Geopolitical Outlook

"Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. " —V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism . Ch. 3. At the time of this writing, most people by now are probably aware of the news story surrounding the "controversy" of a Reddit-based community called 'WallStreetBets' buying stocks on GameStop (and AMC) [1], hurting Wall Street short-selling hedge fund managers' profits in the process and pushing Melvin Capital to the brink of bankruptcy. These short-selling [2] billionaire investors have lost a staggering $70.8 billion during the month of January, 2021 [3]; this was partly because of a very determined group of small, amateur...

The first round of U.S.-British airstrikes on Baghdad on March 3, 2003, marking the beginning of the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq. How soon will we start hearing the likes of Extinction Rebellion, and other neo-Malthusianists, echoing the infamous words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who said that the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions was "worth it"? It's only a matter of time that they will, and we should not put it past them to do so. Just a few months leading up to the U.S.-backed right-wing coup in Bolivia, they were already making calls to oust Evo Morales and were, amongst all things, blaming him for the Amazon forest fires (even though he was actively helping to put them out) and using them as a pretext for imperialist intervention. According to modern-day, vacuous, and 'woke' eco-Malthusianists, independent sovereign nations (i.e. Cuba, Syria, the DPRK, and Nicaragua), who dare to defy the global dictatorship of the U...

Sabaa Bahrat Square in Damascus, Syria. The following below is an addendum to and expansion of the second paragraph of the previous blog entry, " Geopolitical Context Matters pt. 2 - Slouching Towards Syria ". Generally speaking, the West -- but especially America -- is a bastion of ignorance when it comes to the Arab and Muslim world, with two extremes: the right-wing who see Islam as a race (rather than a religion) and a civilizational threat and equate all Muslims with Osama bin Laden. While the liberals and the 'left' also see Islam as a race and think that Wahhabism is just a mere expression of victimhood. Contrary to a popular narrative that is uncritically accepted by Western liberals and leftists, Wahhabism is not an expression of victimhood. Sunni Muslims are also not inherently or naturally predisposed to such an ideology. While racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment is rife with far-right circles who take a racially-charged approach and t...

The Joker movie is not an incel movie or an "angry straight white male" movie. It's a film about class consciousness and alienation under capitalism, especially late stage capitalism. The fact that it is receiving a lot of backlash from Forbes (and other elite publications like it), "alt"-rightists, and 'social justice warriors' (sjw's) alike makes it all the more intriguing. It most definitely is not the "Hollywoke"-kind of film that is, figuratively speaking, force-fed to the masses. Examples of "Hollywoke" films include those found in the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, the post-Lucas Star Wars films (also Disney-owned, and sans George Lucas' input), and the 2016 Ghostbusters movie. It also most certainly is not an appeal to white nationalists and/or hardline reactionaries. And so here we have a refreshing cinematic piece of art. Watch Jason Unruhe's review of the film in the video above. (Warning: the re...

Hollywood celebrities invest in stocks and bonds, accumulating capital in various ways, and have ownership in certain markets. They are not productive workers and do not actually create or generate any value. In fact, their disproportionately high wages come from the musicians who play the instruments,  those who do the sound-engineering, and those who write their songs for them -- if they are singers; in which case, it helps their brand if they place their names in the list of songwriters, even if they wrote little to none of the content. If they are Hollywood actors, it comes from those who write their scripts and work on the set production. Not only that, but the surplus value that is generated comes from consumers who buy their products. And if they have clothing lines and other merchandises attached to their names, they often rely on superexploitative sweatshop labour in Third World countries. Of course, there are some famous entertainers who don't even do anything th...

What is identity politics? To summarize: Identity politics is the anti-scientific idea that "the personal is political." It overemphasizes individual personal experience and separates the root or systemic causes of societal problems from material conditions and the wider class dynamics and economic relations, as it reduces or limits them to psychological phenomena. The most prominent if not overstated subjects are cultural and gender issues. Often, identity politics is fueled by emotionalism, prioritizing self-empowerment rather than class struggle and organizing effectively. And we see several self-styled Western "progressives" indulging in their marginalization, seeing their small group numbers as indicators of how "special they are," while creating a straw man that "asserts that the straight white male is at the apex of the privilege pyramid, responsible for the oppression of all other groups. His original sin condemns him to everlasting ...

Since the United States entered into the Second World War considerably late, it did not suffer as much damage or casualties as other countries had. It also helped that its geographical location kept its cities from suffering the infrastructural damage seen across cities in Europe and Asia. This, in part, helped the American Empire to replace the British Empire (although Britain is still an imperial power) as the global hegemon, especially when the American economy took less time to recover in comparison. And so began the all-conquering march of the U.S. Dollar, undoubtedly the American Empire’s most powerful expression of its global domination and global monopoly. As per requirements during WWII, most of Europe under a war economy had to import its consumer goods. The United States, which had yet to enter into the War, was readily available to trade consumer goods with Europe for gold; and it had done the same in the First World War, to which it was also a latecomer. In other word...

Following the April 1949 signing of the Atlantic Pact and led by then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded by 12 member states in London on May 18th, 1950 . Their purpose, as they claimed, was their dedication to "the preservation of peace" and to the defense of Western Europe against supposed military threats. Not only did the creation coincide with the heightened tensions of the Cold War and the political partitioning of Germany, but it also extended its invitation to West Germany to join the fold on May 9th, 1954 with the intent of re-arming it. This was a violation of the 1945 Potsdam agreement which posited that the partition of Germany was supposed to be temporary and that all of Germany was to be ' de-Nazified '; instead, we saw the development of West Germany into a Western puppet state. The Soviet Union saw the aforementioned invitation to West Germany and its re-arming as a provocation and, in th...

Toronto-based international criminal lawyer and long-time critic of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Christopher Black, recently published a paper titled, " Marx and International Law - A Perspective ," which is now available online on his blog. The paper provides insights on global capital, discussing how international law for capital means the mechanisms used to "solidify and codify" imperialism, and how law affects class relations on a global scale. In it, he states: "This class tension both within states and between states is essential to understand in order to understand the real nature of international law," and that the issue then becomes what to do about the global dominating military power that is Washington. And indeed, the UN has been used by Washington "in violation of the central precepts of the UN Charter," particularly against nations that are targets of U.S. foreign policy and refuse to allow U.S. international capital ...

“It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means that a small number of financially “powerful” states stand out among all the rest. The extent to which this process is going on may be judged from the statistics on emissions, i.e., the issue of all kinds of securities.”  —V.I. Lenin, 1916 (from Ch. III "Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy")  A glob...