One of five commentaries from the 13 November 2024 event in the Panel Discussion Series: American Election 2024, from The Finsbury Institute, City International Policy Studies, and the Research Group on Global (Dis)Order.
By Professor Inderjeet Parmar
We are in an era of great convulsions and transitions - of crises- which played out in the November 2024 US election, but there are also significant countervailing forces that will constrain the Trump administration at home and abroad.
Antonio Gramsci – Prison Notebooks, highly relevant here:
“At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic "men of destiny".”
That is organic crisis: “….the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".
- The USA is a global imperial power – economically, politically, militarily, and financially – and at the centre of the so called liberal international order
- That empire is in crisis - impacting both its global positions and challenges - partly due to its successes but also due to its fundamental focus on global primacy – and now sharpening geoeconomic struggles
- That crisis is also domestic- seen in the elections – a convicted felon heading a far right party vs an equally corporate backed, pro-war, opponent - the American dream is evaporating as the middle and working classes fall through the economic floor
- The ‘agency’ or ‘buckle’ that joins both US domestic and global crises is the US Foreign Policy Establishment- the master key to comprehend the current crisis which is rooted in that Establishment’s political economy, ideology, and imperial-power interests
- The US empire and the USFP establishment are in advanced state of organic crisis, in danger from within and without
- Hence, we are in an age of danger, morbid symptoms, violent solutions…
- But also hope: because crises are also moments of reconstruction and renewal. Three sources of optimism:
Multipolarity and the interpenetration of economies including the US and China constitutes an increasingly significant factor in constraining US power – it has, to a degree, broadened the basis of global oligarchy, democratised it somewhat – there are now far more competing oligarchical actors in world politics, constituting ‘checks and balances’, to a degree.
Mass Resistance – massive strike waves and protests across USA and elsewhere against governments and corporations, military interventions and wars, against racism and fascism; these struggles from below will intensify in the coming period.
Progressive forces and post-neoliberal paradigm emergence, selective de-globalisation, industrial policy, decreased domestic political instability; crisis as a moment of renewal? The old is dying but…
