Radical Engagements: 'Aircraft Carrier Imperialism' By Amadeo Bordiga

Bordiga's impressive analysis of the nature of land and sea power, the importance of transcontinental trade, and the dominance of sea and air power.

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Cohost of Excavations: Jordin Dubin
Cohost of Vulgar Complexity: Abi Hassen
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro Musics: Spaceship Revolution by Etienne Roussel (Solo Intro), Bitterlake (Political Intro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro), The Siege of Kalameth by Jon Björk (Main Show Intro), Teknique by Anthony Earls (Nailing It Down Intro).
Outro Music: Let Down by Issue AB
Intro and Outro Video Design: C. Derick Varn (Main Show Intro, Show Outro), Djene Bajalan (Solo Intro, Political Intro, Space Outro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro)

[TrichordoKostas]

What you say about ignoring older history immediately brought to my mind Jairus Banaji, recently read his book a brief hustory of commercial capitalism that was very interesting

[boskor]

No offense to Mr Bordiga, his analysis is clearly hampered by not having the benefit of 67 years of historical events, but this essay is describing a world that has already passed. Granted, he wrote this less than 15 years removed from the great carrier battles of the Pacific, at a time when the carrier looked like it would be the unchallenged master of the seas and shores for the foreseeable future. Western powers have used airstrikes from carriers to threaten and punish disobedient regimes on occasion, but the list of countries that fear that outcome is shrinking rapidly.

As the essay mentions, Western navies are given freedom of navigation in exchange for providing security for trade to flow through the now 4 vital straits that allow European leeches to sustain themselves on the lifeblood of Asians and Africans. Ships transiting the Bab al-Mandab have to broadcast that they had no connection to Israel and carry armed guards while undermaintained African ports struggle to accommodate additional traffic avoiding the Red Sea even while multiple carrier groups and additional ships were blowing through the Navy’s budget getting embarrassed in the region. Hormuz is firmly under the control of Iran. Any American carrier that tries to assert control over Tawain is headed to the bottom of the Pacific and we can only hope that 7500 drowned Americans doesn’t trigger a nuclear response. Malacca has never really been under anyone’s control historically and an aircraft carrier is far from the ideal weapon to try and assert that control.

America’s carrier program is a mess, maintenance of existing carriers and construction of new boats are years behind schedule and the Navy’s forecasted ability to deploy means that maritime trade routes are going to be under the control of regional powers more so than the hegemon Bordiga describes, even without proactive movement by local actors. Carriers and nuclear weapons have been useless in helping France maintain it’s grip on western Africa, and the British navy doesn’t even deserve mention at this point. India needing to deploy it’s navy to protect ships full of Russian oil on their way to Europe is not a good sign for the strength of American hegemony.

Singapore has idle fueling infrastructure and 2 million containers sitting in port that aren’t getting picked up because ships are just going straight to Cape Town. Modern ships might have a billion dollars worth of cargo, so a million dollars in extra running costs to skip Singapore and West Asia vs the cost of insurance rates based on cargo value is a no-brainer, even if the huge increase in shipping times wreaks havoc with carefully planned port schedules and cause huge backups and delays. The IMF says there has been a 75% decrease in tonnage in the Red Sea since stuff started flying out of Yemen. Multiple carrier groups and dozens of supporting ships were sent out to prevent this and most of them had to turn back after an ongoing series of humiliating defeats because privatization and budget cuts got rid of the ships and crews needed to resupply missile cruisers at sea or divert carriers from their scheduled activities.

The essay’s discussion of WWII strangely doesn’t mention the Soviet Union a single time, nor the 10s of millions of soldiers that it employed to fight the Germans from the shores of the Volga to the streets Berlin. It focuses on the admittedly impressive naval battles between the US and Japan, but never mentions the massive campaigns in China or Burma, much less Korea, only 4 years removed from the UN’s land-forces-heavy and aircraft-carrier-light war at the time this essay was written. Even the carrier battles themselves were only important in conjunction with the fights between Japanese soldiers and American Marines from Guam to the Philippines. Using carriers to strike Pearl Harbor and the Japanese home islands is only important in the context of the events that followed, neither one started or ended the war by themselves.

People have been declaring the obsolescence of infantry since the invention of the sling. The only thing that has made that true are nuclear weapons, which make the human race itself obsolete. The Cuban Missile Crisis has basically been happening every day for two and a half years and no one seems particularly bothered by it, with a sizeable portion of government officials and media personalities openly welcoming nuclear apocalypse because they think that we can survive and even win a nuclear war.

What does aircraft carrier imperialism look like when carriers are unable to protect global capital’s most important assets from militias formed by the poorest people on Earth? What does multipolar imperialism look like when none of the “great powers” have the ability to project power or confront each other directly, but they all have access to a species-ending superweapon at their disposal? History has put us in a position where Bordiga’s conclusion has never been more true or had higher stakes.

I know everyone has gotten bored of and embarrassed by Ukraine, but Western governments are still very much involved in it and the same kind of trainers and advisors being deployed to Vietnam as Bordiga was writing this essay are currently in Ukraine, and have been for a while. Difference is, Vietnam didn’t have thousands of nuclear warheads mounted to a variety of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles. Thankfully, our stalwart NATO ally Turkiye won’t let a carrier group into the Black Sea, not that it would do much good sitting at the bottom.

While the conclusion is correct, and the only thing that can save the international working class is itself, aircraft carrier imperialism has proven itself to be a very expensive one with rapidly diminishing returns ending as a complete failure. The transatlantic hegemon has proven adept at killing large amounts of people, mostly civilians, but hasn’t accomplished much else in terms of achieving the political goals they set out for themselves. So I guess the most important question is: how do we get workers exchanged and physically working together outside of the current context of enforced competition and xenophobic propaganda foisted on us by our capitalist overlords?