by James Howard Kunstler

“The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal.” — Gaius Baltar

    So-called Normies might be musing, this month of approved mental languor, whether the mighty efforts to suppress news of all kinds, about everything, have concealed the true tendings of our wayward country — leading them to wonder whether it is even possible to be a Normie in such an abnormal time and place.

     What news is suppressed? That the USA is worse than dead broke. That the people were poisoned, apparently on-purpose. That the spectral “Joe Biden” sold out our country. That the war we started in Ukraine, on purpose, for no good reason, is about to be lost, and with it our standing around world. That there actually is such a criminal organism as the Blob at large in our government, responsible for the astounding abnormality immersing us. But never mind all that… for now, just go see Barbie. Have a clam roll, a dip in the ocean, another margarita…. September will be here soon enough.

     Eventually, the official perversion of money — especially of borrowing an awesome lot of it with no intention of ever repaying — leads to the unhappy circumstance of money disappearing until nobody has any money. And by such, the broke-ness of the government transmogrifies to a whole land full of broke people. Many banks go broke as well. Even the high-fliers who hoarded things that purport to represent money go broke. Then, nobody has the means to buy anything. Businesses that can’t sell anything stop being businesses. After a while, no activity is meaningful except grubbing in the soil to grow some food, or stealing it from those who grubbed and grew it. By then, you can barely even call it a society.

     By September, we’ll have some idea where all that is heading. The bond market is wobbling because the government can’t stop increasing its spending. America issues more and more bonds to borrow ever more money, but to the world’s bond-buyers (a.k.a. lenders), what used to be considered virtually risk-free now looks like a bad bet. So, the enticement to buy, which is called the interest rate, has to go up. But as it goes up, the cash value of existing bonds goes down (who wants the older bonds when the newer ones pay more?)

     The holders of bonds are mainly big institutions: banks, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds (other countries). They put their large holdings into bonds because in normal times they are safe and dependable investments. But these are abnormal times. When the value of their bonds goes down a lot, the value of their reserves goes down. And when those reserves get reduced too much in relation to the institutions’ liabilities (what they owe), the institutions go bankrupt. When that happens, the people who are vested in those institutions lose their money, too, and end up having to sell stocks and other property to meet their obligations. This ends up looking like what we call “a crash.” It will get Normies’ attention.

     How’s it going with the poisoning of America? Since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now “X”), the app has developed a beefed-up immune system against censorship aimed at it by the FBI, CIA, DHS, and the White House. Twitter is once again a popular medium of information exchange, where news flows pretty freely these days. Even news of previous censorship and cancellation is getting out — and with interesting possibilities for consequences.

 The many brave doctors who questioned the “vaccine” story, are being heard now. Other entrepreneurial analysts on Twitter — e.g., Edward Dowd, The Unity Project, “The Ethical Skeptic,” “Chief Nerd”— regularly publish data and charts showing America and the rest of the world just how much damage the mRNA shots did to millions of people, how many have been disabled and killed by them. By September, the awareness of what has been done, and the psychopathic degree of official lying about it, could pass that threshold beyond which everybody knows and the great crime is revealed. Expect a major American political attitude adjustment.

     There is surely enough publicly-seen evidence to make an impeachment case against “Joe Biden.” The process seems to move slowly, given the traditional lassitude of Congress, but momentum is building as all these other national fiascos careen toward criticality due to abysmal executive leadership. That evidence shows the Biden Family engaged in an international racketeering scheme to peddle “JB’s” influence when he was vice-president. That’s bribery and the very word is in the short passage of our Constitution describing the grounds for sacking a high official.

     Rep. Comer’s House Oversight Committee has already dug up voluminous suspicious activity reports in Biden family bank accounts and has promised more, including information of offshore hidden accounts. Jim Jordan’s preliminary impeachment inquiry has drawn up its first witness list which includes the shadowy “JB” aide Michael Carpenter, and the slippery Trump impeachment “whistleblower,” CIA agent Eric Ciaramella — who essentially accused Mr. Trump of attempting to look into the very bribery crimes of the Biden family lately exposed, a pungent irony. When the impeachment process gets underway in earnest this fall, I expect “Joe Biden” will resign, leaving Ms. Harris to be managed by the shadow-president Barack Obama. That in itself will become a crisis of its own.

       Our country has vested its prestige and treasure — but not our blood, at least yet — in the preposterous Ukraine proxy war, completely misjudging every element of it. The Russiaphobia of so many Blob officials was amplified by their own dishonest efforts to blame Russia for all the self-created ills of our own national life. The dirty secret of the Ukraine war is that we are no longer in control of events. The Russians are going to settle things there and that poor palooka of a country will be wrested back into their traditional sphere-of-influence, no more to be a troublemaker. I doubt that our puppet, Mr. Zelensky will be in power by Halloween. NATO will cease to exist and each nation of Europe will then struggle to settle its own sovereign hash without much of an industrial economy left. Expect governments to fall.

      In the meantime, enjoy the clam rolls, the surf, the corn-dogs at the fair, and all the other blessings of languorous August. Rest up for what’s coming when Normies awake!

source: ClusterfuckNation

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In the different countries of the world, capitalism is shaped and consolidated not only by the general logic of this mode of production, but also by the social, historical, and cultural conditions of each country. The way each country and region understand the forms of accumulation and expansion of capitalism is fundamental to the class struggle.

The dispute between capitalist and socialist projects in the twentieth century generated a rich environment for theoretical and political development in the context of the challenges that social inequality posed in countries on the periphery of capitalism. An important initiative in this regard was the creation of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) by the United Nations. Some sectors that found a way out of these challenges and devised a strategy based on social transformation, such as the communist parties, aligned with the orientation of the Third International or groups of leftist militants who sought to understand the dynamics of Latin American capitalism based on Karl Marx’s theory of value in order to build a socialist alternative. These orientations gave rise to what is known as Marxist dependency theory.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the world saw the development and expansion of commercial, productive, and financial globalisation. This new phase in the world economy was marked by increased trade in goods and services, greater international participation in the productive operations of transnational companies, and the intense circulation of capital at the international level in a new dynamic of world capitalism. Faced with the demands of financial capital—the dynamic centre of this new stage of capitalism—countries have increased the extent to which they have opened their economies externally and deregulated their markets, reducing state participation in the economy in pursuit of the ideal of a ‘minimal state’—despite the unsatisfied basic needs of a huge portion of the population. Neoliberal policies have been implemented in many countries. These policies seek to dismantle both the welfare state in Europe and the few advances that have been made in Latin America towards enshrining democracy and the rule of law in the constitution and are presented as necessary conditions for economic development and overcoming ‘underdevelopment’.

Faced with this new dynamic of contemporary capitalism, the Brazil office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, in collaboration with Professor Renata Couto Moreira and the Research Group on Marxist Studies of Dependency Theory in Latin America—Anatália de Melo Collective of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), seeks to deepen the role of Marxist dependency theory today as an important scientific tool to understand the essence of the processes and current anti-democratic and fascist trends, as well as to identify emancipation processes throughout the twenty-first century.

We therefore seek to present a brief history of the debate on dependency in its various currents and perspectives. We will also reflect on the importance of understanding the super-exploitation of the workforce as a current reality in dependent countries. This is fundamental for understanding the form that the process of accumulation and appropriation of wealth takes in the Global South, and it makes no sense to separate the possibilities of overcoming the condition of super-exploitation of the working class from the structural elements that determine it.

The debate on underdevelopment and dependency arose in the 1960s, guided mainly by attempts to understand the reasons for the backwardness of Latin American countries in relation to the core countries. The international debate revolved around very different, and even contradicting, points of view. This was a period of intense dialogue that sought to develop Latin American thinking through institutions including the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES), the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), and university centres such as the University of Chile’s Centre of Socioeconomic Studies (CESO).

ECLAC economists such as Celso Furtado, Raúl Prebish, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Enzo Faletto viewed underdevelopment as a ‘delay’ in the development of markets and related institutions, a point supported by the World Bank at that time. This analysis maintained that it was necessary to overcome a series of structural conditions in these countries, especially through industrialisation, in a way that would favour the development of internal markets and improve the terms of trade in international relations, which would be possible through active state intervention. Though the unequal relationship between countries at the centre and on the periphery of capitalism in terms of development and underdevelopment was questioned, no consideration was given to the contradictions between the different social classes in peripheral countries.

At the same time, a group of economists—professors Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotônio dos Santos, Vânia Bambirra, Luiz Fernando Victor, Teodoro Lamounier, Albertino Rodriguez, and Perseu Abramo—held their first studies on dependency theory in Brasília in an ongoing course based on reading Marx’s Capital. These studies sought to understand the essence of the phenomenon of the underdevelopment of the countries in the region by analysing the historical development and transformations of the Latin American reality using Marxist methodology. This effort also sought to formulate a strategy that would, on the one hand, address the political challenges that Brazil faced at the time—a time of effervescence for popular movements that existed alongside a government striving to carry out agrarian, urban, and educational reforms ¬— and, on the other hand, combat the offensive of the local ruling classes supported by the bourgeoisies of the core capitalist countries, especially the United States.

These were the first studies of what became known as Marxist dependency theory. Based on the Marxian categories of the general law of capitalist accumulation as well as absolute and relative surplus value, this group of economists stated that the root of underdevelopment was not to be found in the industrial backwardness of each economy, but rather in the historical process and in the way that the countries of Latin America had been incorporated into the world market through colonisation by Europe, and then by the international relations to which those countries were subjected, which were perpetuated after their political independence by means of economic dependence on the dictates of the division of labour in global capitalism.

From this perspective of the combined and unequal development of capitalist accumulation in its globalised totality, one begins to understand that the phenomenon of underdevelopment grips the dependent economy. Thus, a relationship of dependence is created and fed by the development of capitalist industry, which transforms some countries supplying raw materials into receptacles of wealth that drain into the industrialised core. The super-exploitation of the workforce is necessary for this drainage to be sustained, which exposes the real process of the production and reproduction of capital in Latin American countries.

The super-exploitation of labour refers to the intensified exploitation of the workforce, resulting in an extraction of surplus value that exceeds the limits historically established in core countries. This becomes a fundamental feature of the capitalist system in underdeveloped economies, since foreign capital and local ruling classes benefit from workers’ low wages and precarious working conditions as well as the absence of labour rights, thus maximising their profits and capital accumulation. This contributes to the reproduction of these countries’ dependence and subordination as part of the international order.

The super-exploitation and the dispossession of workers in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have helped sustain welfare states in developed countries through the international division of labour. In the Global North, there is a sort of understanding between the state, capitalists, and workers. This understanding is focused on the expansion of productive methods, achieved by increasing profits and productivity, which is shared through real wage increases and the extension of social protection. Therefore, as the economist and popular activist Juliane Furno explains, Marxist dependency theory demonstrates that the capitalist mode of production on a global scale gives rise to two types of economies that develop at different paces, in which development and underdevelopment are not antagonistic but complementary, a dialectical unit, because they lead to the same logic of accumulation 1. Thus, dependent capitalism is defined, first, by the transfer of value from the periphery to the core as a structural dynamic; second, by the super-exploitation of labour as compensatory for the local bourgeoisie; and, third, by a particular type of reproduction of capital in which production and consumption are separated.

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https://mronline.org/2023/08/08/dossier-no-67-dependency-and-super-exploitation/

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