The spectre that haunts the United States and Europe

Alberto Rabilotta

16/12/2014

Opinión

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In the face of the visceral reactions of politicians in Washington and the European capitals, and of their scribes (1), we may say without doubt, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, that “a spectre is haunting the United States and Europe”: The spectre of Vladimir Putin.

The scale of military threats, of commercial, economic and financial sanctions and the violent political and ideological propaganda against “Putin’s Russia” is increasing constantly. The Congress of the United States has just adopted, with 411 votes in favour and only 10 against, a resolution that has already been considered as the first phase of a “declaration of war” against Russia, condemning this country for the continuation of “political, economic and military aggression” and the continuous violation of sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldavia.

The sponsor of this resolution, Adam Kinzinger, urged that: “The US, Europe and our allies must aggressively keep the pressure on Mr. Putin to encourage him to change his behavior” (2).

The former Prime Minister Michael Fradkov, present head of Foreign Intelligence Service for Russia, informed the Bloomberg agency that the Russian government is aware of the actions of the United States to “remove Putin from power”: “Such a desire has been noticed, it’s a small secret… No one wants to see a strong and independent Russia”. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-04/russian-spy-chief-blames-u-s-eu-for-ruble-oil-price-collapse.html).

It is more than evident, as Putin himself said on December 4 in his speech to the Federal Assembly, speaking of the sanctions that NATO countries have imposed on his country, that “they are not just a knee-jerk reaction on behalf of the United States or its allies to our position regarding the events and the coup in Ukraine, or even the so-called Crimean Spring. I’m sure that if these events had never happened – I want to point this out specifically for you as politicians sitting in this auditorium – if none of that had ever happened, they would have come up with some other excuse to try to contain Russia’s growing capabilities, affect our country in some way, or even take advantage of it.” (3).

Why Putin?

The first part of a reply is that Putin is the head of State of the only superpower with conventional and nuclear weapons that is capable of limiting, and even of responding with facts on the ground, to the policy of military, political and economic aggression on the part of US imperialism and of NATO to accomplish full neoliberal hegemony.

A necessary complement to this is that Putin shows signs of serious realism and strong political convictions, something that explains the popularity that he enjoys in his country and in many other countries. This is the case because he states frankly and clearly, though without aggression, and indicating that there are ways of negotiation available to resolve conflicts, what he thinks of those who wish to subject Russia. He also takes measures needed to ensure the defence of his country.

What the Russian President thinks indicates with clarity and precision the aspirations of his country (and of many others), that they do not need to subject themselves to the “diktat” of Washington and their allies under penalty of all kinds of sanctions. They can exercise popular and national sovereignty in order to ensure the protection of their society, of social, economic and cultural development (4).

The aspirations of the Russian leader are to contribute to put an end to the chaos in international and regional relations caused by the unipolar nature of the world we live in since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and to negotiate the creation of an international order that allows Russia, and other countries, to maintain relations on a basis of equality, in a climate of peace, cooperation and constructive dialogue.

If in fact it is unpardonable that the Russian Head of State declares himself anti-imperialist in his actions, and even more in words, it is even worse that the articulation of his position in political, economic and social affairs reflects the legitimate national aspirations of the majority of peoples, including several of those who make up the European Union: “If for some European countries national pride is a long-forgotten concept and sovereignty is too much of a luxury, true sovereignty for Russia is absolutely necessary for survival.” (5).

The Russian President has given his country organs of press, such as Russia Today (RT), to make known to the world the real policies of imperialism and the alternative policies of his country. This is unpardonable, as those who for many decades have worked in the media to denounce the aggressive imperialist policies that the US applies for over half a century against Cuba and other countries have noted (6).

Why all this affects the interests and plans of imperial hegemony!

In a separate communication I had made available to readers translations that I made from English to Spanish of important paragraphs of two speeches of Putin (Putin: http://alainet.org/active/79402) to indicate the initiatives and facts that are buried by Western propaganda (taken from this English version: http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/23341).

It is obvious, to explain both the position of Russia and the general situation of the world, that we should start with the following observation: neoliberalism, as was the case with earlier liberalisms, intends to impose “pure” forms of capitalism, a capitalism that is not contaminated with policies of state intervention (from the social measures of Otto von Bismarck in 1883 to those of the New Deal welfare state of the 1930s), [a capitalism] totally “uncontaminated” by the ideas and social policies of democrats, whether these be bourgeois, Christians, socialists or communists.

The experiences of liberal phases of capitalism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries indicate the disastrous consequences in the economy, institutions and societies of countries where this was implanted, including those of imperialist countries. In this sense, it must be recalled that fascism was and continues to be a consequence of liberalism, as the economic historian Karl Polanyi pointed out in 1944, and that is now emphasized by Putin (7).

The hegemony so desperately and aggressively sought by the neoliberal empire directed by the US and the EU – the utopia of a pure and universal capitalism – will be unable to establish itself or survive if there are existent and prosperous alternatives on a national and regional level that provide democratic responses to the evils that are experienced by societies, including those of the most advanced countries of the empire.

Neoliberal imperialism cannot accept the coexistence of alternative models of socioeconomic development, capitalist or mixed, that show positive results for societies. The nature of neoliberal imperialism leads it exclusively to benefit the oligarchs of the monopolies or Big financial Capitalism, destroying even the free competition that is in theory the creed of capitalism. Thus it tends to establish the bases of an openly antisocial and anti-democratic regime.

The concrete reality of the countries of “advanced capitalism” are the policies of austerity to favour the monopolies and the dominant oligarchy that provokes chronic and massive unemployment, closing the doors of productive work and social integration to youth, that is to say, depriving them of a future.

These are policies of social dissolution and impoverishment of the masses, to concentrate wealth in the hands of the one per cent (or less) of the social pyramid. Neoliberal policies are defined by the privatization of public services and the lessening or closing of social programmes open to all, among other factors that define neoliberal policies.

This explains the strong rejection and the aggressive reactions of the empire in the face of socioeconomic alternatives – as for example in countries of Latin America, Asia, and Russia, among others – where States intervene in economies, regulating and at times planning the private industrial sector, looking to prevent extractive monopolies in the natural resources sectors from strangling public finances, diverting, and hence impeding the entrance of foreign exchange from exports, in order to accumulate them in accounts in fiscal paradises, or concentrate them in global financial speculation.

Without these controls and resources, there is no possibility of tax collection or the dedication of foreign exchange to national plans of economic development, for the creation, maintenance or extension of social programmes (rather than eliminating them), nor for the development of education and public health, support for families and the improvement of pensions for the retired, essential policies to generate employment rather than unemployment, social integration and the strengthening of democracy.

The majority of these socioeconomic alternatives hardly go beyond the framework of a “mixed” capitalist system. Nevertheless, they constitute a serious threat to the neoliberal system, because they acquire some regional importance in the development of economic, financial and monetary projects of cooperation, as for example with the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), in Latin America with Caricom, Mercosur, ALBA, Unasur and CELAC, all this without

including the monumental regional process involved in the agreements for cooperation and planning between Russia and China.

Objectively, as the Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt told me recently, while in the central capitalist countries working under the spell of neoliberalism the social, economic and political panorama gets worse by the day, in many countries of the (ancient periphery) in Eurasia and Latin America there are economies that are developing, reducing poverty and increasing levels of socioeconomic development with state intervention and the promotion of social property. Regional planning of these integration initiatives can allow for the maintenance of this tendency even in the face of a new financial and economic crisis on a global scale (See: “Estancamiento con deflación redoux”, Oscar Ugarteche, ALAI, http://alainet.org/active/79336).

It is obvious that Putin proposes – and acts with growing decision – to concretize the end of the chaotic unipolar world resulting from neoliberal hegemony, which of itself is anti-imperialist policy. Imperialism, meanwhile, has not forgotten that if it had to make the concessions that allow for the creation of “societies of a benefactor State”, that is, a redistribution of wealth that extended from the end of the Second World War to the nineteen-seventies, this was due to a power correlation within societies – strong and active unions, communist parties and other forces on the left – and was represented on an international level by the Soviet Union, which had won the war against Nazism, and which was a military superpower with an alternative socioeconomic project.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, as Putin reminds us, put an end to this competition between systems and the US declared itself the victor. From then on it is easy to understand the reasons for the imperialist efforts to destabilize, surround and isolate in order to overthrow, whenever possible, governments that take part in the creation of national and regional socioeconomic alternatives, such as Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, etc.

The only thing that can put an end to this crazy imperial project is to push forward and increase the movement of regional socioeconomic alternatives in order to establish, on the ground, a multipolar order that puts all nations on a level of equality and protects the right of peoples to choose the socioeconomic system that they prefer, and that excludes unilateral or multilateral force for the solution of internal and external conflicts. An order that looks to resolve such conflicts through political and diplomatic negotiation, among other important aspects.

This, in broad outlines, is the programme of the government of Vladimir Putin. Because of this, it is worth reading his declarations and discourses.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Alberto Rabilotta is an Argentine-Canadian journalist.

Notes

1.- What comes after Putin could be worse, Editorial of December 3 2014 of the Bloomberg agency: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-03/what-comes-after-putin-could-be-worse

2.- http://rt.com/usa/211527-representatives-condemn-russia-aggression/

3.- Presidential address of Vladimir Putin before the 11th Assembly of the Russian Federation http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/23341. Speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club, Sochi, (October 24 2014): http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/23137.

4.- See Atilio Boron’s excellent analysis, “Putin: un discurso histórico”, http://alainet.org/active/79057)

5.- Presidential address of Vladimir Putin before the 11th Assembly of the Russian Federation, op.cit.

6.- The United States and their allies have returned to the era of the Cold War, attempting to impose silence through all possible means, including action, to silence press agencies, progressive media and journalists who denounce the policies and actions of imperialism. Now they are trying to silence RT: “They’ll try to shut you down”; Meeting Assange & the non-stop ‘War on RT’, by Margarita Simonyan, editorial head of RT: http://rt.com/op-edge/212587-assange-democracy-mass-media/

7. In the chapter : “History in the Gear of Social Change” of his book The Great Transformation, the Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi wrote in 1944 that “If there was a political movement that responded to the needs of an objective situation and was not a result of fortuitous causes, it was fascism. At the same time, the degenerative character of the fascist solution was evident. It offered an escape from an institutional deadlock which was essentially alike in a number of countries, and yet, if the remedy were tried, it would everywhere produce sickness unto death. That is the manner in which civilizations perish.

“The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and the political realm. The economic system that was in peril of disruption would thus be revitalized, while the people themselves were subjected to a reeducation designed to denaturalize the individual and make him unable to function as the responsible unit of the body politic”. (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, Beacon Press [2001], p. 245.)

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

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