Capitalism and imperialism
through competition oppression of workers. Now, still exploitative, it is the opposite of free competition or of progress.
Corporate politics
With such strong economic control, as well as through lobbying and donations – pushing politicians to prioritize business interests in return for campaign funds – and because politicians often have corporate career backgrounds and financial assets, these corporations and oligopolies use their size and weight to influence and control political decisions, in both foreign and domestic policy. That is why Marxists use the term ‘bourgeois states’. Despite a veneer of liberal democracy, the decisions of modern na tion- states, and, therefore, the international bodies, like the UN or NATO, work primarily to secure the financial interests of the bourgeois class, usually at the expense of the great majority of the population. Though reforms, degrees of state control over markets, and shifts in civil and labour rights are won and lost, the repeal of the fundamental features of society which allow them to continue operating and churning profit – the existence of private property, inter alia – is completely out of the question under liberal democracy, because governments and political systems are subject to, if not composed by, 50 or so companies that come out on top regardless of who sits in Westminster, Washington, or Brussels.
Spheres of influence and globalization
The economies of advanced nations, today, are divided among these states, these great powers, and there are no more worlds left to conquer, no (discovered) resources, markets, or lands left untapped. Workers, paid less than the value of what they produce, because of profit, cannot buy the products of their nation’s industry. Domestic markets are saturated. Enter imperialism, whereby different great powers, representing their bourgeois classes, without any new territories to conquer, squabble to redivide the world into their own hands, squabble over spheres of influence : for markets to sell their excess products to, resources to extract, and workers to exploit. They strive for hegemony and, equally as important, for the undermining of the hegemony of their rivals. The bourgeois governments of nations subject to this hegemony – the victims of imperialism – play into this, trying to attract ‘investment’, which is to say, economic exploitation perpetrated by foreign companies, by lowering taxes and loosening labour and environmental laws, which is to say, allowing the public and the climate to be exploited for a profit with greater ease. To avoid tariffs, multinational corporations and, specifically, finance capitalists buy up the companies and industries of foreign – subject – nations, and form monopolies and oligopolies in the markets of those nations. Thus, the economies and societies of entire nations come under the control of a few great powers and their respective bourgeois classes, often at the expense of the t arget nation’s population. Take, for example, the plummet in eastern European living standards as the region was picked dry by finance capitalists, investors, and oligarchs – both from the west and from the former Socialist Soviet Republics – after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the USSR. As we see more and more nations pushed to free-trade practices by imperialism, multinational corporations split their supply chains across countries. Cocoa beans grown in one country are ground in another, made into choc olate bars in yet another, and sold worldwide. Adoption of ‘free markets’ in these nations is not, therefore, a question of creating competition, but of exposing the economy and the workers to oppression and to the control of multinational corporations and oligopolies.
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