or so ago.

I didn't really want to keep spotlighting American domestic events as I had assumed that shit would calm down pretty quickly, but it appears that the Trump administration, including Musk, are determined to bring down the empire from the inside.

One of the most important lessons of ruling a country - and especially an empire - is to never, ever believe your own propaganda; and yet now we have neo-Nazi failsons disrupting parts of the imperial apparatus and causing general government mayhem because they actually seem to believe in libertarianism; that the state and the capitalists are somehow in opposition, rather than working in lockstep to maximise profit and boost American hegemony around the world.

I'm not so optimistic as to believe that a national collapse is FOUR DAYS AWAY, like those weird anti-China cranks often speculate - the US has at least a decade or two left even under these conditions. But consider the damage being inflicted in these past couple weeks, and extrapolate that over the next four years. Does any living American political figure possess the competency to halt - or even meaningfully slow - the already ongoing decline? And could they achieve power (or even be allowed to do so) after Trump's term is done?

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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Is capital falling back to the ethnic nation, nationalism and colonial acquisition (greenland, canada, panama) because pinkwashing and moral authority failed as a means of doing imperialism?
For decades they used, successfully I might add, moral authority of spreading "western values" as the tool of justifying their wars on the middle east while elsewhere they used anti-communism. These collapsed, as we've seen with support for Palestine, opposition to Israel, and even support for Iran.
If the "western values" and pinkwashing and superior moral authority are no longer effective tools of waging conflict. Falling back to the previous tools makes sense, the ethnic "nation", my land my people, and religion, which all worked for far far longer than the changed attempt to wage western superiority over everyone else on the basis that it was uniquely better.
I've been thinking about why "the west has fallen" is so prevalent and the reverse course towards religious, patriarchal and ethnic "values" happened. It was a conscious decision made by people that want the population in their society thinking in a certain way in order to use it for specific purposes but the exact reasons for it are rarely discussed in terms of this set of thought being a means to an end. Even in marxists circles it's only vaguely referred to as "threatening capital" and "pillars holding up capital" without specificity of what it materially gives them. This also has to be painted and analysed in the sense that the small group of billionaires that are pushing it all understand climate change and climate migration as an incoming threat.
- I think in regards to Canada, Panama, etc... it's really just Trump saying these kinds of things. It doesn't seem like global capital is on board. I think Greenland is its' own thing. I think that's just straight old imperialism like Lenin wrote about. It was the case that there wasn't any more land to try and colonize, but climate change has changed things. I expect we'll see a big land grab in Antarctica in the next decade.
  Torkil Laussen says the principal contradiction in global capitalism right now is neoliberalism versus nationalism. When I heard this I was skeptical (because it feels like it should be the imperialist / anti-imperialist contradiction) but I'm starting to come around. Neoliberalism was a useful tool to prop up the rate of profit for the last few decades, but neoliberalism has pretty much used up its' usefulness in fighting off TRPF. The TPRF is like a chronic illness - and neoliberalism was a drug that was useful in fighting off the illness for a while. But like any drug, its' effectiveness wears off over time.
  So neoliberalism can't deliver the goods anymore, but global capitalism doesn't have any answers at the moment. I think you have different factions of capital trying different things. I think the faction that wants to fall back on your good ol' "blood and soil" ideology I think are just trying to address the TRPF with a Hulk Smash - squeeze profit the old fashioned way by oppressing domestic workers and exploiting the resources and labor of the weaker nations directly.
  
  Torkil Laussen says the principal contradiction in global capitalism right now is neoliberalism versus nationalism.
  Nationalism outside the imperial core is anti-imperialist. The imperial core of capitalism is a neoliberal american empire hidden from being an empire by being "independent" nations in name only.
  Doesn't this just sound like another way of saying the primary contradiction of capitalism is anti-imperialism?
  
  Sorry, I should specified, Laussen explicitly says the contradiction is between neoliberalism and nationalism in the imperial core. He actually calls it something else, I don’t remember what exactly, “nationalism” was my own editorializing. But he talks about Trump, Boris Johnson, Meloni, the AfD, Brexit, etc.
  
  Neo-illiberalism

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