[Marxism] Some things to think about from Stan Goff's latest

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

It's in the Huffington Post: PING & PONG: you are the ball.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/ping-pong-you-are-the-_b_64533.html


[T]here are two parties of the dominators that play bad-cop/good-cop with
all of us. One is the Ping Party, and the other is the Pong Party, and we
are the ball, batted back and forth perennially. When the population just
begins to become radicalized, as it is doing in the face of this criminal
war that has exposed so much of the system itself, threatening to bounce off
the table so to speak, the Pong Party will reach way out to the side to keep
the ball in play.

*  *  *

The average consumption lifestyle of the United States, which keeps
politicians in office, is based on extortion, violence, and plunder in
places we don't see, and from activities the media seldom mentions. To
maintain that lifestyle, which is an imperial political payoff for a
quiescent home base, requires ever expanding inputs of finite resources --
many from aboard -- and the continued ability to back up financial extortion
with military force where necessary. The pivotal resource that makes it
possible to make all the other consumer goods, be they cars, clothes,
computers, or whatever, is fossil energy. The United States, with five
percent of the world's population, used 26% of the word's energy supplies.
Our domestic production has been falling since 1973, even as our aggregate
demand has continued to rise steeply. The United States has allowed car
companies and developers to establish an economic infrastructure that
depends absolutely on private automobiles. This massive fleet of around 250
million automobiles runs on oil. This oil cannot be replaced by biofuels,
contrary to the bullshit being propagated to support a fresh new
vote-buying-and-corporate-welfare scheme for Cargill, Monsanto, and
Archer-Daniels-Midland.

Follow the logic.

The US economy cannot continue to operate as it is without guaranteeing its
access to fossil fuel that comes from abroad. The establishment wants this
to be our dirty little secret, and that's why we twist ourselves in knots
talking about it, including deluding ourselves that we can continue our
energy profligacy and ignoring the wet work that gets done to maintain
control over a region as strategically vital to this end as Southwest Asia.
This, of course, means that when Republicrats use coded language about
"vital American security interests in the Middle East," they are really
talking about maintaining secondary political control over the human beings
who live on top of those energy lakes. If you accept that maintaining the
American way of life is the highest priority, then you have to accept that
the US has to intervene with force when necessary to get the energy
supplies, and even that this force be maintained through a constant threat,
i.e., a permanent US military presence in the region and support of unsavory
regimes to act as our surrogates.

If you believe that people in that part of the world should have the right
to decide when, where, and how to use their own resources, then you have to
accept that this might result in a dramatic and painful change in the
"American way of life."

*  *  *

Again, I didn't write that, Stan did. But I do agree with those two points,
and I think they are of central political importance.

In particular, I'm increasingly dubious of all the "Money for ____, not for
war"-type slogans. We've got to begin telling people the truth, and the
truth is the imperialist countries' lifestyle is NOT SUSTAINABLE. It CANNOT
be a model for the rest of the world -- there simply isn't enough oil -- but
more importantly, it cannot be sustained except by cheating and robbing the
rest of the world, something that can only be maintain by force and
violence. 

An end to imperialist aggressions abroad means quite simply an end to
imperialist privilege at home.

Joaquin


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