Why the US is on a hunting spree. posted by Richard Seymour

Everyone knows that the first thing the US is concerned about is oil. Whether you believe we have reached peak oil or not, the oil is going to run out. I am told by people in the know that the next fifteen years are going to remembered as the last of the Golden Years. Most of those sitting on the oil, companies or states, tend to overstate the reserves they have left, so we may be closer to crisis than we even suppose. On the other hand, new technologies and new sources of oil cannot be ruled out. The tar sands in Alberta might well deliver up a vast source, but it will be more difficult to get and the cost is going to go up and up. The stock markets, by the way, are delighted about this. The US has, for the last fifteen years or so, become increasingly dependent upon external supplies, and so political control over as much of those supplies as possible is crucial - not only because of the importance of oil to the US economy, but because of its importance to China, Europe and any other economic bloc that wants to challenge for hegemony. A good grasp on the oil spigot means the US gets to decide if China receives the oil it needs to develop its industries.

That's obvious, I suppose. Some of you are pounding your heads against the keyboard already. Bear with me. I've got this internal report from a fairly well-known investment bank which talks about the US economy. Everyone knows they're in some trouble and have been keeping their heads above water, barely - yet, the US press has actually started to speak of a Bush Boom. This is some delusional shit. In the news today, reports have come out that the American economy has slowed down sharply over the last three months. The polyannas in the media are babbling about the economy slowing down from some heady growth prompted by interest rate cuts to a more normal mid-cycle growth rate. The phrase "structural imbalances in the US economy" has presumably never occurred to them. Undoubtedly, the slow-down in the last three months is due to intervention from the Federal Reserve, but they have taken the economy 'off the boil' at considerable cost.

While growth is slowing, prices are rising. Wages are falling in real terms. The housing bubble has burst, and US consumers who had been living off the value of their homes may well find themselves sans income and sans home. Wall Street are worried about 'stagflation' and not without reason. High oil prices benefit the oil giants, but it also keeps prices rising while wages fail to keep up. The cure recommended by Wall Street is always the same - take the pressure off prices by raising interest rates. Cut consumer spending, suppress the wage bill and allow corporate profits to recuperate. However, this will reduce returns to the Federal Government while in the long run actually cutting returns on investment for companies. According to this little memo I'm looking at, the probability of a recession in the US economy has been rising since early 2005, currently stands at 40% and is continuing to rise.

They can temporarily ride this threat out by cutting wages in real terms even further than the Bush administration has been able to, reducing taxes on profits (which may be paid for by reducing social security and health benefits to working people - these benefits are themselves deferred wages), and rather crucially through plunder. The current crisis in Lebanon has probably put some strain on European business dealing with the Middle East and North Africa, but investment banks like the sudden leap in oil prices: they're very relieved. The US economy might resile from the further increase in prices, but as long as capital can ensure that the working class bears the brunt of this it will happily go with it. Further, the rise of an informal working class of migrants (which complements the development of an informal working class in the global South) is being handled by Bush in a way that suits business: they want migrant workers, and they know they'll keep coming even with a separation wall on the Mexican border, but they want to make sure they aren't getting organised and driving up wages like the cleaners in Miami did recently. They want them intimidated, unsure of their legal status, scapegoated for every ill. So-called 'progressives' in the States like Thom Hartmann provide an inestimable service to capital by persuading the left that it should be against migration. (Incidentally, isn't it curious that in this post-Cold War world it is the advanced capitalist countries that are increasingly looking to physical blockades - fences around Fortress Europe, a wall across the border with Mexico, the territory grabbing wall in Palestine - to control their relationship with the poor?)

Above all, the US ruling classes (and their syballing rivals in Europe and elsewhere) are united by a fear of the increasingly evident internal weaknesses of their system, and also by the re-emergence of potential systemic challenges which began in the global south, but which broke out onto American streets in Seattle in 1999. Despite any misgivings they might have, they will support Bush as long as he appears to be aggressively targeting those challenges. The business class was the most supportive of Bush's policies in the Middle East. Only when the present spree of heavy military expenditure becomes such a drain on productive investment that it is no longer sustainable, and only when the proposed long-term benefits of geopolitical hegemony and sustained predominance in the world economy against all threats start to wither to nil, will capital start to squirm and resist this agenda. There are splits already emerging in the American ruling class and parts of the small business layer, traditionally a Republican stronghold, are suffering from the high oil prices. One part of the strategy of the left in the short term is to prise open those cracks by showing that Bush's policies could cost them, and cost them big - they could lose Iraq, and even Afghanistan, and all that money would be wasted. Hostile OPEC countries might well trade in Euros rather than dollars. Migrant workers are getting organised - a tendency that can spread rather rapidly to non-migrant workers. Residents of New Orleans are doing the same (without much help). Demands for higher minimum wages are being pushed through local states, most recently in Chicago. I say we want to divide the ruling class, not so that we can get a nicer section of it in power and gratefully accept some reforms, but because its cohesion is a problem, because its weakness is desirable, because the very actions that will exacerbate such splits will be good for us.

To be against imperialism, racism and plunder is logically to be anti-capitalist, and therefore America requires an aggressive, militant far left to make those connections and to carry that analysis into its interaction with much broader movements and struggles.