Interesting article (small cw: contains usual sectarianism i've come to expect)
Over the last two decades, I’ve seen numerous anarchists make serious predictions about where we were headed, and what dangers we faced. This is a bold thing to do, and a good thing, because it allows us to test our theories. All the predictions I remember have turned out to be wrong.
Trump did not launch a coup: in fact, John Bolton was speaking from experience when he said a coup requires a great deal more organization.
Fascists are not close to taking over: they are primarily a danger for people at the street level and in the way they push the center rightward in terms of acceptable policy for a democratic government to enact.
Promoting antifascism in the midst of a growing antiracist movement was a mistake, a step backwards. As it did in its previous iterations, antifascism decentered questions of whiteness and colonialism and allowed the Left to gain ground in what had previously been anti-state movements: it left us flatfooted when real fascism faltered but the democratic State plowed forward.
Democracy is facing a crisis, but it still poses the biggest danger to us: spreading this awareness more generally might have saved some of our most powerful movements—in Chile and in Greece—from falling into fatal strategic dead ends. It would also have improved the initial framing of the Occupy and 15M movements, allowing them to develop in far more radical directions.
“Late capitalism” or “the final stage of capitalism” were declared after WWI and it’s still chugging along. Discarding Marxism would allow us to more clearly see capitalism’s vital strategic, state-driven element: states and their institutions proactively open up new territories to ensure capitalist expansion.
Being on the look-out for these new frontiers would have given us a head start in identifying the mainstream climate movement and green energy as the biggest threats to life on this planet. Now, we have to play catch up.
...
When a world system is faltering, the general options are:
a) the system successfully renovates and reinvents itself, with the old leader launching a reformed architecture
b) a new leader secures the power and legitimacy to win adherence to a new architecture, beginning a new world system
c) people increase their ability to fight back against the State and we win a global revolution, destroying the world system and preventing a new one from taking its place
d) the current world system remains in place, corroding and descending increasingly into civil war until eventually option a, b, or c occurs.
The IMF, G7, and the whole circus of humanitarian NGOs and international investors were blatant in the ways they benefited from corruption, authoritarian regimes, and internecine civil wars in recently decolonized countries; how by “development” they meant absolute dependence on a single export commodity, so that every poor country was not only completely vulnerable to political pressure from the US and Europe, they might also be plunged into starvation based on the vagaries of the currency market; and how, after the ‘70s, what they were most interested in was making cutthroat profit on the basis of sheer financial speculation rather than any productive growth that, from a capitalist standpoint, could be seen as sustainable. In other words, the entire Lawrence Summers crowd didn’t hide the fact that they were absolute vampires who didn’t even believe their own dogma, and the entire Rumsfeld and Bolton crowd couldn’t hide how ignorant they were about the world, about politics, and about the countries they believed they could dominate.
US power was not masked any better on the political stage.
From the perspective of US power, none of this looks good. To have any chance of renovating the world system it authored, the US would need to make grand gestures in order to expiate their rotten brand:
supporting Palestinian statehood and breaking Israeli public support for its current ruling class by wrecking the Israeli economy
normalizing relations with China and Iran but ensuring favorable investment and trade deals with putative democracies like India, Taiwan, and South Korea
making a convincing, substantial pitch for rebranded international investment that distinguishes itself from the mercenary monetary policy of the IMF by assuring more autonomy for “sustainable development” directed by the local ruling classes of formerly colonized countries, etc.
unveiling a convincing plan for a global transition to green energy that accelerates the current wave of profitable investment, extraction, and production, while also including a “global justice” element that gives meaningful resources to poor countries to participate in the transition and improve their economic standing
And internally:
co-opting abolition for the second time (the first time being in 1865) by decriminalizing drugs, eliminating prison for all nonviolent offenders, and expanding the use of unarmed neighborhood patrol cops
...
The only military capacity China would likely need to take on the role of global leader is the capacity for deterrence and for stabilization operations. Deterrence simply means that they pose enough of a military threat that no other state would directly attack China or the smaller countries that China considers to be in its primary zone of influence, more on this in a moment. Stabilization operations would require China to project force internationally to protect the flow of commerce and protect major investments. Its bases in Eastern Africa are well positioned to help it police the Red Sea and Suez Canal route through which a great deal of commerce flows between Europe and Asia.
Fucking hilarious that peter is somewhat brics head
This is unfortunate because we have the most latitude to build a revolution in a moment like this, when one world system is falling apart, and before it rejuvenates itself or before the next system has the chance to fully animate the replacement.
To not squander our chances, though, we need to remember a great many things:
Democracy is our enemy. Supporting democracy only turns us into innovative designers for the rejuvenation of the American project.
The Right and the Left are the two hands of the State, equally dangerous. The real line of conflict runs between above and below. However, Right and Left are not the same. The followers of the Left are mostly sincere. We need to be present to them to help spread meaningful forms of revolt, and we need to show them the true nature of their leaders. As for the Right, we must always attack its lies and paranoias. The key is to leave the door open for followers of the Right to betray authority, but never accommodating their anxieties. We need to build power based on expansive solidarity to show them what that could look like, but they need to take the step of abandoning identities based on oppression.
Marxism betrayed the strongest revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. It does not deserve any more chances. Vanguards, authoritarian parties, and reforms betrayed the strongest social movements of the last 100 years. They do not deserve any more chances.
Abolition already happened, but because it was partial, it only changed the institutions of oppression without ending oppression itself. Meaningful abolition needs to identify the shared root of exploitation and white supremacy (many of today’s abolitionists are already preparing the groundwork for a second major defeat-in-victory).
Decolonization already happened. But because it was political, it only spread the colony, training the colonized to act like their colonizers. To destroy colonialism, its beginning points and the vehicles for its adaptation need to be destroyed.
A revolution needs to enact solidarity between all people, but people need to be honest about where they are coming from. People who bear a middle class culture need to unlearn it, as it manifests in a politics of comfort: building informal social power, flattening contradictions, and avoiding conflict. Currently, its crusade is to destroy practices of transformative justice—and the difficult experiences those practices come from—in favor of the kind of attitudes (simultaneously fragile and vicious) that flourish on social media.
Revolution is a question of organization, but nearly everyone who poses it this way is already limiting themselves to a counterrevolutionary idea of organization.
There is another way of organizing ourselves, of making plans, of taking strategic steps. And there always has been.
(i don't agree with his dim views on marxism, but i like peter for his forceful directness) (Also, he has a tumor apparently 
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@SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net if you have some time. i'm interested in whatcha thinking in analysis from the other side
Only 1 mention of "Stalinist" in the whole article? He's really off his game. (I mostly kid; I like Gelderloos even if I have to sit through his criticism)
Starting from "Which way the world system?", I have no big problems with the first few paragraphs. I tend to sympathize more with Radhika Desai's critique of world-systems analysis which is that it's too focussed on the dominance of that empire, and not focussed enough on the battles and divisions against that world-system, so the fall of these systems can seem a little... underexplained, because you haven't been talking that much about what everybody else has been doing to weaken them. But that's just a nitpick and I 99% agree.
Elsewhere, Russia has suffered humiliating defeats, as in its inability to support Armenia against the expansionism of Azerbaijan, which is backed by Turkey.
Convenient that this is the COTW, huh? As I said in that megathread preamble, I think this is mostly cherrypicking. I'm also not even sure I'd technically call it a defeat. Or at least, not fully a defeat. Russia just seems relatively noncommittal about Armenia now, and it's hard to blame them in retrospect. On a moral level, obviously Russia should have done something to help the people inside Nagorno Karabakh, just as China should start landing supersoldiers on the shores of Tel Aviv, but on a geopolitical level, it's a messy situation given Russia's frenemy situation with Turkiye and, as Gelderloos mentions, Turkiye's conversion to non-aligned-yet-technically-in-NATO position.
c) people increase their ability to fight back against the State and we win a global revolution, destroying the world system and preventing a new one from taking its place
Obviously I don't share the total mistrust of the state, or at least its potential under socialism, that anarchists do. But even so, I feel like "winning a global revolution" would be a pretty long period, perhaps a human lifetime, due to the necessary wars and changes in material conditions and class structures which would cause different countries to erupt at different times. During that time, a new, strange, non-imperialist (or at least substantially less imperialist) world-system might be established, possibly by China in our current situation.
The foreign and economic policy championed by Bush II and carried on in some ways by Trump and in other ways by Biden, has probably destroyed any chance the US has of restoring the global architecture that it put in place on the heels of its triumph over the Nazis.
The fact that no one in the US or British political elite seem aware of this fact only reconfirms it. And though the level of self-defeating ignorance is astounding, it should not be surprising, as capitalists usually only understand capitalism at a superficial level, and statists usually only understand the State at a superficial level, similar to sports commentators going over the latest plays.
Ouch! Aside from that last quip, yes, 100%.
By unilaterally invading Iraq twice and killing millions of people, by flagrantly overthrowing social democratic (but capitalist!) regimes that didn’t favor a handpicked list of Western investors, by protecting Israel from any slightest slap on the wrist to the point where nearly the entirety of Israeli society now feels entitled to commit genocide—not out of view, the way the US sometimes does, but in front of the cameras, and they’re the ones holding the camera, smiling and cracking jokes—the US and UK have destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument. The US (and under its protection, Israel) flagrantly ignores UN resolutions whenever it wants. It acts like a “rogue state” within the interstate system that it designed, and designed to its advantage. And this cowboy attitude has always characterized US foreign policy (except, arguably, under FDR), but it accelerated under Reagan and especially Bush II.
Not to take this quote out of context, because Gelderloos does talk a little about how the American Empire transitioned from one more based on industrial might to one based on financial might and exploitation of colonies indirectly (compared to, say, the British Empire physically sending troops to walk the streets, and declaring territories to be colonies, and such), though not in those exact words - but I feel like this is kinda putting the cart before the horse. America has always committed heinous acts, and it hasn't "destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument" before. Vietnam didn't really do that, nor did Korea, nor the genocide of indigneous Americans nor the slavery+genocide of Africans and those same indigneous people. The reason why America is actually facing consequences for their actions now, consequences that directly strike at their empire and not just proxies (though it also is very much doing that), is because of how their empire has changed materially. They cannot produce enough weapons; their navy is weak to hypersonic missiles; their bases are weak to drone technology; their sanctions were effective until they put Russia and China on that list as well.
Even progressive electoral victories in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere let the capitalists know: nothing to worry about here. And the democratic states have proved capable of dismantling actually fascist movements like Golden Dawn in Greece before they proved too much of a threat. But the rightwing white populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Johnson not only eroded the functionality of democratic governance, they also threatened the stability of the technocratic status quo, scaring the hell out of investors who had been living in a Candyland made just for them, and they burst the assumed durability of key political formations like the European Union or the US-European alliance.
Did it? Has it? I'm not sure I agree that Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, or Johnson meaningfully threatened those things at all. Western democracy is no democracy at all, obviously, so there was nothing to break other than perhaps conceptions of it, but if you asked the average Westerner "Who is more democratic, us or China/Russia/Iran/Bad Country?" then I think I know what they'd say. And the technocrats might be a little peeved, but I don't think any of them have actually lost any sleep. The newest wave of populists - your Mileis and Melonis and such - have almost hilariously bent the knee at record pace to technocratic governance and the almighty authority of central banks. It seems to me that Gelderloos thinks that the order of events was, to simplify: empire at apex -> stagnation and financialization -> discontentment in general public -> either useless quasi-leftists and socdems OR right-wing populists who disrupted society/technocrats -> further breakdown of empire. Whereas I think that the right-wing populists were instead the avatars of the current stage of neoliberalism. They weren't an outside force, they were an expression of the exact same capitalists that have ruled throughout the newest stage of imperialism (say, since the 70s, or perhaps 40s, depending on where you like to draw lines). They weren't disrupting Western democracy and neoliberalism; they were Western democracy and neoliberalism. They were the mosquitos born in that fetid, stagnant pond and changed very little about it.
Europe—long a valuable container for cultural and political legitimacy, given the white supremacy at the heart of the world system—has for the first time in nearly a century had to consider its separate interests, and this is already showing up in a markedly different approach towards China. In the US, the political elite already consider China an adversary worthy of a new Cold War, whereas in Europe, China is considered a partially reliable strategic partner. If something does not change quickly, the US will be relegated to the same status. And without reliable US support, the EU will have to bring itself up to war readiness, able to dissuade Russia from further invasions. In order to find a balance that Russia won’t risk upsetting, that may mean abandoning Ukraine to a permanent partition.
There are obviously battles within the European elite about what the hell they're gonna do about China, but I doubt that the US will ever be relegated in their relationship. I mean, they literally blew up a pipeline and started a war on their doorstep which has plunged the continent into an economic depression after a period of stagnation following the financial crash in 2009, and they seem to be buying more weapons from the US and getting more involved. I will eat an entire car if AfD is elected in Germany and proceeds to change their relationship with the US by one iota, and I don't even need to make bets about the left gaining power in Germany and doing the same, because it'll never happen.
US force is irrelevant. For two years, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill, the second strongest military in the world, destroying million dollar Russian tanks with thousand dollar drones. The Houthis are now using drones to threaten shipping in one of the most important commercial waterways in the global economy. The effectiveness of multibillion dollar US missile defense systems is moderate. Meanwhile, US missile strikes from bases, ships, and planes all across the region are worse than ineffective, because they are strengthening rivals and forcing nonaligned countries to realign themselves at a more cautious distance from both the US and Israel.
It's always curious where authors draw the line between Ukraine doing something and the West doing it. If Ukraine were to hypothetically win the war, I'd imagine it would be spun as "Small little Ukraine beats nuclear superpower all by itself, with no help whatsoever!" whereas when they talk about Russia being isolated or whatever, it's always "Ukraine is backed by 40-something countries all around the world, supporting freedom and democracy blahblahblah". I could, and do, argue the complete opposite point of Gelderloos. Russia has fought the combined military and industrial might of the imperial core, including the United States, to a standstill, destroying million dollar American/European tanks with thousand dollar drones; and it seems like they might beat NATO in less time than it took for WW1 or WW2 to play out. Throwing the entire male population of Ukraine into the treads of Russian tanks, while Russia takes an order of magnitude less casualties (and probably less than that honestly) and calling it "victory" or even a "stalemate" is just bizarre. "We're in a stalemate with climate change because we're throwing the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps at it before climate change can really impact us!" No, that's what climate change/military defeat is.
But anyway, that's not really the point of what Gelderloos is saying and I agree with the gist of the argument: modern militaries kinda suck against the threats they currently face.
Instead of projecting force, the US needs to be projecting intelligence, creating solutions to the many crises pummeling the world system. The current US ruling class does not see the actual problems, and is not proposing any real solutions. The chance of a change of guard that pushes the US and European elite in a more intelligent direction is extremely low, based on a glance at the electoral map. From the Trumps, throwing gasoline on the fire at home and abroad, to the Bidens, trying the same old techniques and hoping for different results, the political mainstream is at war with itself. Politicians, technocrats, and investors would receive the kind of proposals actually needed to save the current world system like some bizarre mix of treason, progressive nonsense, and socialistic revolution.
Again, I don't think the difference between Biden and Trump is really that much. We all obviously have opinions of their presentation style (the Twitter President! gasp!), but consider just the trendlines of, say, immigrant deporting, or inequality, or police violence, or military funding, or dozens of other factors, and you really have to strain to figure out where the two differ ideologically. There are battles within the bourgeoisie, even big ones, but there always have been. They only go away when revolution approaches.
In the first edition of the book published in 1994, Arrighi does that bold thing: he makes a prediction. And he gets it completely wrong, saying that Japan will be the architect and leader of the next world system. In a later edition of the book, however, he does the decent thing and acknowledges that he was wrong and that it would likely be China. He doesn’t, however, offer a convincing analysis of what flaw in the theory led him to make that mistake. “Anarchy in World Systems” argues that his mistake comes from Arrighi favoring the materialist side of his own theoretical tool over the anarchist side. Capital accumulation is not the driving force of the world system. It is a necessary fuel, but capital accumulation does not happen without the architecture and the strategic planning of states. We can realize how obvious this should be if we let ourselves see, in hindsight, how ridiculous the prediction was that Japan would be the number one global power. This prediction was based on statistics for Japan’s economic growth, leaving out the non-quantifiable factor: strategic planning and power contests by states.
Japan could not possibly be the next global architect because it had never won a war against the old leader, the US, so it had no bubble of autonomy within which to begin creating a new design. Once Japan challenged the US—at a purely economic level—in the ‘80s, US planners simply turned off the faucet. After the Korean War, though, China did have that military victory, and with it a bubble of regional autonomy.
Wow! So you're telling me that the materialist analysis of Japan was wrong because it failed to consider that Japan was so infiltrated by American capitalists and so unable to go against its whims due to their economic reliance and lack of potential for autarky, like Russia and China could instead manage? ...wait, hang on. Shit. That's just materialist analysis again.
Anyway, I like the next several paragraphs analyzing China, up to this point:
state sovereignty: though China engages in a great deal of ethnic cleansing and should be qualified as a settler state in at least half its claimed territory, and Xi himself could accurately be described as a very nationalist socialist, China does not place emphasis on the nation-state, per se, as an organizing principle globally [...]
...I'm not even really sure what to say about that, to be honest. Unless he's talking about the rights of slavers to keep doing slavery, which I assume he's not, then I guess he's talking about Xinjiang? And Hong Kong? I am unaware of a line of reasoning that reasonably argues that China is a settler-state.
Also presumably, as their military power grows, the Chinese ruling class will support coups and regime change in weaker countries throughout Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Africa, but they will need to find an effective way of governing or justifying these exceptional actions.
I think this is kinda silly but not totally ridiculous. As in, I think Gelderloos has correctly identified that the coming decades will feature China trying to work through the contradictions of their stated diplomatic ideology, because a system of "live and let live" probably isn't going to work terribly well. I'm obviously of the opinion that the Party will manage to not repeat Western imperialism, and Gelderloos disagrees, and there's nothing we could say to each other to change each other's minds, so I'll just agree to disagree.
I actually agree with like 80% of the paragraphs in this section; I've said for a long time that BRICS isn't going to be the socialist salvation but instead will inadvertently create the conditions for socialists to rise up, just like how WW1 wasn't started with the intention of creating the USSR but it was instead a byproduct of that action which then became perhaps the single most important result of it. BRICS will probably not get rid of imperialism, but lifting the boot off the neck of countries even if they're still weak and in pain will allow them to take meaningful action.
Also, dictatorial power arrangements rarely survive strong leaders. Granted, Xi is not a dictator in the way that Hitler and Franco were. There is a very strong party apparatus behind him and he has consolidated his power in the Party over the last decade.
Well, that's at least encouraging.
In other words, Xi and his advisers can think in a new paradigm, a quality necessary for being able to design a new world system. But part of Xi’s system of governance has required an intolerance for any disobedience or dissent, which will make an effective succession much more difficult when Xi is gone. The critical question is, does robust debate happen in secret at the upper and intermediate levels of the CCP, with a projection of consensus and unity in public? Or does Xi’s governing method breed a culture of acquiescent bureaucrats who cannot challenge a bad idea? If the latter, China might be able to help launch a new world system while Xi is in charge, but they might not remain the dominant member of the system’s central alliance.
Intolerance for the opinions of capitalists is a pretty great thing, I think. Count me in as a Censoring Capitalists Enthusiast. I could launch into a whole thing about how opinions on censorship and journalist freedom are results of the conditions in which we were purposefully raised and educated (and very conveniently align very well with the interests of capitalists!), and these aren't some fundamental good values in the universe and we have to understand why we think the way we think even about things that we think are very obviously good. And thus more opinions doesn't necessarily equal gooder, though it often does in certain sets of material conditions and systems (such as under feudalism or capitalism). Ruthless criticism of all that exists and so on. But whatever.
And the last section is pretty much distilled anarchism, so I have nothing really to comment about on as an ML that hasn't been said by a hundred thousand other people. I don't think regarding the problem as a lack of memory is wrong, I again just think it places cause and effect weirdly.
Thanks for your time
I found brics importance or even mention very surprising, I feel like they do mainly vibes check seshes.
China note is honestly wildly optimistic for an anarchist. I think china’s diplomacy will get first real challenge when some country they heavily invested in get couped and nationalized tbh. Well myanmar is kinda half of that, but not full duo. I think he talks about whole western part, Inner Mongolia, tianshin etc with settler passage, but that’s whatevs.
despite trump being more of the same, europe doesn’t think he is more of the same. Plus usa president has wild powers (like unilateral first strike).
As for the world systems: china shifts the center of gravity of the world by sheer population, but arrighi was still wild to think of Japan.
China cannot be same exploiter simply because there are not another 5 billion people to be exploited, the world can’t carry two golden billions. (Unless west decides to suicide pact it’s way into nuclear war, but that’s more India/south america/africa win conditions, cause china will get hit in that scenario)
