It is finished.^[1] All over the world, nature and people have been turned into productive forces of capital. In every last corner of the earth there are character masks of capital at work, as well as masses of people dependent on growth and coping with their more or less useful poverty. Business and power are incessantly making sure every aspect of life is subsumed under the need to multiply money; competition drives the key actors to make constant reforms. So that everywhere they keep finding positive conditions for that indispensable growth.

These efforts not only produce a considerable number of victims, who are cataloged by the media with the necessary differentiation. They also keep those responsible too busy to notice the contradictions and limits inherent in what they are doing. Even when they take note of an economic crisis, i.e., diagnose a general slump in business, all they know is that someone has spoiled their business conditions for them, withheld them from them. When they address this complaint to the state in its capacity as administrator of the national business location, they seem, on the one hand, to be emphatically repeating what capitalists are always demanding from states as their service providers. On the other hand, these demands are reminding the rulers of something quite different. In view of the internationalization of business — which they themselves are driving — they also need the capital operating under other sovereigns to be suitable as a source of their power. While capitalists and speculators are mobile enough to show favor to whatever locations serve their business, the sovereigns this puts to the test attend to their peers’ statecraft, granting it respect while trying to influence and control it. In this sector, capital acts as an instrument of the nation, and the nation’s credit as a weapon, while the nation’s weapons procure credit.

§ 25 The right to growth and its means: a right that is vested but insufficiently realized

The capitalists’ competitive success stands or falls with their nation’s imperialist qualities. For when everything is done — domestic society has been put in proper order and the world made over to allow capitalist wealth to grow in each country — nothing is actually done yet. All the legitimate questions and demands the economically dominant class has — i.e., its claim to succeed — are still open, or now really open. This is expressed in no uncertain terms by its criticism, the hard core and ultimate truth of all dissatisfaction that goes along with the capitalists’ business activities from the very beginning. Namely: it is all well and good that nature and society have been made into a resource for their enrichment; but there are doubts whether this will work out as it should; and these doubts are obviously aggravated when well-engineered deals fail and economic crisis ultimately sets in. Money invested is always at risk if not in danger of being entirely lost. The state has empowered the movers and shakers of the economy to make use of the world as their business area, freeing them from the barriers to growth that the state’s own limited size presents. But in doing so, it has made it necessary for them to compete against their peers all over the world. It supports them with its means — its law and its budget — in their efforts to grow and keep growing and growing; but has thereby made their clout dependent on its own balances and on reckonings of national and international scope which even large corporate concerns cannot control. In short, state power puts their profiteering in the right, but whether they make a profit is up in the air.

The reason for this dissatisfaction is plain and simple: all the conditions for competition that the state provides are just that and no guarantee of success. And that is the whole criticism that representatives of the capitalist class raise in view of this experience, and that bourgeois public opinion can only agree with. What they are judging is the commercial success of the nation measured against the demand that everything must succeed; and this demand is usually not realized — and never truly realized — by the actual results, regardless of whether they are determined statistically or extrapolated with a particular bias, summarized overall or presented using appropriately selected individual examples. The yardstick is not the more or less suitable means that state power provides for its economy to operate with; the yardstick is the standpoint that if the supreme power is dutifully doing everything it can to properly serve the country and its wealth, and not afraid of creating victims, then it must really make sure it all pays off. The crucial question for the nation is, where do WE stand in the world of states and in the critical judgment of world history? Reports about political efforts and interim results are no answer: the nation wants to see success.

Capitalist growth, on the national level: the material substance and purpose of states’ fight for their sovereignty

State power shares this standpoint and demand; and gives it imperialist substance. After all, by working to give its capitalist bourgeoisie free access to domestic resources and those of the world, it has been deliberately and purposefully not merely serving one prominent, separate interest, but making its society’s labor and life and its own material existence dependent on its national business location standing its ground in international competition for capitalist growth. Successful enrichment of the dominant class is not a state concern that can be separated or even meaningfully distinguished from the common good; it is the basis of existence for the people and for rule; it is what first and foremost makes for secure national sovereignty. So when the capitalist class justifies its right to success and calls for the government to guarantee it while claiming it is only pursuing its own interests for the nation’s sake, this is more than hypocrisy — or it is hypocrisy that hits the nail on the head.

However, the state is likewise hitting the nail on the head when it, conversely, spells out to capitalists that the true substance and ultimate purpose of their successful market-economy growth is its own overall success in the contest of strength between nations, and when it enlists them to serve that purpose against their specific private interests. For the state sees global business life as the civil arena for its competition against its peers to overcome the contradiction that the internationalization of capitalist business life confronts it with. It needs the world of states as the source of the growth it lives on; it makes use of them to that end in accordance with its claims for success. In the process, it makes itself dependent on other countries being able to satisfy its interests and willing to satisfy the rights it claims. This contradiction between needing to make use of other sovereigns and being dependent on them is the decisive challenge for the state. It must face up to this challenge; it has to overcome it in the service of its national capitalism using the power it has over its business location and the power it gains from ruling over it. In the final analysis, whenever it intervenes in its country’s political economy it is not only out to meet the economy’s intrinsic needs but at the same time out to control the conditions of existence for its rule. In individual cases the government will of course always be taking account of the importance it attaches to some question at issue, but as a matter of principle it is definitely after nothing less than the solidity of political power, and thus the highest of political goods: national security. What it has to do is successfully use all means of power, including the power of money, to secure sovereignty over all the conditions the state makes its material existence dependent on.

The resulting list of tasks includes, firstly, politically controlling free global markets where the competition between the champions of capitalist growth is decided (§ 26). Guaranteeing suitable freedom of the markets requires, secondly, an apparatus of force that prevents the state’s freedom of action from being obstructed in any way within its borders, and spells out the nation’s vital interests to the rest of the world, if necessary by way of military deterrence (§ 27). This kind of security is the basis, thirdly, for turning the boon of international credit business into a civilian fight to take the capitalist means of existence from foreign countries, a fight that is largely decided in advance but must nevertheless be fought with caution in normal cases and quite rigidly in exceptional cases (§ 28). This fight, fourthly, makes the cost of freedom for all countries an acid test that can call into question their established raison d'état in domestic affairs, and in foreign affairs makes it necessary for some to overturn the prevailing power relations, and for others to monopolize world-ordering power (§ 29). The definitive force-based relationship of complete world domination is called — fifthly — “world peace” because it defines and decrees which wars are required and what is not allowed. So it determines the ultimate cost of freedom that an imperialist state makes the world pay in order for the global system of competition between capitalists to endure (§ 30).

§ 26 The ideal market: a claim to possession with guaranteed success

It is on the world markets that the competition of capitalists is decided, and not only theirs. The national summation of their successes determines the economic growth, both in absolute terms and in relation to other nations, that a state has made itself and its country dependent on by opening its borders to capitalist business. So the capitalists’ individual and collective market success is crucial for a state's ability to survive and assert itself, and for the common good of its class society. World markets must therefore not just be spheres where companies from all over the world measure their commercial strength against each other with an open outcome (which they only do, anyway, in the minds of those who advocate and believe in free competition and a strict separation between politics and business). It is imperative that they be shaped by state power following the ideal of guaranteed success — the same ideal every capitalist basically has when staking his wealth as an advance and assuming production equals sale, and investment equals return.

When it comes to this ideal the state is in absolute agreement with its dominant class. What the state is aiming for, however, is a happy resolution of the contradiction between being dependent and having sovereign control over the conditions of its existence, the contradiction it has brought upon itself by giving its economy international reach. It accordingly surveys and handles the means the nation generates for it: as instruments for its sovereign right to assert its vital interests, the purpose being to get control of competition on the world market, to the extent that it needs this market and because it is dependent on it.

Its means are firstly the competitive successes it has enabled its economy to achieve on the world markets. This is circular, as it assumes state power has always been deployed for business both domestically and abroad, with the results being the basis for business operations. But that is how a national capitalism works, there being no more distinction between economic and political interests and capacities. Thus, the state wants, promotes, and if necessary creates competitive power through advances in technology and productivity, through monopolies and the sheer size of capital under its rule. Above and beyond the competitive successes of individual companies, it needs and pushes growth on a national scale that does not just have an impressive rate but an excessive mass for occupying world markets, and that does not just make it possible but mandatory to utilize foreign investment spheres. If the state is not just complying with an uncontrollable force of circumstance, but rather maintaining its freedom to choose its economic partners around the world entirely according to its own advantage, it is coming pretty close to its ideal of guaranteed success for its nation’s use of the world market. For its complementary efforts to make its own territory interesting if not irresistible to foreign capitalists and other states, not just the quantity of accumulating wealth but the sheer mass of basically available sources of wealth again proves to be an essential factor for comparing the quality of nations. If the capitalistic utilization is already more or less across the board, but even if it is only envisaged and possible and beginning, a high population figure will be chalked up as a productive force and buying power, increasing the quality of the economic power available to the state and its ability to impact global trade flows. Large masses of actual and potential proletarians and consumers are not merely attractive, they cannot be ignored by the capitalists of the world, so that the interests of the state ruling them cannot be ignored by other states either.

Everything like this that a state can chalk up as its claim to global economic possession, it uses as its means of competition. Its first aim is to establish all its capitalists’ international achievements to date as its right. This is the first guideline an imperialist state power follows for all agreements to open up free world-trade at all. The associated second guideline is to launch a diplomatic political attack on all successes the other parties have achieved and claim as their right. None of the stuff or methods of commercial dealings between nations is left to any kind of self-acting free competition. At the start, states influence the prices that goods are traded at between nations, and fight over them bilaterally and multilaterally — resulting in the famous terms of trade. When it comes to raw materials, the negotiation of prices is actually a trial of strength between producing countries essentially wanting to cash in on their exclusive power of disposal over their natural resources, and importing nations having the buying power and industries without which such resources cannot be turned into capitalist wealth. As for capitalistically produced goods from businesses in different countries competing with each other, there are disputes about how comparable they are, and standards for quality and other features are set that competition must adapt to. In addition, specifications are issued for cost-effective techniques and conditions of production that have to be adhered to, including rules for methods of determining relevant criteria and data. This is where the old concept of protective tariffs finds multiple uses, especially by the most advanced countries, to prevent their social or environmental laws from ending up favoring foreign producers who do not have to suffer under the burden of such considerations. Between industrialized nations of equal rank it is especially important to standardize countless details of products and manufacturing processes to make sure foreign goods are at a disadvantage and one’s own are protected from discrimination. And before it gets ugly, rules must of course be found to define controversial views. Regulation and deregulation are instruments for dominating world markets in lawful form, which is what states are after. For their tough battles on this civilian front, they enter into alliances, with mutual obligations and joint arrangements for discriminating against third parties, to the point of barring unwelcome competition from common markets through quite objective measures such as approval procedures and other “non-tariff trade barriers.” Such things are not merely a service to privileged companies, but weapons for politically controlling the world markets, where details of the omnipresent question of national success are at stake on a daily basis. This does not wipe out the ideal of free trade. It exists in the elegant form of most-favored-nation status which trading nations grant each other. The practical application of this “clause” — the reality of non-discriminatory world trade — consists in arbitration courts that have to decide on the consequences of treaty infringements. Obviously this makes the courts themselves — their composition and their competences — an important subject of dispute between the parties who are out to get their unilateral benefit but require consensus among each other for getting it. This imperialist contradiction of a world-market order that is both unilaterally beneficial and consensual reaches its highest level in the World Trade Organization, which gives the perpetual dispute between the mighty over the control of world trade the form of a globally valid legal order. In reality, this order depends on its members’ very unequally distributed blackmail potential, so it organizes their constant testing of their strength. This, too, is done with the help of arbitration courts that function as well as suit the real makers and shakers of world markets.

In addition, an imperialistically active state builds up and expands its material power of disposal over trade and commerce on a global scale; with everything its wealth permits. It builds trade routes (ports, canals, pipelines); not just because its global traders need them and ask for them, but in order to establish and secure its dominance over global trade, present and future, with a worldwide infrastructure that is its own, and even if privatized will remain its political property or at least under its protection. This includes global information and payment systems that connect the major financial markets with each other and with the rest of the world, along with undersea cables and satellites, technology and receiving stations, hardware and software. All of this of course only benefits the interests of an imperialist state to the extent that its rivals go along with it. So it all functions only as well as the other nations are, for their purposes, dependent on being networked under the direction of the leading powers. In any case, providing a service for global business life means having real control over the other states that are active on the world markets as the prime movers of their nation’s capitalism.

The credit money of nations is both — without differentiation — the real overall balance of a nation’s capitalism in the form in which this balance is directly available to the state, and the means and the measure of all means that it can have at its disposal. It is the stuff that embodies the nation’s business success as a right, i.e., as the right to lay hold of the wealth of the world. This makes it at the same time the material power to create all the facilities that states need for their business dealings. The quality of this money summarizes, objectifies, and quantifies the global trading states’ claim to possession, as well as the guarantee of success contained therein, which is in reality very conditional.

The power of good money, the legally proper grip on the course of world trade, and the material productive force of the countries that keep the world markets going technically, all come together in exemplary fashion in the imperialist powers’ competition to dominate the world market for energy — the absolutely indispensable material means for all nations’ business and existence. And the three come together especially clearly in these powers’ struggle to change from fossilized raw materials to industrially produced energy sources. This is, after all, pretty crucial to the future capitalist fate of global trading nations. Which is why “human-caused climate change” is being so emphatically cited, like an irrefutable objective necessity, for the purposes of diplomatic persuasion and for agreements intended to commit the entire world of states to new industrial policy objectives to the desired end. It is also why totally overhauling this branch of business at home is a prominent case from the list of tasks the state has to cope with inside its location for capital in its fight for world-market success. Quite in general, however, the government has to put the national economy, with its productive force and its overaccumulated wealth, in a position, and gear it, to have preferably a determining influence on capitalist progress in the world, along with all its consequences for world trade and its state agents. It is not enough just to ride out the demands. The demands themselves are ones that those in charge already face when serving the legitimate interests of their capitalist class, whose representatives do not fail to point them out. But the nations’ fight for their vital interests that are at stake in world market competition makes it absolutely necessary for them to do everything they can to ensure progress and competitive power with guaranteed success on their own territory. That is what a class society has to break world records for, transforming its everyday life and way of working as needed, and altogether putting up with anything and everything. State power has no use for any sand in the works,^[*] not to mention something like resistance.

Here the nation must not make any compromises. It is confronted with the question of how well disciplined its citizens are and how stable its rule is within its borders, and how able it is to fight enemies outside them.

§ 27 The condition for everything: Sovereign power

In order for state power to be able to perform its service to the nation’s capital growth and for market domination the way the nation’s interests require, it must be concerned unconditionally with itself. It must make sure its sovereignty over its people is unassailable at home; and its political will is respected abroad by the governments of the countries whose performance it has made its economy, and therefore itself, dependent on. This necessity gives the contradictory relationship between the state and capital its final form: in order to promote the definitive success of its dominant class, the state must emancipate itself from this class’s claims to profit, more broadly, from its competitive society’s separate interests that it puts into effect and carefully guards. This it must do, not by negating them, but so as to exploit its citizens’ self-interest and economic success for its sovereign power. This contradiction requires that the state specifically consider and act upon the relation of rule as such, i.e., the relation between political power and bourgeois freedom. In a corresponding way, in relations with the nation’s foreign trading and business partners, a primary object of political concern becomes the ‘balance’ of power as such — the constant theoretical, and the practical, comparison of power with the other sovereign administrators of national business locations.

Sovereign power within the state’s borders
The state with its laws and budget: Beneficiary and victim of the service it provides

In order to function, a competitive capitalist society needs an ordering power on a higher level. It needs a ruling apparatus that serves all opposing interests, i.e., no one separate interest as such; a supreme authority that demands submission from all parties and actors in the competitive struggle of bourgeois society. As the source of the power the bourgeois state needs for acting as this authority and enforcing general obedience, it utilizes its citizens’ money-making competition, meaning, in practical terms, the growth of capitalist wealth that is driven by the self-interest specific to this system. This brand of growth is what it draws on, so it needs it. But for the same reason it also needs more than a mass of subjects forced into mere submission: its power depends on citizens identifying its materially demanding sovereign regime with their own personal competitive interest, their unleashed money-making materialism. Thus, the obedience it demands of its people is no simple thing: it must be voluntary, like a service in return for the service the public power provides by enforcing the common good — the system of competition — against all separate interests.

This is contradictory in several respects.

The rights that the lawgiver grants the free agents of competition do not settle their conflicts of interest. On the contrary, they raise the systemically necessary material-based collisions to the higher level of disputes where victories and defeats are decided by the regulatory power provided by the state. This consists of an infinitely expandable code of law and a judicial apparatus that checks itself through a whole series of hierarchical courts. By providing this service, which, rather than clearing up the antagonism between the parties, reproduces it as a legal affair, state power makes itself a third party at the receiving end of the dissatisfaction and criticism that is inevitably stoked. Not only might its intervention be rejected by those private interests that have been put in the wrong; the parties put in the right might be displeased about their success always being conditional. For none of the interests involved in conflicts ever really coincide with the point of view of the legal order. The benefit and the imposition are in an equally contradictory relation to each other when the state wields its budget to manage its class society with the great conflicts of interest such a society involves. And things are no different when it promotes particular competitive interests within the classes and parallel societies. It stimulates all the antagonisms that are there, and creates additional disputes about who is being treated more favorably and who is being put at a disadvantage. So its support measures at the same time make for dissatisfaction and criticism that goes back and forth between those its policies are aimed at, while all sides complain about its budget management. When it acts as a tax collector taking the required budget funds from its economy, i.e., from the big fish and small fry of business, the state definitely does not make any friends among its systemically self-interested citizens, who tend to rally behind that mighty figure, the taxpayer. The same applies throughout the entire agenda of the bourgeois state’s rule of law, welfare system, and economic policy.

The services it provides thus fail to create the consent it is after. From its ruling standpoint, it recognizes by the dissatisfaction it produces that the separate interests it entitles, empowers, and restricts by its laws, promotes with budget funds, and is terribly fair about taxing, not only do not automatically coincide with the common good it takes responsibility for, they do not coincide with it at all. Those with these interests do not even agree to the power the state uses to enforce the common good. In whatever the state is doing to promote the greater good they instead seek their private benefit. From the state’s perspective, the contradiction inherent in the voluntary obedience it demands of its citizens turns into a contradiction in the service it is performing for society. That is, it is running the risk of making itself dependent on powerful, separate self-interests that it has itself empowered, on lobbies, associations, enormous corporations or trade unions, etc. It is running the risk of sacrificing the common good instead of fulfilling it, of ultimately becoming itself a victim of the private self-interest it is furthering.

No matter which angle politicians look at the problem from, the bourgeois state has no choice but to reflect critically and self-critically on its contradictory relationship to its basis. It has to turn its ruling activity to establishing and maintaining the absolutely necessary unity of the ruling authority with its citizens, making this the guiding principle of its rule — which otherwise stays the same in terms of what it is about.

Monopoly on the use of force, the people, dominant culture

The first thing the state owes its citizens, i.e., has to impose on them, is law and order. To this end, it maintains a domestic security apparatus that uses virtually inexhaustible means of force to ensure general compliance with the law. This apparatus testifies to the conflict between a political rule and a population required to be obedient in the banal elementary form of this conflict, for it is the only reason this apparatus exists. The police force is of a size and accordingly equipped so as to deal with disturbances of the peace, which the executive reckons with. However, this whole security service has not been established as a reaction to criminal exceptions to the rule of harmonious coexistence in society, but as the practical form of a message the authorities have to send their countrymen. It stands for the prohibition of private force in absolute terms, which is thus assumed to be normal in the same absolute terms. It nationalizes the relations of force that are immanent to capitalist competition. Without any qualms about thereby admitting how brutal the normal way of producing and living is that the state protects, it accordingly presents and justifies its armed monopoly on force as an indispensable condition for its citizens to be able to live together in a civilized way. But what it is aiming for is not just to deter people, to force them to respect the law and comply with it calculatingly. Without retracting any of the pressure its officers exert, it wants its intimidating monopoly on the use of force to make sense to its citizens. They are supposed to understand that it is good and right for the force used by its police to be omnipresent — which is why this force must not be excessive and citizens are given possibilities of lodging complaints. The state’s security apparatus is meant to function and be perceived as a necessary condition for civic decency, but not as the coercion that it is. It is supposed to manifest itself as what every decent citizen calls for, as help that they appreciate for everyday life. The police is the armed wing of civic morality.

Of course, this does not work by itself. Nor does the free and democratic bourgeois state expect it to. As part of its education system, which equips its young people for career competition, the state gives itself an additional educational mandate: to accustom its citizens to judging the world and themselves, their own needs and plans, in terms of what a functioning overall order demands, and to feeling responsible for a larger whole, ultimately for the very large whole nation. The state enables and encourages the bourgeois media to supply and occupy the public with all kinds of information that presupposes, serves, and thereby cements a consciousness of right and responsibility that applies to everything. When competing individuals having the same passport share the habit of regarding world events big and small as problems, and of demanding good solutions for everything, from the standpoint of a collective that is somehow recognized as important, a highly respectable “we” — ultimately the fiction of a national community — this turns them into a people that national rule can take as its basis in moral terms as well. Distinguishing this kind of population from other, foreign citizens is no longer a prosaic legal question, it is a matter of national identity, which makes the difference between belonging to a state and belonging to a people. The fact that the state is after more than just firm convictions is demonstrated by the process of naturalization, which is by no means granted to every willing foreign applicant. What is required is a declaration that must not be a reversible act of will, but stands for unconditional commitment to the state; in subjective terms, for patriotism without reservation or calculation. This is obviously difficult to objectify. Foreigners are in any case a factor of uncertainty for the state; not in terms of whether they will abide by the law, but in terms of their absolute reliability. There is no question of this with the native population, they are accordingly called on to serve when the state needs them, and it doesn’t necessarily matter if they have broken the law. It is much more doubtful that someone will answer the question of national identity properly if he belongs to a minority whose quite legal way of life deviates from the canon of recognized customs considered to be the dominant culture by a critical ruling authority and its followers. The members of some communities in the homeland of liberty can tell a thing or two about this. However, privately practiced xenophobia and racism are forbidden — it being no coincidence that such behavior is exhibited by those citizens who are particularly insistent on being free individuals who are seamlessly identical with the glory of the national collective and its power entrusted to the government. The national “we” standpoint generates its content abundantly, but not by itself. A state power intent on educating a proper people feeds their patriotic mindset the right images, especially often, extensively, even academically feeding them the past that is teleologically styled as the history of the nation.

So the bourgeois state does much to ensure that the status of right-conscious and responsible citizen and morally integrated native becomes “second nature” to the people it claims as its possession. Nevertheless, it remains suspicious. Not only does it have its judiciary and police monitor acts that violate the self-evident duty to be loyal — the German catchword for this being the acronym FDGO (Freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung, free and democratic basic order). It also maintains at least one intelligence service in charge of being suspicious of the convictions of citizens in general and civil servants in particular. It investigates the gray area of opinion-forming where speech is free but this freedom must not be abused so as to endanger freedom.

Legitimate social dissatisfaction and how it is coped with through democracy

National collectivism and moral conformism do not take care of what the freedom the state grants its citizens means for them in material terms. They must still bear the mighty conflicts of interest in competing to earn money, and the costs for these conflicts to play out properly that the state makes its people pay. It uses its laws and its budget to produce and reproduce the inescapable conflicts between the social interests that are in need of each other, and the conflict between the classes’ and competing individuals’ productive self-interest, which the state wants to have, and its costly regime over it. This contradiction is unresolvable per se. It is coped with, i.e., perpetuated, using the method of bourgeois rule, which dissolves it into a pluralism of mutually qualifying approaches that are supposed to harmonize socially relevant interests with the state power’s quite unqualified necessities and requirements. It is with programs of this kind — and the personnel advocating them — that political parties compete to take power and hold positions whose array of tasks are already given. It is thus clear that whenever all the various string-pullers and victims of capitalist competition have to accept some disadvantage and are legitimately dissatisfied, the target is not the bourgeois state and its relentless agenda but rather the parties intent on doing this job. They are to be blamed for everything deserving criticism, which is not so terribly bad since they are in charge “only” temporarily, from one election to the next. What bourgeois state rule is really about plays no part in the criticism, and not only that. Because the political parties aspire to serve this rule with their programs, this rule is not only beyond all criticism, the good works it is ostensibly pursuing are the yardstick for all criticism. They are the standard that the parties are supposed to meet to be able to prove their worth. The competing parties measure each other by it, thereby constantly, and in their election campaigns acutely, corroborating the wonderful separation between temporary rule, which is responsible for all evils and failures, and the interests of state power, which are approved as lastingly and unconditionally valid by every voting act, no matter what it is for.

By voting, voters give their unrestricted, permanent approval to state power and its interests in the form of conditional, temporary approval “merely” to a party ruling for a certain time, and this they do completely freely, performing their essential act of political freedom. They take the opportunity offered by the democratic state to let out their dissatisfaction with everything that happens to them at work and as a result of political decisions, in a way that may be pretty monosyllabic and therefore lack any definite content, but is fundamental in method and seems to be making a difference. The disappointment that regularly follows free voting is given an answer that is appropriate in every respect by the election result. The supporters of the election winner rarely actually get what they wanted in terms of their material interests, but always get what they chose to vote for, so they can blame themselves when the annoyances continue, and vow to “teach those people a lesson” at the next election. Those who voted for the losers are reliably informed by the election result that their politicized interests are in the minority and that alone makes them invalid, but invalid for absolutely good reason. And at the same time they are given the consolation that their state is still basically open to their wishes and political preferences, and only temporarily tied down to the variant of rule that won. This way of making power relative strictly by way of a method — temporarily linking it with one party’s ruling program and personnel — makes rule absolute vis-à-vis its base. At the same time it creates and guarantees the unity of leaders and people for the state, and the identity of free will and submission for the electorate.

Political movements for making corrections on the left and right

This method of using free competition between parties to establish and periodically confirm the emancipation of sovereign power from its citizens as well as its unity with them meets with two kinds of criticism in the bourgeois polity. Both are represented by parties that do not merely want to be alternatives within the pluralism of political programs, but movements: popular movements for making corrections to the purpose of democratic rule, on the one hand, and to its methods, on the other.

• Radical leftists hold out for the material interests of the large, wage-dependent majority of the people and object to them being damaged by the demands of the capital-owning minority. They accuse the bourgeois state of oppression by neglecting these interests of the masses, discriminating against them in favor of elite profit interests, lawfully restricting them. They take the legal recognition of these interests to be the valid, but often broken, promise of a social justice that will prevent capitalist exploitation of labor, nationalize capitalist property if necessary, and eliminate the might of the capitalist class. To them, real bourgeois democracy, in which political parties qualify their own state agendas relative to each other, and changing majorities govern for a limited time, is unfinished, yet to be completed by the working majority’s representatives ruling lastingly and without qualification: a socialist workers’ movement. The workers’ proud ‘class consciousness’ is the only true patriotism, fitting for a country that is out to be the true homeland of working people. This is the way, the only way, to make governmental power really match the will of the people.

  When a communist left succeeded in making an anti-capitalist “people’s democratic” revolution along these lines, however, it did not do so using the persuasive power of a proletarian majority, but through a civil war or as a result of chaotic war outcomes. What these leftists proceeded to accomplish was to set up a plan based on monetary units to make the people, now freed from capitalist private interests, serve a party rule now independent of its mass base. This alternative to bourgeois democracy is now a thing of the past worldwide. What the class state has been left with is the standpoint, not of rejecting its agenda, but of correcting it. First of all, it embraces all the more the ideals of social justice that already belong to the moral furnishings of a bourgeois polity. In practical terms, it implements a social policy that, rather than undoing the consequences of capitalist growth for the wage-dependent masses and society in general as well as for the state that looks after it all, mitigates them as best it can, and at the expense of the rich and “superrich.” Secondly, there is a push to make society more democratic, the base should have more say, even in the business world. The central argument for such reforms is to attain social peace, which the state power should really be after itself: a society reconciled with itself, and an indestructibly good relationship between rule and citizens. These are goals that leftists think their policies can serve much better than a half-hearted social repair system and an arrogant elite out of touch with reality.

• For the radical right, legally recognizing conflicting social interests is per se the cardinal sin that the bourgeois state commits. Rightists see it as the state approving antagonisms that tear the people apart, that destroy the absolutely imperative and basically self-evident cohesion of the population in everyday life. By allowing this recognition, even actually establishing it through its legal system, the state is also ruining its own unity with the people and the people’s trust and unity with it. Rightists accordingly object to the pluralism of parties that politically represent and reinforce division of the people. Competition between parties contradicts the sovereign monopoly on the use of force that is responsible for law and order, the very word “monopoly” expressing that it is indivisible and can only function as a single will. Parties competing as a permanent state of affairs drive a wedge between the one sovereign state authority, which is what really matters, and the united people, who are entitled to such an authority. They are entitled to a leader who unites all power in himself. The people are deprived of this right by democratic procedures, competition and changing majorities, the principle of time-limited rule. The compromises that all this ends up with document nothing but weakness. They are a mockery of national state power, which is irresistible when it is applied without compromise. They are an insult to the people, who do not perform their services as a people in order to be conscripted for party interests and the half-measures of an establishment that fall so terribly short of the possibilities, strengths and rights of the nation.

  This right-wing standpoint, at least as a tendency, is familiar to those in government, to those having a share in government on the opposition side, and especially to those democrats enlisted as voters; it is exactly what many of them think. After all, what right-wing enemies of democracy are after as the prime political requirement is nothing other than the fullness of power that an elected government has and makes use of as long as it is in office, and is quite reluctant to give up. Seeing legal restrictions as an obstacle and circumventing them wherever possible is a matter of course to democratic politicians when they feel the rights of their rule are in danger and they have a national mission — it might even be an obligation to do so, but in any case certainly not right-wing extremism. If a country falls short of the objectives it has set for itself, and important national projects clearly fail, it is obvious to conclude that the government’s weakness is to blame; for the democratic opposition, this conclusion is the quintessential argument. The parties compete mainly by critically and self-critically demanding ever tougher government action. And this demand has the potential — especially, but by no means only — in times of crisis to turn against party competition itself as a wrong procedure for making decisions and exercising power for rule.

  That is what the radical right is fighting for, to correct state power in that way; it tries to be a movement, breaking out of the status of one political party among many. When it succeeds and wins power, it very directly puts into practice the ideal of a united people and their right to uncompromising rule. Deploying its supporters and the security apparatus it has taken over, which finally gets to show what it is good for, it gets down to“Gleichschaltung,” bringing into line the organized separate interests of its otherwise intact class society, especially the competing parties. It starts training the people to totally embrace their national identity, and eliminating all disruptive elements that are alien to the people. When it has to wait a while to succeed — as can happen in a “resilient democracy” — the right mobilizes its good people against those in power, calling them traitors to the people. These traitors tolerate, even support and fawn over, foreigners, outsiders, leftists and the “idle rich” (rightists can also use “capitalism” as a dirty word), intellectuals alienated from the people, and other subversive elements. And the right agitates for the great alternative for the nation: the masses must cry out for that one “strong man,” the disadvantage being that a true leader only emerges by succeeding with the masses and not just by the proclamation that the people wish for one.

*

As the administrator of a location for capital that competes with others, the state needs and lays claim to its citizens’ unconditional loyalty, bringing it about with its monopoly on the use of force. This loyalty has to prove itself not only by letting the exploitation of labor and social competition as a whole take their course in a civil and socially harmonious way, letting capital growth succeed, and letting political rule itself gain power. The unconditional unity of people and leadership faces its acid test when state power definitively emancipates itself, for the sake of the national whole, from the interests it serves for the sake of this same great whole. The acid test is the nation’s readiness for war.

Sovereign power beyond the state’s borders

In their dealings with each other, states appeal to the “principle of non-interference in internal affairs.” In a world of cross-border capitalist competition this is a joke — on the one hand. On the other hand, it expresses the fundamental reservation that sovereigns with their monopoly on the use of force have toward each other. This reservation is of the utmost importance to them precisely because they have made their most important “internal affair,” the national growth that is the basis of their power, increasingly dependent on each other, with no way back. This dependence relates not just to the economic activities they make use of abroad and have to offer themselves, but to foreign sovereigns being reliably willing to satisfy their demands. States insist that their autonomy be respected, thereby revealing the contradiction involved in their practice of utilizing the outside world for their own capitalist reason of state. As guarantors of national growth, they require control over the conditions of business since they live on its success in international competition, while this claim of theirs is faced with the countervailing power of their rivals’ identical interest, whose monopoly on the use of force is the outer limit of their own, which they have been overstepping for some time. As global trading powers, they are constantly “interfering” in each other’s political decision-making. Conversely, by allowing foreign capital to operate in their own territory they have granted the guardians of that capital power a certain amount of control over their own national economic life.

The rulers in charge perceive this contradiction in their state’s agenda as a challenge: as the task of not letting their autonomous decision-making power be restricted by the necessities of cross-border capitalist growth, and exerting a lasting influence on their economic partners’ decision-making. This does not alter the commercial interests and necessities themselves, but does make a crucial difference when it comes to their political significance. The state relates everything it does in this area to itself as the authority that has the sovereignty to give whatever it finds important the quality of being a right whose enforcement it guarantees. And this applies not just at home but also abroad, vis-à-vis its peers, who are exercising the same sovereign standpoint. In this relationship, it is one right against another’s from the outset. This conflict is opened up once right-creating state powers recognize each other as a condition for utilizing each other. It is opened up as the dispute about how much a claimed right is actually worth. That is, how much will establishing cross-border commercial and monetary transactions impair a state’s guarantee power and will that be bearable, and conversely how much influence will it achieve on the policies of foreign sovereigns? In both directions, politics focuses on the force that the state confers on capitalist property and that it also guarantees beyond its borders, i.e., it focuses on the state’s sovereignty as such.

This gives state power’s globally-reaching service for the competition of capitalists its higher political objective. Not only does the state have to make sure national growth has what it needs as such, it must also heed the overriding viewpoint, and when required follow the practical guideline, of employing the economic necessities it is thereby establishing and guaranteeing, as instruments for waging a competition involving mutual blackmail between sovereigns. At this level it is a matter of trying to make the will of another state reliably useable; it is about no less than one sovereign power dominating or being subordinate to another. However, this struggle requires more than a calculating use of the state force objectified in capitalistic necessities. What a state is after is respect for its force that turns the business of capitalism into constraints that operate outside its borders. It is out to make its own autonomously established rights a premise for other states to base their calculating decision-making on. To this end, the state, with its monopoly on the use of force, applies the means it actually has at its autonomous disposal: itself as the master of an apparatus of force; one that enables it to directly coerce its peers. This ability is tacitly assumed in states’ everyday routine of using and pressuring each other. The military is not the means of choice for normal cross-border business. But this business only works on the basis of a relationship of force, however it has been settled, between right-creating sovereigns.

This is the starting point for the foreign policy of capitalist nations, and it is the crux of this policy.

The state: Beneficiary and victim of its status in the world of states

Military force is indeed necessary for taking possession of a country and its inhabitants so as to have a monopoly on the use of force there, and for barring other states from encroaching on this territory.^[2] This necessity persists as a precondition for state power to serve the capitalists’ need for growth beyond all borders. As competition between capitalists unfolds worldwide and state power subjects the world to their interests, the contradiction involved therein unfolds between the capitalist system overstepping every border and its being established and run on a territorial basis by national sovereigns. States are confronted with the ultimate consequence of this contradiction when they insist on their autonomy against each other, which they at the same time qualify, i.e., call into question, with regard to each other.

Yet all states — still — see a quite fundamental need to entrust their military with the task of home defense. On this point they are even particularly petty, counting in square inches to make clear how unwilling they are to compromise when it comes to the area they claim to possess, which of course includes their human resources. Although the earth’s solid surface has been divided pretty completely into recognized nation states — as a result of the post-war era of decolonization — this has by no means taken care of the idea that an interest in conquests is the first and most serious danger for bourgeois states. From Israel through Pakistan and India to China and Taiwan, there are open disputes over territorial claims of major caliber. Conflicting sovereign interests are directed at countries that used to belong to the Soviet Union. There are quite a few states that count citizens of other nations as their own people and reserve the right to bring them home. Germany’s “reunification” is an extremely successful extreme case of such irredentism. Nevertheless, it is not by shifting borders that states mainly combat the contradiction of the capitalistic utilization of the globe having a territorial basis, that is, combat their share of that utilization being restricted by foreign sovereignty. They have agreed to recognize their borders, in order to surmount them. What this actually means is that they have opened up a competition to functionalize the other recognized national sovereigns for their own national interests, a competition that knows neither geographical or qualitative bounds, that is universal, and that reaches deep into foreign polities. Consequently, they have opened up the struggle to gain what is known as “influence,” a term that is nice and downplaying but cannot be misunderstood. It refers to overpowering other sovereigns in their autonomous decision-making. This is a competitive struggle no state in the world can escape. That is why all states have a genuine, general, that is to say, an absolute security problem. It is absolute in the sense that it is not just their sovereign rule over a territory and its inventory that is at issue, but their sovereignty over how to shape their sphere of rule and beyond to meet their own goals. It is about their freedom to set goals as rulers at all, the whole agenda for their state power. This is what they have to secure; this is the truly fundamental task to be fulfilled by their security policy. This freedom can of course not be expressed in square inches as easily as home defense can. Or to put it another way, the competitive battle to ensure that another state power is compliant can indeed be waged with military attacks on its territory. But then the attacker’s purpose is to exert “influence” on a troublesome ruler, not conquer and take control of land. And for that purpose, for ensuring that other rulers function as required, it is all the more important to have a military power that is capable of doing whatever it takes to make sure foreign rulers are not free to make autonomous decisions.

It is the imperative of satisfying this need for force that is the ultimate challenge for a nation’s economic capability: for the mass and growth rate of its capitalist wealth, the quality of its credit money, the reach of its grip on resources under foreign sovereignty, etc. Everything that determines a country’s status in the competition of national capital locations, its position in the hierarchy of economic powers, has to stand the higher political test of supporting a military capacity that can hold its own against that of other states. At the same time, it is clear, especially to security policymakers and military functionaries, that this task can never be completed. Every military achievement renders the previous source of security obsolete, thus reproducing and intensifying the problem to be solved. So the states’ need for security opens up a never-ending struggle for superiority that separates beneficiaries and victims on the basis of their successes and failures in economic competition but much more thoroughly than the comparison of capitalist performance. For one thing, this struggle forces its actors to arrange their national budget so that they are always living beyond their economic means. They are obliged to spare no expense when it comes to the question of wielding force and their freedom of action as a condition for enforcing their reason of state abroad. They procure the freedom of action they need for this purpose by incurring debt according to the rules of system-compliant budget policy. However, according to the same rules they must also be able to afford the debt. This is opposed by the fact that military costs are strictly faux frais of rule: unproductive costs for a lot of personnel and a vast amount of material that are kept in reserve for nothing but destruction. This shows up all the more the limits of the military state’s debt capacity that are imposed by the power or lack of power of its national credit, and tangible in the valuation of its credit money. For another thing, it is not only that the unproductive use-values of the military (disregarding the pure personnel costs) are a costly affair; they have to be produced in usually very fluctuating quantities and be constantly developed further, which requires a capital advance out of budgetary funds that very few nations can manage. Just to get the famous “barrels of guns” that “political power grows out of,” according to a dated bon mot of Mao Zedong's, most countries have to rely on suppliers who are interested in them as states or quasi-states to be used as military helpers. The so-called emerging countries have mostly crossed the threshold to producing arms they can finance themselves, and are stimulating the global armaments market as suppliers as well as buyers. However, they rarely come close to the potential of the so-called industrialized countries, which are leaders in this area as well, since the latter have the world-money and the technological progress to be able to put a maximum distance between themselves and the few other creditable military powers, which they do not hesitate to do. They maintain a “military-industrial complex” — critically thus termed since the 1950s — in which capital and state power combine in a particularly productive way. The state demands an arsenal to ensure its superiority at ever higher levels, paying for it with credit that it has by virtue of being the creator of a real world-money. A capitalist industry does everything to give its big customer even more than it asks for, thereby constantly winning the nice, ultimately risk-free competition for inexhaustible budget funds. The financial industry finds optimal opportunities for business on both sides, investing in the state’s demand for means of force and advancing funds for their production and perfecting. The additional demand from weaker military powers that manage to drum up quite a bit of buying power for such fine goods increases profits, benefits the state’s trade and financial balances, and is above all productive in terms of foreign policy for the leading states, because their license for such trade ensures — once again — influence between “partners.” The end result is that, established at the top of a hierarchically sorted world of states, there are a small number of leading imperialist actors: global powers both in capitalistic and in military terms, which compete, form coalitions, and contend at their own level to assert themselves through superior might.

How the need for guarantees and corrections specifically works

States see their status in the world, their place in the hierarchy of powers, not as an objective state of affairs but as a challenge to improve their standing. The way they look at themselves mixes the benefit with the sacrifices they have to make. The result of this mixture is their starting point for defining that rank in the hierarchy of sovereigns that they should actually have — which in some way has to be something like number one. In any case, their will to assert themselves is oriented to the future power and recognition they lay claim to. Setting their own standards of success is the essence of their sovereignty. In principle.

In concrete and practical terms, a state perceives the fundamental challenge of securing its power by strengthening it as a critical — friendly or conflict-laden — relationship with certain other state powers that are supposed to benefit it and instead often enough make life difficult. It categorizes its interests according to the material substance of its various foreign relations and its specific power relationship with the particular other state. That is, how much can each side influence the other, and using what means? Some interests it defines as vital, others as not, thus setting conditions for how to deal with other states, along with business conditions for competing capitalists, which are often not at all to their liking. After all, no matter what particular decision has to be made, the important thing is that the other side has to recognize the right that one attaches to one’s interests. In the negotiations that a state conducts, it uses calculating gradations to bring itself into play as an argument: the respect it is demanding from the other side. Testing the persuasive power of this argument with the aim of asserting oneself is the task and domain of diplomacy. What it deals with is everything that states have to arrange with each other, from the very real point of view of what one side has to put up with from the other or cannot put up with. It is the degree of recognition or rejection that states address their need for guarantees and corrections to, asserting this need against each other by way of their business relations, down to the price of individual goods if need be. That is what their struggle is about.

An important place in this struggle is occupied by the category of honor. It acts as a yardstick for the current state of relations and for how hard the assertive claims are that a state is upholding in its negotiations; it determines the vocabulary and grammar of diplomacy. The material interests being pursued in this way are taken as given and cannot be misunderstood when they are asserted in the name of idealistic values and national dignity. This substitution makes it clear how serious a state is about the matter. Stories are told about what a nation’s history of suffering and success actually entitles it to: land and people it has lost, compensation for injustice suffered, but also authority due to glorious deeds of the past, etc. The message is primarily directed to the public at home: citizens are supposed to approve sympathetically of what state power is doing in the world with them as a people, even rooting for it in critical situations. But these are also clear messages between sovereigns in their international business, the recipients knowing very well they are being targeted when a state presents itself as an honorary member of the club of chastened human-rights advocates, criticizing investment decisions by domestic companies in selected distant regions.

Such lofty tones naturally become particularly loud and clear when the competitive fight for assured recognition, i.e., for successful assertion of a nation’s reason of state, leads to the inevitable, namely, to certain hostilities. One very notable task of diplomacy is to approach disruptive rivals and create conflicts in order to resolve them to one’s own satisfaction. Even if the envisioned solution fails because it is actually designed to do so, the other side is always to blame. It is violating a right that only one’s own side has, maybe even an “inalienable” one. So it is defying the power of the affected party to enforce its right that has been violated. Each side thus forces the other to calculate how important the conflict is to it; whether to respond with force, which means of force to use, and how much force to use. In practice, this results in each side mobilizing foreign support for resolving its conflict, testing how adamant the opponent is, and doing all those other things that make that condition called peace so terribly interesting.

It is once again the great imperialist powers that are best at this art of blackmail and its effective escalation, acquiring allies, etc. From the standpoint of superiority they are sure of having, they have developed an arsenal and methods for managing conflicts, even in the most serious cases, that follow this pattern: when a problem state makes use of its autonomy in a hostile way, it must be made to bear costs that it cannot handle. At the lowest level, sanctions are imposed with the aim of diminishing the target’s economic and military assets, of downgrading its global political status. In order for these sanctions to be effective, alliances are formed, by the force of secondary sanctions if necessary. At its highest level of escalation, this procedure earns itself the name of economic warfare, because it aims to destroy the material means that states need for autonomously deploying power. When it becomes the objective to disempower the opponent, the conflict turns into a declaration of incompatibility, bringing the coercive military force into play that each side has already built up in view of the enemy that now needs to be finished off.

War

The first way a state deploys its capacity for war is deterrence policy. It has this name to make clear that all dangerous conflicts are the other party’s fault; that party must be deterred from committing serious misdeeds. The policy furthermore has a good reputation across party lines because it also claims the deterring power is not only interested in preventing the enemy from attacking out of the malice it is assumed to have, it is also interested in altogether avoiding a violent conflict that might be required after all. This claim is self-refuting, since the claimed effect assumes one’s own weapons are superior and one is absolutely determined not to avoid war at all. The only condition that waging war is made contingent on is the supposedly belligerent enemy seeing itself to be inferior and making the opposite decision. But this illogic has not detracted from the claim’s popularity since the days of the ancient Roman war cry, “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you seek peace, prepare for war). And deterrence policy as it is put into practice has certainly not suffered from the transition regularly being made from threat to actual war; why should it? This policy takes the lie that avoiding war is the true purpose of seriously threatening it, and sets it right. Every power that operates with deterrence is indeed out to achieve its war aim without war; and what that means is clear once and for all when the emphasis is reversed: such states are pursuing the contradictory business of achieving nothing less than the war outcome they insist on having, without waging war, without the expenditure of destructive power along with the subsequent costs, and the risks to themselves that war would entail. This is why real deterrence policy — in contrast to the relevant rhetoric — is anything but a combination of armament programs and mere threats referring to some eventuality. The adversary gets weapons aimed at it; the threat to use them is about really damaging its power, something one is actively pressing ahead with if necessary, intending to contest the adversary’s ability to act and ultimately make it unable to act altogether. To this end, states make use of diplomatic messages and fighting words belonging to the sphere of national honor-mongering, which inform the adversary of the incompatibility decision that has been made without officially declaring war on it at the same time. The talk is of “values”; “common” ones that hold a war alliance together; universally valid ones like “peace” and “order” that are shared by everyone but the evil enemy. Formulas like “outlaw state” or “rogue nation” deny that an enemy’s rule has internal legitimacy, so in this case there is no formal basis for upholding the sacred principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other sovereigns, and one can question or directly revoke the premise of international politics, mutual recognition as monopolists on the use of force. By the practice of targeted damage that progresses under such names, states that are no longer willing to tolerate each other establish a relationship of continuing cold war, the aim being to disempower the adversary. This idyll is always just one explicit final ultimatum away from a military attack on the enemy’s power base — its economy, weapons, people.

Hostile states aggravate or ease this relationship — formulating “red lines,” letting ultimatums lapse, seeing war “break out,” or actually waging war in the end — depending on a calculation that correlates mainly two things. First, the degree of intolerability one has defined for the enemy, its reason of state and its might, including any steps forward or backward in disempowering it, and second, the comparison of each side’s military strength, including a more or less self-critical assessment of one’s own superiority or inferiority. Because they calculate in this way, and as long as they are still doing so — sometimes also making misjudgments and transitions to folly — the masters of war and peace present the militancy they are practicing as a continued effort to avoid war, in keeping with the ideology of deterrence. In fact, it reveals the opposite: even when a state embarks on annihilation, on industrially prefabricated killing and destroying, including its own sacrifice of living and material means of power, it is making a calculation, which has its own rationality, following the reason of sovereign freedom of action. War, as the last way state power serves the competition of capitalists, is not “lunacy” but rather an undertaking that has to pay off — not for the profit of the capitalist business world, which is not waging it and has not asked for it, but for the state, the monopolist on the use of force. For precisely when it is sacrificing everything needed to win out over one of its peers, it is acting as the condition for everything that its people and it itself live on.

The authors of the wars taking place in the world always have particular, specific, of course only good, reasons for waging them. However, there is one general reason why they keep finding such reasons for war. It lies in the contradictory logic of the service that the state performs for its class society by doing everything for itself — being the unconditional condition for its society to function and the guarantor of its success — at its society’s expense, from the very beginning and to the bitter end. This is a logic also followed by the heads of formally recognized states who have little functional capitalism to govern, but as modern rulers struggle just as resolutely as their imperialist role models to achieve recognition, improve their status, enforce their rule beyond their borders. The particular conflicts of interest that are fought out in cold or — eventually or straightaway — hot wars are diverse and may be disparate; this applies all the more to the ways these wars proceed. But the fact that war is part of the fixed repertoire of state action, being “the continuation of politics by other means,”^[†] has a necessity that cannot be rooted out — without world revolution! — in the enlightened age of civilian-administered ministries of defense, global arms markets, and humanitarian conventions of war. This necessity is grounded in the contradiction that global capitalism has a territorial basis: it has been created and develops through the interaction of a number of mutually exclusive monopolists on the use of force.

The major imperialist competitors do not need to know that this contradiction is what modern imperialism is all about at every level up to war. In their competition, they are struggling to overcome it. That is why, in this system, not even war is the last word.

§ 28 Credit and force, the supranational way

Even in war, the state does not stop working its society according to the requirements of capitalist private property, i.e., its accumulation and the financial industry based on that: the state borrows and promises to pay interest. It draws on its national, border-crossing capitalism in order to assert its sovereignty up to the utmost act of force. Not only does it burden its economy with the everyday faux frais of its power, the unproductive but necessary expenses of rule; it also sacrifices national wealth, wears out sources of its growth, destroys useful foreign relations; it ruins what it is protecting when and to the extent that — i.e., because — it is ultimately interested in itself as the supremely ruling protective power of its base. But even then it does not switch to a different kind of economy. Even in the extreme case of war, it wants and knows no other economic source of its power than the capitalist use of the private power of money. For everything it gets its people to do so it can fight and stand its ground against its peers, it uses its power over the nation’s credit, which realizes the performance and capacity of the accumulation process that comes about under its control. To put it conversely, when the state competes for all other states to respect its sovereign will, it makes the free market economy, which it installs, and governs according to market-economy necessities, fulfill its definitive political purpose.

In this double sense — as the overall economic result valuated by finance capital, and as the economic means of state rule —

money is the economic expression of a nation’s status

A state draws on its capitalist economy, in accordance with the economy’s conditions for success, for itself as the decisive guarantor of success and overriding purpose. It functionalizes and strains its capital location’s share in the world money and credit markets, in global business, for itself as a national power fit and ready for war. This modus operandi of states is mirrored in the consistently self-serving calculations of the capitalists themselves, in their speculative business on the world’s capital markets. Capitalists exercise their competence for comparatively valuating national credit-moneys quite appropriately in this way. In their free speculation they acknowledge what a state is achieving with its financial power for the country’s status in the hierarchy of powers. The principle they follow is that if political rule draws on the accumulation of capitalist wealth so consistently for its will to power, i.e., for asserting this will in the world of states, then valuating the means a state uses for this purpose centers on the success it achieves. If a state thus makes itself absolute as the whole point and ultimate purpose of the system of capitalist competition without invalidating this system’s end-in-itself way of functioning — its actors’ interest in making money — then the capitalists are entitled and called upon to assess a national money according to the country’s rank that this money represents. They then base their valuations and investment decisions on whether and how much the sovereign power’s expenditure for being able to fight for itself, an expenditure that is always unproductive for national capital growth, improves its status in the world of states.

In day-to-day business, this reflection on a money-creating state’s rank in the competition of highest powers shows as a co-determining factor in the speculation-driven ups and downs of exchange rates between currencies and the prices of national credit instruments. When ‘the situation’ becomes critical, be it due to poor economic prospects, to matters of domestic security or international disputes, the financial markets pass their critical judgment in the form of a prompt exodus of their assets from the weaker states’ credit instruments and currencies to those of the politically decisive powers with more leverage for extortion. This causes the investments of good money in those countries to lose value, but that is part of the risk of doing business.

The criterion of how well a sovereign can assert itself is not only a contributing factor but quite decisive for speculators’ calculations in the event of economic crisis, when credit granted worldwide across all borders turns into irrecoverable debt, and financial markets become illiquid. Then the continuation of capitalist business depends on it. This means that the business players, aware of their importance, count on the states to avert the disaster of general devaluation, after these states have created the credit and provided the so very safe credit-money to enable and promote finance capital’s unbounded and unrestricted run of the world, and after they have exploited its business for themselves, to increase their power. They are the ones who are supposed to buy the world markets out of the crisis — by creating national means of payment to replace the financial instruments and diverse monetary assets that have become worthless, and by creating sufficient quantities of them to silence all doubts. What is needed is nothing more and nothing less than a political dictate that is strong enough to allow the global speculation business to start over again. Finance capital distributes the damage of general devaluation among the states correspondingly, accordingly one-sidedly; to the detriment of those it believes least capable of demonstrating such power.

This selective devaluation of the weaker powers’ credit, possibly even causing them to collapse, inevitably also has repercussions for the financial power of the strongest, who have contributed the most to capital overaccumulating to the point of crisis. The consequence for financial markets is that as the crisis progresses, they keep increasing the divide between the more and the less secure state-guarantees for the liquidity they need, increasingly tightening the circle of powers that meet their security requirements. Financial markets have long since made the credit and moneys of the various nations, especially the powerful ones, so interdependent that one party’s success requires others’ success to confirm it, while, conversely, large-scale failure, no matter whose it is, endangers all of them. In substance, their ambitious speculation is aimed at more than comparative safety; it aims at one ultimate convergence point, the one currency that capital can definitely not go wrong with; the one state-attested credit where the progressive decline in value of financial assets finds firm ground. What economic crisis, or rather the politico-economic logic of its management, demands of state power is one money that materializes the capitalist power of property in a sufficiently reliable way, i.e., globally, exclusively, absolutely binding. It thus requires one sovereign with the monetary sovereignty to put an end to the financial markets’ ever more radical distrust of their own basic principle that debt equals self-expanding wealth. It needs a world power whose political money-guarantee is not relativized, i.e., called into question, by any alternatives.

This necessity does not bring something completely new into the world of capitalist competition, something only owing to the crisis. The everyday finance-capitalist business of comparatively valuating national moneys and credit initially requires nothing more than the general convertibility of currencies and the free movement of capital. What makes national credit-moneys commensurable, however, is not their abstract sameness as a means of business in general, but a benchmark that is very real in the world of capitalist business: a real stuff of money that the respective national moneys are particular (good or deficient) versions of and thus exchangeable with each other in defined — and constantly redefined — quantitative ratios, i.e., in principle the same. And in the age of state credit-money, this means there is the assumption of one national currency whose universal validity sublates the contradiction between a credit-token merely guaranteed nationally and real abstract wealth. Economic crisis, the end point of the international competition of capitalists, demands what the basis of its business, the prerequisite for the functioning anarchy of global financial markets, altogether is: one unrivaled world-money.

Which, on the other hand, does not exist as such. In their practical business dealings, international financial markets assume that every state worth mentioning manages its nation with its own credit-money, including transactions across national borders, i.e., that it draws on real capital power for its legal tender. Finance capitalists earn money by exploiting and comparing the opportunities for capital accumulation that the national capital-locations with their autonomously created credit offer them, and which they valuate in relation to each other by determining exchange rates in global money trading. And even in times of economic crisis, they do not cease relating all nations’ debts and credit-moneys to each other and making their value dependent on being confirmed by others’ assets and liabilities through an exchange transaction. This is why devaluation spreads so inexorably in a crisis. In the end, the financial securities of even the most potent world-money powers are no longer worth much if, and insofar as, they lose debtors able to pay and securities customers willing to invest. In the real world of competing credit-moneys where the leading states insist on their monetary sovereignty, even the currency that finance capitalists see as the last, most reliable safe haven for their wealth in a crisis demands and needs confirmation of its universal value through exchange with the means of payment of its — next-to-last — competitors. The identity of national credit-token and definitive world-money that financial markets going about their global business presuppose as the indestructible basis of this business has no place within this business.

States are even less willing to accept the imperialism of a single, absolutely valid credit-token that puts an end to the competition between the credit and currencies of the various nations. After all, every sovereign insists on managing its capitalist nation with its own credit and money on its own responsibility in order to advance its nation as a location for international capital; this is how they all create the material for the world markets. It is especially true of the major global economic powers, which push capitalist crises through with their money if the worst comes to the worst. When they have their central banks flood the markets with an avowedly inexhaustible amount of liquidity — “Whatever it takes!” — to put an end to the rampant devaluation of capital and threat to their credit-money, they are competing against each other to be the power that serves the finance capitalists’ demand for security better than all the others, so that they can shift the damage of devaluation onto the other nations. In other words, they are competing for the unique position of their credit-money as the embodiment of abstract wealth, pure and simple. This power struggle is not decided in a crisis or by how a crisis is managed. Between the states that consider themselves capable of saving global capitalism, the contradiction remains between the thing they are competing for — the monopoly position of their money and thus their guarantee of capitalist property — and the competition for this position of power that no world-money nation will withdraw or be ousted from. This contradiction does not arise and disappear with economic crisis, even if ambitious crisis managers like to claim that their bold intervention has averted an unforeseeable disaster. Rather, it characterizes the relation between competition and credit in the capitalist era of state credit-money altogether, that is, between the competition of the powerful world-money creators and the necessity for a guarantee of a world-money of last resort that is binding even for them.

Moreover — and this is crucial for their imperialism — states do not promote the persuasive power of their credit-money merely out of an interest in the status of their financial power compared to other nations, but out of an interest in their financial power as the source and proof of their sovereign power, in their status as a player capable of asserting itself in a world of powers prepared to wage war. That is what they call on financial markets with their speculative judgment for, endowing them with the authority to valuate the nations’ credit and credit-money on a comparative basis. They wage their struggle to assert themselves against each other in the form of a competitive struggle to participate in and benefit from the capitalistic utilization of the world under the financial markets’ regime, which is based on the guarantee of a universally binding world credit-money, a guarantee that the major world-money powers lay claim to. States make their economic existence as sovereign powers dependent on the binding nature of this guarantee, i.e., they submit to the political power of the dictate that puts the financial-market regime into force. They obey a universal imperative to compete — but this imperative is not a rule laid down somewhere, or the legislation of a recognized monopolist on the use of force. No, the sovereigns of the world respect the rationale and demands of the system of capitalist competition as the premise of their own reason of state, the starting point of all their pro/con calculations. The same imperialist world-money powers that each lay claim to the status of money creator of last resort ensure that there can be no alternative to the system in which they compete not merely for their place in the constantly contested hierarchy of nations, but for primacy as the indispensable guarantor of this lovely world order of money and force.

This contradictory relationship — between a universally valid and effective political dictate and the ongoing competition of imperialist powers over that decree — holds up when there is an economic crisis. Then, the major political players of global capitalism that are all damaged support each other with credit lines that reciprocally confirm the continued value of the competing currencies. In this way they maintain their regime, i.e., their absolute imperative to compete. The masters of money creation do not give up competing against each other, but they put it on hold in the face of general distress. They act as an imperialist collective — not thereby overturning their world order, but rather bringing to light the contradiction that is the basis for the normality of global capital accumulation developing at all and going on and on, with or without the crises it occasionally falls into. Their always precarious cooperation is the functional substitute for that one power, which is unconditional and independent of any general consent, for creating an absolutely universal money, and it establishes the supranationalism of the competition to play that role. It is the equivalent of a power that does not come about as a perfect monopoly, because all ambitious imperialists strive for this status for themselves, against each other. This is how they accommodate the need for a single world-money of last resort without giving up their sovereignty as autonomous money creators. This is how the guarantee power that global capitalism needs exists, and thus the world market, on which the major imperialist powers fight out their competition for the leading role in utilizing the globe.

They achieved this under resolute US leadership — without a lot of theory, with foresight even before the world war was over, and with Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, so probably in the only way possible — by creating the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. These act as a supranational property guarantee for the government debt instruments that come about according to their rules. By virtue of the imperialist force backing them, they thus, initially and lastingly, create one world of capitalist overaccumulation and national competition. They guarantee the conditions under which the world’s submission to the major powers’ regime of credit and money can take its course, and the nations’ status in the hierarchy of sovereign powers can consequently find its deserved expression in money, as the overall balance and instrument of their competitive struggles. The IMF and the World Bank accordingly define and put into practice a financially based normality of states taking part in global business. In the majority of cases, of course, this normality is only realized approximately and by political dictate.

The monetary expression of a nation’s status: Supervised normality and political dictate

Systematically prior to all commercial financial relations between states, the International Monetary Fund organizes political credit for its members — today practically all states — to serve the elementary needs of their international business dealings. It pools funds from its members according to their economic strength, to be paid partly in their own currency and partly in currencies it defines as “freely usable.” In order to bridge payment difficulties, states can withdraw foreign currency they need from the fund in keeping with their quota. As the blessings of free global trade do not help a nation’s balance of payments problems disappear, but rather multiply them, the IMF additionally provides its members with firmly stipulated direct access to needed world-moneys, which it regulates, administers, and supervises. The instrument of this authorization are special drawing rights created by decree, which are allocated to the member countries according to their quota and which they can sell, according to their needs and by prescribed procedures, to other countries with sufficient freely disposable foreign-exchange reserves. Beyond that, the IMF can lend money to countries in specific emergency situations in accordance with various gradually introduced credit facilities to deal with balance of payments emergencies, the IMF financing this lending by bonds for its own account.

In this way, the Fund and the analogously designed World Bank link states into a collective of creditors and debtors who lend to each other as needed in order to enable all to conduct international business. Formally they all lend reciprocally, but de facto it is the large depositors who lend money in their own currency to the rest of the world. The IMF thus provides a political guarantee for states to participate in global capitalist business dealings, granting its members credit when they cannot get it from financial markets anymore, to make them creditworthy again. In this way, it offers the business world the certainty that the world of states will not allow any of its members to go bankrupt for good — and not release them from their financial obligations either — but will support insolvent state debtors and dictate conditions for survival to them so that, and until, the business world develops a speculative interest in them on its own accord again. Constantly supervising IMF debtors and, if necessary, intervening in how they manage their finances are up to a bureaucracy under the regime of the Fund’s major contributors. This bureaucracy ensures that states regain their solvency case by case with lasting reliability — at least that is the idea.

In reality, what the institutions do for the various categories of participants is, appropriately enough, quite different.

The leading members, whose deposit quotas are the basis for the IMF’s and World Bank’s credit power, have the status of real guarantors of IMF-managed international solvency. This is because they recognize each other as creators of a reliable credit-money, i.e., as basically equal — albeit not equally weighty — guarantor powers of global capitalism. To them, the Fund is the organized form of this mutual recognition. This is the status they enter the competition of nations with. Who belongs to this club, for the time being and with limited voting power on the institution’s policies, is decided politically by the members as a whole, but in practice such countries are chosen — assuming they are consistently very successful in competition of course — by the small number of established powers. This collective offers the rest of the states in the world, de facto with no alternative, a participation in a secured system of international capitalist competition as the prevailing economic system and the economic condition for their existence. The course of this competition determines even for this elite of leading countries how much their respective national money, the monetary expression of their political founder status, is worth in comparison. But this does not alter the fact that they are the ones who create the money the IMF uses to keep its members generally solvent. This holds even if — in exceptional cases of crisis — they have to fall back on funds they have paid in. In their case, the supervisory and corrective function they entrust the Fund with takes the form of regular critical reporting on their competitive situation.

The vast majority of members typically have an international solvency that is fundamentally precarious, albeit to varying degrees and at very different levels. They have to constantly earn their status as creators of a credit-money that is comparatively useful for capitalistic purposes by proving they are creditworthy to the financial markets, whose interest and approval they need. This requires foreign trade success or promising growth — or both — as well as recognized “political stability.” They do not provide the reliable, ultimate, i.e., fundamental, guarantee of their solvency themselves; the IMF does this. It grants standby credit in accordance with its rules of procedure only in exceptional cases, but it guarantees solvency as a matter of principle by giving them this right. And once a nation has needed help, the IMF imposes conditions on its use of money and rigorously oversees compliance, this being crucial for the business world’s private speculation, and for other countries’ political engagement. That is also part of the IMF’s guarantee of solvency. The price these states have to pay for having a secured ability to do business is less autonomy in shaping their national budget, i.e., a restricted freedom of action as sovereigns. (Contrary to the well-meaning criticism of humanists speaking in the name of the poor populations, it is not the people who pay this price first — they are already in a bad way without the IMF and World Bank. It is whatever effective monopoly on force exists in these indebted states that suffers.) In the better cases, the state becomes creditworthy again, usually for a limited period of time; it might be able to buy its way out of IMF assistance. Even then, the nation often enough remains a candidate for a career under IMF tutelage.

However, the persisting great work of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference stands for more than these two things, supervised normality of the political world-money regime and the complementary political dictate, each laid down in the organized consensus of the world’s states. This work only exists, and only endures, because the USA is the not-at-all-equal decision-making power in the collective of IMF and World Bank creators. Its credit-money is the real “coin,” the means of payment of last resort, which in practice guarantees to the global economy that nations remain fundamentally solvent, as politically desired. This has come about for several reasons. At the end of the Second World War, the USA was faced with a world of bankrupt states, with its allies deep in debt to it. According to the capitalist powers’ consensus at the time, precious metal as the stuff of money was the only real, because material, form of existence of capitalist wealth and the basis of all monetary tokens made binding by states. And this precious metal was owned almost exclusively by the American central bank, and initially represented by its banknotes in a fixed ratio between a certain quantity of gold and the “gold dollar.” But above all, the USA intended to make capitalist use of all foreign states, so they had to be equipped with the ability to pay somehow, and in the longer term enabled to accumulate national capital with their own credit and credit-money, in order to contribute to the accumulation of American capital. The latter succeeded so well, especially after the initially decreed dollar/gold parity was officially dissolved and the world flooded with dollar credit and dollar capital, that the political command-qua-offer to recognize and utilize the US dollar as the true monetary expression of capitalist wealth has in practice long since been fulfilled by its universal use for everything that can be done with money in capitalism. Conversely, this use of US credit-money is still based on its political guarantee through the authority that the USA enjoys due to its repeatedly proven military superiority. As the means of payment of last resort for the world, the US dollar is the monetary expression of the status of American global power, at the very top of the hierarchy of state powers.

The US dollar thus supplies the thing that international finance capital requires as necessary to the system: a non-relative property guarantee that allows speculators the freedom to compare all nations’ credit and credit-tokens. It is thus the means they can use directly worldwide to make money on nations’ capital growth and on the comparison of their credit-moneys. In world trade, it mediates the exchange of goods through two exchanges of a national currency into dollars; it thus acts as a standard for the exchange-value of the currencies that measure the value of capitalist wealth on a national basis. As a binding yardstick, it is the measure and valid stuff of this wealth, i.e., of its power to expand as a capital advance laying hold of the world’s labor and resources. It assesses and represents business success in the final instance, and mediates the endless worldwide progress of capital accumulation, through all crises. The lasting political connection of nations’ credit-moneys to the US dollar is represented by its use as a prominent part of the reserves in their national banks’ holdings and balance sheets, i.e., the states’ treasuries, including those of major competitors. The dollar thus realizes the monetary imperialism that finance capital needs, by objectifying it.

For the US state, this means that the dollar is the expression and means of its special status as the leading capitalist power. With the dollar the US procures direct access to wealth and sources of wealth in the world; by generating dollars the US increases this access. This gives it practically unlimited means for potentiating its military capabilities, which in turn gives absolute credibility to its guarantee for global capitalism and the dollar as its driving force. The power of the dollar is an imperialist fact, supported by a consensus of the world’s states that is put into practice by the IMF and World Bank as organizations. It is up to US governments to reproduce the power status that their money expresses, and to use their money to that end.

And that is the rationale they act on. Which has brought them the accusation of wielding dollar imperialism, this label being indeed meant as an accusation.

Seeing imperialism as stealing from states and their people

There is no doubt that the regime of the US dollar — and the few other world-moneys created by states aligning with their leading power with the awareness and standpoint of being interdependent — ends up expropriating other, even most other, countries. This happens in two respects. With their contributions to the global accumulation of capital, the nations credited from the centers of global finance confirm and increase the credit power of the states that are home to the global financial markets. The power of capitalist wealth thereby transferred to these centers from the “periphery” is both the result and the means of a constant redistribution of global political freedom of action in the same direction. It is also true that both processes, rather than being simply the natural consequence of some neutral force of circumstance, are politically intended, pursued in a calculating way, and by extortionate means. However, the way this situation is seen, which also determines the way it is dealt with politically, focuses mainly on the legal form that leading global powers have given to their competition, and used to establish it as a universal offer without alternative. Sovereign powers participate in international business in the form of formally equal legal entities freely involved in supranational institutions, which are legally constituted even to have arbitration courts and a legal process for settling disputes. This gives damaged interests, which are part of the everyday competition between active and more passive governing imperialists, the character of being legal cases pertaining to whether accepted norms have been complied with or not, to rights being claimed but not granted, to discretionary decisions by the authorities being disputed, and the like. Politically, this everyday business of imperialism is translated into the idea that the formal set of rules stands for a politically binding promise that no nation will come off badly, that plundering foreign countries and political dictates about foreign sovereigns are quite generally forbidden, having been abolished as normal political procedures by the prevailing rule-based world order. What inter-state competition in its established legal form actually wreaks therefore appears, when those affected object to it, as a violation of valid norms and invoked principles, as an exploitation of unjustified superior power, although the “law of the strongest” has long since been replaced by the “strength of the law” — as if the two were antagonistic in the world of competition… Such accusers are not just found among the losers’ representatives and their indignant sympathizers. The accruing costs of competition are also seen by radical advocates of imperialistically active and successful nations as stealing from their “hard-working” people and damaging their well-deserved right to dominate other political powers.

There are of course critical voices who hold many of imperialism’s horrendous effects against the system of competition itself, not its supposedly being abused. They often advance the moral argument that the self-interest this system demands and promotes tempts or even compels those involved to be ruthless. However, the majority of political opinion-makers absolve the system as a whole from critical accusations, if not all its actors — especially the adversarial ones — are to be approved of. These commentators have never heard of any weak states or their peoples being systematically expropriated. And such ignorance has a certain validity: no one advocates plunder or oppression as proper objectives of global politics; and they are not its real purpose either. What the imperialist powers are after is to appropriate the results of foreign capital accumulation, so that has to be and is supposed to happen, and to make use of the services of foreign state power, not simply disempower it. And this works — there being no alternatives on offer — so that the “force of the factual” deflates any criticism claiming that the factual misery is not an exception that proves the good rule. For this misery, viewed correctly, only goes to show how valid the dogma is that

if a nation is unsuccessful it hasn’t followed the recipes

The states of the world are invited in due form to participate, out of self-interest, in the global competition for recognition and assertion of their sovereign will and for capitalistic increase of their money as the source of their power. They have no realistic chance of turning down the invitation and still surviving as states, nor do their leaders want to. This subjects them to various necessities that have their own logic and dictate the rationale of political rule. This is one thing. To fulfill this rationale, i.e., politically manage the accepted tasks of state power, states have committed to rules that the dominant powers have established in the form of international law. This is a second thing. The two together form what is known as the “rules-based world order.” This is kept to, more or less. How successful that turns out to be for a state is an open question; just going along with the rules cannot and is not supposed to settle that question. After all, these are rules and constraints involving the international competition of nations. All are pitted against each other, and the intended result is a small number of winners and a whole lot of “second place finishers” and losers.

That is banal. But it is worth remembering because the arrangers and notorious beneficiaries of this one world of competition, which leaves no state out, do not leave it at that. They stage and wage this relentless competitive struggle, legally formalize and institutionalize it — and use supranational monetary agencies to add a compensation mechanism. The latter does not avert the inevitable defeats but is supposed to virtually neutralize their necessary consequences without really compensating for them. After all, the explicit mandate that the IMF and World Bank have had from the start is to give bridge financing to states that become insolvent as a result of foreign-trade deficits in order to get them going again. There is an expectation of consequences from international competition, which jeopardizes the existence of weaker candidates; and these results are treated as mishaps to be remedied by temporary, interest-bearing, repayable assistance in meeting the very necessities the state is failing to meet. This institutionalizes a sustaining lie of egalitarian, freedom-based imperialism: that the competition of nations over the monetary expression of their status in the hierarchy of powers is a task that all participants can equally master — not without difficulty, but ultimately — if only they do everything right. Nations’ struggles to survive, with their ruinous consequences, are supposedly a contest to see who can best realize general recipes for achieving national creditworthiness that all of them can follow.

This sustaining lie is organizationally realized in the “Bretton Woods” institutions, which, logically enough, are concerned with maintaining it against its constant refutation constantly, not just now and then. On the one hand, they construct and administer ever new assistance loans that are temporary but then keep replacing each other, loans that are tailored to the individual case, which is a particular one but keeps recurring. On the other hand, these institutions at the same time supervise each case locally. They intervene in the debtor states’ politics in order to restore their creditworthiness, with recipes that apply the austerity-budget practices of democratic welfare states to conditions that are not the least bit compatible with them.

Taken by itself, this is a hopeless undertaking if one expects it to fulfill to the letter the IMF’s mandate of ensuring a general balance in international payments and debt management. This is why the imperialist principals, who calculate quite differently, also tackle the situation quite differently, alongside and independently of their supranational agencies. They see it as their duty — toward themselves — to make the world’s states suitable objects for their credit-heavy speculation on profitably utilizing the globe when states are not suitable yet or have lost their suitability. They intend every spot on earth to be under state rule, and won’t release any state rule from the competitive struggle they stage. But it’s not on their agenda to take over rule in failing state structures themselves. They intervene as financiers and overseers in the politics of the victims of global competition and local struggles for survival when they are somehow relevant to them. This of course always involves a regulatory analysis of the “phenomena” to be blamed for the local state power’s failure in completing its country’s path to success that was basically so clear to see.

The main diagnosis is corruption, and is always correct because all it expresses is that the financial resources the government of even the poorest country somehow has, wherever they are from, have been misappropriated. Misappropriation is already proven by the fact that the state has evidently failed to achieve its main economic purpose, to be autonomously able to make payments. This is held against the rulers as a breach of their official duty, often with a view to the prestigious lifestyle they regard as appropriate to their standing and office — as if they had to keep to bourgeois civil-servant law. The remedy is therefore also clear. It is called “good governance” and consists in simply being the analogue to successful rule. This does not necessarily require those in power to show modesty, but they definitely have to show the democratic authority not to be impressed by an unruly, impoverished people and certainly not to be put off pursuing an austerity policy that is often termed necessary like “bitter medicine.” When the imperialist powers are bothered by such a state’s career with this diagnosis and never-ending treatment, they find that it has not only failed to follow recipes for success but might actually lack the prerequisites for successfully taking part in fine global business, an insight taken from the competition-based ideal of equal opportunities. What they really mean is that the country lacks the conditions for being useful to its sponsors in charge, whether politically or economically. The practical effect of such an accommodating view of things is usually to launch projects that organize specific services and are subject to an external performance review. Altogether they are called “development aid.” How far this goes is in turn decided by the competition of the capitalist powers to monopolize utilization of the world’s states. And this is what the key players accuse each other of doing as soon as one achieves some commercial or political/strategic benefit that another begrudges or would have liked to have itself. Then the competitor’s concern for the top criterion for success in international business, the development-aided country’s creditworthiness, is exposed as being a “debt trap” that the enemy — only it of course! — is catching innocent failing states in… In this way the notorious losers, and ultimately even the hopeless ones, are in any case retained within the system of competition between nations.

§ 29 Imperialism today

These days, the anarchy of competition between nations over rising and falling in the hierarchy of sovereign powers is called “rules-based world order.” The name is well-intentioned. It feigns a world in which the leading actors readily stick to a code of norms aimed at something like predictably good behavior. The catch is that this achievement is usually, if not only, mentioned when it — once again — has to be defended against rule-breakers, rescued using force; by military force that a handful of major powers insist on using. So the “rules” are not the “basis” of anything; what is referred to as “order” stands and falls with the force that is first of all asserting itself. And what this force then establishes cannot properly be defined as “order” even in formal terms, since the “rules” in question are about the nations forcefully testing their strength against each other. They are competing for capitalist wealth as the source of their power and for being able to assert force as the indispensable condition for their capitalist wealth. The only order that prevails here is the inherent logic of the areas where this competition rages. The only rules involved are the principles of making others functional for one’s own success, of excluding others from the success all are seeking.

That there are major powers that use their means of force to ensure that all sovereigns take part in this “order” and have to in order to survive, and that contribute something like procedural rules for it, provides a final advance in the constant fight between states to prove stronger than each other. They make the dream of One World with open borders come true in such a way that a) the imperialist circumstances have an undermining effect on nations’ domestic life, and b) world war becomes the premise for the sovereigns’ force-wielding competition.

Within the nation: reason of state and patriotism, imperialistically revised

With the regime of their world-money, the political makers and supervisors of global financial markets undermine the states’ monetary sovereignty without abolishing it. They leave sovereigns responsible for financing their capital locations with their own credit and credit-money, but they crucially interfere with the suitability of these national currencies as a means of capitalist business and life for the countries and their inhabitants. This is due to their world-moneys’ monopoly on definitive validity as the binding general equivalent, i.e., as the absolute power over the sources of capitalist wealth and as a quantum of private participation in the world of goods. For the market-economy life process of state-organized class societies, this contradiction of relativized monetary sovereignty has a consequence that varies depending on the country’s status in the imperialist monetary system, but in principle affects all of them. It even affects the few nations that, with their capitalism, have brought about and now set the foundation for the power of the leading credit-moneys, as laid down in the IMF.

Money causes a split between state and people

As participants in the global economy, states compete not just for money and its sources, but to acquire and increase their holding of world-money that is unquestionably valid, i.e., American or from a small number of not quite equal-ranking other states. To them as trading nations, this is not simply a matter of convenience for handling imports and exports to and from each other, with the US dollar being a measure of value for the various currencies and facilitating and economizing the comparison and settlement of their trade and payment balances. What states earn or owe in foreign trade becomes — positively or negatively, but in any case — dependent on their credit-money’s exchange rate against the leading imperialist nation’s. This is completely out of their hands from the outset; the leading world-money acts as an uncontrollable external influence on all the trade they do with each other. It applies all the more to the states’ competition over their status as locations for profitable capital investment and growth-potentiating credit creation. Though they manage their countries with their debt and their currencies on their own, their taking part in global financial markets relates them to the US dollar as the benchmark for security and returns and as the decisive stuff of money. With their autonomous budgetary and credit policies they are part of the circulation of dollar capital. The ultimate imperialist purpose and benefit of capitalist business is built into their politico-economic self-interest as its practical premise. Making autonomous use of their monetary sovereignty means being under external influence.

This has consequences for the nations’ domestic life in economic, social, and political ways, consequences that vary depending on a nation’s status in the world. At the bottom end of the wide-ranging hierarchy of states, there is the fairly common extreme case of nations whose populations earn their living, as well or as badly as they can, in the form of dollars on black markets, bypassing or going against their government. This is a way of dealing with the constraints and results of the comparison of currencies from a position of the nation’s inability to withstand the comparison. In the case of the ruling elite, which of course also exists there, it is called corruption. Other capitalist nations can more or less withstand the calculations of the international finance industry — i.e., the practical constraints taking effect in the global credit and money market that is determined by the USA — and contribute to global overaccumulation actively and for their own benefit. But even as locations for successful growth, they cannot avoid their national credit industry being conducted to a crucial extent on Wall Street, and their national budget having to measure its freedom to borrow against that of the USA. The contradiction between autonomous rule and subjection to America's monetary dominance inevitably turns into the antagonism between a state power that is sovereign over its national class society, and the internationally decisive interests and legal claims it is thereby serving.

In the eurozone states this effect shows itself in a quite special way — distorted to the point of recognition, so to speak. On the one hand, with their common currency these states have got themselves a unique status in the global financial system: a collective autonomy vis-à-vis the US dollar, the freedom to manage their continent with credit-money created on their own authority and responsibility as an alternative to and in competition with American world-money, and at the same time as a cooperative part of the global financial markets dominated by US credit and money, a part that contributes to guaranteeing these markets’ stability. On the other hand, among themselves, they have established a sui generis quasi-imperialist relationship: a supranationalist regime over the creation of their common credit-money, administered by the European Central Bank whose powers supersede the euro states’ monetary sovereignty, and over the national budgets’ access to credit, administered by joint institutions having state-like tasks and powers and monitoring compliance with debt limits intended to ensure the euro’s world-money quality, namely, the value of the national debts materialized in it. At the same time, this collective sovereignty, rather than overriding the states’ autonomous competition for maximum growth in their own countries, sets it free in an extreme form. It doesn’t just commit the capitalists competing across borders to the same yardstick of their wealth’s power, but makes the costs and results of national accumulation and both the debts and the expenditures of state budgets directly comparable. It rules out the otherwise typical use of sovereign power to correct the course and results of competition, for instance by imposing tariffs or other trade restrictions or by tampering with exchange rates. Instead, the sovereigns involved add to their partnership a struggle to shape the binding conditions for competition: a special culture of bipolar and multipolar extortion.

This very special contradiction between supranationalism and competition — with autonomous competing states submitting to a self-created and -shaped financial regime having significant power on global financial markets — leads within each EU country to frictions in the relation between state power and its class society that are equally special but at the same time exemplary for modern imperialism. Capitalists are not only confronted with the costs of their freedom from national restrictions on their competition, costs they cannot all manage equally well. They have to address their claim for public-spirited support of their private interests to not one but two authorities. They must look to their own government’s financial power and interest in growth, and to the EU agencies’ constantly contentious interest in growth, which does not coincide with any national standpoint. They focus their dissatisfaction on their own government, which is never doing enough to assert its nation’s business interests. The government, for its part, is not free to side with its national good due to the anarchy of competition being institutionalized within the EU and between Europe and the rest of the world. It is therefore all the keener to exert decisive influence, even though that is hardly the same thing as being solely in charge. It seeks agreement with its dissatisfied citizens, whose private interests are all regulated at the national and European levels, by constantly complaining about “Brussels bureaucracy”; but this is at the same time an admission that it is under Brussels’ power, which can in turn not at all please its citizens, whose patriotism it is corroborating. With respect to the money that is earned within the country but managed collectively and distributed — as little as there may be — on a pan-European level, market-economy materialism and Eurosceptic love of one’s homeland come together in the notion of a nation’s heritage or acquired rights. This heritage does not apply in the same way to one’s partners but gives one the right to make claims on them, and it is never guarded well enough by one’s own government. Of least concern here is the question of what individuals actually get out of this heritage.

The denationalization of money is quite fundamentally a hopeless contradiction. On the one hand, money is used worldwide as an international means of business that a nation’s economic status depends on. On the other, it is a binding national currency that is the lifeblood of a nation’s class society, the “real community” in a world of peoples belonging to states, the material essence of a common national bond. So it is only right that the euro, constructed out of imperialist reason, repeatedly causes a split between state and people in the member countries.

This effect caused by an actively pursued imperialism, in this case by the global success of the national currency, is of course not alien to the USA and its real and virtual dollar owners. They quite rightly take it for granted that dollars can buy everything in the world, even if they don’t have any at the moment. The other side of the coin is that the whole world, all states and all businessmen, do their utmost to get hold of dollars, and every private individual as well, even newcomers to the country with no entitlement. This side of the coin appears to the American people and their politicians to be an encroachment by foreign powers and outsiders, especially when problems with national overaccumulation or one’s own livelihood or quite generally with the greatness of one’s own country and its dollar monopoly cry out for a self-critical explanation. Then it is time to take stock and register the real and imaginary costs of the country’s imperialist supremacy as harming “hard-working” Americans due to the undeserved aid given to foreign peoples.

And not only that.

A partially mobilized world population disturbs “domestic peace” more than any class struggle

The imperialist nations’ good money, or more precisely, the way the sovereigns in charge aggressively pursue its boundless accumulation, has one repercussion on their countries that makes the contradiction of internationalizing their nation’s lifeblood directly visible and tangible to citizens and politicians: the so-called “refugee problem.” This is a misnomer because, although more or less everyone in the country “with a migrant background” is defined and treated as a problem for state and people depending on the political climate, the immigrants are not the ones really responsible for the immigration that causes such a fuss. It is the leading imperialist nations above all else. Not only do they give their capitalists cross-border access to the human resources that the world’s states have to offer. After calculating their demographics with an anxious look to the future and concluding that their own young generation will not meet the personnel needs of boundless national overaccumulation, they declare themselves immigration countries. They make other states with unemployed overpopulation the generous offer of meeting their need for qualified personnel of all kinds, especially their interest in the “best brains,” but likewise their demand for hardy, cheap young labor in general. What clinches the deal for the other side is the prospect of foreign-exchange earnings through remittances to the home country. Rich oil-exporting countries without a mass base manage to get themselves something like a working class that way. This migration model for the purpose of capital accumulation gives surplus masses in countries left behind by the global economy the opportunity to make money, even without recruitment or a “welcoming culture,” an opportunity that does not exist in their home countries. They migrate at their own expense and risk to places where, in the best case, there is already a community of their kind. They make use of legal entitlements, where such laws exist, for political victims and displaced persons, whom there are likewise masses of in the modern world and who rarely make it into the leading states of this world.

However, this is not the way the prominent destination countries planned to access human material abroad; they define and treat this part of twenty-first century migration as “irregular.” It leaves them with two problems. The lesser one is to sort the masses of people who have not been invited or recruited but come on their own initiative, according to the legal entitlements that allowed them to cross the border, and according to national needs and individual suitability. This means ruthlessly warding them off and deterring them, leaving many who are not deported to a fate as day laborers without rights, making the accepted ones as useful as if they had been ordered up. The latter inevitably involves costs, which do not pay off directly for the state budget, but they do for the nation’s low-wage sectors. The greater political challenge lies in how to determine and set the limits for the legal discrimination against immigrants who have arrived one way or another, on their own initiative or on demand: to distinguish neatly between full citizenship and the conditions for allowing foreign residents. These do not get a passport; nor do they have the right to vote, because the loyalty to rule that is expressed by voting looks like voters having power over their rule. And their integration into the nation’s competition retains the legal character of a concession, including gradations in social welfare support all the way down to the inalienable human right to “a bed, soap and bread.” What migrants are denied depending on their particular legal status, native citizens can consider a privilege they are entitled to not on the basis of how they actually perform in competition, but rather as part of the people. On the other hand, the wage labor and business that the state lets foreigners into the country for are blind to the criterion of inborn or definitely legal nationality; success and failure in the competition for money as a means of existence, and money itself, are blind to it. Still, nationality gives the native population their inviolable, exclusive claim on the highest power, and their status as belonging to the true sovereign that ensures law and order. Though citizens rarely notice this status, they become acutely aware of it when competing with foreigners.

So the same state that draws on its people as its exclusive possession while declaring itself to be its people’s exclusive possession, acts at the same time as a pragmatist responsible for the nation’s capital growth and tolerates, even promotes, the immigration of foreigners into its competitive society, however strictly it controls the influx. This does not go down well with its people. When individuals from all over the world who aren’t properly entitled are drawn in, competition is not regarded as a challenging freedom but as an imposition on “us.” The nasty ways that capitalist labor and housing markets work, which are otherwise habitually endured, railed against and accepted, like all hardships of life that are necessary to the system, are seen as violations of “our” priority right to a normal existence when immigrants without inborn residence rights are also subjected to them. The state’s expenditure for integrating useful migrants and even for keeping out and removing unwanted foreigners appears to patriotic citizens to be nothing but a burden, which the good people have to bear by paying taxes and having their living conditions deteriorate. And what they are holding against the state, once again and with xenophobic insistence, is not the living conditions under its imperialist management, but that its citizens have to share these living conditions with people who are not its own.

Bold paths to harmony, the useful kind

When money divides state and people, one way or another, the cause is taken up by opposition movements, which sometimes seize power. They radically criticize their nation’s active imperialist reach or its more passive imperialist inclusion as surrendering national self-determination. This is immediately equated with betrayal of the people, the sole owners of the public power and object of its concern. Such movements fixate on a monstrous tally of national losses, due to those in charge hopelessly giving in to foreign demands. They relentlessly expose all this compliance, in order to fight relentlessly against both foreign pests and their domestic accomplices in order to put the nation back in order, i.e., make it “number one.”

Across the many countries degraded by imperialism, the accusation is corruption. This accusation arises quasi-automatically when one combines an officially cultivated belief that the country is “basically” rich with a moral perception of how grossly unfair it is for the masses to factually be impoverished while those in power enrich themselves. The resulting power struggles involve the people through elections — this has become the norm worldwide. But what decide them — this is also quite the rule — are interests and interested parties from capitalistically strong states with plenty of purchasing capacity for buying needed goods that the particular country has to offer, and services, including political ones, that it has to provide. The election winner tries hard not to let go of the power he has won, but to establish a rule tailored to his person using money and a force-wielding apparatus on the model of functioning bourgeois states. This is often successful. State power and population are then reconciled in a stereotypical way by the leadership presenting its people with the glory of an indigenous heroism for them to find their unique national identity in. In other cases, the parties lay into each other with the ever-repeated accusation of corruption. Then the recurring change of power keeps citizens hoping things will actually improve one day, and their patriotic spirit alive. Both ways of reconciling state and people fail, and only force can maintain a semblance of state rule over a people who have not really been made useful. Such conditions are ultimately also part of the “rules-based world order.”

The fetish of a wonderful national identity, in which the people’s nature harmoniously coincides with the sovereignty of their rule to the benefit of each side, is all the more alive in more notable nations and the dominating imperialist states. But it has its own importance in a bourgeois democracy. The reason for the rift between state power and the “hard-working” people, and thus the starting point for criticizing the party blamed for it, is, in the most prominent cases, not that the nation has lost out in the competition among powers. It is instead its imperialist success that has turned the world-money it has created into a business means for the global economy, that has made the use of this money a fought-over means of existence for states and their peoples, and has made its acquisition the last hope for the mobile fraction of the One World population. On this basis, the rank and file at home are all the more indignant about being excluded as a class from the proceeds of the nation’s economic power and forced to compete with the whole world’s wage earners, compete with them even in their own home country. When the faction of the political class that claims credit for the nation’s imperialist success is accused of having forgotten its own people, this can therefore not be dismissed with the usual democratic sparring between competing parties. The accusation is radicalized to go further than just criticizing the political opponent for shamefully neglecting their duty to serve a common political agenda. It is aimed against the traditional agenda itself, which translates the effects, successes, and difficulties of exercising imperialist power into problems for the state to solve. The critics’ point of view is that the problems to be solved, if they have not just been invented out of calculation in the first place, are nothing but the result of the homeland being irresponsibly subjected to foreign interests. The nation’s imperialist status is beyond question. But the costs it involves are not merely too high; there shouldn’t be any at all for a state that is truly sovereign. A truly sovereign state proves itself by imposing all the faux frais of national greatness on its victims. The domestic victims are those who incur costs as welfare cases and, when they are unwanted immigrants, do not even deserve to be recognized as welfare cases. The victims abroad are the states that have the privilege of being business partners. A ruling establishment that fails to make others pay is committing crimes against the nation and the sovereign, the people. Such critics do not simply corroborate citizens’ dissatisfaction; they carry it over into an angry popular movement against domestic enemies. The fact that such enemies can actually come to power and stay there casts a bad light on the procedure that makes such anti-people governance possible. Elections as a method of empowerment are all right, but all the checks and balances, the legal and bureaucratic precautions for preserving the bourgeois and imperialist raison d’état, hinder or sabotage an uncompromising patriotic rule, one that does away with (basically self-created) conditions and commitments that tie down the people’s sovereign power. What the stirred-up wrath of the people is offered is a leader to embody it and be confirmed by acclamation through the people united in the act of voting. In the end, this offer is critical of the system in that such a man of the people, if successful, has come to stay, and will not let any anonymous procedural rules undermine him or his regime. He will quash anything that could lead to such an impossible outcome.

The other side, the establishment under attack or already booted out, fights back in a decidedly conservative manner as far as the political agenda is concerned, arguing that its rule has proven effective for the nation’s status, which should not be recklessly jeopardized. It wages its counterattack on the same methodology-of-rule battlefield as its radical critics, mainly by accusing the “authoritarians” of dividing a democratically united people by their cult of never compromising and their frenzy of ostracism. That is, they are the mirror-image of their opponents, uncompromisingly ostracizing them as gravediggers of tolerance and pluralistic democracy.

Thus, the dispute between the two sides over harmoniously uniting the people with their leadership ends up revealing both modern imperialism’s contradiction between national sovereignty and the internationalism that nations require to exist, as well as the false idyll of bourgeois democracy that has let this contradiction mature.

Foreign relations: Monopoly on the use of force, and anarchy of competition, worldwide

The nations and their anti-imperialist policies

No matter how nations deal with their fundamental rifts domestically, when it comes to external relations they all insist on being absolutely free agents. No state power sees itself as working for any higher authority or even any other political will; each has itself as its purpose, asserting itself against being subject to others. This has been true, everywhere in the world, since the colonial empires’ imperialism, with their rigid legal and real separation between metropolis and periphery, was surmounted by a new kind: peoples at large being subjected to sovereign nation-states that have equal legal status and recognize each other. Such states insist on being sovereign without restriction, protesting against interference in their “internal affairs” whenever their peers seem to be encroaching on them or trying to extort something from them. And because encroachment and extortion are the order of the day in nations’ everyday relations, the rulers in charge are constantly busy defining limits to foreign influence, warding off attacks on their sacred national egoism, and definitely not letting anyone tell them what to do. In the modern world of states, the imperialism that no one will put up with begins where the stronger fail to show respect for the right to autonomy that the weaker also, and especially, have.

This stance of sovereign self-determination that free nations have, their fundamental anti-imperialism, by no means induces them to distance themselves from the world of capitalist markets and international relations, and certainly not to keep out of them or seclude themselves from them. On the contrary, it is with a constant critical eye for possible encroachment and pressuring by others that they act as committed participants in the competition of nations for capitalist wealth and to increase the power required for and arising from that. For the sake of successfully preserving themselves, i.e., in keeping with their general anti-imperialist line, they freely choose to adhere to the conditions and constraints of a competition that they have not really freely chosen but that they cannot not take part in. The reason why they do so, however, is not the constraints dictated by the logic of this competition. Their need to compete is the work of force, a force that leaves the sovereign political will of modern nation states no choice, that rules out the alternative of withdrawing from the necessities involved in competing.

This global regime exists, quite in line with the anti-imperialist policy of sovereign nations, as the UN: a “world organization” that all states belong to as formally equal members. It stands for the theoretical, and to a certain extent also practical, authority of international law as a code of good conduct for states. At periodic general assemblies, it adopts resolutions by majority vote on joint projects and on how to judge problems in world politics. It maintains or supports a large number of supranational institutions, not least those that have come about separately from it and deal with the nations’ global capitalist business. At the level of sovereign state decision-making it embodies, in form, the power of the collective over its voluntary and still sovereign members. It is thus the legal counterpart of the contradictory capitalist supranationalism that world markets put into practice when the world’s nations set about acquiring their economic means of sustenance, a world-money deriving from the sovereign creation of money by the USA and a small oligopoly of other global economic powers. This material relationship of cooperation and subordination between the collective of world-money makers and the great number of countries whose own creation of credit and money depends on that has a political equivalent: the legal distinction and representation relationship between the mass of ordinary UN members with equal rights, and the UN Security Council, whose resolutions are binding under international law, unlike the majority votes of the General Assembly. They do not expressly put into effect any of the global economic constraints that determine the competition of nations in practice. Instead, the Council’s majority decisions relate to the higher level of state decision-making. They deal with relations between nations in the way that state sovereigns as such, in their abstract nature as force monopolists, concretely interact and decide on prevailing constraints. That is, they deal with them as questions of using force. By making these questions the subject of negotiation, the UN’s decision-making bodies decree, as a principle, a peaceful coexistence of states that is based on the constraints of competition. This does not mean that the Security Council is really collectively suppressing the nations’ will to wage war. Such a thing is already countered within the illustrious body itself by the veto power of the five permanent members. These founding states of the “United Nations” can therefore formally override other states’ monopoly on force and decision-making only by consensus, and will definitely not surrender any of their national power of decision on war and peace themselves. Nevertheless, this arrangement has formally launched a supranational regime over states’ sovereign decision-making, an institutional obligation to act in accordance with international law, which includes, among other things, recognizing and respecting the institutions that organize and oversee the constraints of world business — the IMF, World Bank, GATT or later WTO,^[‡] etc.

The real foundation of this regime and its authority follows from its origins: it is the work of a victorious world-war alliance, and this has not disappeared from the global political reality taking shape in the UN. There has not been a monopoly on world war for some time, but the world-war-capable regime over the One World of free competition that has taken on institutionalized forms in the UN is all the more effective in a different shape. It exists in the real world-war alliance that the US has created in NATO. This alliance waters down the sovereignty of nations in actual fact, committing them to the prevailing system of competition with all its constraints, i.e., to the capitalistically functional peace order that was intended with the founding of the UN — at least by its principal author, America. NATO achieves this without the participation of the great family of nations, but with the weight of what it considers the strongest military alliance of all time.

Historical aberrations and their rejection

The extremely unequal alliance between Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States that gave rise to the UN overcame, to the point of unconditional surrender, the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy that was out to make extensive conquests for dividing up the world among themselves and dominating it. In the end, the US had achieved the unprecedented and unparalleled status of being the sole capitalist world power. Economically, it was the location for unrivaled industry, for a capital accumulation that had fully managed to pay for years of world war on multiple fronts, and for a financial power able and willing to credit the reconstruction of capitalist countries around the globe. Militarily, it emerged as the sovereign occupying power in most of the defeated countries and as the monopolist of a successfully employed, epoch-making new type of “weapon of mass destruction,” the atomic bomb. In terms of global politics, it was an order-maintaining power that succeeded in turning the world-war brotherhood-in-arms into the UN, which was first open to all fellow combatants and ultimately included all states, and thereby institutionalizing a kind of global domestic and economic policy. The German-Japanese attempt to revise the dominant imperialist power relationships by using force to expand their own territories had thus not only failed, but been shot down as a historical mistake. The similar imperialism of the colonial empires, whose European metropolises had needed saving by the US and, ironically, by the achievements of the Red Army, was subsequently liquidated as well. This was done essentially through wars that were supported by the Soviet Union as wars of liberation, and then turned by the US into proxy wars against the Soviet Union’s attempt to gain strategic positions against the Western alliance’s rival capitalist regime over the newly emerging world of states.

For that was the decisive barrier to the new imperialism the US intended to impose as a post-war order, One World unified under its leadership. The Soviet Union, as the second victorious power, did become a member of the UN, albeit with a veto right for Security Council decisions on war and other essential questions of using force. However, it excluded itself from the creation of a capitalist world of states using American money and credit, surrounded itself with a “socialist camp” with its own sort of political economy, and secured its autonomy and sphere of power militarily with occupation troops and by rearming to catch up with the US-developed ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

To the US, this was not merely an annoying exception to the rule of a competition of sovereign states meant to open up the entire globe to its economic might. It was a flagrant attack on its war-won right to dictate to the world’s states that they had to follow this rule as the condition for peace. So it was a violation of world peace, which again had to be combated as a historical aberration. This could not be done by a war on the model of the world war the US had won, because the Soviet Union was a strategic nuclear countervailing power that could not be eliminated without risking the existence of America’s global power. America’s solution was a “cold” world war, a policy of offensive deterrence intended to force the enemy to capitulate as an alternative world power and fit it into the One World of free competition without the use of “hot” nuclear weapons. The US did not achieve this result until more than four decades later. But in the process, and on the basis of its urgent need to correct the Soviet Union’s exceptional position, it brought about nothing less than the West. The most important capitalist rival nations were now integrated into a solid, always-ready anti-Soviet war alliance. What bound them together was the European allies — America’s line of forward defense — being subsumed under the constant threat of nuclear war, which left them no chance of effective defense, except through America’s credible deterrent threat to destroy the Soviet Union, styled as the “nuclear umbrella.” They were reliable partners, voluntarily doing capitalist business with America and allying with it against the Communists, and for better or worse acting as the front line of America’s nuclear war planning; they were active supporters in a constant virtual world war. This also involved the political and economic benefit of removing barriers from the competitive struggles within the thus united West, struggles that of course could not, and were not even meant to be avoided between the most powerful capitalist nations.

For America’s partners, this resulted in careers as profiteers from free access to resources around the world and, above all, from participating in the American goods and financial markets. This was the basis for the contradictory relationship of mutual dependence, and confirmed the US dollar’s quasi-monopolistic dominance on global trade and financial markets and the quasi-equal status of a small number of alternative world currencies. In return, the US had its big partner countries’ capital accumulation at its disposal as a source of its growing credit power. This power was extensively utilized and proved an excellent resource for an inexhaustible military budget that America used to develop its strategic nuclear capabilities to an unprecedented degree, supplement its conventional military might with novel tactical nuclear weapons for not-so-far-fetched deterrent deployment scenarios, and altogether expand it into a continuum of military superiority at every conceivable intermediate level, from foot soldier to outer space. For the means of “conventional” warfare had by no means been superseded by the concept of truly total war with strategic nuclear weapons. The strategic “stalemate” achieved through nuclear deterrence and laid down in agreements with the main enemy was utilized by the USA to embroil the Soviet Union in costly conflicts, to impede it from developing its own global power and geopolitical influence, and to wage proxy wars against it. And whenever any state emerging from the old colonial empires, or other “non-aligned” state, was suspected of independently moving in a communist direction, the US fought it as well. All this at the same time set the framework for the politics of reciprocal utilization between the one big NATO partner and the dependent ones, who thereby achieved their two major successes. Firstly, they won the “contest between two systems.” The competition of capitalists and their state guardians and beneficiaries yielded far more means for the arms race aimed at world-war superiority than did their enemy’s “real socialist” economy of monetary levers. Secondly, they achieved a US-led collective regime over the rest of the world, which has more than made up for the necessary outlays in economic terms as well.

Condition for peace: World war

By defeating its Soviet enemy, the West lost its compelling reason for holding together but did not come to an end. The leading power and its allies have continued their alliance geared toward world war. However, the US has redefined world war and modified its alliance policy accordingly. The “new world order,” which it ushered in with military campaigns in Iraq after the Soviet Union’s demise, and continues to pursue, aims at and establishes a worldwide monopoly on peace through war that no longer has to take into account a nuclear war–capable countervailing power. Instead, states that act too independently, along with the surrounding region, are identified as problem cases and brought under control by a build-up and, if necessary, deployment of overwhelming military force. To appropriately intervene as a regional power of unrivaled dominance, the US enlists its allies and even local not-yet-allied forces as a “coalition of the willing.” In addition, even without being challenged by a strategically equal opponent, it expands its capacity for total world war — measured solely by its goal of being invulnerable — as far as outer space. It co-opts Europe anew as a reliable outpost for laying hold of the big continent with its problem regions from the Mediterranean through Eastern Europe to the Pacific. Remaining particularly important for this is NATO, the consensus between the US and its chief capitalist competitors and classic alliance partners, organized in the form of a military bureaucracy. The partner states participate in this new world-peace dictate as a useful support for America's global power, constantly striving to turn it into a collaboration that gives them a say and allows them to assert their own strategic interests.

These relations are affected in an either positive or negative way by the considerable challenges that follow for this imperialism of US- and West-guaranteed world peace from its own inherent logic. To tackle these challenges, there are always ambitious rulers to be found.

The most important test for NATO stems from a prior condition that the “new world order” was born under. Soviet nuclear-war power did not disappear with the end of the Soviet Union; it serves its downsized successor, the Russian Federation, as the basis for an independent security policy and its claim to be recognized as a global power. The new state no longer segregates itself from the system of capitalist competition between nations, the regime of global markets for goods, money, and credit that is based on US dollars and other Western credit-moneys. It is open to it, but it has the ability to measure up to the US in the field of nuclear strategic weapons, and the intent to define the quality and scope of its security needs autonomously — i.e., not have them allocated in accordance with the Western world-peace order — and to assert these needs autonomously, and also to intervene militarily in conflicts abroad without being asked. For the West, any country just having such an ability and intent is already a major disturbance that has to be eliminated, an enemy that must be disempowered at all costs. The fitting consequence is that the West’s aggressive world-peace policy and Russia’s counteroffensive have been escalated to the Ukraine war and continually within that war. This is a hybrid test for NATO in the sense that the imperialistically necessary struggle against a competing world-war power is taking the form of a regional conflict. That is, it is to be waged in a regionally limited arena so successfully that little remains of Russia as a strategic disturbance.

A second great challenge, only to be expected according to the logic of the US’s “new world order,” is the conflict between China and the West. It is being waged with the weapons of capitalist-state competition, and is programmed for escalation to a military confrontation in the Western Pacific. America is positioning itself and an extensive regional alliance for this conflict, and its NATO allies want to be included as well. The One World of the US and its partners knows only one global economy and only one leading supervisor of the relationships of dependence and extortion between states. This quasi-monopoly is incompatible with any attempt to create an alternative, and with the very existence of a rival conceivably able to make such an attempt. Because this is a question of proper world peace, Taiwan and an entire island world plus neighboring states in the Pacific have acquired the status of theater of war in case this question can only be answered with force.

A challenge of the third kind, which is likewise essential to the system and at the same time a matter of chance in terms of how and where it is dealt with, is what the partners of world peace call terrorism. This is the militant activity of organized followers of an idealism of other-world justice, who fight this world’s “system” from a position of armed powerlessness. They do not endanger the real system of competition between capitalists and their states. The effect that they can produce in global politics, however, is that otherwise useful governments lose control over parts of their country and population. This causes disturbances that have to be cleared up militarily, according to the importance attached to them.

Finally, there is a challenge of a completely different kind that the system of competition and world peace faces: its movers and shakers themselves. They strain their alliance with the very standpoint and ambition that are their reason for pursuing it: the will and ability to control the world of states so as to use it for their own benefit. America’s most important allies are capitalist powers by no means of the same caliber as their leading power, but big enough to have similar aspirations. And because Europe’s biggest states most self-assuredly consider themselves too small to achieve these aspirations on their own, they have joined together to form the almost-supranational EU in order to be able to compete with the US economically and eventually also become a strategic military power alongside it. The fact that “alongside” necessarily implies a certain “against” is one more reason for them not to terminate their special alliance with America. This alliance is left to the calculations of the leading power, which, as such, consistently reflects on the cost. That is, the US is always considering how much its partners’ sharing and having a say in the upkeep and proceeds of its global regime — how much collectivism for world peace — is even necessary, on the one hand, and pays off, on the other. In the end, the doubts that all involved parties inevitably have always lead back to the starting point: the epoch-making alliance between the biggest sovereign competitors is ultimately only as valuable as a common enemy is strong. And in any case, imperialist world peace is only as secure as the world war that secures it.

§ 30 The capitalist dream — a dystopia of money, force, and goodwill

Capitalists and politicians only mean well — for the people they are responsible for. This responsibility is often a heavy burden because those whose fate depends on their decisions are many, and because they very often have to make decisions that harshly affect many of those many in their way of living and their life planning. It is not uncommon for the livelihoods of entire company workforces or the survival of a vast number of citizens to depend on them. That is why they make the necessary decisions to the best of their knowledge and belief: their knowledge of what the situation — of their business, their nation — requires of them, and their belief that the situation leaves no alternative. They realize of course that one cannot know anything for sure about the future their decisions will bring, and that they may well be mistaken about the problems to be overcome and how to solve them. And they also know only too well that some of their colleagues are unscrupulous and fail to live up to their responsibilities. However, they will not have this said of their profession as such, of them as pros. Like any decent citizen, they are acting in accordance with the requirements of their “job,” which happens to involve having power over other people. Being paid, or if “self-employed” paying themselves, in accordance with the responsibility their job entails is something they have every right to and do not need to apologize for. After all, they are only doing their duty in their line of work.

The professional attitude that capitalists and politicians have is the whole explanation for how ordinary people, as well as those who consider themselves geniuses and world-savers who are constantly reinventing themselves, manage to keep the global market in all its parts and divisions and the associated relations of force running day after day. This requires only two things. The first is the development, driven by trial and error, of all the practical constraints that are objectively involved — quasi-concretely given — in the capitalist use of money as the powerful source of its increase. And the second is people who apply their wills and minds to getting the best out of the process of capital valorization for themselves using the means individually available to them, their property, their however limited understanding; or who choose the career of managing the capitalistically required use of political force and pursue it with the necessary tenacity. The logic of capitalism or the rationale of political rule does not need to be invented by anyone; knowledge about them would never lead to them coming about. For putting them into practice, for contributing to the global career of capitalist business and bourgeois rule through thick and thin, a decidedly affirmative stance is sufficient, but also required. There must be people who have the clever pragmatism to apply sufficient money and participate in the accumulation of abstract wealth, or to enter and climb the power hierarchy within the political regime over capital accumulation.

Provided, of course, that the vast majority of people settle into the status of being at the disposal of the dominant economic class and the holders of state power, and accept being utilized that way. The bosses and beneficiaries of the prevailing system take on the additional responsibility of making sure they do. They go to the trouble of explaining the essentials of their job to themselves and their rank and file:

Good business, freedom everywhere, and policies for peace

What the decision-makers have to say about this follows an extremely simple principle. They voice how they themselves view their professional activity, emphasizing that this is how everyone else should see and appreciate it too. Everything they — the private businessmen and the public officials — do for the purpose of capital accumulation that benefits them privately or benefits the nation, they are doing for the sole purpose of having this purpose succeed. This takes care of any further questions about what this purpose is about. The abstraction “business” is enough to make the criterion of success — meaning the intended private and national gain — the only relevant one. If business has succeeded, then — only then, but then without question — it is good. If it has failed, this accordingly casts a bad light — never on the matter itself, nor necessarily on the good intentions, but rather on everything that has or could have thwarted success. It is mainly the people who have fallen short in an undoubtedly good undertaking. The same thing deserves very bad marks when it is being pursued by other leaders and aimed against one’s own pursuits, but this is even less of a reason to object to capitalist business as such: the criticism boils down to saying the others are defeating one’s own identical plans. This makes it clear that good business is a competitive struggle, meaning that the success of one side is always to the disadvantage of the other. Succeeding is therefore about winning; otherwise all that taking of responsibility is worthless. The abstraction “good business” is not anonymous; what matters is one’s own, and that must be fought for. With this self-disclosure, those in charge have also made it clear what they expect of the many people who are to be used as material for the upcoming commercial or political contests. With or without explicit reference to their being dependent on the competitive success that is at stake quite independently of them, people are co-opted as the party whose success is at stake. They are co-opted not in the sense that they are being called on to take sides, which would require them to form an opinion first — as they are of course entitled to do — but rather in the sense that they are being addressed as part of an overarching collective actor in the particular competitive goings-on. They are supposed to be a “we” that most generously unites those who exercise the command power in a business or state with those dependent on it, a power that is only to be judged by how well it succeeds, how well it manages to prevail over another party. It goes without saying that, for both the leading figures and the dependent ones, this is not merely a theoretical assessment of the situation but a committed attitude, the deliberate embrace of a right to succeed that is taken for granted. The “we” and the affirmation already exist before, and therefore in order that, the individuals addressed willfully adopt the imperative these two things involve.

Among the wage- or salary-dependent citizens spoken to as a collective in various respects, the rights-consciousness this evokes is so alive, the abstractly partisan will to succeed so decisive, that when their leaders report some success they are rarely satisfied. They are most likely to be pleased when they can welcome the failure of another collective that has been presented as an adversary. Otherwise, there is plenty of everyday or special trouble, personal or general trouble, to be discontented with. This does not make them critical of the “we” with its right to succeed, or the economic or political cause it stands for. More often they are self-assuredly skeptical about the top brass, who claim they have not only tried for the best result but also generally achieved it. Citizens readily feel betrayed by their government precisely because they share its “we” standpoint. And all the more justifiably so, since that is exactly the kind of accusation that those competing for the top positions fling back and forth: their rivals are merely denying or concealing the fact that they are unable to succeed. Citizens with doubts easily feel deceived by their leadership, whom they have to follow one way or another. With their collective rights-consciousness and their individual consciousness of self derived from it, they feel they are being controlled from above in the face of popularly cited real or imagined interventions in both public life and their private lives.

Those in charge take such dissatisfaction as an opportunity to explain to those they are ruling over what the freedom to hold a dissenting opinion is actually about. There is, of course, the license to criticize, at least in the leading imperialist democracies. When competing for high state positions or political influence, they make use of this freedom themselves to disparage their opponents. However, they insist that however sharp the criticism, it has to be constructive, i.e., it has to be based on an unquestioned support for the common cause they are competing to manage. In the same spirit, the responsible go-getters point out to the less responsibility-laden members of their civil society that this freedom, which no one wants to take away from them, has to be exercised responsibly by them as well, otherwise there will be anarchy. Most importantly, individuals should not expect everything from their superiors, and definitely not from the state; they are basically responsible for themselves. This is what the freedom the state grants them truly means. The state’s main task is to guarantee this freedom by making sure it finds its limit where it touches the freedom of others, a limit determined not arbitrarily but by law. Competition is what a free civil society is really about, and this is how state-licensed personal freedom is to be exercised too: as the affirmative self-conception that a person constructively engaged in competition has. That is the point, and the limit, of the general permission to complain that the state grants.

Civil discontent does not come to an end once it has been permitted by those in charge, of course. What they have set loose is in reality not just some opinions or other, but rather irresolvable conflicts of interests. This gives the authorities their next essential task: it is up to them to maintain social peace in their free country. Only now do they start seeing themselves as regulators — not in relation to good capitalist business, which is a hotbed of constant conflict and produces endless antagonisms, but in their task of setting loose and containing these conflicts by way of law. It is only with this legal framework that those conflicts become the constant bourgeois struggle for existence, that is, everyday civil life, whose cruelties and quarrels cannot be overcome with the exhortations to get along that of course always have currency. The manifold antagonisms and disputes of capitalist competition require legal certainty in order to persist and to function in accordance with the system. And legal certainty can only be had with a sovereign power that subjects the conflicting yet interdependent social and private interests to its regime, i.e., officially provides them with proper means of coercion. In this way, as a weapon in the clash between competing actors, state power is in turn a means and a guarantee of both general freedom and the order that makes everyone’s lives revolve around making money. And when those in charge turn class society into a legal situation, the inhabitants of this order develop the legalistic realism to match the situation. On the whole, they take the troubles of competing to finance a livelihood as the unquestionable starting point for independently waging a struggle for existence that cannot work without social peace, i.e., without a state using force to maintain law and order and social welfare. If asked, they justify the way they conform without any alternative as their lifelong quest for “fulfillment” or the like. And they demand that the results be acknowledged, especially by those in charge, who accordingly do not stint on praise for enduring poverty with pride (“hard-working…”).

Not only do state leaders untiringly see to good business, general freedom, and social peace, they also pay attention to the competition between nations. This, too, they do not see as being necessitated and fundamentally embodied by the reason of the state they serve; they just take it as the given reality whose challenges — which those in charge take turns hurling at each other — they have to respond to. They are preferably proactive about it, so that other states have the problem. Whatever the particulars, the matter at hand is always security; not simply to ensure some cross-border interest or other, but to ensure a state’s self-determination, ultimately its unconditional right to exist. When it comes to such supreme goods it is clear that they have to be defended on principle — this, too, is a categorical imperative of reality that is simply to be taken for granted. The other major, and particularly delicate, task that those responsible constantly face is to determine to what extent, against whom, and by what means the nation has to defend itself. Foreign powers are basically presumed guilty regardless of proof, from which follows the equally basic imperative to act. Whatever knowledge of details commanders require for this is provided by their experts. Being responsible for their people, they insist on performing the service of deciding, in the people’s name and mandated personally by them, whether, where, and to what extent the nation’s vital interests have been contested, i.e., its usually inalienable rights trampled on, what level of escalation to respond on, how firmly which other power can be relied for support. For here, the law-making power does not stand above the conflicts to be dealt with, as in domestic affairs, but is faced with other supreme powers. This makes it accordingly tricky to create peace. The only way to do it is to force an enemy to accept a peace recognizing one’s own nation’s carefully defined legal position. Which can go wrong of course. In the worst case, one loses a war. After the fact, the outcome distinguishes serious peace politicians and prudently acting commanders from daredevils and criminals. Before the fact, an army backed by a military-industrial complex is definitely a good thing; and cowardice in the face of the enemy is the last thing national leaders can reconcile with their conscience.

Vis-à-vis their people, however, there is a certain need to explain things when they are being drawn on in a different way and to a greater extent than usual to serve the higher levels of escalation in imperialist competition. They are needed to perform deeds that are prohibited at home, and to make sacrifices that require a different brand of moral resolve and fortitude compared to everyday civilian life. The conviction that the nation’s leaders have only the best in mind for their citizens, and indeed overall, when calling on them to stand up for the costs of peace and freedom in this way — that requires more than the usual partisanship toward the success of one’s own cause. It requires, on the part of those in charge, the moral assurance of being forced to engage in militant resistance by an enemy that is encroaching on their nation’s inalienable rights. For convincing its citizenry, every nation has a specific repertoire of images of how vile the enemy is, with the truth-content of these images not being measurable by the factual claims presented to support them. What is being illustrated is the practical confirmation of the wrong the enemy has done by violating one’s national right and, in a higher sense, violating the security of peace on earth altogether. Which is why this violation firstly has to be quashed, and secondly punished from the standpoint of world peace.

Those commenting from a distance like to say that truth is the first casualty of war. But what truth is that supposed to be? If it is how war is explained as being necessary for peace between states, then what should a sovereign state do with the truth about itself? Its truth is its reason of state; the proof is its success in the competition between state powers. The politicians’ truth is their resolve to perceive this reason of state as a collection of problems and challenges to their power and to overcome them accordingly — in general, and especially in war; the only way this truth can be refuted is defeat. The final argument they use to persuade their citizens is warfare itself, which leaves those affected with no alternative. The national truth about war is complete when citizens want their leaders to provide long-range offensive weapons for defense, thank them for building bomb shelters, and hate the enemy for the sacrifices that have to be made for victory.

*

This solves the mystery — if it ever was one — of how capitalists and politicians, managers and bureaucrats manage to bring about an entire world system that defies all reason, right up to the most extreme consequences, as if it were a matter of course. They are obeying the objectively given logic of the competition of capitals and of bourgeois state powers, through all its immanent contradictions, each of which is the solution to the previous one and the reason for the next. They do so with the commitment of the responsible actors of this competition; with the false consciousness that “it” cannot be done any other way; convinced that what they do matters. It also solves the other mystery of how the governed masses being exploited manage to settle into this world in which they only matter as human material to be used for alien, dominating interests harmful to them. The reason is that the ruling powers allow no alternatives to this system, and within it the inhabitants can find no alternative to going along with it. They perceive the competition for money, and the rule of law, both in practice and in their minds, as a moral duty and an opportunity to master their situation in the best possible way; with the same wrongly affirmative stance as their bosses. Both sides, each with their complementary opposing means, act according to the reality they are faced with, and think the way they act. They are character masks of the competition of capitalists.

One more thing to note:

This world of consummate competition of capitalists, consummated in a system of imperialist might, has no alternative because, since, insofar as it, or rather its decisive leading powers, have destroyed its only real alternatives.

• One alternative “actually existed” for a time as a special kind of alliance of states — the Soviet power, plus allies with limited sovereignty, under the rule of allied political parties — because it could offer the only things imperialist states respect, the only things that impress capitalists, the only things that count in the world of competition and even against it: wealth and power. These were based on material successes of a party ruling with the means of a state, on its successes in making use of available peoples to promote economic growth and defending against the imperialists. The birth defect of this “real socialism” is one thing, the party leaders’ decision to respond to the superiority of imperialism by dissolving their system is another. Both are reason enough not to shed any tears over it. However, while the imperialist powers were successfully waging their “cold war” against the Soviet power they secured a different kind of triumph altogether:
• The world’s states rid themselves of the only real alternative to their system of competition of capitalists and nations. They were extremely successful in destroying the only opponent that can actually overcome the trinity of business, freedom and peace: a proletariat enlightened about and activated for communism. Which is why the proletariat also has to be spoken of at the end here. For just because “communism is dead,” that obviously does not mean the contradiction that capitalism creates for itself with its regime over a wage-dependent working class has ceased to exist.

Despite all the capitalists’ efforts to free themselves from being dependent on this factor of their competition to make money, they still need it. And political rulers definitely need it as human material to use on their national business location and as a source of their power. We are talking about a nation’s own working population. The system lives on its service. And even if the productivity of this service and the purpose of its use lie entirely in the hands of the capitalist property owners and political rulers, the system of competition between capitalist moneymakers and between imperialist lawmakers lives on commandeering the will and minds of its wage-dependent class. How? It exploits its materialism by pinning it down to the capitalistic money-earning system as its absolutely only means. This pins it down to the irresolvable contradiction between people’s active interest in having a good and secure life and the goal of increasing capitalist wealth and imperialist power. This system has, and reproduces, its base in its wage-workers, in a dual way. It turns them into socially supported casualties of its regime and at the same time into its instrument: into a weapon for the competition between capitalists and between states.

This system successfully survives — so it appears, quite easily even its destruction of the natural, naturally necessary conditions for its human material’s existence — because it has dealt with all attempts at emancipation from its regime. For of course there have been such attempts. It does not escape people that they are being utilized to their detriment. Many cannot help noticing that they always have to wring their livelihood out of their money-earning materialism additionally by mounting organized resistance to the interests they live from serving. This has even given rise to a labor movement, a proletarian class consciousness, a will to be emancipated from the given status. And a radical theoretical critique of this status and the world it is part of has also existed since the end of the nineteenth century; including a correction of the affirmative false consciousness of those who, in their daily lives, inevitably try to make the best of their circumstances and then no longer care to distinguish between what is fatally necessary and what they are consenting to. What has won out instead is the power that manifests its economic impact through money; that in this form enables the state to perform its glorious deeds; that the state in turn uses to bring about the boundless rule of money. Underpinned by the quasi-organic practical imperatives of earning money for proletarians and others, and by a great deal of legally framed class struggle from above, states have managed to turn labor movements into constructively acting unions, to replace class consciousness with nationalism, and to devote themselves entirely to their own hostile relations without any bother from a communist alternative. Their trump card is a global proletariat that is controlled everywhere by mutually hostile political powers and, in the leading imperialist states, exhibits exemplary qualities:^[3]

• politically emancipated, meaning: while critically striving to live well it is completely fixated on the legal claims it imagines it has against its political rulers;
• socially disciplined, meaning: it is nailed down to its role as a constructive social partner;
• globally utilized, meaning: it is a weapon of capitalists and states in their competition for growth and successful national budgets;
• warped by nationalism, meaning: it is confined by the standpoint of admiring oneself and one’s own as a distinct kind of people with inalienable human rights to preferential treatment.

In short, it is not merely an instrument for its nation’s imperialist reason of state, but a dangerously amplifying echo chamber for it, to boot.

© GegenStandpunkt 2024, 2025