During this phase of exploitation, some significant regions such as South America and Russia have managed to achieve their freedom from the hegemony of the US. By refusing to trade in dollars, these integrated economies are beyond the dominance of imperialism. China too is fishing to get out of this sphere. A newly formed BRIC bank provides one example of resistance to US hegemony. To this recipe of disaster imposed by globalisation the biggest challenge is offered by Bolivia and Venezuela. According to a report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, “Bolivia has grown much faster over the last eight years than in any period over the past three and a half decades. The benefits of such growth have been felt by the Bolivian people: under Morales, poverty has declined by 25 percent and extreme poverty has declined by 43 percent, social spending has increased by more than 45 percent, the real minimum wage has increased by 87.7percent and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean has praised Bolivia for being ‘one of the few countries that has reduced inequality’”. According to The New York Times, “Morales has transformed Bolivia from an ‘economic basket case’ into a country that receives praise from such unlikely contenders as the World Bank and the IMF — an irony considering the country’s success is the result of the socialist administration casting off the recommendations of the IMF in the first place.” How much socialism a democratic change is capable of embracing remains a matter of debate yet, in this process, it has become evident that the claim of the US as a single super power is now a mere cliché. Its biggest proof can be seen in case of the India-Iran relationship. Despite despotic sanctions against Iran, India and many other countries continue to flout this blackmail and are regularly buying Iranian oil. After a rebuff in Georgia, the US has miserably failed to maintain its hegemony over Ukraine. Crimea has already been taken over by the Russians while its eastern parts and southern parts (Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic) have declared their unilateral independence from the mainland. Capitalist globalisation has maimed the concept of a nation state; although former Yugoslavia has been dissected into nearly six artificially independent lame duck states, the nature of its crime was different. In Europe, it was the only country that refused to yield to the neoliberal economy or globalisation. It flouted the decision of the almighty capital, which, during that period, was an almost impossible task and hence was punished. To sustain its hegemony, the US army is maintaining its presence in more than 100 countries. This has added further pressure upon the masses living in the US. Billions of dollars have been amassed from the food stamps programme this year alone. Due to massive social cuts, the number of homeless people is mounting daily. It is interesting to note that in a few states feeding the hungry/homeless is considered a crime punishable with lengthy imprisonment. This is happening in a country that, in regard to human rights, claims to be the freest in the world. “In the 18th century, philosophy’s laughter at big words sounded a rousing and courageous note that had an emancipating force. Such words were the symbols of actual tyranny; scoffing at them involved the risk of torture and death. In the 20th century, the object of laughter is not the conforming multitude but rather the eccentric who still ventures to think autonomously,” (Horkheimer) and hence less callously and more humanly. For this globalisation, democracy too is an abstraction. In Egypt, if General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removes an elected president, democracy remains unharmed. So is the case in Italy. In order to impose the agenda of the IMF, if Mario Monti, an unelected technocrat, is promoted as the prime minister, democracy remains unblemished. However, if, in Palestine, Hamas gets elected the whole democratic process becomes flimsy and abhorrent. But then Hamas too is alleged to be the brainchild of the US and Israel. If not, none of these states can deny the responsibility of creating certain conditions congenial for the blossoming of this organisation. The motive was to split the Palestinians into two halves: one led by a resistance-oriented religious group and the other more emaciated, malleable and secular through the equally corrupt Palestinian Authority. In a post globalised US, the state of democracy had gotten even worse: “A Harvard University project that monitors political attitude found that the feeling of powerlessness has reached an alarming high, with more than half saying that people like them have little or no influence on what the government does, a sharp rise through the neoliberal period” (The Essential Chomsky). Noam Chomsky adds to it by stating: “what remains of democracy is to be construed as the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on population a ‘philosophy of futility’ and ‘lack of purpose in life’ to concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption. Deluged by this propaganda in infancy people may then accept their meaningless subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They may abandon their fate to the wizards and, in the political realm, to the self-described ‘intelligent minorities’ who serve and administer power”. Hence, “the majority principle”, which was a new god did not remain sacred “in the sense in which great heralds of great revolutions conceived it, namely as a power of resistance to existing injustice but a power of resistance to anything that does not conform…the moral is plain: the apotheosis of ego and the principle of self-preservation as such culminates in the utter insecurity of the individual, in his complete negation,” (Horkheimer). The most significant idea behind this whole sham is the uninterrupted flow of capital from developing states to developed ones. The corrupt rulers of the developing world especially linked to the bourgeoisie have maintained huge amounts of stolen money in foreign banks. Wealth is created by the working class. But in this struggle of capital versus labour, the latter is made to appear redundant. The product, the fetish, is allowed to move in the wink of an eye from one end of the globe to the other but the real producer is left to wallow in the slums of the world. The fall of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh is one such example. Innumerable workers were maimed, more than 1,000 were killed when a moth-eaten, debilitated structure — wherein due to the extraction of surplus value many generations of workers might have turned into cadavers — collapsed under its own weight. The vulture representing the native capitalist was arrested but bailed out while two Australian based multinationals having a heavy stake in it went unscathed. More than a year and a half has passed since then but these companies are yet to sign the crucial safety accord for the workers. “Social power,” says Horkheimer, “is today more than ever mediated by power over things. The more intense an individual’s concern with power over things the more will things dominate him, the more will he lack any genuine individual traits and more will his mind be transformed into an automation of formalised reason.” As Marx put it, “the capitalist is embodied capital” — no human emotions can be expected of him. (To be continued) The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com