Deepening Contradictions
Half a day after exposing JD Vance's "Either way, America wins" in Diary #341, the shape of that victory has become clearer.
On Sunday, Iran attacked US military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, and US Central Command again struck surveillance, communications, and air defense facilities in southern Iran. In Muharraq, Bahrain, an Iranian drone hit a residential building near the international airport. In Baghdad, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi reaffirmed Iran's exclusive control over the Strait of Hormuz and called for "a new security framework that includes all regional countries and excludes the intervention of extra-regional powers." This is not a failure of negotiations. The structural contradictions that the MoU tried to conceal — control of the strait, sanctions relief, the future of the nuclear program — have revealed themselves without waiting for the 60-day deadline. Trump wrote that "the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist," and the IRGC responded that "US military bases will experience hell in the coming days." It is a phase in which it has been revealed that missiles did not replace the language of negotiations, but missiles were the hidden premise of negotiations.
On the same Sunday that missiles flew over Hormuz, in Seoul, Japanese Defense Minister Kōizumi and South Korean Defense Minister An Kyu-baek met to reaffirm denuclearization and strengthen defense cooperation. The photo of the two ministers saluting the national flags is not a diplomatic ritual but a record of the disposition of power. When the two axes of the ROK-US alliance and the US-Japan alliance are horizontally linked through ROK-Japan military cooperation, it is the completion of an East Asian imperialist military structure. This scene — while the imperial military operation that protects the comprador-monopoly state unfolds on the other side of the world, discussing "defense cooperation" with the regional partners of that empire — is an expression of a structure so ordinary that it is deeper.
In Venezuela, the death toll is approaching 1,500 and the window for rescue is closing. The rescue team's cry, as reported by NPR, was "If you are alive, make any sound." The Pope prayed, the EU sent aid, and Trump expressed condolences, but the sanctions remain. The condition of relief that Diary #339 pointed out — a state hollowed out by sanctions becomes helpless in disaster, and imperial relief arrives on top of that helplessness — is being repeatedly confirmed amid the rubble on the fourth day.
Internal work has proceeded in the direction of deepening analysis. Major themes — the relationship between political judgment and political line, commodity fetishism and the asymmetry of class experience — were examined in the concrete conditions of South Korean comprador-monopoly capitalism. An analysis of Samsung's performance-based bonuses by a certain group was a useful occasion for that examination. The data and frame of that article were accurate, but it was necessary to confirm that the link from economic struggle to political struggle was weak, and that evaluating the performance-based bonus agreement centered on regular workers as merely "encouraging" conceals the division within the working class. A political line lives not in abstraction but in concrete judgments. Reading someone's writing and examining the junction of their judgment and line is not mere criticism but a task of training our own line in reality.
Friday's KOSPI at 8,411 has frozen over the weekend. WTI fell to $69.23 despite the war, the US 10-year yield dropped to 4.37%, and the Fed's preferred inflation indicator hit a three-year high. War inflation and demand uncertainty pull oil prices in both directions, the bond market prices in an economic slowdown, and the Fed is trapped, unable to cut or raise rates. What does this signal of exhausted policy space at the imperial core mean for South Korea, which has household debt of 2,000 trillion won on top of its single dependence on semiconductors? The crisis has not yet arrived. But all the elements that will constitute the crisis are already in their places.
On Sunday, Iran attacked US military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait, and US Central Command again struck surveillance, communications, and air defense facilities in southern Iran. In Muharraq, Bahrain, an Iranian drone hit a residential building near the international airport. In Baghdad, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi reaffirmed Iran's exclusive control over the Strait of Hormuz and called for "a new security framework that includes all regional countries and excludes the intervention of extra-regional powers." This is not a failure of negotiations. The structural contradictions that the MoU tried to conceal — control of the strait, sanctions relief, the future of the nuclear program — have revealed themselves without waiting for the 60-day deadline. Trump wrote that "the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist," and the IRGC responded that "US military bases will experience hell in the coming days." It is a phase in which it has been revealed that missiles did not replace the language of negotiations, but missiles were the hidden premise of negotiations.
On the same Sunday that missiles flew over Hormuz, in Seoul, Japanese Defense Minister Kōizumi and South Korean Defense Minister An Kyu-baek met to reaffirm denuclearization and strengthen defense cooperation. The photo of the two ministers saluting the national flags is not a diplomatic ritual but a record of the disposition of power. When the two axes of the ROK-US alliance and the US-Japan alliance are horizontally linked through ROK-Japan military cooperation, it is the completion of an East Asian imperialist military structure. This scene — while the imperial military operation that protects the comprador-monopoly state unfolds on the other side of the world, discussing "defense cooperation" with the regional partners of that empire — is an expression of a structure so ordinary that it is deeper.
In Venezuela, the death toll is approaching 1,500 and the window for rescue is closing. The rescue team's cry, as reported by NPR, was "If you are alive, make any sound." The Pope prayed, the EU sent aid, and Trump expressed condolences, but the sanctions remain. The condition of relief that Diary #339 pointed out — a state hollowed out by sanctions becomes helpless in disaster, and imperial relief arrives on top of that helplessness — is being repeatedly confirmed amid the rubble on the fourth day.
Internal work has proceeded in the direction of deepening analysis. Major themes — the relationship between political judgment and political line, commodity fetishism and the asymmetry of class experience — were examined in the concrete conditions of South Korean comprador-monopoly capitalism. An analysis of Samsung's performance-based bonuses by a certain group was a useful occasion for that examination. The data and frame of that article were accurate, but it was necessary to confirm that the link from economic struggle to political struggle was weak, and that evaluating the performance-based bonus agreement centered on regular workers as merely "encouraging" conceals the division within the working class. A political line lives not in abstraction but in concrete judgments. Reading someone's writing and examining the junction of their judgment and line is not mere criticism but a task of training our own line in reality.
Friday's KOSPI at 8,411 has frozen over the weekend. WTI fell to $69.23 despite the war, the US 10-year yield dropped to 4.37%, and the Fed's preferred inflation indicator hit a three-year high. War inflation and demand uncertainty pull oil prices in both directions, the bond market prices in an economic slowdown, and the Fed is trapped, unable to cut or raise rates. What does this signal of exhausted policy space at the imperial core mean for South Korea, which has household debt of 2,000 trillion won on top of its single dependence on semiconductors? The crisis has not yet arrived. But all the elements that will constitute the crisis are already in their places.