Kees Van der Pijl

Inleiding 1 De Covid-crisis als staat van beleg 2 Kan de wereldbevolking nog in toom worden gehouden? 3 Hergroepering van de heersende klasse in de IT-revolutie 4 Het virusscenario als basis voor een machtsgreep 5 Biologische oorlogvoering met of tegen China? 6 De 'pandemie' als rampenkapitalisme 7 Radicale democratie en digitale planning Eindnoten

This book is about the manipulation of public opinion by governments, and more specifically, about how the emotions evoked by a drama such as the downing of a passenger plane in the war zone of eastern Ukraine in July 2014, are being used for geopolitical and economic gain. My first concern is how Western governments, and more particularly my own government in the Netherlands, continue to exploit the disaster, in line with NATO policy of economic and ideological warfare against Russia. All governments will resort to the manipulation of public opinion, but in this case and in many others, the West has demonstrated it is the undisputed master of ceremonies. One would have hoped, perhaps naïvely, that other governments including the Russian government, might have used their knowledge of events to cut through the NATO propaganda and enlighten world public opinion on this and other matters. However, we have to accept that that is not the business of governments. They of necessity have other priorities and in fact do better to leave the field of historical enquiry to academics and journalists. What happens when governments and parliaments do involve themselves in establishing what is historical truth and what is not, can be seen when they resort to prescribing it in law. For instance, it is forbidden in several countries to deny the reality the great systematic massacres of modern times, whether or not they must be labelled 'genocides', and so on. As a result, even scholars who would not dream of denying the basic facts, would still feel constrained by the official codification of historical truth in advance, which establishes taboos instead of a basis in fact. In the case of the Dutch-led investigation of the MH17 disaster, this is illustrated by the law of 2010 governing the work of the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), the body entrusted with technical investigation of the catastrophe. That law decrees in article 57 that not all information the DSB collects will be made public, or put otherwise, its publications will not necessarily contain all it knows. Specifically, information that will harm the relations of the Netherlands with other states and international

AVIS A MM. LES SOUSCRIPTEURS: La publication des Annales des Mines a lieu par cahier» ou livraisons qui paraissent tous les deux mois. Les trois livraisons d'un même semestre forment un volume. Les deux volumes composant une année contiennent de 60 à 72 ...

Este artículo sostiene que las Relaciones Internacionales como disciplina académica (RRII) han entrado a formar parte de una creciente preocupación con la “seguridad” tras el 11 de septiembre. Esto no siempre ha sido así, e incluso actualmente existen también teorías alternativas dentro de la corriente principal de la disciplina. Sin embargo, la perspectiva de la seguridad estuvo determinada por dos momentos concretos en los que el miedo a un ataque inminente sobre Estados Unidos y sus aliados se articuló de manera muy dramática. El primero tuvo lugar entre la constitución original de la disciplina durante los años de entreguerras y el asedio de posguerra hacia la URSS. Aquí el papel de las RRII fue definir como racional la asunción de un ataque nuclear sorpresa, equiparando a la URSS como estado “totalitario” similar a las potencias del Eje, una de las cuales atacó Pearl Harbour. El segundo puede situarse en la década de los setenta cuando la amenaza de la revuelta del Tercer Mundo...

I advance an unusual view on the confrontation of the Western capitalism and Soviet–Russian socialism. I suggest to see this confrontation through the prism of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ideologies. Today, almost one hundred years after the October Revolution 1917 in Russia, there are few reasons to celebrate the success of revolutionary ideology. Indeed, the Soviet Union, the socialist country built as a result of the Revolution, demised thirty years ago, while its economy was pillaged and devastated by the new Russian oligarchy. Simultaneously NATO advanced to the East and the EU approached the very Russian borders (e.g., Baltic countries). However, such achievement of revolutionary ideology as planned economy may be regarded as a useful instrument for developing eco-socialism and especially repairing Western capitalism and corporate liberalism that were seriously threatened by the incessant financial, economic and mental crises of the last decades. During these decade...

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Empire and Nationality in the Pax Britannica 2. The Crusade for Democracy and World Politics 3. Cold War Discipline in International Relations 4. The Pax Americana and National Liberation 5. The Crisis of International Discipline References Index

espanolEste articulo sostiene que las Relaciones Internacionales como disciplina academica (RRII) han entrado a formar parte de una creciente preocupacion con la �seguridad� tras el 11 de septiembre. Esto no siempre ha sido asi, e incluso actualmente existen tambien teorias alternativas dentro de la corriente principal de la disciplina. Sin embargo, la perspectiva de la seguridad estuvo determinada por dos momentos concretos en los que el miedo a un ataque inminente sobre Estados Unidos y sus aliados se articulo de manera muy dramatica. El primero tuvo lugar entre la constitucion original de la disciplina durante los anos de entreguerras y el asedio de posguerra hacia la URSS. Aqui el papel de las RRII fue definir como racional la asuncion de un ataque nuclear sorpresa, equiparando a la URSS como estado �totalitario� similar a las potencias del Eje, una de las cuales ataco Pearl Harbour. El segundo puede situarse en la decada de los setenta cuando la amenaza de la revuelta del Terce...

8 Transnational class formation and state forms Kees van der Pijl This chapter explores aspects of the process of transnational class forma-tion of the capitalist class or bourgeoisie in historical perspective. It looks at forms of imagined community (Anderson, 1983) by which this class ...

Die im vorigen Kapitel behandelten strategischen Konflikttheorien konzentrieren sich auf die Konflikte zwischen Staaten. Auch die Systemtheorie einschlieslich Rapoports Kritik der neo-hobbesschen Politikwissenschaft bleibt in ihrer Analyse auf der Ebene des Staatensystems stecken, da sie den Staat lediglich in abstrakter Weise betrachtet. Die materielle, gesellschaftliche Beschaffenheit bleibt weitgehend unberucksichtigt.

... Hegel's philosophy, on the other hand, is based on a rejection of all approaches assuming that ... of the world of their making, are generated by alienation, another concept Marx took from Hegel. So every mode of production (or other modes, but Marx did not live to theorise these ...

This article argues that the corridor that runs from the Balkans, via the Caucasus to Central Asia, has constituted a major axis of Western expansion for at least two decades, intimately connected but not reducible to energy pipeline issues. It interprets NATO as a structure through which the Atlantic, English-speaking heartland has sought to create a wider `West through military integration. This integration always had to contest with the legacy of rivalries dating from the epoch prior to it. From France in the long 18th century to China today, contender states developing a state-led alternative to Anglophone liberalism have been/are such rivals. All along, frictions accompanying integration into the expanding West (often in the wake of war) have complicated liberal-capitalist expansion, whilst the breakdown of contender state control over their societies has laid bare structural fault-lines causing endemic instability. The examples of the collapse of the USSR and the Balkan wars are given to illustrate intra-Western rivalries and the consequences of dispossessing contender state classes. A concluding section deals with the security issues concerning the wider Caucasus in these terms and argues that events here may mark the end of an era of Western expan-sion.

In this piece I look at the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as rivals of the West, united more by circumstance than by intent. It emerged as a seemingly innocuous banker’s gimmick referring to the ‘emerging market’ potential of the countries thus thrown together, but due to the aggressive Western response to independent policies, the BRICS have slowly moved towards solidifying their  cohesion. Comprising half the world’s population, the bloc on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008 was closing in on the West. In Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, China’s GDP was three-quarters the size of the US economy, and India no. 4 behind Japan, whilst Brazil and Russia were catching up with the main EU states (Armijo 2007: 12). The 2008 financial collapse in the West contracted China’s export markets and speculation that the BRICS were passé, was rife (Sharma, 2012: 6). However, China and India soon recovered, surpassing the US and Japan, respectively, whilst Ru...

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the outbreak of Covid-19 (the respiratory illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 corona virus) a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Within a short time-span, a large part of the world went into lockdown, forcing people into their homes, outlawing jogging or meeting others, etc., all supposedly to ensure their protection. In this piece I challenge this assumption. As with previous events signalling that the era of political compromise in the West was drawing to a close and a politics of fear ushered in instead (first the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, then the new Cold War with Russia, dramatised by the downing of Flight MH17), the way the event is being exploited for other purposes is far more important than the forensics of the event itself. In this case as in the two previous ones, the Atlantic ruling class that presided over the postwar liberal world order, is seizing an opportunity (not necessarily of its own making) to try and stem its loss of control at home and abroad. Soon after the epidemic began or, better: was proclaimed to be developing into one, draconic measures were taken completely out of proportion to the real threat to public health. Although apparently a worldwide phenomenon (e.g., India with 1,3 billion inhabitants, of whom some 7.2 million die of various cases each year, ordered a complete lockdown, although only around 10,000 people have been infected and 358 people have died of/with Covid-19 at the time of this writing), the epicentre of the response is the West, where the ruling classes have seized on the opportunity to try and radically reverse the trend towards 'populism' both in the streets and in the shape of maverick leaders like Trump. The vulnerability of contemporary capitalism and its combination of speculative money flows and the global spread of product chains, as well as the instability of the underlying social contract, is key here (Desai 2020). With the media and governments 1 Originally published on https://www.newcoldwar.org/health-emergency-or-seizure-of-power-the-political-economy-of-covid-19/ Thanks to Karel van Wolferen for key materials, and to Radhika Desai,

This is Part I of a project jointly undertaken with Hector Reban and Max van der Werff after the author’s return from attending a conference MH17—The Quest for Justice, in Kuala Lumpur in August 2019. Many thanks to Mr. John Philpot, international criminal lawyer, for valuable comments.

in reply to a Twitter message summing up a series of crimes ascribed to 'Saudis', beginning with their alleged responsibility for bringing down the Twin Towers, I posted, 'Not Saudis, Israelis brought down the Twin Towers with help from Zionists in US Govt'. This was picked up by self-professed Jewish and pro-Israel organizations denouncing it as 'anti-Semitic'. The accusation was accompanied by the identical demand of practically all complainants to strip me of my status as professor emeritus of the University of Sussex. The comments were duly reported in the Daily Mail, the Independent, and Russian Sputnik, and possibly others. No mention was made of the many supporting reactions, often accompanied by new documentary evidence and by the important enjoinder that the university should investigate, if anything, the claim being made, not the person making it.

This comment was submitted to International Affairs in late September 2018 and returned within 48 hours with a note that the journal does not publish rejoinders. That the article I comment on can be published at all is testimony to the sorry state of the field of International Relations, which since 9/11 has slowly descended to what I call in my Discipline of Western Supremacy (Pluto Press 2014) an ‘embedded discipline’ serving the requirements of war preparation and demonisation of the ‘enemy’. To allow peer review I had to refer to my own Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War in the third person and I also tried to be as ‘academic’ as possible and did not refer to the ‘mercenary quality’ of this research (as I do in the book), although ERC funding of work of this quality tells it all.

The Russian Revolution in this paper is analysed in the context of a conjuncture dominated by counter-revolution. Beginning with the repression of the 1850s, a process of permanent counterrevolution has become the over-determining trend of social-political history. The Russian Revolution was subject to several distinct aspects of this process. First, external counterrevolution, the attack on it from the outside. Whilst Anglo-America was the main bulwark organising it, the Nazi/fascist counterrevolution and invasion of the USSR was an example of counterrevolution run out of control and ending in a defeat in Europe hat was only overcome through a long and risky Cold War. Internal counterrevolution affected the Russian Revolution as part of a longer process of adjusting socialist theory to successive defeats. In the Soviet case, Socialism in One Country was the decisive mutation in this respect and must be viewed as the decisive component of the triumph of counterrevolution. After the war, Anglo-America adjusted the counterrevolutionary strategy to surgical excisions of socialist tendencies until the USSR, isolated and ideologically exhausted, collapsed. Even so several of its legacies contrinue to be relevant, notably the nationality policy and internationalism. Also, today’s information revolution casts a new light on the Soviet planning experience that must be studied now that capitalism is slipping into a systemic crisis.

What follows was written as a background document for the referendum on the blanket surveillance law in the Netherlands in March 2018 and part of a book project, ‘The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism’. I argue that surveillance is part of the ‘War on Terror’ complex, which in turn evolved as a ‘Strategy of Tension’ after the model best known from the Italian experience in the 1970s. There it served to prevent the Left, and the Communist Party in particular, from advancing further towards participation in government. After the state capitalist turn of China and the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR, the global wage-dependent but underemployed population grew to around 3 billion people of which one third inhabit fast-growing slums. Controlling this vast human mass became a core issue in managing the post-Cold War global political economy. The United States, profiting from its military pre-eminence, its role as the provider of the world’s reserve currency and enjoying the privilege of running permanent budget and current account deficits, from the 1970s worked with the emerging IT industry to establish a global security state grounded in ‘Total Information Awareness’. Based on this information advantage, global society is being kept in a state of tension by a range of intelligence activities targeting ‘demographic bulges’ in the reserve army of labour, even risking or provoking acts of violence against US/Western targets to allow armed control to be imposed. Mass surveillance and a spreading war after 2000 serve to stir the surplus population into activity and a domestic politics of fear has been deployed to win public support The Israeli-US NeoCon project of a War on Terror was revived after the Twin Towers attacks on 9/11, combining the attack on terrorists with pre-emptive war against ‘states supporting terror’. Ultimately the doctrine behind the global strategy of tension entails the explicit option and regular practice of targeted assassination of opponents.

The current global configuration and more particularly, relations between the liberal West and Russia after the defeat of the Soviet Union (as well as China in the not too distant future) are widely perceived as a new Cold War. The comparison is t with earlier Cold War(s) must however be fine-tuned because the first and second  Cold Wars were very different. One covered the period until the late 1960s was based on a division of spheres-of-influence; the second was launched unilaterally under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In this paper, part of current work in progress, I argue that the current Cold War against Putin’s Russia mostly resembles the second Cold War which was intended to achieve regime change in Moscow and bring down the USSR. I also relate the three Cold Wars to the mutations in the format of capitalist discipline on society and nature, which has changed from a compromising corporate liberalism to a systemic neoliberalism (against all forms of socialism), and finally, after the collapse of the USSR, a predatory neoliberalism  The latter has moved beyond compromise into a realm of absolute risk-taking, financially, militarily and ecologically, and has in fact knocked the foundations from under the post-war world order. Amidst what looks like a terminal crisis of the capitalist  West, risk-taking has assumed the characteristics of a suicidal road to nowhere that must be urgently understood and blocked.

Resumen Este artículo sostiene que las Relaciones Internacionales como disciplina académica (RRII) han entrado a formar parte de una creciente preocupación con la " seguridad " tras el 11 de septiembre. Esto no siempre ha sido así, e incluso actualmente existen también teorías alternativas dentro de la corriente principal de la disciplina. Sin embargo, la perspectiva de la seguridad estuvo determinada por dos momentos concretos en los que el miedo a un ataque inminente sobre Estados Unidos y sus aliados se articuló de manera muy dramática. El primero tuvo lugar entre la constitución original de la disciplina durante los años de entreguerras y el asedio de posguerra hacia la URSS. Aquí el papel de las RRII fue definir como racional la asunción de un ataque nuclear sorpresa, equiparando a la URSS como estado " totalitario " similar a las potencias del Eje, una de las cuales atacó Pearl Harbour. El segundo puede situarse en la década de los setenta cuando la amenaza de la revuelta del Tercer Mundo bajo el estandarte de la liberación nacional fue rebautizada como " terrorismo internacional " promovido por la extrema derecha y los militaristas israelíes en Estados Unidos, creando de esta manera una continuidad entre la supuesta amenaza soviética y los casos pos-soviéticos de revuelta antioccidental. De todo ello el artículo concluye que las RRII han servido para colocar a políticos y líderes de opinión bajo una " disciplina de miedo " que es insuficientemente reconocida, y menos aún retada por parte de investigadores de RRII. absTRacT This paper argues that International Relations as an academic discipline (IR) since 9/11 has become part of a growing preoccupation with 'security'. This has not always been the case, and still today there are alternative theorisations also within the mainstream of the discipline. The security perspective however was shaped by two particular junctures in which the fear of impending attack on the USA and its allies was articulated at its most dramatic. The first occurred between the original establishment of the discipline in the interwar years and the postwar siege laid on the USSR. Here the role of IR was to define as rational the assumption of a nuclear surprise attack, equating the USSR as a 'totalitarian' state similar to the Axis Powers, one of which did attack Pearl Harbour. The second can be traced back to the 1970s when the threat of Third World revolt under the banner of national liberation was re-baptised 'international terrorism' at the instigation of the Israeli Far Right and militarists in the US, thus creating a continuity between the supposed Soviet threat and post-Soviet instances of anti-Western revolt. From this the paper concludes that IR has functioned to place policy-makers and opinion leaders under a 'discipline of fear' which is insufficiently recognized, let alone challenged by IR scholars.

Wolfgang Streeck’s Gekaufte Zeit/ Buying Time contains a compelling analysis that points to the origins of the current crisis in the wave of strikes of 1968-69. It caused the capitalist class to try and wrest free from the post-war social (-democratic) contract forced on it by labour. However, not only does Streeck not pay attention to imperialism and war, he also tends to assume that capital-as-agency governed the entire period since, attempting to postpone the full social impact of the crisis in three different ways, restricting democracy as it went along. However, the three periods he distinguishes (inflation, state debt and private debt) were directed by changing coalitions of capitalist interests uniting behind a different concept of control—corporate liberalism and two versions of neoliberalism. This highlights that in 2008, when these remedies all had exhausted themselves, capital-as-agency in command was the bloc of forces led by speculative, money-dealing capital, which in the 1990s had captured the states of the West and steered them onto a path of high-risk, high-reward policies both in the economy proper and in international affairs. This explains why after 2008, solutions to the crisis followed this particular political-economic orientation, with more risk-taking in all areas on the agenda.

In this paper I argue that the current crisis in Ukraine (a well as, in hindsight, that in Yugoslavia in the 1990s), reveal that the English-speaking West no longer can rely on a competitive advantage in production to meet the challenge of new ‘Rapallos’—a rapprochement along the lines of the 1922 treaty between Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. Ever since, the Anglophone West has responded to such events by re-connecting Western Europe to Anglo-America’s economic powerhouse. The Dawes and Marshall Plans were cases in point. In the crisis of  1970s when the US uncoupled the dollar from gold and the global political economy entered the phase of perennial instability that is continuing today, Charles Kindleberger came up with the new version of the Rapallo response by reserving the role of a ‘hegemon’ providing stability for the US.  When the NATO treaty expired in 1999, it was renewed under an offensive military doctrine to allow, among others, the US to rush in whenever Europe, meanwhile led by a reunified Germany, appeared to adopt a compromise attitude to the East—except that the economic component has meanwhile receded behind the military one.

After the repression following the bourgeois revolts of 1848 in Europe Marx and Engels adjusted their original ideas of working class revolution with the theory of permanent revolution. It held that since the bourgeoisie no longer could be counted on to side with the workers against the ruling classes, socialists should move from the stage of democratic revolution straight to that of socialist transformation. The  international dimension of this theory was emphasised  by Trotsky when he reformulated the theory in the early stages of the Russian revolution. One can also turn the argument around by seeing that beginning with the repression of the 1850s, a process of permanent  counterrevolution has evolved which has passed through phases of retrenchment and attack, without allowing the initiative to pass to the side of revolution ever again. From this perspective, fascism and Fordism, the successive editions of the Cold War, covert action, military interventions and full-scale wars are all part of this counterrevolutionary process. It owes its ‘permanency’ to its unrelenting imposition which in each case works to isolate revolutionary challenges ‘with the concentrated strength of the international forces’ (Gramsci) and yet today, against the background of a deepening crisis of exhaustion of  capitalist discipline, has reached its apogee without having obliterated the forces of resistance world-wide. This paper presents a first outline of the argument of a forthcoming book, ‘The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism’.

The argument of this paper is that after the crisis of 2008 which has turned into an enduring stagnation amidst proliferating violence, capitalist property relations are increasingly being upheld by authoritarian means. The mode of production and social organisation, including the supremacy of the West in international affairs, has lost its self-evidence in the face of a deepening crisis of the biosphere and the effective running aground of the accumulation process on a world scale. Under these circumstances processes of class formation on both sides of the historic divide between a liberal West and a series of contender  states are converging along the lines of authoritarian, oligarchic capitalism.
The paper argues that corporate liberal capitalism based on class compromise in the 1980s was displaced by to neoliberalism, initially intended to restore systemic market discipline but increasingly degenerating into speculative, predatory forms undermining the forces of stability in the global political economy and fostering oligarchic enrichment. A contradiction is identified between global oligarchic convergence on the one hand and conflict at the level of political (governing and state) elites on the other, and which explains the current turbulence in the global political economy.

After references by Agamben and others, I ordered the Patrick Zylberman book 'Microbial Storms' and also read a piece of his in an edited collection free on the internet. This is a first reading of these two sources for use in further work (hence the frequent references so you can lift out pieces). I will use it in my forthcoming book The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism of which the last chapter deals with the Covid state of emergency

This paper discusses the urgent need to define a socialism of the 21st century based on the achievements of the Information Revolution. Compared to the labour socialism based on the Industrial Revolution and culminating the Soviet experience, a digital socialism would broaden the revolutionary subject of a transformation to what Guy Debord called ‘the class of consciousness’ today created by linking the large mass of the population to the Internet. Although owned effectively by capital, the pressure towards transparency and Open Data is changing the balance of forces now that capitalist society remains mired in crisis, no longer able to offer a meaningful social contract. Digital planning was attempted already in the USSR but it would have to be enlarged by democratic control and be anchored in an educational cultural change conscious of the need to preserve the biosphere.