Work Text:
Excerpt from the Introduction of Powers and Profits: Neo-Imperialism Under the Parahuman Stage of Capitalism 1987-2011 by Xiuying Liu, published by New Left Books, New York, 2012. This is a preview copy provided for the benefit of the reader.
Since the emergence of the parahuman phenomenon, the notion that parahumans control the world's major governments and economies has become stock-in-trade for conspiracists. The idea is not entirely without foundation; many of the so-called "third world" nations have proven vulnerable to parahuman capture, the most notable cases being the late PRC (which suffered from a unique confluence of historical circumstances that will be discussed in further detail in Ch. 15) and the ongoing nightmares of Latin America and Africa. Of course, conventional analysis tends to overstate the influence of parahuman warlordism and understate the destabilizing influence of Western intervention, both overt and covert, when explaining these tragedies. It is no coincidence that the division between those countries who were able to harness the parahuman phenomenon for their own advancement and those who were harnessed by it happens to neatly fall along old imperial-colonial lines, after all.
In the imperial core we see an entirely different story, especially in the United States of America, the origin and nexus of the paraliberal transition. Faced with labor unrest, the transformation of the money commodity with the dissolution of Bretton Woods, a global economic downturn with stagflation at home and the end of the postwar rebuilding boom abroad, and the Scion-driven loss of nuclear deterrence which threatened American hegemony over Western Europe, the Reagan administration and the forces of capital it represented initiated a sequence of critical transformations in the qualitative mode of production, commonly known as paraliberalism, which were soon mirrored throughout the first world.
An economic policy of deregulation, trade liberalization, union-busting, and so-called "austerity" (which obscured the reality of enormous increases in state expenditure across this period as the military-industrial complex scrambled to adjust to a post-nuclear and parahuman world, with all the attendant costs) was coupled with a rush to commodify and militarize the new parahuman reality. State propagandists were quick to introduce and encourage the adoption of childish comic-book terminology—"superheroes" and "supervillains"—to make the phenomenon comprehensible, palatable, and marketable to the mass public. Within less than a decade, the latter label was already being applied to activist and radical fronts that had any sort of parahuman involvement; the difficult decision of whether or not to expel parahuman membership only accelerated the fracturing of radical left groups coming down from the previous decade’s febrile atmosphere of vigorous direct action. The first notable incidents of powered terrorism inflicted by the Red Army Faction in Berlin further legitimized this strategy and helped introduce a Red Scare angle into the public discourse. All these conditions set the stage for the managed integration of parahumanity into the state and capital.
Though the Protectorate-PRT is often characterized as a product of the Bush years, with its official debut in 1993, declassified documents have revealed that the groundwork had already been fully laid under Reagan. State security forces at every level, from the military to local police, were issued enormous black budgets to facilitate the development of parahuman assets. The PRT subunit itself has its roots in the FBI's Parahuman Analysis Unit, the CIA's Stargate Project (which grew to absorb a staggering percentage of the CIA's already-bloated funds in the years following Vikare, much to the consternation of traditionalist Company men), and the informal "Super Divisions" of the LAPD and NYPD, which began collaborating with future Protectorate luminaries Alexandria and Legend well before their formal incorporation into the state security apparatus. To this day, many of the central tensions within the organization can be explained by the clash of alphabet agencies that characterized its foundation.
But the true birth of paraliberal neo-imperialism was not in 1993 but in 1992, at Marun Field. Though Washington had high hopes about the future of parahuman militarization, it was in many ways a "solution looking for a problem." While there were secret discussions along diplomatic backchannels from 1987 to 1991 where the United States attempted to barter US military assistance in dealing with "superhuman threat excursions" (the P-PRT wouldn't adopt the familiar E- through S-Class terminology until Operation Clothespin poached large segments of the ex-Sentai Elite command staff), no such threats presented themselves, with the possible exception of Glaistig Uaine in Northern Ireland. The emergence of EB1, which we will henceforth refer to by its original name "Hadhayosh" despite its more popular Biblical-eschatonic moniker "Behemoth," provided the problem.
The devastating new "Endbringer" phenomenon became the dynamo of paraliberal neo-imperialism. The US finally had a way to couple its ambitions of militarized parahumanity with its long-standing policy of global force projection. The powerful American parahumans that the state had successfully identified and cultivated into law-enforcement assets became the tip of the spear in a battle against an existential threat that could take them anywhere in the world. The USSR, far more enchanted with the potential applications of parahuman analysis to some particularly thorny questions of socialist economic planning than with fantastical and costly super-battles, was neither willing nor able to build itself into a rival world police force; the US went into the Cape Race with a decisive advantage which it carried to the finish in 1995, when Hadhayosh again proved itself a friend to American foreign policy interests by leveling Moscow, killing the sitting Premier and two-thirds of the Presidium.
Of course, the Endbringer phenomenon has been extraordinarily damaging to the United States, as with the rest of the world. The rebuilding of New York City alone cost an extravagant 1.7% of GDP annually averaged across the period of 1994-2004. The fraying of the trans-oceanic capital flows with the EB2-induced decline of world shipping severely taxed the US economy at the turn of the millennium and forced a shift to a sort of limited continental autarky. Capital was able to preserve growth by means of a "spatial fix," moving the bulk of critical manufacturing to Mexico, and by reaping the productivity gains of parahuman labor (regulations like NEPEA-5 are often falsely characterized as halting parahuman integration into the economy—in reality it was a gift to the corporate lobby, criminalizing the growing stratum of parahuman petty-bourgeois smallholders and forcing many of them to professionalize under the umbrella of the existing cartels), but the glory days of untrammeled capitalistic expansion were undoubtedly over.
But there is no doubt that the phenomenon also accelerated the American ascent to world primacy. The Endbringer phenomenon gave the United States the opportunity to declare itself the world's super-police, and it did not hesitate to seize it. It served as the wedge by which the Protectorate-PRT, the de facto fifth branch of the US Military, gained global authority over all "S-Class Threats." As a consequence, Protectorate "Critical Action Squads" now enjoy the power to rapidly deploy to nearly any ostensibly sovereign territory on Earth with only the barest pro-forma consent required from the locals. The completion of the controversial Baumann Parahuman Containment Center, an extralegal clandestine detention center which stands in violation of nearly every international law on the humane treatment of prisoners, further solidified US hegemony in this arena. Rumors of political dissidents and foreign detainees, powered and un-powered, being "birdcaged" without due process have never been decisively proven, but the place still looms large in the nightmares of every person who has ever picked up a Kalashnikov in defiance of US imperialism. For every Legend lighting up the streets of the Big Apple and giving stirring speeches about gay rights, there is a black-clad Alexandria, whose actions during the 2004 Iran-Iraq war earned her the nickname "the Little Satan" throughout the Shi'a world. It is no wonder that a sizable portion of the global population professes belief that Hadhayosh is an agent of the US government, despite its high-profile attacks on New York, Chicago, and other major American cities.
We return now to our original question: are parahumans the secret masters of our society? The answer is, resoundingly, no. We find that in all the developed economies of the world the parahuman phenomenon has been yoked to the wagon of capitalism. Capital has the power to subsume all critiques into itself; with its evolution into the paraliberal stage it has even found a way to commodify the trauma it manufactures in the exploited classes, via militarizing and exploiting the parahumans it "triggers." The parahuman juntas of the Global South are not the first flowerings of a new order but rather the final maturation of an old one, a societal annihilation beyond the wildest imaginings of the endless generations of Western génocidaires, from Columbus to Churchill. The powers which some amongst us have been endowed with in this latter age are great, but as with all other individual human capabilities they still ultimately pale before the rapacious accumulative power of capital.
You have reached the end of the preview copy. Please consider purchasing the full work at nppds:\\newleftbooks.com\products\2994-powers-and-profits or from your local independent bookstore.