New Year, Same Crisis: Prepare for Imperialism's Terror and Carnage in 2016

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New Year, Same Crisis: Prepare for Imperialism's Terror and Carnage in 2016

Saturday, 09 January 2016 00:00
By Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed


Every January 1st, a significant number of the population in the US formulates resolutions for the New Year. Some promise to exercise more, eat healthier, or save more money. Imperialism, the system that rules a large portion of the planet, has only one resolution. That resolution is to spread carnage and terror on oppressed people all over the world. Achievement of the resolution is measured by how rich in profits the ruling class becomes at the expense of the oppressed masses. The imperialist system transitions into the New Year in a state of crisis. This crisis must be understood if the forces of progress around the world hope to unite toward the goal of social transformation and revolution.

The Crisis

Imperialism enters 2016 in a general crisis that began in the 1970's and exploded in 2008. This crisis is characterized by a gradual decline in the rate of profit. The rate of profit has declined in concert with the expansion of global capital and technology. Technological advances have permanently replaced a large sector of the working class and made the system expensive to maintain. Imperialism's economic infrastructure, capitalism, has developed the technological basis for both higher productivity and labor efficiency. Cycles of overproduction inherent in the capitalist order are no longer resolved by the rehiring of labor to bolster profits.

One could say the imperialist system is trapped in its own contradictions. On the one hand, imperialism needs labor to accumulate profits. On the other, the introduction of technology has permanently replaced jobs and reduced capitalism's only source of profit: labor. Fewer workers are producing more and working longer hours, yet all workers have seen their conditions fall immensely over the last forty years precisely because imperialist entrepreneurs must extract profit from a shrinking workforce. As the system has grown more costly to maintain, the exploitation and repression of workers and oppressed peoples has intensified with no end in sight.

The Carnage and Terror

The intensification of exploitation has come in many forms, all of which stem from the root and branch of the imperialist system. Since the economic crisis of 2008, the imperialists have waged wars of destabilization abroad to fend off the rise of Russia and China. Internally, a massive campaign of repression and surveillance has been instituted to dampen the rebellion of the workers in the imperialist countries. This campaign of repression has largely affected the historic victims of white supremacy. The Mass Black Incarceration state, which ensures that one of every eight prisoners in the world is a Black American, provides the quintessential example of the terror imperialism brings to those whose labor is no longer necessary for production. .........(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34317-new-year-same-crisis-prepare-for-imperialism-s-terror-and-carnage-in-2016