The problem is acute for the US, at the top of the global hierarchy. Its position had depended on its being the policeman for the whole system, offering general protection, Mafia style, to the other ruling classes, while using that position to privilege the position of US based capitals. Crises make those capitals need that privileged position more than ever. The failures in the "war on terror" meant that already in the mid-2000s other states felt more empowered to challenge such privilege, shown by China's increased sway in Africa, Russia's in parts of the former USSR, and the BRICS in global trade negotiations. Then came the crisis that began in 2007 with widespread predictions that it would dent US global hegemony even more just as many of its great corporations looked to that hegemony to help them out.
US imperialism might be temporarily chastened as it contemplated the way in which some of its recent adventures have rebounded to its disadvantage-just as the Vietnam War did. But it can not abandon its global position, even if defending it leads to further assertions of military might in other poorer countries, with devastating and destructive consequences. Increased troop deployments were meant to ensure the retreat from Iraq did not turn into rout in Afghanistan. Significantly, Barack Obama's first budget increased, rather than decreased, military expenditure. And so did the budgets announced in the same month for Russia and China. The bloody road which led from Korea to Vietnam and from Vietnam to Iraq is not yet at an end.
But that is not all. The "new", environmental, limits of capital will react back upon its old economic limits. Climate change, peak oil and global food shortages will add to the overall economic instability of the system expressed in the boom-bust cycle, the downward pressure on the rate of profit and the flows of capital from industry to industry and country to country. We had a glimpse of this in the first half of 2008. Rising food and energy prices produced an inflationary surge which added to government dificulties in dealing with the credit crunch at the same time as causing protests, riots and strikes in a score of countries. We can expect many more clashes within and between states as problems of food security and energy security lead to shifts in surplus value from some sections of capital to others and provoke popular outrage. And all the time climate change tipping points can suddenly impact unexpectedly on hundreds of millions of people's lives, in much the same way that economic crises and wars do, but even more destructively.
The Runaway System and the Future for Humanity
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