Machineries of violence: Q&A with James Schneider
The American Empire at home and abroad
Words: Jonty Langley • Photos: Alex Baker
James Schneider co-founded Momentum, the grassroots left-wing organisation that helped Jeremy Corbyn become leader of the Labour Party, and currently heads up Communications for Progressive International, a group that unites and mobilises trade unions, leftist parties, peasant movements and groups like Code Pink, the Democratic Socialists of America and South Africa’s shack dwellers movement. He spoke to Shibboleth about the American empire turning in on itself.
Shibboleth: Historically, does anyone come close to the US in terms of levels of aggression in recent history?
James Schneider: No. Objectively, no. Jimmy Carter, former US President, said that the United States is the most warlike nation on earth. And it is true – the US has been involved in more wars, has bombed more countries [than any other]. In the last twelve months, the US has itself directly bombed at least seven countries. Its primary regional ally in west Asia has bombed a few more. It has 800 military bases around the world. And its designs are not pacific – it says “peace through strength”, but it’s actually pursuing domination through strength.
Compare the last three Republican US presidents and their international war-making. Today we have Donald Trump who says he’s not concerned about international law – the only question for him is his own conscience: what is okay rests in the person of Donald J Trump, not even in the office of the US President. The so-called Board of Peace, is just him – Donald J Trump – the pure essence of US ruling class power. Go back to George W Bush: he obviously rode roughshod over international law, but he at least got John Yoo to write disgusting torture memos saying that torture is totally legal and fine, creating the legal fiction of the enemy non-combatant and so on. And he did try to get UN Security Council backing for the war in Iraq – he was at least still engaging with this system of rules. Then go back to his father, George HW Bush, who sought and got UN Security Council support for clearing Iraq out of Kuwait after the invasion, but didn’t have cover to pursue regime change and invade Iraq – and he didn’t.
What they feel constrained by has changed, and that changes based on the context around them. The policies, and how they are done, have become cruder.
What is the relationship between what’s happening in the streets of, say, Minneapolis, right now, and American foreign policy over the last few decades?
It’s a very good question, which I think gets right to the heart of what kind of power structure the US ruling class is operating. Trump has brought both a rupture and not a rupture from what came before. It’s a rupture in its form – it is clearly much more crude and doesn’t try to dress anything up in the language of values, law, or justice. But it isn’t a rupture in that it continues fundamentally what many decades of US policy have been in the world, and what centuries of policy have been in the US internally.
Trump and his top advisors, particularly Stephen Miller, have made plain that their project is essentially one of white European domination, where the United States is the leading state within that order. Now, of course, that can fold in some subordinate individuals and groups if they accept that power structure and know their place. That has always been the case with systems of racialised or stratified power – there is always room for the acceptance of some subordinates, but only if they accept the terms.
The United States has always had a peculiar seeming contradiction between being proud of being an immigrant nation while also being a settler colonial state that has perpetuated its ruling classes’ management of that system through creating racial hierarchies – to prevent, essentially, poor whites from allying with their natural allies: enslaved Africans and the native population of the continent. So, it’s not surprising that this attempt to make things more coherent, on these very unpleasant and narrow grounds, [is now happening] both internationally and domestically.
At home, it’s clearly being racialised – you can see that in the policies of ICE, in the preoccupations around whiteness among leading Trump figures. Internationally [you can see it] in a retreat from hegemony across the whole globe towards a more geographically limited but intense domination.
Because the US is so and has been so culturally hegemonic (because we share a language with them, so we consume their media and their films and their TV shows and so forth), the US political system is often held up as the normatively democratic system. And it’s not a democratic system. It was never intended to be a democratic system. If you go back to the original founders, the idea was to be a republic, not a democracy, and it was deliberately designed to prevent the claims of the many against the wealth of the few. That’s not my gloss – that’s a direct quote from, I believe, James Madison, one of the founding fathers. [The quote is: “Another effect of public instability, is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the monied few, over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people... it may be said, with some truth, that laws are made for the few, not for the many.”]
Fast forward to the process of how that continues today: there is competition within the oligarchy – internal conflict in who should be the leading force at any given time – and they use the electoral mechanism to do that. You have a political system where the leading fractions of capital and richest single individuals can spend unlimited money to shape not only the information space around politics through owning the media and tech platforms, but can fund… or let’s say the real word: purchase the political leaders themselves.
There are huge amounts of very mainstream, middle of the road US academic research which shows that the policy preferences of big capital (Wall Street, the military industrial complex, big pharma, and so on) are perfectly represented in ongoing US policy, administration to administration to administration. And things like increasing the minimum wage (which hasn’t increased since the 1970s at a federal level), or universal healthcare, always have huge supermajority support among US citizens and are never brought forward, because the system is designed not to do so.
That ‘rupture of form’ you mentioned, between perhaps the subtlety or classiness of other administrations and the crudeness of Trump’s exercise of American coercion – is that just down to Trump’s ideology or is there something else driving that in terms of where we are in history? Why does this feel different?
There are three factors at escalating levels. At the most practical: if you have a tool, it gets used. Particularly when the US system has almost unlimited funds for machineries of violence. Trump just announced that he wants to increase the defence budget from $1 trillion – which is already more than the next ten biggest countries combined – by an extra $500 billion. This is per year. So the kit is being replaced and it’s got to go somewhere. Things that were used in Afghanistan and Iraq end up being given to police departments at home. And of course, the US is a highly armed society and its police often looks like an occupation force because it is using the equipment of an occupation force. That’s the most clearly material level: if you’ve got the stuff, you use the stuff.
Then, one level of abstraction above, I would encourage your readers to look up Aimé Césaire, the Martiniquan poet and theorist and national political leader. His 1952 work, Discourse on Colonialism, really theorises the concept of the imperial boomerang – this idea that colonialism abroad comes back as fascism at home. And his argument, which I think is so powerful, is that colonialism not only brutalises the colonised, but it brutalises and dehumanises the coloniser. And that is the process which can lead to fascism at home.
And that leads us to the third point of greater abstraction: liberalism and fascism are often presented as totally different systems – the system of liberalism, which is to do with rules and order, and then fascism as a break from it. I think that’s an incorrect understanding. I think liberalism and fascism are different modes along a spectrum in capitalist rule. When capitalist rule is self-confident, it’s at the liberal end of the spectrum. You can have high levels of dissent, no problem. You can have progressive reforms which improve the living standards of the majority. You can temper power by law and by rule. You can create that kind of stability. In the context where the ruling order is insecure, anxious, scared [things look different].
Look at the crazed minds of people like Stephen Miller, they believe that the ‘white race’ is being abolished, is disappearing, that they are under attack, that the US state is run by Marxists. It’s fantastical, it’s completely divorced from reality, but this is a more feverish extension of what Corey Robin, in his book The Reactionary Mind, lays out: the importance of the concept of victimhood or potential victimhood on the part of the powerful in the construction of reactionary thought worlds. And clearly they’re in this anxious state, and so you tend more in the fascist direction.
It’s less that those of us organising from below for substantial material change are winning. It’s more that the system is falling apart on its own terms.
From the US perspective, you can see that at home. US society is a total mess for tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, in all sorts of ways. If you looked at US life expectancy, health inequality, deaths of despair, the number of children killed by guns – you would not say this is a healthy society.
And internationally, US dominance is constantly being challenged. It’s a garden, they have to water it the whole time, they have to do a huge amount of work to keep it going – but it’s being fundamentally challenged. Economically, the US is no longer the major economic might in the world. That is now quite clearly China. And that’s also now the case technologically. That opens up space for other states to begin to think about taking a different course. China is hardly a perfect system trying to produce freedom and liberation for everybody on earth – but it’s opening up space, politically, technologically, economically, that endangers US domination.
The fascist mode appears when capitalism is vulnerable. We can think of 1930s fascism as being an option for the ruling class in ‘defence’ against the demands from socialism and communism. [Socialism] is basically the idea that human dignity is available to all people. Somewhere lurking in every single religious and deep cultural tradition, there is this idea that we can transcend the order which is, to use Christian terminology, fallen, and secure human dignity of all. In Christian ideas, there’s the spark of God in everybody; therefore, everybody at a fundamental level is worthy of equal dignity, but we have a society which doesn’t secure that. In the late 19th and 20th century tradition, that idea comes to be called communism.
A lot of American liberals, say of Trump-led violence at home and abroad: “this is not who we are” as a nation. Is that true?
No. It is profoundly what the US ruling class is, and it is profoundly what US state policy has been. Since 1970, according to a study in the medical journal The Lancet, there have been 38 million excess deaths caused by unilateral coercive measures – ie sanctions, predominantly from the US, or where the US is the political driving force behind them. The data suggested around half a million excess deaths a year. That is an incredible level of violence that goes completely unchecked.
These sanctions are meant to cause chaos. This is not a conspiracy theory – let’s just look at what the US ruling class does when it speaks to itself candidly.
Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, said last year President Donald Trump told him they had to make the Iranian economy scream. And he said: so that’s what we did. We ramped up the sanctions, we ramped up OFAC, and in December we crashed their currency, drove up prices and caused the revolt against economic hardship. Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t other elements at play in domestic politics in Iran, but you can’t understand those other elements unless you look at this structuring context.
And that doesn’t even begin to look at the wars and the bombings of countries and the coups against governments and the blockades against alternatives.
If you are an Obama stan and you think everything was wonderful then and think “can’t everything go back to 2012,” well, he didn’t apologise for the deportation regime – he expanded it dramatically. More people were deported. They just didn’t do it so crudely. And that is because of a shift in the moment of the deployment of power, not for any moral reason. There’s no moral difference. The deportation regime [now], is a much more vulgar version of pre-existing architecture.
Part of the ‘wages’ of fascism – part of what it gives to a portion of the population [that supports it] – is the theatre of violence being done to others. That is a key constitutive part of it as a system, both abroad in terms of colonialism, and at home in terms of authoritarian violence. There are different types, and now we’re in the open type. Trump is a singular individual in lots of ways, but he is also almost the purest expression of the system – he’s like the id of capitalist imperialist domination.
In defence of at least substantial chunks of US American people, though, there is and has always been a substantial gap – bigger and smaller at different times – between the public stated position, and where the majority of people actually are. The majority of US Americans weren’t opposed at the time to the Iraq war, but a substantial minority were. The majority are opposed to the arming of Israel and its genocide in Gaza, were opposed to what’s happened with Venezuela, and so on.
What should we, particularly people with privilege for whom some of that theatre of cruelty is intended, be doing?
First of all, you have to break with those things. The second thing is to recognise that this system is not trying to benefit you on your own terms, for the most part. Then for the people of conscience, who do carry within themselves somewhere lurking that idea that all humans are humans: those people can revolt internally against this intense system of violence, and should do. If anybody does think that all humans are humans, then you have to be in some form of revolt. That can happen in an almost infinite number of material ways, depending on people’s social location.
But I think a key thing for people in the global North who have some kind of revolt – whether you’re a tenant trying to organise because your rent is going up or your tenancy is unstable, a worker trying to organise because you haven’t had a pay rise, or you’re in a community trying to stop a community centre being pulled down or whatever it might be – we need to work to not only see the connection between the revolts in the North and the revolts of the South for sovereignty, but to actively make those connections. If we’re going to be able to confront this violent system of domination, particularly in the context of a changing and unstable climate with elements of breakdown, we’re going to need a fundamental alliance between the revolts in the North and the revolts of the South, and also recognise that the centre of gravity of the world system must move, and must move quite substantially.
How much of a role is the Christian Church playing in propping up the US right, and mask-off Christian nationalism?
It’s certainly playing a role. The Christian nationalist stuff – they’re saying it and they’re also exporting it. The far-right in Britain has never really had a religious element to it. It’s had an Islamophobic drive to it, and previously an anti-Semitic drive, but generally hasn’t been dressed up in the language of “the army of Christ” and this sort of thing. But now when the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson has his big marches and rallies, it’s explicitly Christian nationalist – white Christian nationalist. It’s an abomination. It’s a total abomination.
So the first thing to say is: yes, it is really there. And if you are attached to these traditions, you have a role in countering it because it is using the world of meaning that you also inhabit. And it is using it as a weapon of real violence of the strong against the weak. And that is an abomination.
But the second thing is to not exceptionalise Christianity here either. Within every religious and deep cultural tradition, there is the idea somewhere that all humans are humans and that we all share human dignity. In different languages and different concepts, but that central idea is very, very deep in humanity it seems – you find it popping up everywhere, and it has great power. There is that tradition in every religion. All cultures and religions are systems of meaning, but can also be systems of power. All religions are susceptible – as well as having this wonderful thing in them. It really isn’t Christianity alone. In Buddhism, you can have a wonderful non-dualist tradition, or you can have Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism.
Powerful systems of meaning and understanding the world – things don’t have to have God in them to have a religious structure – can be a tremendous motivation towards both positive collective action and horrific collective action. The call to the nation is both the most progressive potentially and the most potentially dangerous aspect of our very deep systems, because it speaks to a collective identity that can either be expansive or bounded, that can either seek to advance or to contain.
No-one should think that the abomination of Christian nationalism – which tends to come out of one particular strand of evangelicalism – represents all of Christianity.
So I think all of us in our own traditions have things that we have to be doing. I’m Jewish, and supposedly in the name of all Jews, a genocide is being carried out against the Palestinian people – that is an abomination as well. We all have these things to grapple with, part of which speaks to the power of these ideas.
James Schneider is a writer and political organiser based in London. He serves as the Communications Director for the Progressive International, is the author of Our Bloc: How We Win, and was Director of Strategic Communications to Jeremy Corbyn and the UK Labour Party. He holds a degree in Theology.
Watch James Schneider's appearances via his TikTok channel here.