Richard Mellor
A quick note on the video.
I have admired John Mearsheimer’s analysis of the events that have dominated our lives over the past period, at least since he co-wrote with Stephen Walt, the article on Israel and the Israeli lobby two decades ago. I think he is the best of the bourgeois political strategists, at least, those I am familiar with
He paints a very bleak but accurate picture of America’s (and the worlds) future in the above video. His description of the state of affairs with regard to the political leadership in the US is very compelling and I am sure so many workers would agree with it. The greatest threat to the US he says is the internal strife reminding people that “A house divided cannot survive…” and certainly cannot “….compete with China”. He savages the degenerate Trump but stresses he is not the cause of the crisis, of the decline of US power but a, “….reflection of a society that has lost its moorings.” Millions of US Americans would agree with that.
He refers to the lies and the name calling and the personal insults that dominate US political discourse but it is the delusion that is the underlying cause; a complete ignorance of what is happening in the world around them. The US economy is a house of cards based on an AI tech bubble and $32 trillion in debt. The private sector has taken over the means of communication edging out the state as a source of stability and accurate assessment of the situation. Edward Luce and his Reader’s Digest pales in comparison and the tech bourgeois, he says as well as other important sectors of the ruling class, are “private actors serving their own interests.”, rather than the interests of the nation.
He ends his talk telling the viewer, “I want you to think about this the next time you hear a politician speak. Ignore the tone. Ignore the insults. Look at the policy. Look at the power. Ask yourself, does this make us stronger? Does this make us safer or is this just more noise in a dying empire?”
I think Professor Mearsheimer is a not as aware as many outside academia that millions would agree with his assessment of the body politic and its occupants. Millions have opted out of the electoral process altogether and just as many are convinced that the entire political class has, lost its bearings.
Given the absence of a political alternative to the two parties of capitalism and a mass media that simply regurgitates the message that the free market is the answer to all things and the only form of social organization that works even as most workers see that it doesn’t work for them, many of the disheartened blame corruption, greed, or human nature; they all just criminals. People look to religion and others blame the crisis on the struggle between good and evil spirits, God and Satan. They are demonic, someone commented on one of my tik-tok videos.
During and before Trump’s first term I wrote extensively about the fear sections of the US ruling class had over his undermining of the institutions of capitalism. Trump threatened their precious bourgeois democracy, the most stable form of class rule for them up till now. He trashes the mass media, the universities which are in essence capitalist think tanks. He did the same with regard to the justice system that is an important part of class rule. And in his second term we have seen the right wing, overwhelmingly overconfident sections of the ruling class, tech in particular, gain more control of the established media outlets after already controlling the most important outlet of all at this point in time, the social media platforms. The Zionist’s genocide in Gaza would not have been brought to the world without social media.
Finally, for me, despite his excellent analysis of events Mearsheimer does not see that at the root of the problem is the social system itself. Everything he describes is a crisis of capitalism. The capitalist system is inherently unstable, inherently violent, and there is no rational solution to this. There is no such thing as friendly competition and at some point war between great powers is inevitable if we do not chart a new course.
And he does not see the working class as a force for change at all. Why should he? There has not been a major upsurge of the organized or unorganised working class in the US for over 80 years. The Black Revolt shook US society and many of its leader were co-opted, those that weren’t assassinated. But in the main, organized labor stood outside this or participated in a supportive role, some unions like my former union Afscme for example. The potential power of organized labor was kept apart from that struggle just as it is today when the issue of foreign policy arises. The silence of the labor hierarchy in the midst of the Gaza genocide, Sudan and the US piracy and murder in the Caribbean is nothing short of criminal.
Mearsheimer ends with a warning, “If we do not learn these lessons soon, history will teach them to us and the lesson will be written in the ruins of the American order.”
He’s right about that, and a change in the order of things can be progress. The possibility that workers can govern society, or that socialism and democracy are not in opposition to each other, that collective ownership and control of the means of producing the necessities of life is not only possible but the only solution to the madness and savagery of the market, is not given an ounce of thought by the esteemed professor. But it is the only possible conclusion the dangers he raises in this lecture.
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