I think this is terribly mistaken. Reaction is inherent in any society undergoing change. It’s not something imposed from the outside.

Sure, but a fundamental cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and revisionism and outright anticommunism everywhere. While the USSR was already dealing with organic internal issues, the Cold War continually heaped more on top of that. Color Revolutions don’t just happen because the revolution wasn’t good enough, there are continual CIA injections of cash and propaganda and people.

Revisionism in the USSR had nothing to do with the West and everything to do with the reactionary elements within the USSR that wanted to make socialism compatible with enterprise for profit and individual enrichment.

It’s both. Reactionary elements within the USSR were supported by the West.

The Cold War was the way that the US created pressures on the USSR without engaging them in nation-state war. The USSR needed to manage these pressures, and they failed to do so. The counter-revolutionaries within the USSR outmaneuvered the revolutionaries, and Stalin had no one to pass the torch to when he died. Kruschev launched the anti-Stalin campaign and from that point forward there was an attempt to build a new world power that allowed for private wealth accumulation and would compete with the West on economic and hard power grounds instead of ideological ones.

These things are all true, but I think you’re undervaluing the material forces at play during the Cold War. US dominance was a material outcome of its position after WWII, its extremely favorable geography, its rapid development from primitive accumulation and its continued internal colonization of Black and Indigenous people, and its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Revolutionaries weren’t just outmaneuvered by counter-revolutionaries, but by the vast empire that they had supporting them.

It still is. The problem isn’t that the USA got soft from it’s success.

This is a contradiction. If the USA has gotten soft, then it’s not the formidable power it once was.

And it certainly has gotten soft. As I’ve said before, the current leadership consists of Cold War mummies and their sons who grew up in the End of History. I believe that the growth of BRICS and the push towards dedollarization, the ICJ ruling against Israel, countries pulling out of ECOWAS, the deal China made with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Iran, these are all signs of the empire’s decline.

I don’t think this is a mistake. The apparent divisions politically are really useful rhetorically. You can easily see this because there’s clearly continuity in the USA’s behavior, despite the appearances of lacking a united front. The way the USA prosecuted the proxy war in Ukraine is identical to how to it prosecuted other proxy wars, but this time they did while putting out an image of division. The image and the reality don’t match up. The reality belies the continuity and consistency. The only conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the image is artifice.

Trump ended US occupation of Afghanistan, and unlike Biden’s fake withdraw from Iraq where he left the US’s handpicked leader in place and left US troops behind, Trump actually just pulled all US troops out and surrendered Afghanistan back to the Taliban. Does that not strike you as a break of continuity? How about when Trump pulled out of the TPP, which promised to open up global markets even further to US capital? And how about this most recent obstruction of Ukraine funding or Texas blocking federal border patrol agents?

What other colonial actors and capital interests are acting in defiance of empire? The international bourgeoisie is firmly in control of the empire. There are no wars between billionaires. And just to pre-empt the obvious - Russia and China are not colonial powers.

Please, I’m not a liberal, I’m well aware that Russia and China are not colonial powers. But I was talking about Brexit here:

How is this defying empire? The UK participated in a project to create a European economic union and then backed out to protect some of its interests. In no way is this a defiance of empire.

By placing limits on the movement of capital between the UK and the rest of the EU. Capital needs to be able to flow freely within the imperial core to serve imperialist interests, and what the UK did runs counter to that. It also introduced coordination complications between the imperialist armed forces and forces the UK to muster up its own inferior military capabilities (i.e. a “citizen army”) to make up for it.

It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.

Maybe you’re right, but they didn’t need to do that before.

The political superstructure hasn’t changed at all towards polarization and partisanship.

Yeah I was getting ahead of myself. I think that’s starting with them trying to make it illegal for Trump to run for office and Trump promising to jail his political opponents, but that could all be theater like you said.

They were manipulated into it through the propaganda arm of empire. The empire chose to make them extremely partisan. It serves the interests of empire.

See my previous examples of Afghanistan and the TPP and Brexit. These are outgrowths of partisanship that the empire manipulated people into, but now the blowback is setting in and this partisanship is starting to make empire management more difficult.

You haven’t shown any subgroups of the ruling class being in contradiction with each other.

Fair.

How about the so-called “labor shortage”, which is in direct contradiction with anti-immigrant/anti-refugee partisanship? The empire grows stronger when it can steal labor from other countries to come be superexploited in the imperial core and, for some reason, the partisan divide is pushing towards less immigration and less admittance of refugees. That’s hard to explain except as blowback.

Or the contradiction between States barring foreign land investment and the need for the market value of land to perpetually increase?

Or the contradiction between starting a microchip tradewar with China and creating microchip shortages that harm business interests (a tradewar that accomplished nothing funnily enough, China is completely fine and only US businesses were impacted)

Then there’s the Nordstream Pipeline, which was clearly sabotage meant to force the EU into a permanent war footing with Russia. Europe doesn’t benefit from this at all, only the US does, and as a whole this also weakens the empire by weakening the Euro’s purchasing power.

I think there are more contradictions within the ruling class than you give credence.

You’re getting confused by the image of conflict. There’s no real conflict within the ruling class.

Maybe. Or maybe you’re overly cynical.

This has been fun, but I think I’ve said my piece. You may have the last word.