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By the fall of 2008, many among the capitalist elite and within the agencies of the U.S. government had concluded that the U.S. would have its first (and hopefully only) black president. It was also in the fall that the U.S. Strategic Command (AFRICOM) was created. The clear objective of U.S. policy in Africa, as spelled out by U.S. State Department advisor to AFRICOM Dr. J. Peter Pham in 2007, was “protecting access to hydrocarbons and other strategic resources which Africa has in abundance, a task which includes ensuring against the vulnerability of those natural riches and ensuring that no other interested third parties, such as China, India, Japan, or Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential treatment.”

In line with the historic role of capitalist development in Africa, a capitalist relationship that at its core has always been dependent on violence and plunder, is it an incredulous position to conclude that the real interest of the U.S. policy in Nigeria is less a concern with the lives of Nigerian girls and more with bringing key strategic areas in Africa under their control in order to block the Chinese?

while all of us mourn for the more than 200 girls who have been kidnapped and can only imagine what their families must be going though, we also have to make sure that we don’t allow the very real emotion of the issue to cloud our analysis – something that is probably easier for us who are not directly impacted. We have to do this because it is precisely at these moments that we have to be clear-eyed and not allow ourselves to be manipulated.

while all of us mourn for the more than 200 girls who have been kidnapped and can only imagine what their families must be going though, we also have to make sure that we don’t allow the very real emotion of the issue to cloud our analysis – something that is probably easier for us who are not directly impacted. We have to do this because it is precisely at these moments that we have to be clear-eyed and not allow ourselves to be manipulated.

The aggressive posture of U.S. imperialism over the last few years has proceeded with very little organized opposition from the capitalist center in the U.S. Not just because of the institutional weakness of left and progressive forces but, even more ominously, because of the ideological collaboration and alignment by left forces with the imperial project. This latter phenomenon is more characteristic of positions taken by some of the more chauvinistic elements of the white left than our ranks, but even within our ranks the confusion seems to be increasing when, for example, you look at the positions taken by some on Nigeria, Zimbabwe and the U.S. NATO assault on Libya.

Too harsh? We hear that surges, assassination, spying, must be laid at Bush’s door, hence exonerating Obama (part of the mythology of liberalism and the presumption a black president somehow must stand for social justice).

From this brief background, I shall take up Obama’s obsession with besting Putin (luckily for him, not a matter of two out of three falls), and then, in a subsequent article, his cover-up of a war crime (not his own, e.g., drone assassination, but that on Bush’s watch), which, nonetheless, he was able to keep largely under wraps for more than six years. In this case, liberals’ blame is heaped on Bush with no admission of Obama’s silence tantamount to complicity.

The real fear in Washington is that Putin is telling the truth and is seeking a peaceful solution. For in that way, it becomes more difficult both to maintain tensions and scare the EU into America’s arms.

Peace is ridiculed as an expedient to those maintaining a confrontational stance in international politics, i.e., the US, and as events play out, even, now moving closer to the present than in Baker’s piece, with Poroshenko of Ukraine signing a trade agreement with the EU (June 27), Putin’s continued pursuit of an overall settlement fails to make a dent in the Obama administration’s belligerent attitude (read, state of readiness).

Overreach intuitively seems unlikely in capitalism, yet the realization is slowly sinking in that, particularly egged on by the Congressional Right, Obama ultimately may be bad for business.

Bad enough we as a nation have to endure massive surveillance of our own people, bad enough to have Kerry smother Sisi with love as journalists go to prison, bad enough that Obama is back to drone assassination and the use of the Espionage Act to prevent revelations of USG wrongdoing. But to an overt face-off against Putin when Putin has not given cause, is ugly, bizarre, madness, as though Obama wills intervention and war as politically expedient and somehow economically rejuvenating.

His fear is that Poroshenko will not be as compliant, i.e., anti-Russian, as was originally hoped. Obama may be right. [No, written the 25th; Poroshenko has ended the cease-fire on the 30th, and July 1 sees massive Ukrainian air and land attacks in the East.]

Ukraine Signs Trade Agreement with European Union,” but the finer points hardly suggest an unqualified Obama victory over Putin and Russia. Russia, of course, was angry, envisioning the West’s attempt at absorbing into its orbit not only Ukraine but Georgia and Moldova, as part of a concerted effort to dismember the Russian Federation piece-by-piece, a not unreasonable assumption because generally bruited about in Neo-Con circles (though not mentioned by the reporters, themselves not even willing to credit the fact of a coup, simply saying that Poroshenko “won Ukraine’s presidential election in May to fill a post left vacant by Mr. Yanukovych’s flight from the country in February”). Angered, too, again not mentioned, that Ukraine would make possible the movement of NATO forces to the Russian border.

Poroshenko’s initial renewal of the truce implied that he viewed the trade agreement as just that, affecting trade and not part of an anti-Russian mobilization of forces to promote confrontation. When a Putin senior adviser, Sergei Glazyev, charged the Kiev government was “Nazi,” Putin’s spokesperson contradicted him, stating this was “not the official position” of Russia—perhaps further indication Putin seeks an accommodation rather than war with the Ukrainian government.

Many of the demands that exist in a society do not have an essentialist reactionary or progressive character. It is how they are to be articulated that determines their identity. This brings to the fore the role that representation plays in the constitution of a political force. Representation is not a one-way process going from the represented to the representative, because it is the very identity of the represented that is at stake in the process. This is the central flaw of those who argue that representative democracy is an oxymoron and that a real democracy should be direct or “presentist”. What needs to be challenged is the lack of alternatives offered to the citizens, not the idea of representation itself.

Collective political subjects are created through representation. They do not exist beforehand. Every assertion of a political identity is thereby interior, not exterior, to the process of representation.

I use “passions” to refer to the common affects at play in the collective forms of identification that constitute political identities. Passions perform a central role in the construction of a collective will at the core of any left-wing populist project.

The EU is currently composed of consumers, not of citizens. It has been mainly constructed around a common market and has never really created an European common will. So it is no wonder that, in times of economic crisis and austerity, some people will begin to question its utility. They forget its important achievement of bringing peace to the continent.

We could say, following Gramsci, that we are witnessing an “organic crisis” where the old model cannot continue but the new one is not yet born.

AFRICOM also provides a  massive role for private military contractors such Berry Aviation