Richard Mellor
Well he doesn't mention capitalism or the laws of motion of the capitalist system of production that are at the root of the problem and that drive the system toward war and, in the present era, the possibility of nuclear annihilation. But his analysis of the events surrounding the so-called rising "tensions" between the US and China is accurate I reckon.
Capitalism is a ruthless, competitive, system of social organization. It has left in its historical journey a sea of blood, death and destruction. The colonization of the African continent, the Americas or Ireland for that matter was driven by the rapacious quest for markets, and profits, for the trade in commodities, and the raw materials and labor power necessary for their production.
All the talk of cooperation and diplomacy is phony. The goal in this game is to drive one's competitor from the market, to be the "last man standing". There is no such thing as a humane capitalism. Two world wars were the product of competition between the European capitalist states and Japan for domination in this game. The result of the second war was the end of European domination and British colonial power in particular and the emergence of a new global boss, US imperial power. This European settler state emerged from WW2 as the dominant world power with over 50% of world trade and, for a while, no competitors.
The post WW2 era, the "Cold War" as we know it was a bi-polar world in which the Soviet Union and the US existed side by side in relative peace and stability, both protecting spheres of influence. That ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union leaving for a brief period, the US as the dominant wold power economically and militarily.
The Chinese Stalinist regime took a slightly different path to the Russians and has in the past three of four decades become a serious competitor to the US and its dominant world position as Sachs points out in the video. The decline in global poverty is due to the rise of China. China owns the largest bank in Africa and is also a major builder of infrastructure on the continent. It has refused to join the sanctions on Russia as have many former colonial countries, 16 in Africa for example. India has also refused to join the fray.
US imperialism has spent some $50 billion selling arms to Ukraine in its war with Russia, a war it cannot win. This support has nothing to do with freedom or democracy and the US has admitted this saying that its goal is to weaken its competitor on the global stage, the much weaker imperial power, Russia. The folks in Washington and the Pentagon will fight to the last Ukranian standing. The US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuel and US oil companies and makers of weapons of mass destruction are raking in huge profits. They salivate at the thought of it and are blind to the consequences.
This week, the Administration of "Worker Joe" Biden, has pledged another $12 billion for Ukraine (including supplying drinking water according to reports) and $1 billion in weapons for Taiwan. The US taxpayer is very generous it seems. Meanwhile, 150,000 residents in or around Jackson Mississippi are without potable water. Numerous communities in the US suffer serious water shortage and Flint Michigan is among the most famous case of residents being forced to drink poisoned water due to political choices made by politicians of the ruling class.
Under the blanket of NATO, US imperialism is paving the road to a potential nuclear disaster. It is leading a proxy war against it's weaker Russian competitor and is about to repeat this disastrous strategy with regard to Taiwan. The decrepit old bourgeois Nancy Pelosi has sparked off a wave of diplomatic visits by her Democratic Party colleagues to Taiwan culminating in the arms deal this week; this is a political party that can't even provide European style health and dental care to the citizens of California, a state in which it has control of the governorship, and the state legislature; by all accounts it is a one party state.
Perhaps, Sisters and Brothers of the working class, we might consider cutting back on posting pictures of our food on Facebook and at least more openly start condemning the actions of the murderous gang that occupies the US Congress and the Pentagon. Behind them are the US Oligarchs, like Bezos, Gates, The Koch brothers, Mercer and the unelected minority that own the war production companies, the media all the way down to the sports franchises. The obsession with sports is another escape from what is becoming a dangerous reality, a nuclear conflict, not to mention the environmental catastrophe that is threatening extinction of life as we know it. This is a product of human activity, of how capitalism produces the necessities of life, and equally frequently, useless things.
We are in the belly of the beast here. The mass media is very powerful and, we have to be honest, the US population is in many ways ignorant and isolated from the rest of the world and from world events and history. The joke is that we learn geography after the US bombs some place and we see the little maps on CNN. Workers have never had a political party of our own, at the national level certainly, and this has contributed to the isolation and lack of class consciousness in the US.
So many of us are unaware that the US government and its pronunciations have no respect in the rest of the world. Up until recently, the US supported the "One China" policy with regards to Taiwan, but simply violates it. In Hawaii as far as I know there is a strong nationalist movement that wants independence, perhaps the Chinese should send a representative there and offer to supply them with arms, or Cuba maybe.
The history of the US from its beginning is an extremely violent one and its ruling class the most brutal of all. As Chief Red Cloud warned a long time ago: "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it."
But we should be clear in understanding that every ruling class considers the system it governs to be the apex of civilization and themselves the rightful leaders of it. In the case of the US, it is a divine right.
Sachs in the video, like Mearsheimer and many of the left critics of the inequality and dangerous direction the US is headed, do not see the working class as a force for change. They do not consider the working class at all in their projections; this must be very depressing for them and their writings are depressing at times. But history proves them wrong. For myself, I am convinced that the US working class will enter the stage in a serious way at some point and there are signs of this at the present. I couldn't remain political at all if I thought differently. I think the delay means that there will be unnecessary suffering as a result.
The time to act is now before it's too late.
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