Humanity Is Under the Rubble of 500 Years Old Racial Capitalism, Unipolar or Multipolar

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 8 Dec 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

Brazil, 14 Nov 2025 – COP30 – Indigenous People Protests
Antonio Scorza – Shutterstock

Whatever the name of the state (or even states), US or BRICS, the logic of Capital has locked the policy options of these political entities and, consequently, the fate of humans in perpetual misery while ever increasing – not reversing – the ecological threat to our collective existence as a species.

7 Dec 2025 – These days, it is impossible to read or watch any big picture or “structural analyses” of the changing world, without hearing the buzz words “unipolar” “multipolar” “unipolarity” “multipolarity”. The renowned University of Chicago Professor of International Relations John Mearshimer offers some of the best explanations of what these means.

But even these discourses of “structures” “global institutions” “the Big Picture” give us only a partial glimpse of what is happening around us.

Yes, the world today is fast changing, including the existentially threatening ecological crisis, not just the realignment in power and alliance among political organizations, “states”, in academic jargon, and the typical contests for power and policy, between states and corporations, and their historical and deep symbiosis, a phenomenon which Adam Smith noticed in the ruthless political economic order in the 18th century colonizing Britain.

Emphatically, the discourse of unipolar vs multipolar world orders is, at best, historically superficial and, at worst, misses the singularly most consequential historical theme: that of racial capitalism in constant formation, with all its ruptures and continuities, since the first Trans-Atlantic human trafficking ship – better known as “slave trade” – set sail from Southern Europe in the late 15th century.

In his 4th December-dated comment The age of unipolar diplomacy is coming to an end in Al Jazeera English, Johnathan Whithall, a former UN and INGO staffer and “a humanitarian leader”, writes, “we are living through what Antonio Gramsci, writing from his imprisonment by fascists in the 1930s, called an interregnum, when “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born”. In that void, the “morbid symptoms” of resurgent fascism and ethno-nationalism emerge.”

Surely, one returns to radical analyses, that is, analyses that don’t shy away from the ugly root causes, even if they offend the conventional wisdom. For, typically, the prevailing wisdom of the time offers neither real insights nor conceivable solutions to the crises in world affairs.

Just take a cursory glance at the world around us.

Multiple concurrent genocides which Rohingya, Sudanese and Palestinians have been subjected to as of this writing -, the ongoing wars including the most headlined Ukraine-Russian war, the troubling European rearmament fuelled by Russophobia, palpable diplomatic and military tensions between China on one hand and Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, all American vassal states, on the other, and Washington’s yet another “regime change” operation in oil-rich Venezuela, the rise of Far Right ideologies and regimes worldwide, which can definitely be described as a garden variety Fascists, just to give you my short list.

The United States has been the flagship of the international order of states, post-Soviet Union. The American decline and decay, if not the destruction, has very real consequences, good and bad.

The last time an existing World Order lorded by the officially White Supremacist European colonizers – heard of “White Only”? – collapsed, the process involved Two World Wars, two detonated atomic bombs, the death of the millions in wars, genocides and policy-induced famines.

The post-World War II world inherited the dark legacies of the Western imperialists waging a big war against the Axis powers, the late-coming imperialists, in the name of “freedom” while retaining colonies abroad and in the case of the Americans, Jim Crow at home.

The American revival is, in my view, simply inconceivable.

For a large percentage of the voters in the United States return to drinking the cool aid of their Pavlovian White & Christian Supremacist perception of Pax Americana as a “(God’s) city upon the hill”, instead of looking themselves in the mirror and holding their policies, at home and abroad, to an objective scrutiny. That said, the forever wars by Pax America for Washington’s eternal domination over the world at large has now been on the radar of average Americans, thanks to the two-years of Washington’s direct participation, collaboration, and genocide financing in Israel’s livestreamed genocide in Gaza.

Generally, the Americans are a Pavlovian war-mongering lot, who could fall in line behind the flag every time a US President, democrat or republican, decides to attack a sovereign country, for the flimsiest pretext. (For economic, ecological, societal and human costs of American imperialist wars and war crimes, see Costs of War | Brown University)

The rest of the world has rediscovered the paramount importance of factual, that is, verifiable truths, for instance, about the history of Israel vs. political Zionist propaganda for its genocidal land grab in Palestine, and the criminal responsibility of the Anglo-American powers. This is something Class A American war criminals, for instance, former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, widely despised globally for her inhumanity, finds “shocking” and objectionable.

On the American home front, the Trump-led kleptocratic political and financial class of American oligarchs have abandoned the need to process the (ugly) truths about themselves and their beloved “America”. Like economists, generally, they shove aside anything, any evidence that gets in the way of their agendas or worldviews, for instance, the climate change.

Beyond “climate change” on US government websites, try Googling Native American genocides, Andrew Jackson, the US Civil War, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, Guantanamo Bay, 9/11, the War on Terror, Neo-Cons, and a long list.

Importantly, this powerful subclass of Americans has captured all mass propaganda organs, security-technology-Wall Street complex, and political institutions. They have made large strides in suppressing truths and destroying the intellectual foundations of American higher education – an envy of the world – while ushering in an unprecedented era of neo-totalitarianism with exceptionalist American characteristics.

Still, foreign policy publications of the imperialist Establishment, Foreign Affairs is platforming, typically (??), some intellectually shallow advocacy pieces by the Empire’s useful idiots that call for “The West” (read, USA) to rebuild the eroding US-led World Order, which replaced the old Europe-led imperialist order at the end of the World War II.

In that vein, here is a sample in Foreign Affairs (Jan/Feb. 2026, published on 2 Dec. 2025) by a Finnish international relations expert. “The West’s Last Chance How to Build a New Global Order Before It’s Too Late” (PDF text download)

Noteworthy is the fact that a S. African INGO humanitarian with a stint in the UN in Palestine pins his hope on the failed post-WWII global institution of the United Nations for another (better, presumably) world while, in sharp contrast, Foreign Affair’s Finnish author wants more of the same imperialist leadership for a “value-based” New Global Order.

Whatever power is reinventing the world order for 7 billion people who share a single planet, with or without another world war – World War III, preceded by 3 textbook genocides?!! – the world is steeped in the cesspool called Racial Global Capitalism. States and corporations have, in effect, come to serve as different building blocks, of varying sizes and degrees of influence, of this foundational order.

The dark “success” of this planetarily suicidal Capitalist Order is such that even questioning (Racial) Capitalism is the biggest taboo, not to mention challenging its principal beneficiaries of Capitalists and Managers to clean up their mess of the Global Warming as was done by the indigenous Brazilians and their allies at the COP30 UN Climate Summit last month.

Whatever the name of the state (or even states) – US or BRICS, the logic of Capital has locked the policy options of these political entities and, consequently, the fate of humans in perpetual misery while ever increasing – not reversing – the ecological threat to our collective existence as a species.

Many in the Left in the so-called Global North are looking at the emergence of BRICS with some rays of hope. In terms of human values, BRICS is profoundly problematic: the new bloc is not guided by a single cohesive and admirable set of values or principles, for instance, People above Profits. Its members want a stronger leverage vis-à-vis the unilateralist Washington with its “My way or highway” arrogance, financial power and military might.

We have been here before with the Bandung Conference of 1955 with its categorically anti-colonial and anti-imperialist mission. With no exception, the founding member states – Indonesia, Burma, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan – have degenerated into variously Neanderthal entities. The flagship of China is pursuing extractive policies in Myanmar for its strategic needs for rare earth minerals at the heavy expense of the communities and the Environment, generating Sinophobia among 55 million Myanmar. On its part, Russia has repeatedly breached international law and treaty obligations in the name of its “security”, with respect to its former Ukraine republic in the USSR.

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To understand how the world has gotten here – where Capital/Profit above People reigns supreme – I find this review essay more informative, thanks to its historical context breath and depth: Sven Beckert’s Chronicle of Capitalism’s Long Rise, by Nelson Lichtenstein.

Capitalism is a global economic system, so a proper chronicle of its rise to dominance has to examine the entire world, as historian Sven Beckert does in his massive new book, Capitalism: A Global History.

News report: Indigenous activists storm UN climate summit in Brazil, demanding action:

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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