Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism - Political Hegemony and Fraud

Table of contents

1. The New Monopoly of Production and Circulation
2. The New Monopoly of Finance Capital
3. Minority of Financial Institutions Control Main Global Economic Arteries
4. The Globalization of Monopoly-Finance Capital
5. From Production to Speculative Finance
6. The Monopoly of the U.S. Dollar and Intellectual Property
7. The Spatial Expansion of the Capital-Labor Relation: Global Value Chains and the Global Labor Arbitrage
8. Monopoly-Finance Capital and Multinational Corporate Dominance
9. Neoimperialism and the Neoliberal State
10. U.S. Dollar Hegemony, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Plundering of Global Wealth
11. The New Monopoly of the International Oligarchic Alliance
12. The G7 as the Mainstay of the Imperial Capitalist Core
13. NATO and the International Monopoly-Capitalist Military and Political Alliance
14. Cultural Hegemony Dominated by Western “Universal Values”
15. The Economic Essence, the General Trend, and the Four Forms of Ideological Fraud
16. Economic Hegemony and Fraud
17. Political Hegemony and Fraud
18. Cultural Hegemony and Fraud
19. Military Hegemony and Fraud
20. Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism
21. Neoimperialism Is a Transitional and Moribund Late Capitalism

The United States has always labeled itself a representative of countries advocating democracy, freedom, and equality. Using political and diplomatic means, it spares no effort to impose its political system on other countries, especially the developing states it identifies as “dictatorships.” Former U.S. president George W. Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” The United States exerts pressure on the rulers of such countries, applying double standards on questions of human rights. Using its propaganda, it demonizes these states as “undemocratic” and “autocratic,” while subsidizing nongovernmental organizations and media, as well as inciting dissidents and the opposition to mount “color revolutions” aimed at overthrowing the legitimate governments.

Acting at the behest of its military circles and monopoly energy groups, the United States has been a consistently destructive force in the Middle East and Latin America. Syria was listed by Washington among six “evil” countries, and the United States branded the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad as illegal. U.S. senator John McCain, however, revealed the real purpose behind these moves. “The end of the Assad regime,” McCain stated, “would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.”65 In Latin America, the United States has continued its blockade against Cuba despite twenty resolutions carried overwhelmingly in the UN General Assembly. Meanwhile, the United States is conducting an economic blockade against Venezuela, resulting in the country’s economic deterioration in recent years. Former U.S. vice president Mike Pence, setting aside Venezuela’s elections and popular support for the government, with no consideration of truth—even leaving out the U.S. economic siege war on Venezuela in violation of international law—pronounced: “The Maduro government’s vicious gangs have crippled the economy.… The true cost of the crimes of the Maduro regime cannot be assessed in numbers.… Two million people have fled the result of dictatorship and political repression that’s resulted in deprivation and created conditions near starvation. The United States will continue to help the Venezuelan people restore their freedom. The people will be free.”66

The United States is now applying to China the kind of Cold War policies that used to be employed against the Soviet Union. State department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner describes the fractious relations of the United States with China as “a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology.”67 The U.S. ruling class knows very well that the socialist system is superior to the capitalist system. Once large socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China become rich and strong through peaceful competition, it is inevitable that they are faced with confronting the hegemonic aims of the United States, which seeks nothing less than a unipolar world. Any attempts to promote broad reforms in the outdated imperial economic and political order are seen as a threat to U.S. hegemony. Consequently, the United States has adopted the dual strategy of “contact and containment,” engagement and aggression, which it seeks to pass off as “peaceful evolution.”

In reality, the so-called democratic politics in the United States are nothing but an illusion. First, the electoral process in the United States has increasingly amounted to a political fight between the two parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie. As the candidates of different factions of the monopoly bourgeoisie have campaigned for election, they have resorted to rumors, personal attacks, and slanders against their opponents, sidelining the real issue. Second, so-called democratic politics in the United States involve no more than a pro forma and procedural democracy. The pro forma voting system has been reduced to monetary politics, family politics, and oligarchic politics—that is, to an essentially undemocratic “despotism of monopoly capital,” or democracy for the few.

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