Crisis Of Empire THE CRISIS OF US HEGEMONY
By Michele Berti: In recent months, with the arrival of Trump, the concept of imperialism has reappeared strongly in public discourse as a catch-all term for interpreting the current international phase. It is used after adjectives such as aggressive, cruel, and ruthless. In reality, none of the adjectives used is capable of accurately defining the concept of imperialism, which by definition has always had these characteristics. But what is meant by imperialism in the historical and political sense? The genesis of the term must be attributed to Hilferding, although its widespread use is due to the work of Lenin, who defined it as the monopolistic phase of capitalism, which corresponds to a social and economic formation characterized by an enormous concentration of production and capital in a monopolistic manner, the fusion of banking capital with industrial capital in a form of finance capital managed by a small financial oligarchy, extensive use of capital exports, and the division of the world among international trusts.
American imperialism is, therefore, an economic and social formation that cannot be labeled on a president, but rather a configuration predisposed to dominating foreign space through conventional and unconventional methods, assuming the role of leader with allied subjects and dominant with adversaries. There is, therefore, no imperialism branded as Trump or Biden, but rather an American imperialism that, depending on the phase, acquires certain characteristics in the management of the relationship between governed and rulers in international relations.
The dynamics to which the adjectives combined with the term imperialism refer, resulting from the discontinuity presented by Trump's election, can instead be interpreted effectively and coherently with some Gramscian categories such as the concepts of hegemony, crisis of hegemony, and organic crisis.
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci draws on his studies of dialectics and the interaction between different groups, managing to develop some useful reasoning to decode the events of this confusing historical phase.
Let's begin by defining the crisis of hegemony as the political-ideological dimension of an organic crisis, or rather, a transitional phase in which the distance between the ideological apparatuses and the narratives functional to a particular economic structure (superstructures) becomes so great with respect to the economic structure itself that the latter cannot be sustained. Superstructures must therefore, at a certain point, reattach themselves to the economic structures, precisely through an organic crisis.
The organic crisis in the United States has different origins and is intertwined with several levels; we can list some of them without claiming to be exhaustive.
In the economic and financial sphere, we can undoubtedly observe a retreat in the United States, which in recent years has sacrificed the real economy in favor of financial income and profits. De-dollarization, or the process that began years ago to replace the US dollar as the reserve currency in many commercial transactions, and the explosion of US debt. The international division of labor that has led China to transcend its status as a global manufacturer and assume a central economic role as a point of reference for the global South. The identity crisis of a superpower without an alter ego and the failure of the universal and unipolar project of a "global sheriff." The current social crisis in the United States, with the division between wealthy coasts and deindustrialized and impoverished continental areas, a dynamic clearly evident in the geographical analysis of the November election results.
All these elements lead to the fracture between the narrative of the American Dream and the "best of all possible worlds"—free and democratic but rigorously unipolar and supremacist—and the reality of increasing difficulty in sustaining economic efforts on a global scale in terms of tools for power projection and a widespread military presence.
All of this has transformed, from a political-ideological perspective, into a profound crisis of hegemony—that is, a crisis of international consensus—that undermines the credibility and authority of the United States and forces it to increasingly resort to coercion to pursue its own national interests.
This trend has existed for years, but it accelerated with the launch of Russia's special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. We are now witnessing what increasingly appears to be a global strategic realignment in light of the challenge posed by China in the coming years.
The need arises for a recalibration of US spheres of influence, with a possible retreat to a continental imperial area, the Americas, with a new and updated Monroe Doctrine on an appropriate geographic scale from the perspective of resources and raw materials, including Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and Venezuela.
The case of the Panama Canal is also interesting, as it fits into this dynamic and demonstrates, for those who still have some doubts, that multinationals like BlackRock are above all instruments of US power and that the myth of the 1% of multinationals against the 99% of the world is merely a veil to hide the direction of US imperialism. The only exception to this reasoning, a novelty at this stage, is the role of Musk, who, having achieved undisputed superiority in the space game, enjoys unprecedented degrees of freedom compared to the past.
In this context, it is necessary to fully understand and understand the instruments of power of US national interests, codified in numerous military doctrine publications. These are the DIMEFIL (economic instruments) or arms of the US domination system: Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement. Each of these instruments has a corresponding organizational structure and precise references, and all are effectively coordinated with each other to achieve US national objectives and interests.
Delving into the details of the economic instrument (defined in the manuals as "economic warfare" or "economic weapons"), the cuts to agencies like USAID or foundations like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) indicate the need for continued reorganization and are clearly reducing US soft power capacity. The large budgets allocated to these instruments funded NGOs, foreign journalists, activists, and even, apparently, some terrorist groups used as "proxies" or "surrogates." The attack on USAID certainly has a component linked to the presence of elements of the democratic Deep State within these structures, but it is also linked to the need to reduce the costs of these consensus-building activities, because they are no longer sustainable.
By shifting attention to Europe, the old continent will be forced to deal with this dynamic by inventing autonomy and a "European imperialism" after seventy-five years of US-led NATO and its economic arm, the EU. We can define this desire for European imperialism as a castle-in-the-air imperialism, rhetorical and passionate, but without an economic and financial basis, as Gramsci and Crispi defined Italian imperialism. In Europe, it is evident that the "clerics" of the past historical phase, employed in the consensus machine, risk their careers, and this can lead to very dangerous dynamics, linked to the survival of a political and media ruling class and its bellicose and warlike reaction.
The crisis of hegemony, which represents the fracture between the governed and the rulers, also at the international level, as Gramsci asserts, can be traced to two main reasons: the failure of a political enterprise for which the ruling class has demanded consensus and/or the entry of new forces onto the political scene.
Undoubtedly, the failure of the unipolar world and European integration falls into the first category; the birth of the BRICS, to which the entire South of the world looks with hope, falls into the second possible cause.
The solution to a crisis of hegemony could be precisely the arrival of the "man of providence," a Trump who, however, in this reasoning, becomes the consequence and product of a process, not a foreign and exogenous element to whom all evil can be attributed. He is the monster that is born when "the old world is dying and the new is slow to emerge."
The most visible effect of a crisis of hegemony, a current element, is the emergence in every context of true power relations, pure and unmediated by the superstructure, and the return to the purely economic nature of processes without narratives to support them.
Join El Viejo Topo
These power relations can be clearly understood by going beyond the activities of Trump's front man and studying the political activities of Secretary of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the statements of Vice President JD Advance, who are building a network of bilateral agreements, rebuilding lost strength, based on the need to distance Russia from China.
At its core, in fact, lies what John Pilger defined, in his wonderful and timely documentary, as "the coming war," a new phase in which US objectives will be linked to containing China's win-win globalization at all costs, with the relative concentration of power resources in the Indo-Pacific quadrant.
This phase of deep crisis could be an excellent opportunity to rethink the European ordoliberal construction and its international role. It's a shame that a reckless, diplomatically incompetent, and disconnected ruling class has fallen into a dead end that condemns Europe to irrelevance in international relations, and from which it seems the only way out—we are told—is with weapons and a war against the Russian invader. Meanwhile, however, the military on our territory is American, not Russian, which reminds us of the old saying: "A sheep spends its entire life fearing the wolf. In the end, the shepherd eats it." In short, the old and artificial fear of seeing Cossacks drinking from the Trevi Fountain seems destined to come back into fashion.
