WHAT NEXT?

I get the Military Industrial Complex. Or the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, which is what President Eisenhower initially considered naming it. Or the Military Industrial Congressional Academic Technological – and everything else – Complex, as Ray McGovern calls it. I have read Christian Sorensen’s Understanding the War Machine, and it all adds up: the whole system run by algorithms on autopay. And then there is the “full spectrum dominance” in space. I do get it.

And in addition to all the utterly convincing factual evidence and logical argument, I have personal motivation. Having survived the 1941 bombing of Belgrade as a three-year-old, I have been a peace activist all my adult life. But the remarkable result of the international peace movement is that we have graduated from MADD (mutual assured destruction) to “humanitarian intervention” – in Yugoslavia and Iraq and Sudan and Libya and Syria and Yemen and all the South and Central American upstarts – and now in Ukraine.

What’s next? A Rand Corporation report offers the good news that a general nuclear attack on China is winnable. In other words, my American kids and grandkids, for whose sake I had waved my peace signs, will be just fine if we obliterate China. China must go so we can trample each other at the gates of Walmart on Black Friday? But don’t we get it? If China goes, so does Walmart. It looks like we don’t get it.

But should we not protect all those good jobs in all our bomb factories? Robert Sheer describes in his The Pornography of Power how every congressional district has been provided with some military outfit to employ the locals. No wonder even Bernie Sanders has voted for every military budget. Can you blame him if the military industry is all that’s left after all the outsourcing?

This is pretty much what Caitlin Johnstone had concluded in an article in Information Clearing House some time ago: You Can Have Peace or The US Empire. You Can’t Have Both.  As she neatly puts it all together, “the United States is built on war, is made of war, and is sustained by war. If the wars end, America as we know it ends.”

Some win-win situation. So, what is to be done? Famous last words. Remember Lenin, who asked the question over a hundred years ago? Actually, the title goes back to another crazy Russian. I was astonished to read that Lenin had read Chernyshevsky’s novel of the same title four times. As it happens, this modest utopia featuring seamstresses’ cooperatives did get the author quality time in Siberia. And it did, clearly, inspire Lenin.

So, could Lenin’s version inspire us today? For one thing, it represents the Marxist critique of Capitalism, and since Capitalism is the reigning ideology still, such a critique may still be valid. On the other hand, Lenin turned his back on the German Social Democrats because they supported World War I and used the crisis of that war to tell the Russian peasants to go home and take over land.

Given these theoretical and practical features, would Lenin’s arguments still be a threat to the status quo today? This does seem to be the case, given the spectacular rise of China’s “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” On the other hand, much has changed. Industrial Capitalism has morphed into Financial Capitalism, which Michael Hudson defines as a new feudalism. According to this view, the medieval lord of the manor is now a ubiquitous global hegemon whose power is based on financial rather than land or industrial control. And since that control is implemented through the petrodollar, it requires the military backbone of the United States.

In other words, we are back to the military-industrial complex. There is, after all, a method to the madness. Only instead of, as Lenin hoped, the colonial powers fighting it out to the last Capitalist, we are now engaged in “hybrid wars” and “color revolutions” all over the world. In addition to NATO there is SOUTHCOM, which takes care of Central and Latin America; then AFRICOM (listing mysterious places in Africa); and, of course, CENTCOM, the greater Middle East, where we are still battling the “axis of evil.”  They are all busy getting their algorithms lined up to orchestrate these conflicts. So then, “what is to be done?” While Russia seems to have lost the bi-polar conflict between Soviet Socialism and American Capitalism, there still seems to be plenty of fight left in the country as it looks to join the incipient rebellion of the Global South against what John Pilger called “the masters of the world.” These public-private bosses may be huddling together at their “round tables” in Davos or London or New York, but the Socialist argument does seem to regain traction around the world. It’s all about the haves and the have nots as in Karl Marx’s and Lenin days.