Plurality of Powers and the Atlantic Crisis
In general terms, the United States is [the model of] society we will arrive at in a few years
. It was 1962 and Arrigo Cervetto was addressing the conference of the Movement of the Communist Left, pointing to the American script
as the direction in which Italian society was developing: the accelerated disintegration of the peasant world, the growth of a vast industrial proletariat, the emergence of white-collar workers
, and the wage-earning strata of the service sector. The Americanisation
of Italian and European society was driven primarily by the laws of capitalist development and class change, but, to some extent, it also influenced political forms through the transformation of social psychologies.
I thought Marx’s observation that the most advanced capitalist country shows the way forward to the most backward was valid
, Cervetto commented twenty years later; American development generally showed the recurring patterns of the transformation into imperialist power.
However, alongside the criterion of the American script borrowed from Marx and updated as a general regularity of imperialist development, Cervetto also pointed out the crucial importance of a materialist examination of social psychologies and political history which underpin the national character of the various powers. By doing so, one can scientifically assign the correct weight to the specific moral factor that distinguishes each country and integrate it into a deeper analysis. These two criteria are to be developed and balanced together, and here too we must draw on the scientific legacy of Marxism.
During the 20th century, the United States emerged as the world’s leading power, providing a script
for imperialist development. However, it was also regularly gripped by fevers, such as religious revivals or McCarthyism, as well as by the oscillations of American exceptionalism, which alternately pushed the country towards internal retreat and foreign engagement. For Marx, with the sudden emergence of California in the mid-19th century, America was the scene of the change of course
that would shift the centre of gravity of global development from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But, as Henry Charles Carey’s economic theories showed, precisely because capitalism in the New World had developed so rapidly, surprisingly, and happily
, its false consciousness was a Yankee universality
, which saw the American exception as the norm, and the rest of the world as equally foreign. For Carey – Marx wrote – France and China
were equally close
to the US; he was always the man who lives on the Pacific and at the same time on the Atlantic
.
Of course, in the 20th century the United States benefited from Europe’s self-destruction in two world wars, and in the second half of the century it was at the centre of every balance of power – the true partition of Yalta in Europe, and the quadripolar and then pentapolar game with the USSR, China, Japan, and India in Asia. Ultimately, this is what matters in the balance of power on the global scale, and only in the 1990s and the new century has this been disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union, European unification, and, above all, the emergence of China.
As for the fevers that run through the entirety of the American social and political history, in individual battles they have often entered the calculations of allies and adversaries. Charles de Gaulle saw the risk of an America that could explode due to terrorism
or racism
as an argument for the strategic autonomy of the force de frappe. Konrad Adenauer feared that the volatility of American opinion would jeopardise Germany’s guarantee of the extended deterrence of the US atomic arsenal. The British, in the alchemy of the special relationship between London and Washington, dreamed of being like the Greeks to the Romans in refining the simplistic American political culture. In the bloc against bloc mythology of the Cold War, they saw Washington as unwilling to recognise the autonomous drives of young capitalist countries and their nationalist character, despite their reliance on the USSR or China in their anti-colonial struggles and rise. During the Vietnam War, when advising the leaders in Hanoi to persist in their resistance to the Americans, Mao Zedong argued that the United States had historically found it difficult to maintain a long-term commitment to war abroad. Helmut Schmidt, during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, had already lamented the erosion of bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and noted the partisan capture of key administrative functions through the practice of the spoils system. He also predicted the imminent spillover of television democracy and show politics to Europe.
Here, we note that the Americanisation of political forms, before being an imitative phenomenon, is an objective result of the links of capitalist socio-economic formation. It reflects both the irruption of big capital into the entertainment and information industry – the mass media giants, the hybrid of the private logic of capital and public political influence – as well as the fading of the organised grip of political parties on the psychology of the masses and the new middle and white-collar social strata. The crisis of the parties, which today reflects property-owning fears and the insecurities of decline, had its first season at the height of the ascending cycle of social-democratisation, once the construction of the welfare State and the colossal expansion of public institutions, facilitated by those parties, had been completed.
This raises a question. Today, the social features of late imperialist maturity are typical of all the old powers: the generalisation of wage labour, the expansion of both upper strata and an immigrant proletariat living in conditions of segregation, multi-income families, mass accumulation of wealth and property-owning individualism, and a decline in fertility to the point of a demographic crisis. And today, power relations are marked by the relative decline of America, Europe, and Japan in the face of emerging China and the Indo-Pacific, in the wake of what Marx had predicted in 1850.
What, then, has become of the American script in the crisis in the world order and Atlantic decline? And to what extent are the oscillations in Washington, the unilateral claims of the Trump presidency, and the tensions affecting the separation and balance of powers contingent peculiarities of the crisis in the US? Do they represent an exacerbation of the historical features of American political culture, or do they anticipate the attributes of a new political cycle and a power contention that will become widespread and permanent?
To a certain extent, both, but this implies assessing the American crisis and the crisis in the world order in their mutual relationship, with scientific attention to times and proportions.
Let us consider two issues for the moment. The first is the extreme polarisation of the confrontation between Democrats and Republicans, which has made bipartisan consensus almost impossible and contributed to a cycle of political violence, from the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021, to the killing in Utah on September 10th of Charlie Kirk, the de facto youth leader of the MAGA movement.
In Arrigo Cervetto's Quaderni, his political memoirs, we find an illuminating passage on the method of political assassination
, which took its cue from the American political cycle of the 1960s:
I heard the news that J. F. Kennedy had been killed. It was November 22nd, 1963. For months the newspapers spoke of that fact that brought back to the political front page the practice of political assassination that had fallen out of use for a number of decades, despite having flourished for long historical periods. Politics has often been dominated by assassination. Even more often, it has also and mainly been political assassination. When I first went into politics, the fascists were killing us and we were killing them. I became a Marxist also because I tried to find a scientific explanation for the political passion that animated me; I tried to understand whether there was any rationality in the emotional behaviour that pushes people to act. The materialist conception of history and the materialist conception of politics proved to me that political action can be studied as a science. Politics can therefore be a science. For me, finding this truth in Marxism meant becoming a political man in addition to being a political animal; it meant providing passion with a brain. Political assassination may be a calculation, but very often it's only and exclusively passion and mere political incapacity to resolve the problems that reality poses. It's the primitive use of a primitive tool. It's like resolving the problems of economics with barter. I've always seen in Stalinism and the Stalinist way of thinking a primitivism that's the negation of Marx, Engels, and Lenin's scientific rationality.
I have always believed that the widespread diffusion of this way of thinking was an obstacle to the emancipation of the proletariat, in general, and to the formation of a party that has mastered the science of revolution, in particular. I have found in Marxism the rejection of the ideology of violence, together with the rejection of all ideologies. This isn't a rejection that is inspired by moral ideology, which is none other than the other face of the ideology of violence, being expressions of common subjectivism. On the contrary, it's the scientific rejection of a prejudice.
In this way,Marxism puts itself in the condition of being able to make rational use of the violence that a class-based society unleashes just as the sea unleashes storms, that is, to transform war into revolution. Again:J. F. Kennedy's assassination shocked me [...]. I felt vaguely that a new factor had come into play, a factor that I believed had been superseded because it was primitive. Since then, political assassination has become a recurrent news item. This has triggered an extremely vast series of collateral effects.
As far as I am concerned, it has led me to adopt the greatest rigour in preventing that primitive phenomenon from hindering a task that I knew would take a considerable number of years.
Cervetto wrote these lines between 1981 and 1982; as one can see, his observations are by no means limited to the method of political assassination as a feature of the American political cycle. The petty-bourgeois intellectual terrorism of the early 1980s had not yet receded; the poisoned seeds
of Middle Eastern terrorism were already arriving across the Mediterranean. Cervetto's reflection remains highly relevant today, a practical translation of the Marxist theory of violence, which is once again indispensable as the crisis in the world order deepens.
However, while Europe has its own history of political assassination – as was the case with the political terrorism of the 1970s or the ethnic-identity terrorism in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country – there is a specifically American manifestation of armed violence. On the one hand, it has been an expression of cycles of political upheaval, as it was in the 1960s in reaction to racial inclusion policies, but on the other hand, it has been reinforced by the widespread availability of firearms and the constitutional protection of armed citizens. Unlike in Europe – notes the Financial Times – the State monopoly on violence in the New World has never existed or is very imperfect, a legacy of the Frontier and the Indian wars, of the private militias controlling slaves, and of the distrust of federal powers.
The tensions of the Atlantic decline and the crisis in the world order found expression in the election of Donald Trump, and it may be that this is ushering in a new cycle of turmoil. It is also true that electoral uprisings are a common feature of all the old powers, with fear and resentment harnessed by the more or less ephemeral formations of populism and xenophobia. While this is one of the characteristics of the new political cycle, for now its acute manifestations in the US can still be traced back to internal factors, i.e., the regular features of American political culture and the course of its fevers, rather than externally, to a new norm that might extend to the entire West.
As the crisis in the world order progresses, we shall see. There are undeniable superficial similarities with the political storms of the 1930s, but to push the comparison further overlooks a seminal difference. At the time, the sorcerer's apprentices
of capital – seeking to mobilise law and order against the workers' movement – were joined by frenzied public opinion, intellectuals of anti-democratic pessimism and reactionary modernisation, and the deadly adventures of social-national demagogues: all were registering the aftershocks of the First World War or the Great Depression of 1929. Today, although the 2008 crisis has undoubtedly shattered the certainties of liberal globalisation in the West, we are still faced with the fears and anxieties of mass wealth accumulation – trillions of pounds that are beginning to pass from the baby boomers to the younger generations through inheritance.
The second issue is the wrench that the Trump presidency is exerting on the balance and separation of powers, demanding control over independent agencies on the basis of doctrines of a unitary executive and, above all, laying siege to the independence of the Fed.
Trump is accused of wanting to drag the US towards illiberal democracy, i.e., towards a plebiscitary regime in which the checks and balances between the powers conceived by liberal doctrine would be compromised. In truth, for well over a century, the issue of independent agencies in America has affected the relationship between the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, and between these three powers and the States of the Federation. It has been the subject of tension and conflict for at least five political seasons.
It began with the progressive era between 1890 and 1920, with the Interstate Commerce Commission created in 1887 and antitrust measures against the robber barons. Then, we had the New Deal years, which effectively established federal centralisation in the United States, and the proliferation of agencies also had the aim of overcoming resistance from the States. However, in the reorganisation of the administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers supported the primacy of the Presidency, in terms not unlike the current theories of the unitary executive. The confrontation between Roosevelt and the Supreme Court over the centralisation undertaken by the New Deal saw moments of acute conflict.
The third phase, the maximum expansion of independent agencies, came with the planning of the Great Society under the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, i.e., with federal programmes for the extension of welfare and racial integration. The counter-movement – the fourth phase – began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the cycle of imperialist liberalism. In that context, the political lines supporting the primacy of the executive branch were marked by deregulation and opposition to the big State – the statism of the Roosevelt coalition – in line with the resentment of the States, especially in the South and West, with federal constraints. The idea of strengthening the White House to implement deregulation and decentralisation gives practical substance to the propaganda paradox agitated by Reagan: getting elected in Washington to fight the cliques of federal statism there. Finally, an appendix to the Republican line of the unitary executive came after the September 11th, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers, providing a legal framework for the state of emergency measures taken by the George W. Bush administration.
Thus, the tension over the strengthening of the executive and the balance of powers is a long-term feature of the American political cycle, which, depending on the season, has taken on both the liberist connotations of deregulation and the statist connotations of federal centralism. The Trump administration's haphazard approach leaves uncertainty as to how the doctrines of the unitary executive may be used, even though it has already been noted that the categories of liberism and dirigisme alone cannot account for the new political course. On the one hand, deregulation is promised for high-tech and innovative finance groups, while on the other, the club of protectionist policy is brandished and State interventionism in industrial policy is practised.
A related but distinct issue is the siege of the Fed. One school of legal thought believes that independent agencies should be considered as a fourth power
, alongside the classic tripartite division between the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. In our Marxist analysis on imperialist democracy, we concluded that this is true for central banks as monetary power, so much so that their independent status, in various forms and degrees, has become a generalised attribute among the powers and a requirement for their mutual relations.
We are following the battle surrounding the Fed with great attention. In other strategic circumstances of conflict, it goes without saying that the monetary power of the warring powers has been and will be enlisted in the union sacrée of imperialist war to support the war effort. On the one hand, complicating the puzzle is the fact that the peace debt, in the US and elsewhere, has taken on the proportions of a war debt, and that in the context of the American crisis, a debt crisis would have the catastrophic mark of losing a war. On the other hand, addressing the debt issue in the US would require bipartisan consensus, of which there is no sign, and indeed the Trump administration's actions, divisive to the point of provocation, are the opposite of what is needed to call for a union sacrée at a critical juncture.
It is clear that the issue calls into question the times of the crisis in the world order. A spiralling of the contention would challenge the independence of monetary powers everywhere, and the American wrench would then be an anticipation of the future course of the confrontation between imperialisms. For the moment, this is not the case, and the dynamics surrounding the siege on the Fed lack similar momentum in other powers. Similarly, in the tariff war, Japan and the EU have chosen not to rush into confrontation and are instead seeking free trade agreements among themselves and with others – Mercosur, Mexico, Indonesia, India – that bypass Washington.
For the moment – we should stress – because the issues of American debt are global in nature, and because the American and Atlantic relative decline is precisely one of the driving forces behind the crisis in the world order.