By JERRY HARRIS

Race and Class

Abstract: The Russian invasion of the Ukraine is a powerful assertion of geopolitical power and conflict. But Russia’s nationalist and expansionary drive takes place within the context of transnational economic ties. Such ties help define the nature of the war, and both the Russian and western response. The contradictory pressures of nationalist desires conflicting with transnational integration is an underappreciated complexity of the war that this article will explore.

 Keywords: energy resources, finance capital, nationalism, oligarchy, Russian invasion, sanctions, transnational capitalist class, Ukraine.

 Introduction

The invasion of Ukraine is seen by most as a geopolitical conflict between the West and Russia. Nationalist ideologies and power competition do play a significant role, but such competition takes place within the context of transnational relations that also define the nature of the struggle. Unlike the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which took place during limited economic and cultural ties between the West and Soviet Union, the current war is deeply affected by mutual economic relationships between transnational capitalists and links between transnational corporations. Exploring how the contradictions between national and transnational elements structure the character of the war is the purpose of this article.

Global capitalism has gone through tremendous change over the past forty years, building a system of transnational integration characterised by global financial flows and production. This has profoundly changed a world built around nation-centric power. The emergence of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) reshaped domestic economies and social relations by restructuring state institutions and rules to serve the new forms of global accumulation. Major trade arrangements were ratified, banks bailed out, corporate taxes cut, transnational corporations promoted and social contracts undermined. And yet the old forms of power, habits, identities and privileges still fight to maintain their existence. This mixture of national structures overturned by transnational forces creates a powerful vortex of tensions.

In Russia, this process took place first under Yeltsin and then Putin, turning the country into a neoliberal state. As the new ruling class sought a capitalist identity outside the Soviet experience, it linked to its imperial past. As a result, Russian national concepts of power rooted in Tsarist imperialist expansion reasserted their influence, even as the oligarchy made use of transnational accumulation. Neither did Great Power concepts fully fade in the West, as NATO’s eastward expansion shows. As globalisation entered a sustained period of economic, environmental and social turmoil, transnational hegemony was opened to greater challenge, particularly from authoritarian state capitalism, which finds inspiration in fascism and empire. As the globalist project of a fully integrated economic world floundered under the weight of its own excess, nationalist ideology and power projections re-emerged.

Mike Davis hits home when he describes the Putin government as one that hates Lenin and the Bolshevik position on self-determination, a government drenched in Great Russian chauvinism and supported by the reactionary religious hierarchy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. A government that invites the backing of pan-Slavic neo-fascists, that idealises the Tsarist empire, with Putin himself an iconic hero of far-right nationalists throughout Europe and the US.[1]

And yet it is a government that has structured its economy to serve and benefit from transnational capitalism. That contradiction, between nationalist ideology and its transnational model of accumulation, is the Russian trap. And it works both ways, for Russia and for its global partners.

Global capitalism and Russia

In Russia, the creation of a TCC took place primarily through the privatisation of state assets, in combination with private/state ownership arrangements in energy and finance. The state did not represent a national capitalist class, nor was its primary concern building a modern industrial base. Rather, the state played a central role in integrating the key sectors of the Russian economy into global capitalism. Russian oligarchs also rushed to integrate into elite cultural and financial networks. They sent billions into offshore havens, spent hundreds of millions on London and New York real estate, lived on their yachts, and sent their children to elite western schools.

But the full political integration of the Russian state was stymied by the western architecture of power. NATO’s expansion eastward clashed with Russia’s intent to re-establish its own sphere of influence. This was an uneven process, unfolding over a period of three decades. The G7 became the G8 as Russia was given a seat at the elite table. But tensions never fully resolved. Political, social and environmental problems continued to sharpen, giving rise to security concerns and a renewal of nationalist rhetoric to regain state legitimacy. In turn, rivalries became more aggressive, and the balance between globalism and nationalism began to shift.

To explore the above process, we begin with Russia’s internal transformation and the creation of its transnational capitalist class.

Scholar Oleg Komolov describes the Russian economy primarily as a supplier of resources, with the TCC deeply integrated into global capitalism. He points out how the ruling class that emerged from the privatisation of state assets occupies primarily the role of an intermediate seller of Russian commodities on world markets and is not interested in improving the efficiency of the economy, developing competitive manufacturing industries and technological progress. [Moreover] the export economy was developed with large-scale participation of foreign capital in all sectors of the economy, the artificial devaluation of the ruble and net capital outflow to countries of the center.[2]

Between 1997 and 2017, the outflow of capital exceeded inflows, with offshore havens the destination for 70 per cent of capital exports. The two most prominent outflow years were during the global crash of 2008 and the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, with a combined total of $285 billion.[3] Outside the flight to offshore havens, Russian energy TNCs had made foreign direct investments of $335.7 billion by 2017.[4]

The Russian state and private oligarchy worked together in the outflow of capital, which reduces the amount of held dollars and keeps the value of the rouble low. In turn, this helps the export of fossil fuels and minerals. According to the World Bank, the rouble is one of the world’s most undervalued currencies.[5] Oil and gas make up 65 per cent of Russian exports, but minerals and wheat also play an important role. The state has supported this process by increasing its overseas holdings in US Treasury bonds from $8 billion to $164 billion between 2007 and 2013.[6]

Keeping the value of the rouble low meant undercutting investments in the modernisation of manufacturing. The results being high import prices for machinery and agricultural inputs, as well as high consumer prices for foreign goods. In 2017, machinery and equipment made up 47 per cent of imports, and chemical products 18 per cent.[7] Thus, a low-valued rouble drove up the cost of tractors, combines, transport and machine tools, fertilisers and chemicals – a typical pattern among transnational petro-states. Privileging globalist accumulation over the national market marked the Russian ruling class with a transnational character and strategy.

Another aspect of Russia’s integration was creating an attractive market for foreign speculative capital. During the 2005–08 financial frenzy, capital flowed into Russia, benefiting from liberalisation of currency regulations. During these years, transnational capitalists sank $325 billion into Russian corporations, with large amounts going to state-owned entities like Sberbank and the energy giant Gazprom. Among the biggest investors were financial giants JPMorgan, BlackRock and Pimco.[8] Loans were also made, reaching $400 billion from some of the biggest global banks including Citigroup, HSBC, BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank. The benefits for finance capital were double: debt from loans and earnings from investments meant profits for transnational investors the world over. The outflow of profits over a twenty-year period reached $1.2 trillion, and taking on foreign liabilities certainly didn’t support the rouble.

Energy, transnational capital and sanctions

Key to the Russian economy, and indeed the world economy, are energy resources. Russia’s fossil fuel industry has been largely exempt from the sanctions in 2022, as it was in 2014. In both cases, transfer payments for energy continued to flow through the SWIFT computers, and in 2022 these were worth about $350 million per day. Between 24 February and 24 March 2022, Russia sold $19 billion in fossil fuels. The links between western oil majors and Russian TNCs deeply influences the limits and impacts of sanctions, and so deserves attention.

First, we can review the degree of joint ventures between Russian and transnational energy majors. Rosneft emerged as Russia’s largest oil producer when Putin dismantled Yukos, and sold its $90 billion in assets for just $2 billion. Western banks rushed to loan Rosneft $22 billion as it became Russia’s dominant energy company. Financial backing came from ABN Amro, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. Rosneft then raised $10.7 billion in an IPO on the London Stock Exchange with BP taking a 20 per cent stake. Other strategic investors included Petronas (Malaysia) and CNPC (China). Russian oligarchs joined in, with Roman Abramovich, Vladimir Lisin and Oleg Deripaska each investing $1 billion. As Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of Barclays and Rosneft board member, noted, Russia was ‘on the track of international economic integration’.[9] In 2006 Rosneft turned east, joining with China’s Sinopec in a $13.7 billion buyout of TNK-BP’s Udmurtneft Oil. In a key deal after the 2014 imposition of sanctions, Rosneft signed a thirty-year contract with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation worth about $400 billion. Furthermore, Exxon had a $3.2 billion Arctic offshore drilling deal with Rosneft in which the Russian TNC obtained minority stakes in the Gulf of Mexico and oil fields in Texas. Rex Tillerson, chief executive of Exxon Mobile and future Secretary of State, received the Order of Friendship award from Putin in gratitude for Exxon’s commitment.[10]

Gazprom also has a significant level of transnational integration. In developing Shtokman, one of the world’s largest gas fields, Gazprom partnered with Total from France and StatoilHydro of Norway. Total has a close relationship with the Russians. The French oil major has investments in two other Russian oil fields, and a 16 per cent stake in Novatek, the country’s largest gas producer after Gazprom. The largest foreign investment project in Russia, the Sakhalin-2 oil field, involved the British and Japanese. Although Gazprom retains majority ownership, Shell held 27.5 per cent, Mitsui 15 per cent, and Mitsubishi 10 per cent.[11]

Overall, more than 400 foreign financial institutions have provided $130 billion to Russian energy companies, $52 billion in investments and $84 billion in credit. A total of 154 US financial companies hold almost half of these investments at $23.6 billion. JPMorgan is the largest with investments and loans of $10 billion. Other major investors include Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund with $15.3 billion invested in Rosneft. The UK was the third largest investor, where 32 financial institutions contributed $2.5 billion. Other important investors come from Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Japan and China.[12]

To understand how sanctions disrupted these transnational relations, we need to investigate sanctions from 2014 and 2022. In 2014, companies weren’t banned from conducting business with Russian state-owned energy giants, although banks were sanctioned from making loans. The policy allowed protection for transnational institutional investors. But the US did move to sanction Rosneft’s president, Igor Sechin. This prompted Jack Ma, founder of China’s Alibaba, and John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley, to resign from the Rosneft board; while Donald Humphreys, former chief financial officer of Exxon Mobil, and BP chief executive Bob Dudley continued to serve. As western sanctions tightened, they did cause some difficult problems, forcing Eni, Exxon and Statoil to withdraw from a $20 billion Rosneft Arctic exploration project. But to replace the loss of advance drilling technology, Rosneft took a 30 per cent stake in North Atlantic Drilling, a subsidiary of Seadrill, the world’s largest offshore driller controlled by Norway’s richest man, John Fredriksen. Rosneft also faced problems when sanctions cut access to foreign capital markets. To counteract the sanctions, it arranged a series of prepayment deals with some of the largest western oil traders including Glencore, Trafigura and BP. Furthermore, Rosneft bought Morgan Stanley’s global oil trading business, obtaining an international network of oil tank storage contracts, supply agreements and freight shipping contracts, as well as a 49 per cent stake in Heidmar, a manager of oil tankers. So, while the 2014 sanctions caused a number of real problems, Rosneft’s transnational relationships provided important avenues to avoid major disruptions.[13]

Overall, the 2014 sanctions did hurt Russia. FDI inflows fell from $69 billion in 2013 to $21 billion in 2014. But the Obama administration also faced stiff resistance not only across Europe, but in the US as well. Hostility to the sanctions came from the two most influential US business groups, the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce. Both lobbied and took out critical ads in national newspapers, insisting that sanctions should not hurt financial institutions that held significant Russian debt. Among the corporations who lobbied against the sanctions were Exxon Mobil, BP, American Petroleum Institute, Amway, Caterpillar, Chevron and GM.[14]

In implementing sanctions, the US believed Russia would view its global business ties as too valuable to lose, and so economic pressure would force a retreat from eastern Ukraine. But from the other side of the mirror, Putin believed global business’s ties to Russia were too valuable and would undercut western sanctions. In important ways both were right, and the same dynamic is at play in 2022. In the recent crisis the US Chamber of Commerce has again lobbied Congress arguing sanctions should be ‘as targeted as possible in order to limit potential harm to the competitiveness of U.S. companies’.[15]

The magnitude of the 2022 invasion has caused the current sanctions to be deeper and broader. What Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky pointed out in 2014 is even more true today:

The situation confronting our elites … is more or less straightforward, they cannot enter actively into confrontation with the West without dealing crushing blows to their own interests, to their own capital holdings and to their own networks, methods of rule and way of life.[16]

But this is a two-way street – the West can’t sanction Russia without hurting itself, so the question becomes who hurts the most. For example, the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock took a loss of $17 billion on their Russian exposure.[17]

Because Russia is the main supplier of oil and gas to Europe, its energy industry is a major focus of new sanctions. ExxonMobil is beginning steps to exit the Sakhalin-1 project and cease operations it carries out on behalf of a consortium of Japanese, Indian and Russian companies. Shell also announced plans to leave Sakhalin and ‘withdraw all involvement in Russian hydrocarbons’.[18] BP has moved to offload its 20 per cent stake in Rosneft and may take a hit estimated at $25 billion. BP’s move comes after thirty years of joint venture. Additionally, the Singapore-based trading company Trafigura is threatening to opt out of its 10 per cent shareholding of Vostok Oil, a vast gas project led by Rosneft. And Norway’s Equinor will also begin to exit its joint ventures. But TotalEnergies, the large French transnational, while committing to no new investments, is holding on to its nearly 20 per cent of Novatek.

Yet none of these companies may end up leaving. Exxon, BP and Shell need to find someone to buy out their interests. That will not be easy in the present circumstances, and they may have to appeal to their Russian counterparts to take their shares. Furthermore, oil tankers continue to transport millions of barrels of oil from Russian ports, estimated to be worth $700 million per day. These include tankers from Greece, and those chartered by US oil giant Chevron.[19] And SWIFT payment transfers for energy continue at the above-mentioned $350 million per day. Consequently, for all the difficulties of the sanctions, global energy integration affords Russia significant amounts of capital, which helps to finance the war.

India’s case is yet another example of the complexity of transnational production. Obtaining about a 33 per cent discount from Russia, India’s oil imports have surged by 700 per cent.[20] Some of these imports go to Reliance Industries, which has the world’s largest refinery complex, and also to an affiliate of Rosneft, Nayara Energy. Using Russian crude, Indian refineries produce diesel and jet fuel, which is sold to Europe, whose imports from India have jumped. As Shell’s chief executive explained, oil substantially treated or changed loses it national origin. ‘We do not have systems in the world to trace back whether that particular molecule originated from a geological formation in Russia, [therefore] diesel going out of an Indian refinery that was fed with Russian crude is considered to be Indian diesel.’[21]

One particularly ironic aspect of transnational relations is that Russian gas flows through pipelines running through Ukraine to Italy, Austria and eastern Europe. Russia pays transport fees to the government, thus supplying funds to Ukraine even as the war raged. And, of course, gas reaching the EU means more money for Russia. It wasn’t until May 2022 that Ukraine stopped the Sokhranovka pipeline that operates from the Russian-controlled Luhansk region. The value of the gas is about $1 billion each month. But Sudzha, Russia’s main pipeline, is, at the time of writing, still in Ukrainian-held territory, allowed to operate, and expected to take on some of the lost capacity.

Another example of the complexity of transnational production is how the invasion impacted Rusal, the world’s second-largest aluminium producer, owned by Oleg Deripaska and listed on the Hong Kong market. Rusal has a joint venture with Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. But because of sanctions, their joint refinery, Queensland Alumina, will not ship products to Russia. The result is that Rusal had to halt production at its Nikolaev refinery located in Ukraine, which accounts for 23 per cent of its annual production. Nikolaev is one of the most modern refineries in the world and employs about 1,500 people. To make up the shortfall Rusal may divert production from its Aughinish refinery in Ireland to feed its Russian smelters.[22] In turn, that will reduce supplies in Europe where materials are already short. The end result is higher unemployment in Ukraine, higher prices in Europe, and a lower stock price for Rusal.

Data compiled by the Yale School of Management reported 253 TNCs are making a clean break with Russia, essentially leaving no operations behind. Some of these include Uber, Shell, Salesforce, Reebok, McKinsey, Nasdaq, eBay, Delta, Deloitte, BP, BlackRock, American Airlines and Alcoa. Another 248 companies have suspended their operations without permanently exiting or divesting. Among these are Adidas, American Express, Burger King, Chanel, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, GM, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Hyundai, IBM, McDonalds, Mastercard, Nike, Oracle, Starbucks, UPS, Visa and Xerox. Some seventy-five companies have suspended a significant portion of their business. These include Caterpillar, John Deere, Dow, GE, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Kellogg’s, Pepsico and Whirlpool. Pausing new investments are ninety-six companies. This is different from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who, while suspending some operations, continue to snatch up depressed Russian securities at very low prices. Among those pausing new investments are Cargill, Colgate-Palmolive, Credit Suisse, Danone, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens and Unilever. The total so far is 672 companies taking various forms of action. Yale reported 162 companies staying the course, including Acer, Alibaba, International Paper, Koch, and Lenovo.[23]

Some funds not appearing in the Yale report include the important financial centres in Singapore, which has halted any new economic activity with four major Russian banks. And Singapore’s large sovereign wealth funds, which have about $6 billion invested in Russia, have also suspended activity.[24] Two of China’s largest state-owned banks are limiting loans for purchases of Russian commodities.[25] The New Development Bank, established by Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa, put new transactions on hold. And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, whose major shareholder is China, stopped its projects in Russia and Belarus. As of the middle of March 2022, there were more than 3,600 sanctions on Russian individuals and companies.

Table 1: Estimated and potential losses of companies leaving Russia[26]

The rush to boycott Russia reminds one of the corporate rush to endorse Black Lives Matter; essentially a marketing strategy to stay in front of popular politics. And while the costs are disruptive, transnational corporations are large enough to swallow such losses. For example, as the price for oil rose, Shell increased its early quarterly profits by 300 per cent to $9.1 billion – already enough to cover its projected $5 billion loss. Most of these sanctions will only harm the Russian people without having any real effect on the ruling class or the invasion. Russian citizens are already experiencing a dramatic decline in purchasing power and may soon face growing unemployment and a lack of consumer goods. The larger developing crisis is in world food supplies as Russia and Ukraine export a significant amount of the world’s wheat, corn, barley and sunflower oil. Shortages and price increases will hit the poor in the Global South the hardest.

Financial institutions and the TCC

Because of the integration of the global financial system, Russian capital was exposed to severe sanctions in 2022 that constituted a geo-economic break. There has been a general belief in the sanctity of foreign reserves. The US often talks about a ‘rules-based world order’. This includes open capital markets and accounts, deeply integrated financial markets, and benchmark assets in US dollars. Putin counted on all of this to keep the Russian economy functioning during the invasion. But seven of the largest Russian banks have been removed from the SWIFT interbank system. This severely limits the ability to pay for imports or receive payment for exports, as SWIFT is used to link funds for transnational deals. Russia’s central bank also kept about half its $630 billion dollars and euro reserves in foreign institutions residing in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, and from $86 to $140 billion in Chinese bonds. Except for the Chinese holdings, these funds are now frozen, causing the rouble to lose about 40 per cent of its value, although with capital controls the rouble regained most of its value. Moreover, the collapse of Russian corporate stocks triggered the multi-week closure of the Russian stock market. And both Moody and Fitch downgraded Russian sovereign debt to ‘junk’. Russia is moving towards its first foreign currency debt default in one hundred years, but, as of May 2022, was still making payments using money from energy exports.

The severity of the economic sanctions is a radical step. Even during the second world war, relations between the Bank of England and the Reichsbank continued into the 1940s. And the Bank of International Settlements continued to allow the German central bank access to its clearing and settlement facilities throughout the war.

As Dominik Leusder points out:

More than any armed conflict, the current international monetary system has laid bare the folly of this romantic liberal portrait of globalisation. The sanctions against Russia are the clearest manifestation yet of a distinct undercurrent of financial globalisation … the West’s ability to coerce states has only increased as a function of their integration [so] as Russia became a central node [of] the global economy, it became more vulnerable.[27]

And yet western investors and companies are also in danger, as sanctions over the transfer of funds may mean Russia defaults on billions in loans. Facing such problems, US authorities gave the okay to JPMorgan to process interest payments due on dollar bonds from the Russian government. Citigroup is another payment agent for about fifty corporate bonds tied to Russian TNCs like Gazprom and MMC Norilsk Nickel. [28] Furthermore, the important financial institution Gazprombank is spared from sanctions and continues to be a conduit for commodity transactions. For example, working with Citibank it helped Brazil purchase Russian fertiliser, which is not sanctioned. Thus, the flow of capital continues, at least in part, despite sanctions.

Again, Leusder provides insightful analysis:

As globalization underwrote Putin’s militarism and his increasingly hostile posture toward Russia’s neighbors, it simultaneously rendered the country’s economy fatally reliant: on the net demand from other countries such as Germany and China; on imports of crucial goods such as machinery, transportation equipment, pharmaceutical and electronics, mostly from Europe; on access to the global dollar system to finance and conduct trade … This is one way to construe the deceptively simple insight of Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman’s theory of weaponized interdependence: the logic of financial globalization that generated Russia’s trade surplus and gave Putin room to maneuver also provided the economic and financial weaponry that was turned against him.[29]

Thus, a nationalist strategy to reconstitute the Russian empire, using the profits and ties that come with globalisation, is undercut by the contradiction of those same ties and relationships.

Weaponised interdependence is a good description of the financial markets in metals. Alongside Russian fossil fuels are its exports of metals, including copper, alumina and nickel, which is used in making stainless steel and batteries for electric cars. Here are the complications of transnational capitalism. Tsingshan Holding Group in China is the world’s largest nickel producer, China’s second largest steel producer, and is involved in electric vehicle batteries. Tsingshan made an enormous $3 billion bet shorting the price of nickel, counting on its own increased production in creating an abundance of supplies. This bet was made on the London Metal Exchange (LME), which is a unit of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited. With the Russian invasion, although nickel was not sanctioned, fear took hold of the market and prices jumped 250 per cent. The short bet based on lowering cost was a disaster. Trade chaos took hold, leaving Tsingshan with two choices. Either deliver tons of nickel or pay for margin calls, which means coming up with the cash or securities to cover potential losses. But Tsingshan only held 30,000 tons of its 150,000-ton bet. The remainder was held by JPMorgan, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered and United Overseas Bank. On the cusp of a global financial disaster, LME suspended trading and retroactively cancelled $3.9 billion of trades, blaming banks for preventing efforts to create greater transparency that could have revealed the interconnected problem.[30] Consequently, the Russian invasion set off a financial crisis that punished transnational capitalists that have no part in the war.

Facing sanctions, oligarchs can’t be happy with the war, and a number have stated their opposition. Nevertheless, the global financial system has been built to safely hide their money, as well as the wealth of others in the TCC. It’s estimated that oligarchs have hidden about half their wealth offshore, amounting to some $200 billion. Somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 Russians hold more than $10 million each in offshore assets and havens.[31] Still, that is significantly less than their American counterparts who have an estimated $1.2 trillion in offshore tax havens. Much of the Russian money is in US, UK and EU assets. Transparency International has estimated about $2 billion just in UK property.[32]

But much of this wealth is difficult to discover because the TCC has structured international laws to hide wealth in complex trusts and shell corporations.[33] Global accounting firms PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY helped oligarchs move money to offshore shell companies for years before currently withdrawing services. Rosneft, VTB, Alfa Bank, Gazprom and Sberbank have been represented by leading US law firms, including White & Case, DLA Piper, Dechert, Latham & Watkins and Baker Botts. And Baker McKenzie, one of the world’s largest law firms, continues to represent some of Russia’s largest companies, including Gazprom and VTB.[34] Concord Management specialised in serving ultra-wealthy Russians, helping them invest in hedge funds, private equity and real estate. Since 1999, Concord has channelled billions to BlackRock, Carlyle Group and others. Wall Street banks such as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley often acted as intermediators, linking Concord to hedge funds.[35] Such well-worn networks tie the Russian TCC to global capitalists and financial institutions in a mutually beneficial relationship, and creates a shared culture that exalts the privileges of wealth and common ideas about how the world economic system works.

Capitalists the world over make use of sophisticated accountants, bankers and lawyers to hide their assets. An agent will set up an offshore shell company in a country with little transparency. This company then creates more shells in other low-transparency jurisdictions – about forty-two exist across the world, including the US states of Delaware and South Dakota. This allows the ‘ultimate beneficial owner’, often unknown, to have multiple bank accounts and the ability to move money and invest without any scrutiny. Government investigators in both the US and the UK regularly ignore suspicious banking activity. In 2018, the EU passed regulations demanding access to information on the ownership of European companies nested in shell companies. Yet in 2022 no such registry exists. Congress passed a transparency law in 2021 with a $63 million budget, but never provided the money to the Treasury Department. Consequently, the effort to sanction oligarchs is undercut by the global financial system built to the demands of the TCC, of which Russian capitalists are members. While some pressure is being directed on the oligarchs, the system of hidden cross-border capital flows is too valuable to end, allowing the Russian TCC to escape greater harm.

A good example of how shell corporations function is the effort to sanction Arcady Rotenberg. Rotenberg is worth about $3 billion with an estimated $91 million invested in the US and a $35 million mansion outside London, bought through an entity in the British Virgin Islands. He has at least 200 companies located across dozens of countries. Even after coming under sanctions in 2014, Rotenberg became the owner of two additional companies located in Luxembourg, well known as a haven for billionaires. Although senate investigators found countless bank filings on suspicious Rotenberg activities, none of them have been investigated by the Treasury Department.

As Cihan Tuğal reminds us, Putin and his cronies

are a solid part of world capitalism, and their apparently insane actions are intended to produce a better place at the table. They want to be recognized as legitimate imperialists in the new, post-Wilson and post-Lenin world of the 21st century … [Putin] is not only serving his ego, but a capitalist class fostered by post-1991 reforms, which were selective appropriations of free market ideas. The gang of cronies is not Putin’s creation alone. It is an outcome of transnational dynamics. This class is hungry for markets, and it cannot help but look for ways to burst out of Russia.[36]

German/Russian economic relations

Moving from a picture of transnational markets, industries and finance, we can explore the specific relationship between Germany and Russia. Germany as the largest European economy is also the most integrated with Russia. For Russia, it’s their most important economic partner alongside China. In 2021, German exports to Russia were worth more than $28.4 billion, and it invested a further €25 billion in operations.[37] Germany still depends on Russia for about 55 per cent of its natural gas, 35 per cent of its oil, and half its coal.

Before 2014, there were 7,000 German companies inside Russia representing some of the largest TNCs in the world, such as Adidas, BASF, Siemens, Volkswagen, Opel and Daimler. On the financial side, all major German commercial banks were active in Russia. In terms of oil and gas, Germany’s biggest energy group Eon was the largest foreign shareholder in Gazprom, which, alongside BASF, was building the $6.6 billion Baltic Sea pipeline. The Germans held 20 per cent of the Nord Stream joint venture, with former chancellor Gerhard Schröder as chairman and Matthias Warnig of Dresdner Bank its chief executive. Even after the seizure of Crimea, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser confirmed its commitment to Russia to sell trains, energy infrastructure, medical technology and manufacturing automation technology. Cross-border deals also continued, with RWE selling its oil and gas subsidiary to Russia’s LetterOne for over $7.5 billion. But, with the 2014 sanctions, German trade with Russia dropped by 35 per cent, and German firms investing in Russia dropped to just under 4,000 by 2020.[38]

Now the invasion of Ukraine has shaken the German/Russian relationship in a very significant manner, particularly in the auto and energy industries. Wintershall Dea, an oil and gas TNC, will stop payments to Russia and write off its €1 billion investment in Nord Stream 2. Additionally, it will not receive revenues from its Russian operations, which accounted for about 20 per cent of its 2021 profits. The company issued a statement on the turmoil caused by the invasion lamenting,

What is happening now is shaking the very foundations of our cooperation. We have been working in Russia for over 30 years … We have built many personal relationships – including in our joint ventures with Gazprom. But the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine marks a turning point.[39]

Nord Stream 2 has been a contentious issue between the US and Germany for years. The pipeline running through the Baltic goes directly to Germany. The US has pressured Germany to end the project, but Angela Merkel refused to do so. The project, worth $11 billion, is registered as a Swiss firm whose parent company is Gazprom. Gazprom owns the pipeline and paid half the costs, the rest shared by Shell, Austria’s OMV, France’s Engie, and Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall DEA.[40] The invasion has prompted Germany to halt the project. The suspension of Nord Stream 2 may not be permanent, but even a temporary suspension is a huge shift.

Russia exports fifty-six billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas to Germany yearly. Inside Germany, Gazprom owns and operates thousands of miles of pipeline, key storage facilities, and the largest underground storage tank for natural gas in western Europe. Russia also supplies German refineries with a third of their oil, a number with long-term contracts that Russia is not willing to cancel. Particularly ironic are the weapons sent by the German government to Ukraine that use steel produced in German factories powered by coal coming from Russia. As Putin has stated:

Let German citizens open their purses, have a look inside and ask themselves whether they are ready to pay three to five times more for electricity, for gas and for heating … You can’t isolate a country like Russia in the long run, neither politically nor economically. German industry needs the raw materials that Russia has. It’s not just oil and gas, it’s also rare earths. And these are raw materials that cannot simply be substituted.[41]

Turmoil has also hit the auto industry. Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW halted production in Russia, and also suspended all vehicle exports. But the invasion has had an even bigger impact because of the coordination of production between Ukraine and European auto companies. With its low labour costs and educated workforce, Ukraine became a manufacturing centre of systems which connect electronic components, like tail lights and car entertainment systems. The work, done by hand, requires a large number of skilled workers. The fighting brought production to a sudden halt, and within days the lack of parts shut down European factories. BMW shut several plants in Germany, Austria and Britain, while VW was brought to a standstill at multiple locations, including its main site in Wolfsburg. Electric vehicle production at Zwickau stopped, including its SUV exports to the US, and Porsche idled manufacturing the Cayenne sport utility vehicle in Leipzig. As Jack Ewing noted:

No car can operate without wiring systems, which are often tailor-made to specific vehicles. So-called wiring harnesses are among the first components to be installed in a new vehicle, and their absence brings assembly lines to a standstill.[42]

Furthermore, Ukraine is also a major source of neon, a gas used for high-performance lasers required for production of scarce semiconductors, adding more woes to the industry.

None of these economic disruptions are welcomed by the TCC. But the German government has taken a major step away from its previous positions. At first opposed to banning Russia from SWIFT, and refusing to send arms to Ukraine, it has now reversed on both those issues. And the sizeable increase in its military budget surprised everyone. Although transnational links are deep, for now geopolitical tensions are riding roughshod over economic concerns. But such concerns have not gone away. The New York Times observes that ‘multiple cracks’ have already occurred over ‘lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth’, as well as lower employment.[43] As Martin Brudermüller, the chief executive of the chemical giant BASF stated, ‘Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness’.[44] And again, ‘Do we want to blindly destroy our entire national economy? What we have built up over decades?’[45] What is true for BASF is true for the German economy, whose success is built upon cheap gas from Russia and exports to China.

Conclusion

There are a number of questions not explored in this article. NATO’s eastward expansion, Great Russian chauvinism, fascist forces in both Russia and Ukraine, the meaning of independence and self-determination, US hypocrisy on foreign interventions, China’s role, and growing debates within the Left over the war. All these topics already have a growing and substantial body of literature. Also, events continue to rapidly develop and so the article has some time limitations. But the deeper issues on the intersections between national geopolitics and transnational economics, and how the resulting contradictions affect the war, will continue. What is clearly evident is that global capitalism has plunged the world into yet another crisis. A crisis that ignores a pandemic that threatens the health of every human on the planet, and an environmental crisis that threatens every species. The failure is staggering in its ignorance.

What the new global configuration will look like is difficult to tell. Much depends on how the conflict ends. A long-term occupation will freeze Russia’s transnational links, a rapid conclusion may mean the easing of sanctions. The invasion is a further deconstruction of the global capitalist system built over the past forty years of neoliberal hegemony. But there are still many trillions of dollars in cross-border accumulation, and global assembly lines continue to churn out commodities in a coordinated system of production and trade. The current problems in logistics and supplies are not because of too little demand, but because of too much, with the infrastructure of ports, shipping and transportation actually too limited. Such problems might call for an expansion of globalisation, which is at the heart of China’s Belt and Road strategy. But economic, political and social disruptions cause states to look to their own national security. As a result, the contradictions between national and transnational forces continue to be the nexus for world events, changing the balance of forces into new configurations of struggle.

This complex relationship between nationalism and globalism needs to be understood through historical materialism, which defines the world as a continual process of movement. Marx saw everything in motion – production, distribution, environmental metabolic relationships, the class struggle, and all human interactions. Change was driven by the balance between opposing forces, and the results were defined by the power between the aspects. How much of the old that remained, and how much of the new that was asserted, continually set the conditions for the movement to continue. This process of motion and change results in contradictions unfolding in many different forms. There is no historic queue in which socialism waits its turn to appear at the front of the line.

In the current capitalist world, neither nation-centric nor transnational relationships exist in isolation from the other. They exist in the same institutions and continually define and determine each other within a changing balance of forces. This unity of opposites in tension and conflict is what produces the historic transformation towards a new synthesis. No outcome is predetermined, but produced by the dynamic itself. Consequently, what aspects of nation-centric relationships survive or re-emerge depend on the agency of political struggle. Under pressure of globalist economic and environmental crisis, nationalist antagonisms have rematerialised, but within the context of transnational relationships. Globalisation didn’t create the ‘end of history’ because the past continues to exist in the present.[46]

We can see this contradiction in the balance between national and transnational forces in the Russian invasion. A balance in which nationalism and inter-state conflict has grown stronger as the forty-year hegemony of neoliberal globalisation has faced a series of economic, environmental and social crises. As the balance of power shifts, aspects of the old system reassert themselves, but deeply affected and redefined by the changes globalisation engendered. Old ideas and conflicts may re-emerge, yet they are never the same, but contextualised through the new forces that have asserted themselves. So, in analysing the Russia/Ukraine/NATO conflict, we must be careful not to place it in the world of the 1960s, but a world deeply restructured by transnational capitalism.

References

By Ian Angus

Climate & Capitalism

Sep 07, 2022

In Part Eight of Capital, titled “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx describes the brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence, and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists. It’s one of the most dramatic and readable parts of the book.

It is also a continuing source of confusion and debate. Literally dozens of articles have tried to explain what “primitive accumulation” really meant. Did it occur only in the distant past, or does it continue today? Was “primitive” a mistranslation? Should the name be changed? What exactly was “Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation”?

In this article, written for my coming book on The War Against the Commons, I argue that Marx thought “primitive accumulation” was a misleading and erroneous concept. Understanding what he actually wrote shines light on two essential Marxist concepts: exploitation and expropriation.

This is a draft, not my final word. I look forward to your comments, corrections and suggestions.

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On June 20 and 27, 1865, Karl Marx gave a two-part lecture to members of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) in London. In clear and direct English, he drew on insights that would appear in the nearly-finished first volume of Capital, to explain the labor theory of value, surplus value, class struggle, and the importance of trade unions as “centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital.”1 Since an English translation of Capital wasn’t published until after his death, those talks were the only opportunity that English-speaking workers had to learn those ideas directly from their author.

While explaining how workers sell their ability to work, Marx asked rhetorically how it came about that there are two types of people in the market–capitalists who own the means of production, and workers who must sell their labor-power in order to survive.

How does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence, all of them, save land in its crude state, the products of labour, and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains? That the one set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood?

A full answer was outside the scope of his lecture, he said, but “the inquiry into this question would be an inquiry into what the economists call ‘Previous, or Original Accumulation,’ but which ought to be called Original Expropriation.”

“We should find that this so-called Original Accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a Decomposition of the Original Union existing between the Labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour.… The Separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.”

Marx was always very careful in his use of words. He didn’t replace accumulation with expropriation lightly. The switch is particularly important because this was the only time he discussed the issue in English–it wasn’t filtered through a translation.

In Capital, the subject occupies eight chapters in the part titled Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation–later rendered in English translations as “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” Once again, Marx’s careful use of words is important–he added “so-called” to make a point, that the historical processes were not primitive and not accumulation. Much of the confusion about Marx’s meaning reflects failure to understand his ironic intent, here and elsewhere.

In the first paragraph he tells us that ‘ursprüngliche’ Akkumulation is his translation of Adam Smith’s words previous accumulation. He put the word ursprüngliche (previous) in scare quotes, signaling that the word is inappropriate. For some reason the quote marks are omitted in the English translations, so his irony is lost.

In the 1800s, primitive was a synonym for original–for example, the Primitive Methodist Church claimed to follow the original teachings of Methodism. As a result, the French edition of Capital, which Marx edited in the 1870s, translated ursprüngliche as primitive; that carried over to the 1887 English translation, and we have been stuck with primitive accumulation ever since, even though the word’s meaning has changed.

Marx explains why he used so-called and scare quotes by comparing the idea of previous accumulation to the Christian doctrine that we all suffer because Adam and Eve sinned in a distant mythical past. Proponents of previous accumulation tell an equivalent nursery tale:

Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. … Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work.

“Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defense of property,” but when we consider actual history, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” The chapters of So-called Primitive Accumulation describe the brutal processes by which “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”

These newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

Marx’s account focuses on expropriation in England, because the dispossession of working people was most complete there, but he also refers to the mass murder of indigenous people in the Americas, the plundering of India, and the trade in African slaves–“these idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.” That sentence, and others like it, illustrate Marx’s consistently sarcastic take on primitive accumulation. He is not describing primitive accumulation, he is condemning those who use the concept to conceal the brutal reality of expropriation.

Failure to understand that Marx was polemicizing against the concept of “primitive accumulation” has led to another misconception–that Marx thought it occurred only in the distant past, when capitalism was being born. That was what Adam Smith and other pro-capitalist writers meant by previous accumulation, and as we’ve seen, Marx compared that view to the Garden of Eden myth. Marx’s chapters on so-called primitive accumulation emphasized the violent expropriations that laid the basis for early capitalism because he was responding to the claim that capitalism evolved peacefully. But his account also includes the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the Highland Clearances in capitalist Scotland, the colonial-created famine that killed a million people in Orissa in India in 1866, and plans for enclosing and privatizing land in Australia. All of these took place during Marx’s lifetime and while he was writing Capital. None of them were part of capitalism’s prehistory.

The expropriations that occurred in capitalism’s first centuries were devastating, but far from complete. In Marx’s view, capital could not rest there–its ultimate goal was “to expropriate all individuals from the means of production.”2 Elsewhere he wrote of big capitalists “dispossessing the smaller capitalists and expropriating the final residue of direct producers who still have something left to expropriate.”3 In other words, expropriation continues well after capitalism matures.

We often use the word accumulation loosely, for gathering up or hoarding, but for Marx it had a specific meaning, the increase of capital by the addition of surplus value,4 a continuous process that results from the exploitation of wage-labor. The examples he describes in “So-called Primitive Accumulation” all refer to robbery, dispossession, and expropriation–discrete appropriations without equivalent exchange. Expropriation, not accumulation.

In the history of capitalism, we see a constant, dialectical interplay between the two forms of class robbery that Peter Linebaugh has dubbed X2–expropriation and exploitation.

Expropriation is prior to exploitation, yet the two are interdependent. Expropriation not only prepares the ground, so to speak, it intensifies exploitation.5

Expropriation is open robbery. It includes forced enclosure, dispossession, slavery and other forms of theft, without equivalent exchange. Exploitation is concealed robbery. Workers appear to receive full payment for their labor in the form of wages, but in fact the employer receives more value than he pays for.

What Adam Smith and others described as a gradual build up of wealth by men who were more industrious and frugal than others was actually violent, forcible expropriation that created the original context for exploitation and has continued to expand it ever since. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in The Robbery of Nature:

Like any complex, dynamic system, capitalism has both an inner force that propels it and objective conditions outside itself that set its boundaries, the relations to which are forever changing. The inner dynamic of the system is governed by the process of exploitation of labor power, under the guise of equal exchange, while its primary relation to its external environment is one of expropriation.6

In short, Marx did not have a “theory of primitive accumulation.” He devoted eight chapters of Capital to demonstrating that the political economists who promoted such a theory were wrong, that it was a “nursery tale” invented to whitewash capital’s real history.

Marx’s preference for “original expropriation” wasn’t just playing with words. That expression captured his view that “the expropriation from the land of the direct producers–private ownership for some, involving non-ownership of the land for others–is the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”7

The continuing separation of humanity from our direct relationship with the earth was not and is not a peaceful process: it is written in letters of blood and fire.

That’s why he preceded the words “primitive accumulation” by “so-called.”

Notes:
1 Quotations from Marx’s 1865 lectures, “Value, Price and Profit,” are from Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 20, 103-149. Quotations from “So-Called Primitive Accumulation” are from Marx, Capital vol. 1 (Penguin, 1976) 873-940.
2 Marx, Capital vol. 3, (Penguin, 1981) 571.
3 Ibid, 349.
4 See chapters 24 and 25 of Capital vol. 1.
5 Linebaugh, Stop Thief! (PM Press, 2014), 73.
6 Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2020), 36.
7 Marx, Capital vol. 3 (Penguin, 1981) 948. Emphasis added.

About Ian Angus
Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011), editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016). His latest book is A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017).

How Hegemony Ends: The Unraveling of American Power

By Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon
Foreign Affairs July/August 2020

Multiple signs point to a crisis in global order. The uncoordinated international response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic downturns, the resurgence of nationalist politics, and the hardening of state borders all seem to herald the emergence of a less cooperative and more fragile international system. According to many observers, these developments underscore the dangers of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America first” policies and his retreat from global leadership.

Even before the pandemic, Trump routinely criticized the value of alliances and institutions such as NATO, supported the breakup of the European Union, withdrew from a host of international agreements and organizations, and pandered to autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He has questioned the merits of placing liberal values such as democracy and human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Trump’s clear preference for zero-sum, transactional politics further supports the notion that the United States is abandoning its commitment to promoting a liberal international order.

Some analysts believe that the United States can still turn this around, by restoring the strategies by which it, from the end of World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War, built and sustained a successful international order. If a post-Trump United States could reclaim the responsibilities of global power, then this era—including the pandemic that will define it—could stand as a temporary aberration rather than a step on the way to permanent disarray.

After all, predictions of American decline and a shift in international order are far from new—and they have been consistently wrong. In the middle of the 1980s, many analysts believed that U.S. leadership was on the way out. The Bretton Woods system had collapsed in the 1970s; the United States faced increasing competition from European and East Asian economies, notably West Germany and Japan; and the Soviet Union looked like an enduring feature of world politics. By the end of 1991, however, the Soviet Union had formally dissolved, Japan was entering its “lost decade” of economic stagnation, and the expensive task of integration consumed a reunified Germany. The United States experienced a decade of booming technological innovation and unexpectedly high economic growth. The result was what many hailed as a “unipolar moment” of American hegemony.

But this time really is different. The very forces that made U.S. hegemony so durable before are today driving its dissolution. Three developments enabled the post–Cold War U.S.-led order. First, with the defeat of communism, the United States faced no major global ideological project that could rival its own. Second, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its accompanying infrastructure of institutions and partnerships, weaker states lacked significant alternatives to the United States and its Western allies when it came to securing military, economic, and political support. And third, transnational activists and movements were spreading liberal values and norms that bolstered the liberal order.

Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.

THE VANISHING UNIPOLAR MOMENT

It may seem strange to talk of permanent decline when the United States spends more on its military than its next seven rivals combined and maintains an unparalleled network of overseas military bases. Military power played an important role in creating and maintaining U.S. preeminence in the 1990s and early years of this century; no other country could extend credible security guarantees across the entire international system. But U.S. military dominance was less a function of defense budgets—in real terms, U.S. military spending decreased during the 1990s and only ballooned after the September 11 attacks—than of several other factors: the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a competitor, the growing technological advantage enjoyed by the U.S. military, and the willingness of most of the world’s second-tier powers to rely on the United States rather than build up their own military forces. If the emergence of the United States as a unipolar power was mostly contingent on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, then the continuation of that unipolarity through the subsequent decade stemmed from the fact that Asian and European allies were content to subscribe to U.S. hegemony.

Talk of the unipolar moment obscures crucial features of world politics that formed the basis of U.S. dominance. The breakup of the Soviet Union finally closed the door on the only project of global ordering that could rival capitalism. Marxism-Leninism (and its offshoots) mostly disappeared as a source of ideological competition. Its associated transnational infrastructure—its institutions, practices, and networks, including the Warsaw Pact, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and the Soviet Union itself—all imploded. Without Soviet support, most Moscow-affiliated countries, insurgent groups, and political movements decided it was better to either throw in the towel or get on the U.S. bandwagon. By the middle of the 1990s, there existed only one dominant framework for international norms and rules: the liberal international system of alliances and institutions anchored in Washington.

The United States and its allies—referred to in breezy shorthand as “the West”—together enjoyed a de facto patronage monopoly during the period of unipolarity. With some limited exceptions, they offered the only significant source of security, economic goods, and political support and legitimacy. Developing countries could no longer exert leverage over Washington by threatening to turn to Moscow or point to the risk of a communist takeover to shield themselves from having to make domestic reforms. The sweep of Western power and influence was so untrammeled that many policymakers came to believe in the permanent triumph of liberalism. Most governments saw no viable alternative.

During the 1990s, most governments saw no viable alternative to Western sources of support.
With no other source of support, countries were more likely to adhere to the conditions of the Western aid they received. Autocrats faced severe international criticism and heavy demands from Western-controlled international organizations. Yes, democratic powers continued to protect certain autocratic states (such as oil-rich Saudi Arabia) from such demands for strategic and economic reasons. And leading democracies, including the United States, themselves violated international norms concerning human, civil, and political rights, most dramatically in the form of torture and extraordinary renditions during the so-called war on terror. But even these hypocritical exceptions reinforced the hegemony of the liberal order, because they sparked widespread condemnation that reaffirmed liberal principles and because U.S. officials continued to voice commitment to liberal norms.

Meanwhile, an expanding number of transnational networks—often dubbed “international civil society”—propped up the emerging architecture of the post–Cold War international order. These groups and individuals served as the foot soldiers of U.S. hegemony by spreading broadly liberal norms and practices. The collapse of centrally planned economies in the postcommunist world invited waves of Western consultants and contractors to help usher in market reforms—sometimes with disastrous consequences, as in Russia and Ukraine, where Western-backed shock therapy impoverished tens of millions while creating a class of wealthy oligarchs who turned former state assets into personal empires. International financial institutions, government regulators, central bankers, and economists worked to build an elite consensus in favor of free trade and the movement of capital across borders.

Civil society groups also sought to steer postcommunist and developing countries toward Western models of liberal democracy. Teams of Western experts advised governments on the design of new constitutions, legal reforms, and multiparty systems. International observers, most of them from Western democracies, monitored elections in far-flung countries. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advocating the expansion of human rights, gender equality, and environmental protections forged alliances with sympathetic states and media outlets. The work of transnational activists, scholarly communities, and social movements helped build an overarching liberal project of economic and political integration. Throughout the 1990s, these forces helped produce an illusion of an unassailable liberal order resting on durable U.S. global hegemony. That illusion is now in tatters.

THE GREAT-POWER COMEBACK

Today, other great powers offer rival conceptions of global order, often autocratic ones that appeal to many leaders of weaker states. The West no longer presides over a monopoly of patronage. New regional organizations and illiberal transnational networks contest U.S. influence. Long-term shifts in the global economy, particularly the rise of China, account for many of these developments. These changes have transformed the geopolitical landscape.

In April 1997, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Boris Yeltsin pledged “to promote the multipolarization of the world and the establishment of a new international order.” For years, many Western scholars and policymakers downplayed or dismissed such challenges as wishful rhetoric. Beijing remained committed to the rules and norms of the U.S.-led order, they argued, pointing out that China continued to benefit from the current system. Even as Russia grew increasingly assertive in its condemnation of the United States in the first decade of this century and called for a more multipolar world, observers didn’t think that Moscow could muster support from any significant allies. Analysts in the West specifically doubted that Beijing and Moscow could overcome decades of mistrust and rivalry to cooperate against U.S. efforts to maintain and shape the international order.

Such skepticism made sense at the height of U.S. global hegemony in the 1990s and even remained plausible through much of the following decade. But the 1997 declaration now looks like a blueprint for how Beijing and Moscow have tried to reorder international politics in the last 20 years. China and Russia now directly contest liberal aspects of the international order from within that order’s institutions and forums; at the same time, they are building an alternative order through new institutions and venues in which they wield greater influence and can de-emphasize human rights and civil liberties.

At the United Nations, for example, the two countries routinely consult on votes and initiatives. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, they have coordinated their opposition to criticize Western interventions and calls for regime change; they have vetoed Western-sponsored proposals on Syria and efforts to impose sanctions on Venezuela and Yemen. In the UN General Assembly, between 2006 and 2018, China and Russia voted the same way 86 percent of the time, more frequently than during the 78 percent voting accord the two shared between 1991 and 2005. By contrast, since 2005, China and the United States have agreed only 21 percent of the time. Beijing and Moscow have also led UN initiatives to promote new norms, most notably in the arena of cyberspace, that privilege national sovereignty over individual rights, limit the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, and curtail the power of Western-sponsored human rights resolutions.

China and Russia have also been at the forefront of creating new international institutions and regional forums that exclude the United States and the West more broadly. Perhaps the most well known of these is the BRICS grouping, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Since 2006, the group has presented itself as a dynamic setting for the discussion of matters of international order and global leadership, including building alternatives to Western-controlled institutions in the areas of Internet governance, international payment systems, and development assistance. In 2016, the BRICS countries created the New Development Bank, which is dedicated to financing infrastructure projects in the developing world.

China and Russia have each also pushed a plethora of new regional security organizations—including the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism—and economic institutions, including the Chinese-run Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Russian-backed Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—a security organization that promotes cooperation among security services and oversees biennial military exercises—was founded in 2001 at the initiative of both Beijing and Moscow. It added India and Pakistan as full members in 2017. The net result is the emergence of parallel structures of global governance that are dominated by authoritarian states and that compete with older, more liberal structures.

China and Russia have been at the forefront of creating new forums that exclude the United States.
Critics often dismiss the BRICS, the EAEU, and the SCO as “talk shops” in which member states do little to actually resolve problems or otherwise engage in meaningful cooperation. But most other international institutions are no different. Even when they prove unable to solve collective problems, regional organizations allow their members to affirm common values and boost the stature of the powers that convene these forums. They generate denser diplomatic ties among their members, which, in turn, make it easier for those members to build military and political coalitions. In short, these organizations constitute a critical part of the infrastructure of international order, an infrastructure that was dominated by Western democracies after the end of the Cold War. Indeed, this new array of non-Western organizations has brought transnational governance mechanisms into regions such as Central Asia, which were previously disconnected from many institutions of global governance. Since 2001, most Central Asian states have joined the SCO, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, the EAEU, the AIIB, and the Chinese infrastructure investment project known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

China and Russia are also now pushing into areas traditionally dominated by the United States and its allies; for example, China convenes the 17+1 group with states in central and eastern Europe and the China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum in Latin America. These groupings provide states in these regions with new arenas for partnership and support while also challenging the cohesion of traditional Western blocs; just days before the 16+1 group expanded to include the EU member Greece in April 2020, the European Commission moved to designate China a “systemic rival” amid concerns that BRI deals in Europe were undercutting EU regulations and standards.

Beijing and Moscow appear to be successfully managing their alliance of convenience, defying predictions that they would be unable to tolerate each other’s international projects. This has even been the case in areas in which their divergent interests could lead to significant tensions. Russia vocally supports China’s BRI, despite its inroads into Central Asia, which Moscow still considers its backyard. In fact, since 2017, the Kremlin’s rhetoric has shifted from talking about a clearly demarcated Russian “sphere of influence” in Eurasia to embracing a “Greater Eurasia” in which Chinese-led investment and integration dovetails with Russian efforts to shut out Western influence. Moscow followed a similar pattern when Beijing first proposed the formation of the AIIB in 2015. The Russian Ministry of Finance initially refused to back the bank, but the Kremlin changed course after seeing which way the wind was blowing; Russia formally joined the bank at the end of the year.

China has also proved willing to accommodate Russian concerns and sensitivities. China joined the other BRICS countries in abstaining from condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, even though doing so clearly contravened China’s long-standing opposition to separatism and violations of territorial integrity. Moreover, the Trump administration’s trade war with China has given Beijing additional incentives to support Russian efforts to develop alternatives to the Western-controlled SWIFT international payment system and dollar-denominated trade so as to undermine the global reach of U.S. sanctions regimes.

THE END OF THE PATRONAGE MONOPOLY

China and Russia are not the only states seeking to make world politics more favorable to nondemocratic regimes and less amenable to U.S. hegemony. As early as 2007, lending by “rogue donors” such as then oil-rich Venezuela raised the possibility that such no-strings-attached assistance might undermine Western aid initiatives designed to encourage governments to embrace liberal reforms.

Since then, Chinese state-affiliated lenders, such as the China Development Bank, have opened substantial lines of credit across Africa and the developing world. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, China became an important source of loans and emergency funding for countries that could not access, or were excluded from, Western financial institutions. During the financial crisis, China extended over $75 billion in loans for energy deals to countries in Latin America—Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela—and to Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan in Eurasia.

China is not the only alternative patron. After the Arab Spring, Gulf states such as Qatar lent money to Egypt, allowing Cairo to avoid turning to the International Monetary Fund during a turbulent time. But China has been by far the most ambitious country in this regard. An AidData study found that total Chinese foreign aid assistance between 2000 and 2014 reached $354 billion, nearing the U.S. total of $395 billion. China has since surpassed annual U.S. aid disbursals. Moreover, Chinese aid undermines Western efforts to spread liberal norms. Several studies suggest that although Chinese funds have fueled development in many countries, they also have stoked blatant corruption and habits of regime patronage. In countries emerging from war, such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and South Sudan, Chinese development and reconstruction aid flowed to victorious governments, insulating them from international pressure to accommodate their domestic foes and adopt more liberal models of peacemaking and reconciliation.

Chinese state-affiliated lenders have opened substantial lines of credit across the developing world.
The end of the West’s monopoly on patronage has seen the concurrent rise of fiery populist nationalists even in countries that were firmly embedded in the United States’ economic and security orbit. The likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte have painted themselves as guardians of domestic sovereignty against liberal subversion. They dismiss Western concerns about democratic backsliding in their countries and emphasize the growing importance of their economic and security relationships with China and Russia. In the case of the Philippines, Duterte recently terminated a two-decade-old military treaty with the United States after Washington canceled the visa of the former national chief of police, who is accused of human rights violations in the Philippines’ bloody and controversial war on drugs.

Of course, some of these specific challenges to U.S. leadership will wax and wane since they stem from shifting political circumstances and the dispositions of individual leaders. But the expansion of “exit options”—of alternative patrons, institutions, and political models—now seems a permanent feature of international politics. Governments have much more room to maneuver. Even when states do not actively switch patrons, the possibility that they could provides them with greater leverage. As a result, China and Russia have the latitude to contest U.S. hegemony and construct alternative orders.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCES

Another important shift marks a break from the post–Cold War unipolar moment. The transnational civil society networks that stitched together the liberal international order no longer enjoy the power and influence they once had. Illiberal competitors now challenge them in many areas, including gender rights, multiculturalism, and the principles of liberal democratic governance. Some of these centrifugal forces have originated in the United States and western European countries themselves. For instance, the U.S. lobbying group the National Rifle Association worked transnationally to successfully defeat a proposed antigun referendum in Brazil in 2005, where it built an alliance with domestic right-wing political movements; over a decade later, the Brazilian political firebrand Jair Bolsonaro tapped into this same network to help propel himself to the presidency. The World Congress of Families, initially founded by U.S.-based Christian organizations in 1997, is now a transnational network, supported by Eurasian oligarchs, that convenes prominent social conservatives from dozens of countries to build global opposition to LGBTQ and reproductive rights.

Autocratic regimes have found ways to limit—or even eliminate—the influence of liberal transnational advocacy networks and reform-minded NGOs. The so-called color revolutions in the post-Soviet world in the first decade of this century and the 2010–11 Arab Spring in the Middle East played a key role in this process. They alarmed authoritarian and illiberal governments, which increasingly saw the protection of human rights and the promotion of democracy as threats to their survival. In response, such regimes curtailed the influence of NGOs with foreign connections. They imposed tight restrictions on receiving foreign funds, proscribed various political activities, and labeled certain activists “foreign agents.”

Some governments now sponsor their own NGOs both to suppress liberalizing pressures at home and to contest the liberal order abroad. For example, in response to Western support of young activists during the color revolutions, the Kremlin founded the youth group Nashi to mobilize young people in support of the state. The Red Cross Society of China, China’s oldest government-organized NGO, has delivered medical supplies to European countries in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign. These regimes also use digital platforms and social media to disrupt antigovernment mobilization and advocacy. Russia has likewise deployed such tools abroad in its information operations and electoral meddling in democratic states.

Some of the forces driving the unraveling of the liberal order have originated in the United States itself.
Two developments helped accelerate the illiberal turn in the West: the Great Recession of 2008 and the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. Over the last decade, illiberal networks—generally but not exclusively on the right—have challenged the establishment consensus within the West. Some groups and figures question the merits of continued membership in major institutions of the liberal order, such as the European Union and NATO. Many right-wing movements in the West receive both financial and moral support from Moscow, which backs “dark money” operations that promote narrow oligarchic interests in the United States and far-right political parties in Europe with the hope of weakening democratic governments and cultivating future allies. In Italy, the anti-immigrant party Lega is currently the most popular party despite revelations of its attempt to win illegal financial support from Moscow. In France, the National Rally, which also has a history of Russian backing, remains a powerful force in domestic politics.

These developments echo the ways in which “counter-order” movements have helped precipitate the decline of hegemonic powers in the past. Transnational networks played crucial roles in both upholding and challenging prior international orders. For example, Protestant networks helped erode Spanish power in early modern Europe, most notably by supporting the Dutch Revolt in the sixteenth century. Liberal and republican movements, especially in the context of the revolutions across Europe in 1848, played a part in undermining the Concert of Europe, which tried to manage international order on the continent in the first half of the nineteenth century. The rise of fascist and communist transnational networks helped produce the global power struggle of World War II. Counter-order movements achieved political power in countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading those nations to break from or try to assail existing structures of international order. But even less successful counter-order movements can still undermine the cohesion of hegemonic powers and their allies.

Not every illiberal or right-wing movement that opposes the U.S.-led order seeks to challenge U.S. leadership or turns to Russia as an exemplar of strong cultural conservatism. Nonetheless, such movements are helping polarize politics in advanced industrial democracies and weaken support for the order’s institutions. One of them has even captured the White House: Trumpism, which is best understood as a counter-order movement with a transnational reach that targets the alliances and partnerships central to U.S. hegemony.

CONSERVING THE U.S. SYSTEM

Great-power contestation, the end of the West’s monopoly on patronage, and the emergence of movements that oppose the liberal international system have all altered the global order over which Washington has presided since the end of the Cold War. In many respects, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be further accelerating the erosion of U.S. hegemony. China has increased its influence in the World Health Organization and other global institutions in the wake of the Trump administration’s attempts to defund and scapegoat the public health body. Beijing and Moscow are portraying themselves as providers of emergency goods and medical supplies, including to European countries such as Italy, Serbia, and Spain, and even to the United States. Illiberal governments worldwide are using the pandemic as cover for restricting media freedom and cracking down on political opposition and civil society. Although the United States still enjoys military supremacy, that dimension of U.S. dominance is especially ill suited to deal with this global crisis and its ripple effects.

Even if the core of the U.S. hegemonic system—which consists mostly of long-standing Asian and European allies and rests on norms and institutions developed during the Cold War—remains robust, and even if, as many champions of the liberal order suggest will happen, the United States and the European Union can leverage their combined economic and military might to their advantage, the fact is that Washington will have to get used to an increasingly contested and complex international order. There is no easy fix for this. No amount of military spending can reverse the processes driving the unraveling of U.S. hegemony. Even if Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, knocks out Trump in the presidential election later this year, or if the Republican Party repudiates Trumpism, the disintegration will continue.

The key questions now concern how far the unraveling will spread. Will core allies decouple from the U.S. hegemonic system? How long, and to what extent, can the United States maintain financial and monetary dominance? The most favorable outcome will require a clear repudiation of Trumpism in the United States and a commitment to rebuild liberal democratic institutions in the core. At both the domestic and the international level, such efforts will necessitate alliances among center-right, center-left, and progressive political parties and networks.

What U.S. policymakers can do is plan for the world after global hegemony. If they help preserve the core of the American system, U.S. officials can ensure that the United States leads the strongest military and economic coalition in a world of multiple centers of power, rather than finding itself on the losing side of most contests over the shape of the new international order. To this end, the United States should reinvigorate the beleaguered and understaffed State Department, rebuilding and more effectively using its diplomatic resources. Smart statecraft will allow a great power to navigate a world defined by competing interests and shifting alliances.

U.S. policymakers must plan for the world after global hegemony.

The United States lacks both the will and the resources to consistently outbid China and other emerging powers for the allegiance of governments. It will be impossible to secure the commitment of some countries to U.S. visions of international order. Many of those governments have come to view the U.S.-led order as a threat to their autonomy, if not their survival. And some governments that still welcome a U.S.-led liberal order now contend with populist and other illiberal movements that oppose it.

Even at the peak of the unipolar moment, Washington did not always get its way. Now, for the U.S. political and economic model to retain considerable appeal, the United States has to first get its own house in order. China will face its own obstacles in producing an alternative system; Beijing may irk partners and clients with its pressure tactics and its opaque and often corrupt deals. A reinvigorated U.S. foreign policy apparatus should be able to exercise significant influence on international order even in the absence of global hegemony. But to succeed, Washington must recognize that the world no longer resembles the historically anomalous period of the 1990s and the first decade of this century. The unipolar moment has passed, and it isn’t coming back.

ALEXANDER COOLEY is Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute.

Women bang pots and pans to show their support for the emergency services dealing with the coronavirus outbreak © Atul Loke/Panos Pictures

The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next

By Arundhati Roy
Financial Times

April 3, 2020 – Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

A resident wears a face mask in Mumbai, where the usually bustling streets are almost deserted.?.?. © Varinder Chawla/MEGA

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

n the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

A boy wearing a protective mask ventures on to a balcony in Srinagar, which recorded Kashmir’s first coronavirus death in late March © eyevine
People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Arundhati Roy’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’

Members of the Wayuu ethnic group watch as a U.S. army helicopter arrives for a joint exercise in the “Tres Bocas” area in northern Colombia on March 13, 2020. JUAN BARRETO / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By William I. Robinson
Truthout

March 23, 2020 – What does a virus have to do with war and repression? The coronavirus has disrupted global supply networks and spread panic throughout the world’s stock markets. The pandemic will pass, not without a heavy toll. But in the larger picture, the fallout from the virus exposes the fragility of a global economy that never fully recovered from the 2008 financial collapse and has been teetering on the brink of renewed crisis for years.

The crisis of global capitalism is as much structural as it is political. Politically, the system faces a crisis of capitalist hegemony and state legitimacy. As is now well-known, the level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented. In 2018, the richest 1 percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 4.5 percent of this wealth. Such stark global inequalities are politically explosive, and to the extent that the system is simply unable to reverse them, it turns to ever more violent forms of containment to manage immiserated populations.

Structurally, the system faces a crisis of what is known as overaccumulation. As inequalities escalate, the system churns out more and more wealth that the mass of working people cannot actually consume. As a result, the global market cannot absorb the output of the global economy. Overaccumulation refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are accumulated, yet this capital cannot be reinvested profitably and becomes stagnant.

Indeed, corporations enjoyed record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate investment declined. Worldwide corporate cash reserves topped $12 trillion in 2017, more than the foreign exchange reserves of the world’s central governments, yet transnational corporations cannot find enough opportunities to profitably reinvest their profits. As this uninvested capital accumulates, enormous pressures build up to find outlets for unloading the surplus. By the 21st century, the transnational capitalist class turned to several mechanisms in order to sustain global accumulation in the face of overaccumulation, above all, financial speculation in the global casino, along with the plunder of public finances, debt-driven growth and state-organized militarized accumulation.

Militarized Accumulation

It is the last of these mechanisms, what I have termed militarized accumulation, that I want to focus on here. The crisis is pushing us toward a veritable global police state. The global economy is becoming ever more dependent on the development and deployment of systems of warfare, social control and repression, apart from political considerations, simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation. The so-called wars on drugs and terrorism; the undeclared wars on immigrants, refugees, gangs, and poor, dark-skinned and working-class youth more generally; the construction of border walls, immigrant jails, prison-industrial complexes, systems of mass surveillance, and the spread of private security guard and mercenary companies, have all become major sources of profit-making.

The events of September 11, 2001, marked the start of an era of a permanent global war in which logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance, and even military personnel are more and more the privatized domain of transnational capital. Criminalization of surplus humanity activates state-sanctioned repression that opens up new profit-making opportunities for the transnational capitalist class. Permanent war involves endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction, each phase in the cycle fueling new rounds and accumulation, and also results in the ongoing enclosure of resources that become available to the capitalist class.

Criminalization of surplus humanity activates state-sanctioned repression that opens up new profit-making opportunities for the transnational capitalist class.

 
The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total defense outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to $2.03 trillion, although this figure does not take into account secret budgets, contingency operations and “homeland security” spending. The global market in homeland security reached $431 billion in 2018 and was expected to climb to $606 billion by 2024. In the decade from 2001 to 2011, military industry profits nearly quadrupled. In total, the United States spent a mind-boggling nearly $6 trillion from 2001 to 2018 on its Middle East wars alone.

Led by the United States as the predominant world power, military expansion in different countries has taken place through parallel (and often conflictive) processes, yet all show the same relationship between state militarization and global capital accumulation. In 2015, for instance, the Chinese government announced that it was setting out to develop its own military-industrial complex modeled after the United States, in which private capital would assume the leading role. Worldwide, official state military outlays in 2015 represented about 3 percent of the gross world product of $75 trillion (this does not include state military spending not made public).

But militarized accumulation involves vastly more than activities generated by state military budgets. There are immense sums involved in state spending and private corporate accumulation through militarization and other forms of generating profit through repressive social control that do not involve militarization per se, such as structural controls over the poor through debt collection enforcement mechanisms or accumulation opportunities opened up by criminalization.

The Privatization of War and Repression
The various wars, conflicts, and campaigns of social control and repression around the world involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization. In this relationship, the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization. The most obvious way that the state opens up these opportunities is to facilitate global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Between 2003 and 2010 alone, the Global South bought nearly half a trillion dollars in weapons from global arms dealers. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016.

Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016.

 
The U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan precipitated the explosion in private military and security contractors around the world deployed to protect the transnational capitalist class. Private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan during the height of those wars exceeded the number of U.S. combat troops in both countries, and outnumbered U.S. troops in Afghanistan by a three-to-one margin. Beyond the United States, private military and security firms have proliferated worldwide and their deployment is not limited to the major conflict zones in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. In his study, Corporate Warriors, P.W. Singer documents how privatized military forces (PMFs) have come to play an ever more central role in military conflicts and wars. “A new global industry has emerged,” he noted. “It is outsourcing and privatization of a twenty-first century variety, and it changes many of the old rules of international politics and warfare. It has become global in both its scope and activity.” Beyond the many based in the United States, PMFs come from numerous countries around the world, including Russia, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, India, the EU countries and Israel, among others.

Beyond wars, PMFs open up access to economic resources and corporate investment opportunities — deployed, for instance, to mining areas and oil fields — leading Singer to term PMFs “investment enablers.” PMF clients include states, corporations, landowners, nongovernmental organizations, even the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. From 2005 to 2010, the Pentagon contracted some 150 firms from around the world for support and security operations in Iraq alone. By 2018, private military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, deploying forces to guard corporate property; provide personal security for corporate executives and their families; collect data; conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance operations; carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters; manage prisons; run private detention and interrogation facilities; and participate in outright warfare.

Meanwhile, the private security (policing) business is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in many countries and has come to overshadow public security around the world. According to Singer, the amount spent on private security in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, was 73 percent higher than that spent in the public sphere, and three times as many persons were employed in private forces as in official law enforcement agencies. In parts of Asia, the private security industry grew at 20 percent to 30 percent per year. Perhaps the biggest explosion of private security was the near complete breakdown of public agencies in post-Soviet Russia, with over 10,000 new security firms opening since 1989. There were an outstanding 20 million private security workers worldwide in 2017, and the industry was expected to be worth over $240 billion by 2020. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers.

As all of global society becomes a highly surveilled and controlled and wildly profitable battlespace, we must not forget that the technologies of the global police state are driven as much, or more, by the campaign to open up new outlets for accumulation as they are by strategic or political considerations. The rise of the digital economy and the blurring of the boundaries between military and civilian sectors fuse several fractions of capital — especially finance, military-industrial and tech companies — around a combined process of financial speculation and militarized accumulation. The market for new social control systems made possible by digital technology runs into the hundreds of billions. The global biometrics market, for instance, was expected to jump from its $15 billion value in 2015 to $35 billion by 2020.

Criminalization of the poor, racially oppressed, immigrants, refugees and other vulnerable communities is the most clear-cut method of accumulation by repression.

 
As the tech industry emerged in the 1990s, it was from its inception tied to the military-industrial-security complex and the global police state. Over the years, for instance, Google has supplied mapping technology used by the U.S. Army in Iraq, hosted data for the Central Intelligence Agency, indexed the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence databases, built military robots, co-launched a spy satellite with the Pentagon, and leased its cloud computing platform to help police departments predict crime. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and the other tech giants are thoroughly intertwined with the military-industrial and security complex.

Criminalization and the War on Immigrants and Refugees

Criminalization of the poor, racially oppressed, immigrants, refugees and other vulnerable communities is the most clear-cut method of accumulation by repression. This type of criminalization activates “legitimate” state repression to enforce the accumulation of capital, whereby the state turns to private capital to carry out repression against those criminalized.

There has been a rapid increase in imprisonment in countries around the world, led by the United States, which has been exporting its own system of mass incarceration. In 2019, it was involved in the prison systems of at least 33 different countries, while the global prison population grew by 24 percent from 2000 to 2018. This carceral state opens up enormous opportunities at multiple levels for militarized accumulation. Worldwide, there were in the early 21st century some 200 privately operated prisons on all continents and many more “public-private partnerships” that involved privatized prison services and other forms of for-profit custodial services such as privatized electronic monitoring programs. The countries that were developing private prisons ranged from most member states of the European Union, to Israel, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Africa, New Zealand, Ecuador, Australia, Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Canada.

Those criminalized include millions of migrants and refugees around the world. Repressive state controls over the migrant and refugee population and criminalization of non-citizen workers makes this sector of the global working class vulnerable to super-exploitation and hyper-surveillance. In turn, this self-same repression in and of itself becomes an ever more important source of accumulation for transnational capital. Every phase in the war on migrants and refugees has become a wellspring of profit making, from private, for-profit migrant jails and the provision of services inside them such as health care, food, phone systems, to other ancillary activities of the deportation regime, such as government contracting of private charter flights to ferry deportees back home, and the equipping of armies of border agents.

Undocumented immigrants constitute the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population and are detained in private migrant jails and deported by private companies contracted out by the U.S. state. As of 2010, there were 270 immigration jails in the U.S. that caged on any given day over 30,000 immigrants and annually locked up some 400,000 individuals, compared to just a few dozen people in immigrant detention each day prior to the 1980s. From 2010 to 2018, federal spending on these detentions jumped from $1.8 billion to $3.1 billion. Given that such for-profit prison companies as CoreCivic and GEO Group are traded on the Wall Street stock exchange, investors from anywhere around the world may buy and sell their stock, and in this way, develop a stake in immigrant repression quite removed from, if not entirely independent, of the more pointed political and ideological objectives of this repression.

Every phase in the war on migrants and refugees has become a wellspring of profit making.

 
In the United States, the border security industry was set to double in value from $305 billion in 2011 to some $740 billion in 2023. Mexican researcher Juan Manuel Sandoval traces how the U.S.-Mexico border region has been reconfigured into a “global space for the expansion of transnational capital.” This “global space” is centered on the U.S. side around high-tech military and aerospace related industries, military bases, and the deploying of other civilian and military forces for combating “immigration, drug trafficking, and terrorism through a strategy of low-intensity warfare.” On the Mexican side, it involves the expansion of maquiladoras (sweatshops), mining and industry in the framework of capitalist globalization and North American integration.

The tech sector in the United States has become heavily involved in the war on immigrants as Silicon Valley plays an increasingly central role in the expansion and acceleration of arrests, detentions and deportations. As their profits rise from participation in this war, leading tech companies have in turn pushed for an expansion of incarceration and deportation of immigrants, and lobbied the state to use their innovative social control and surveillance technologies in anti-immigrant campaigns.

In Europe, the refugee crisis and EU’s program to “secure borders” has provided a bonanza to military and security companies providing equipment to border military forces, surveillance systems and information technology infrastructure. The budget for the EU public-private border security agency, Frontex, increased a whopping 3,688 percent between 2005 and 2016, while the European border security market was expected to nearly double, from some $18 billion in 2015 to approximately $34 billion in 2022.

The Coronavirus Is Not to Blame

When the pandemic comes to an end, we will be left with a global economy even more dependent on militarized accumulation than before the virus hit.
As stock markets around the world began to plummet starting in late February, mainstream commentators blamed the coronavirus for the mounting crisis. But the virus was only the spark that ignited the financial implosion. The plunge in stock markets suggests that for some time to come, financial speculation will be less able to serve as an outlet for over-accumulated capital. When the pandemic comes to an end, we will be left with a global economy even more dependent on militarized accumulation than before the virus hit.

We must remember that accumulation by war, social control and repression is driven by a dual logic of providing outlets for over-accumulated capital in the face of stagnation, and of social control and repression as capitalist hegemony breaks down. The more the global economy comes to depend on militarization and conflict, the greater the drive to war and the higher the stakes for humanity. There is a built-in war drive to the current course of capitalist globalization. Historically, wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis while they have also served to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. Whether or not a global police state driven by the twin imperatives of social control and militarized accumulation becomes entrenched is contingent on the outcome of the struggles raging around the world among social and class forces and their competing political projects.

William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. This article draws on the author’s forthcoming book, The Global Police State, which will be released by Pluto Press in July 2020.

By John Ross
Learning from China

June 2017 – The Hamburg G20 summit was a further stage in a process that has been developing strongly during the  2017: a recognition that a new stage in China’s international ‘thought leadership’ has developed.  For decades China had the world’s most rapidly growing economy, the world’s fastest increase in living standards, and was responsible for over 80% of the reduction of the number of people in the world living in poverty.

But now, as Edward Luce, the chief Washington correspondent for the Financial Times, noted: ‘ It was during Obama’s second term that China overtook the US as the world’s largest economy on a purchasing power parity basis. It is likely to overtake the US in dollar terms within the next presidential term, regardless of who is in office.‘ This gigantic economic development inevitably produced a growing global impact. But  the new stage, as confirmed below, is even Western analysts note that China, or to be more precise the Communist Party of China (CPC) and President Xi Jinping, are winning in the global ‘battle of ideas’. It is therefore important to analyse the reasons for this.

Such examination illustrates not only individual issues but demonstrates clearly the superiority of Xi Jinping’s Marxist analysis over Western thinking. This can be particularly clearly demonstrated by examining the wide international discussion which has contrasted China’s key recent global initiatives, such as Xi Jinping’s speech at the Davos World Economic Forum and the One Belt One Road summit in Beijing, with US attempts to articulate a general alternative foreign policy framework to China’s. Such analysis has the advantage it clearly demonstrates the way these concepts put forward by Xi Jinping both flow from Marxist ideas and simultaneously develop them in a new international situation – and why they can be clearly understood by a non-Marxist audience. In summary, as will be shown, the wide ranging international discussions in 2017 have clearly demonstrated the superiority of the CPC’s Marxist thinking over Western ideas.

China rising

Immediately following Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President his Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, admitted in practice what were the two most influential global views today: ‘I think it’d be good if people compare Xi’s speech at Davos and President Trump’s speech in his inaugural…. You’ll see two different world views.’

Indeed, it is widely understood in the Western media that the last period has seen a major shift internationally in both practical policy initiatives and ‘thought leadership’ towards China. Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, and one of the West’s most influential journalists, stated bluntly at the end of May that the question now being discussed in all countries was: ‘Would it not be wiser, they wonder, to move closer to China?’ Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, the most influential Western ‘risk analysis’ company, noted regarding one of the key indicators of China’s success in projecting not only practical power but also ideas: ‘Davos reaction to Xi speech: Success on all counts.’

Merely to take in chronological order some of the landmarks of China’s sharply rising influence:

China’s initiative to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was highly successful – with even close United States allies, such as the UK and Germany, participating and refusing to support US calls to boycott it.
Xi Jinping’s speech at Davos World Economic Forum was almost universally analysed in the West as encapsulating a major strategic success. In addition to Bremmer’s conclusion already cited, Hans-Paul Buerkner, chairman of the Boston Consulting Group, noted: ‘President Xi emphasized the importance of continued globalization, growth and equity, which impressed me the most.’ Khalid Al Rumaihi, chief executive of the Bahrain Economic Development Board concluded: ‘President Xi’s insistence to deepen globalization, to strengthen economic growth, and his warning against isolationism are extremely comforting and a strong endorsement.’

The recent Beijing One Belt One Road (B&R) summit’s significance was well understood in the West. The Financial Times, under a self-explanatory headline ‘Europe must respond to China’s Belt and Road initiative’, analysed: ‘Beijing is using the laws of economic gravity and physics to shape the global economy… The gravity metaphor is well established in the so-called “gravity models” of international trade, which relate the size of trade flows to the “mass” (economic size) and distance between trading partners. The indisputable finding is that physical distance remains monumentally important in international economics… as international supply chains have grown over recent decades, the most complex ones are regional more than global… As for physics metaphors, the relevant concept is friction. Gravity affects all bodies equally in a vacuum; friction, however, can change the speed at which they fall. So, too, in economics, where the frictions are the costs of trade. These can be physical — in the case of landlocked countries with poor infrastructure, say — and man-made. The most significant man-made trade costs are no longer border tariffs but regulatory, administrative and cultural barriers to doing business across national borders. They remain high…China… understands both concepts very well. The Belt and Road aims to overcome the bounds of gravity by reducing frictions, and to use the forces of attraction this unleashes to centre a growing part of global economic activity on China.’

China has long been influential among developing countries but the Financial Times has now noted that China’s overall influence is extending even into traditional US allies. EU officials noted for example: ‘the establishment of a 16-nation bloc of central and eastern European countries — many of them EU members. The bloc is sometimes used to frustrate EU decisions that could disadvantage China, said the officials.’ Regarding Singapore, another traditional US ally, the FT analysed reporting the recent Shangri-La dialogue,: ‘Ng Eng Hen, Singapore’s defence minister, was keen to build bridges with Beijing when he spoke to the assembled generals, diplomats and policy wonks at the Shangri-La hotel at the weekend. He made no mention of… the South China Sea and fawned over the Belt and Road project… “China has stepped on the pedal to push ahead with its plans to be a leader for trade in the Asia Pacific region, if not the world.”‘ Regarding Australia, another traditional US ally, Edward Luce noted: ‘Long before Trump’s victory, Australians were also debating whether their country should distance itself from the US to accommodate a rising China — a more important economic partner than the US. Now such arguments have gone mainstream. Former prime ministers, such as Paul Keating, make the case that Australia should hedge its bets.“’

China’s sharply rising international influence was certainly further aided by self-inflicted US wounds such as Trump’s virtually universally internationally condemned decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. Even within the US this latter decision was attacked as weakening the United States – a pillar of the US establishment such as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein taking to Twitter for the first ever time to declare: ‘Today’s decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.’s leadership position in the world.’ But, as is clear from the facts already noted above, the further weakening of the US’s international position by Trump’s position on the Paris Climate Accord simply followed from a period when China’s global position was already strongly strengthening. As Edward Luce summarised:

‘The world was already making adjustments before Trump… Almost two years before the UK’s Brexit referendum, David Cameron, Britain’s then prime minister, rolled out the red carpet for Xi Jinping on a state visit to the UK. Britain also enraged Obama’s White House by rushing to join China’s Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank… Others, such as Australia and Germany, hesitated but then followed suit. Almost every western power sent delegations, among them 29 heads of state, to China’s recent “One Belt, One Road” summit in Beijing. When China speaks, foreign governments listen.’

The shifting of the centre of global initiatives and thinking to China, analysed from the point of view of internal Chinese development in Wang Wen’s analysis is therefore fully confirmed by the analysis in the Western media itself.

A ‘Trump doctrine’?

Almost certainly in reaction both to the rise in China’s impact noted above, and to increased scepticism regarding US foreign policy views, immediately after President Trump’s first foreign trip, his National Security Adviser McMaster and his Director of the US National Economic Council Cohn jointly authored a Wall Street Journal article systematically setting out the principles of US foreign policy. The significance of this joint article, which could not have appeared from such high placed figures without approval of the President, was immediately recognised – CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, one of the US’s most important foreign policy commentators, noted: ‘We now have a Trump Doctrine.’
With two coherent global views therefore now set out it is possible to systematically analyse the views of President Xi Jinping and the CPC on the one side and on the other the Trump administration. It is particularly revealing, as it deals with the most fundamental issues, to make a comparison between Xi Jinping’s concept of ‘Community of Common Destiny’, which forms the core of China’s foreign policy, and the ideas expressed in the ‘Trump doctrine’ by McMaster and Cohn. Making a detailed analysis of this contrast shows clearly the superiority of the CPC’s Marxist ideas to those of the West.

McMaster and Cohn

McMaster and Cohn’s starting point is a restatement, and an attempt to defend on the international field, the view in neo-classical Western economics which analyses the economy and society as simply  composed of individual units. As Margaret Thatcher declared on the national terrain: ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.’[1] As McMaster and Cohn state on the international sphere: ‘The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.‘[2] McMaster and Cohn then draw out the conclusions which flow from this struggle between individual units: ‘America First signals the restoration of American leadership and our government’s traditional role overseas—to use the diplomatic, economic and military resources of the U.S. to enhance American security, promote American prosperity, and extend American influence around the world.’  It is, evidently, inconceivable that such a general statement of US foreign policy could have appeared by two of Trump’s most senior officials if he had disapproved of it.

This statement that ‘the world is not a “global community”’ is evidently directly opposed to the explicit concept put forward by Xi Jinping of a ‘community of common destiny’ – and its associated ideas of ‘win-win’ solutions, ‘one plus one is greater than two’ etc. These concepts of Xi Jinping are, of course, derived from Marxism – this will be analysed in greater detail below.  More precisely, to use Xi Jinping’s precise phrasing: ‘‘Mankind… has increasingly emerged as a community of common destiny.’ [3] Regarding ‘win-win’ solutions in regard to the US, in his first statement regarding Trump’s election, Xi Jinping made clear on 9 November: ‘I… look forward to working with you to uphold the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation.’ Similarly, in regard to Africa Xi Jinping noted: ‘“We will work with Africa to embrace a new era of win-win co-operation and common development.’ This fundamental concept is popularly expressed in the concept ‘one plus one is greater than two’. As Xi Jinping put it: ‘By engaging in close cooperation and drawing on each other’s strengths to make up for respective shortcomings, we can show to the world that one plus one can be greater than two.’[4]

It is not hard in terms of psychology to understand why other countries prefer the concept of a ‘win-win’ relationship, that is their country also gains as well as China, to the goal set out by McMaster and Cohn that the US objective is enhancement of its own position: ‘America First signals the restoration of American leadership and our government’s traditional role overseas—to use the diplomatic, economic and military resources of the U.S. to enhance American security, promote American prosperity, and extend American influence around the world.’

But international relations, and the ideas based on them, cannot be based on nice words, which can be false, or psychology – which is notoriously changeable. A policy can only be powerful and have a great international effect if it corresponds to real interests. Therefore, it is necessary to examine objectively which of these concepts is correct: the McMaster & Cohn US view that ‘the world is not a “global community” or Xi Jinping’s ‘Mankind… has increasingly emerged as a community of common destiny’?

Does a global community exist?

The difference of McMaster/Cohn on the idea of global ‘community’, and instead their assertion that there is simply ‘an arena where nations… compete for advantage’, versus Xi Jinping’s ‘community of common destiny’, is in fact both nationally and internationally an issue of which force is most fundamental – the individual or the social? Xi Jinping is evidently not asserting that there are never any clashes between individual interests – if that were true China would scarcely need a department of foreign affairs, except to organise convivial meeting with other countries at which everyone could celebrate that they agreed on everything! In reality China, like every country, is constantly dealing with specific differences in foreign policy (conflicts over protectionism with the EU and US, the South China Sea, relations with India etc). What Xi Jinping is asserting is not that there are never any conflicts of individual interests but that the common ones, the community, are most fundamental.
McMaster/Cohn are equally not asserting the US never has any common interests with other countries – on the contrary they state regarding the US and other countries: ‘Where our interests align, we are open to working together to solve problems and explore opportunities.’  What McMaster/Cohn are asserting is that the clash of individual interests is most important and there is not a ‘community’ – ‘the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,’ Xi Jinping is asserting in contrast that while certainly specific conflicts of interest exist, the most fundamental is the community.

It can now be analysed which of these positions is correct from a fundamental point of view?  Such analysis in detail of what will be shown to be among the most fundamental issues of both ‘Western’ and Marxist thinking, shows not only the superiority of Xi Jinping ideas on the particular issue of the ‘community of common destiny’ but also the general superiority of Marxism to the most recent Western ideas in ‘neo-classical economics’ and the relation to the most advanced Western ideas in general.

Adam Smith

The analysis of the relation between individual interests and common interests, or ‘community’, goes back to the origin of modern economics – and includes not only the economic but the moral and foreign policy dimensions of this issue. It was, indeed, one of the most fundamental questions analysed by the founder of modern economics Adam Smith. Examining in detail the fundamental and original statements of this issue precisely brings out its significance and solution most clearly – Adam Smith and Karl Marx were, to put it mildly, much clearer thinkers than McMaster?chohn.

While Smith is remembered for The Wealth of Nations he himself earlier published, and constantly revised until his death, a second book – The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This writing on moral issues preceded Smith’s writings on economics – one of Smith’s earlier positions, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, was Professor of the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University.

The opening sentence of The Theory of the Moral Sentiments states precisely that the issue Smith aimed to investigate in the book was the relation between merely individual interests and those of society in general – that is precisely the issue analysed by McMaster/Cohn and Xi Jinping. Or, in the language of the mid-18th century, Smith wanted to analyse why: ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles…. which interest him in the fortune of others.’[5] However, despite devoting his entire book to the question Smith came up with no satisfactory explanation of why a human being took an interest in the interests of others. He merely concluded it was ‘in his nature’.[6] Because The Theory of the Moral Sentiments failed to answer the question it set itself it is today largely forgotten, except by historians, while The Wealth of Nations is rightly regarded as one of the most important books ever written.

What is ironic is that Smith solved the question he asked in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments in his real masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. The problem was that Smith did not realise he had solved the issue! However, the reason Smith did not realise he had resolved his own problem regarding the relation of self-interested actions and common interests flowed from a method of analysis common not only to his book on morals but to The Wealth of Nations itself.

Adam Smith’s framework

In The Wealth of Nations Smith analysed the consequences that flowed from the fact human beings engaged in the social exchange of products with each other – thereby founding modern economics. But Smith attempted to explain this objective exchange of products from ideas held by human beings – merely debating whether these ideas were inherent in the nature of human beings or flowed from ‘reason and speech’:

‘This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived…  is the necessary…  consequence of a certain propensity in human nature… the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given, or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. ‘ [7]
The reality is, of course the exact opposite. The objective social exchange of goods does not exist because of ideas, whether inherent or due to ‘reason and speech’, but ideas are created by the objective social exchange of goods. This fact, that ideas were created by social reality was of course a fundamental concept introduced by Marx.

Marx himself, in the Afterward to the Second German Edition of Capital, famously once described his own relation to Hegel by the phrase of standing Hegel ‘on his head’, that is Marx turned Hegel upside down – but exactly the same parallel exists on this issue in Marx’s relation to Adam Smith. Regarding Hegel Marx noted:

‘For Hegel, the process of thinking… is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.

‘I criticized the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just when I was working at the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel… as a ‘dead dog’. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker…  The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.’

The same process applied by Marx to Hegel applies to Smith. Smith explained exchange of products from ideas, in reality ideas were explained by the social structure of exchange of products. But once this ‘inversion’ was carried out, that is Marx eliminated the problem that Smith, like Hegel, was ‘standing on his head’ the question of the relation between individual interests and common interest is immediately solved.  By tracing carefully Smith’s analysis of the issue, and Marx’s reformulation of it, it is possible to see clearly the error of McMaster/Cord on foreign policy, the fundamental error of neo-classical economics, and the superiority of Xi Jinping’s Marxist concept of a ‘community of common destiny’ – and thereby the overall superiority of Marxist analysis.

Division of labour

The title The Wealth of Nations embodied the fact that Smith wished to analyse why the ordinary people of the advanced European countries of his time enjoyed such a high standard of living compared to many other parts of the world – in summary, why the advanced European nations were ‘wealthier’ than most other parts of the world. Smith began analysing this fundamental question long before completing The Wealth of Nations. In Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence delivered in 1763, 13 years before publication of The Wealth of Nations, Smith noted, using the extremely prejudiced and racist language of his day:

‘The unassisted industry of a savage can not any way procure him those things which are now become necessary to the meanest artist. We may see this… in comparing the way of life of an ordinary day-labourer in England or Holland to that of a savage prince, who has the lives and liberties of a thousand or 10000 naked savages at his disposall. It appears evident that this man, whom we falsely account to live in a simple and plain manner, is far better supplied than the monarch himself. Every part of his clothing, utensils, and food has been produced by the joint labour of an infinite number of hands, and these again required a vast number to provide them in tools for their respective employments. So that this labourer could not be provided in this simple manner (as we call it) without the concurrence of some 1,000 hands.‘His life indeed is simple when compared to the luxury and profusion of an European grandee. But perhaps the affluence and luxury of the richest does not so far exceed the plenty and abundance of an industrious farmer as this latter does the unprovided… manner of life of the most respected savage…. In what manner then shall we account for the great share he and the lowest of the people have of the conveniences of life.’[8]

Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence gave the answer to this question he posed, of the much higher living standard of Europe in the form in which, as The Wealth of Nations makes clear, the systematic development of the founding of modern economics was to flow:
‘The division of labour amongst different hands can alone account for this.’ [9]

This question, and the answer given, were the starting point of The Wealth of Nations. As Smith put it concluding Chapter I of The Wealth of Nations, in words summarising his own Lectures on Jurisprudence, he was asking in his great masterpiece why:
‘the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king.’[10]

Smith stated the answer, thereby creating the science of economics, in the first sentence of the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations – from which the entire rest of the book flowed:

‘The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is directed, or applied, seem to have been the effect of the division of labour.’[11]
The famous example of division of labour Smith analysed at the beginning of the The Wealth of Nations, a pin factory, in reality simply illustrated the entire process which led to globalisation. Smith analysed why, put in prosaic quantitative terms, the division of labour embodied in the pin factory raised productivity by a minimum 24,000%.

‘To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches… [the] business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations… I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed… Those ten persons… could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.’ [12]
This fundamental principle of division of labour, applied to far more complex operations than pin making, created the huge international division of labour interconnecting even different continents. But it followed that as greater productivity was created by greater division of labour, therefore the more advanced the country the greater would be the division of labour, including international division of labour, on which this development and prosperity was based. Therefore, as Smith noted:

‘The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. This separation, too, is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry and improvement.’ [13]

This fact in realty simultaneously solved the problem of the relation between ‘individual’ interest and ‘common’ or ‘social’ interest. As Smith noted it was not on individual effort but on this massive division of labour that the prosperity and well-being of each individual necessarily depended:

‘It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.’[14]
The prosperity of the individual, therefore, could not exist without this social division of labour and depended on it. [15] That is the well-being of the individual depended on this division of labour/socialisation of labour – whose effects were far more powerful than the efforts of the individual themselves. As Smith summarised:

‘if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that, without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated.’[16]

The result of which was therefore that the fundamental well-being of each individual depended not on himself/herself but on this social division of labour:

‘In civilized society he stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes.’ [17]

Without this social division of labour with others, i.e. without ‘society’ or the ‘community’, human beings would still be living in the most primitive conditions, with no advanced facilities or conditions of life and with an average life expectancy of around 30 – as did early human beings. The myth of the ‘self-sufficient individual’ is precisely that – pure myth. In reality, the well-being of the individual most fundamentally depends on society.
Or as Smith noted in his earlier Lectures on Jurisprudence, which prepared the ideas of The Wealth of Nations:

‘In yesterday’s lecture I endeavoured to explain the causes which prompt man to industry and are peculiar to him of all the animals… These wants a solitary savage can supply in some manner, but not in that which is reckoned absolutely necessary in every country where government has been some time established.’ [18]

As without this social division of labour and society the individual would merely live very badly for a very short time, the interests of the individual are therefore not in the fundamental sense opposed to the interests of society, on the contrary the well-being of the individual most fundamentally  depends on the development of social division of labour, on society.

Marx division of labour

Marx solved the problem Adam Smith had posed of the relation of individual interest and social interests by reversing the situation whereby Smith was ‘standing on his head’ – that is not explaining objective social structure from ideas, but explaining ideas from social structure. This simultaneously makes clear why there is no fundamental counterposition of self-interest and social interest and which is the most fundamental. By standing Smith ‘on his head’, in terms of causality, Marx solved the problem Adam Smith had entirely accurately posed but which Smith himself could not answer.

Marx, in the same way as Smith, analysed the principle of division of labour, of the pin factory which Smith had studied, that is as Marx put it: ‘division of labour… not by one person doing everything, but by many doing a little.’[19] As with Smith, Marx noted it was this division of labour which gave rise to the tremendous development of production and productivity: ‘The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is caused by the division of labour.’ [20]

Marx noted, even more clearly than Smith himself, that division of labour immediately gave rise to this question of the relation between individual and general interests – the question Smith had rightly asked but been unable to answer in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. As Marx noted:

‘For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.’

Therefore, put in general terms, the division of labour necessarily and immediately raised the question of the relation between individual and general/social interests:

‘the division of labour also implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the common interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another.’ [21]

But this contradiction was in fundamental terms resolved because, as already analysed, the high standard of living an increasingly advanced society, and the individuals within it, is only possible because of the huge division of labour which therefore creates the dependence of the well-being of each individual on society – the dependence of the ‘individual’ on the ‘general’ or on ‘all’. As Marx noted:

‘this common interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest”, but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided.’ [22]
This in turn created structures, including the state, which organised the relation of individual specific interests and general interests:

‘Out of this very contradiction between the particular and the common interests, the common interest assumes an independent form as the state.’[23]

The consequence, given division of labour’s fundamental role in developing productivity, was that as society develops  division of labour becomes greater and greater. That is:
‘division of labour raises the productive power of labour and increases the wealth and refinement of society’[24]

Or, as Marx succinctly summarised it in the most general terms:

‘Division of labour increases with civilisation.’[25]

Such increasing division of labour precisely created globalisation, the international division of labour, or as Marx phrased it what is created is:

‘the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them.’[26]

Such international division of labour indeed creates a world community of ‘general interest’ – that is, the maximum prosperity of individuals in one country depended on production by those in other countries. Or as Marx put it:
‘only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established… and… puts world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.’ [27]

Therefore, this mutual international dependence of the well-being of individuals in each country on those in other countries, creates for the first time a truly ‘globally connected’ human being. Or as Marx phrased it this produces:
‘this development of productive forces… which at the same time implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being.’ [28]
Such an international connection develops not only in production but also in ideas:

‘the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only this will liberate the separate individuals from the various national and local barriers, bring them into practical connection with the production (including intellectual production) of the whole world and make it possible for them to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man).’ [29]

Indeed, international division of labour is particularly clear and transparent in the sphere of ideas. No country has a monopoly in ideas – and all countries adopt other countries ideas. Human civilization could not have reached its present level without China’s four great inventions, without the contribution of British scientists (Newton, Darwin), the contribution of German scientists and mathematicians (Gauss, Einstein) etc.

But while such great ‘individual’ geniuses and inventions are rightly celebrated they were in reality themselves the product of social division of labour and the development of ideas by others which were indispensable for their own. To the present author’s knowledge nobody knows exactly which individuals created China’s four great inventions; it was the inventors of the telescope in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 17th century who allowed the observations by the Italian Galileo that definitively destroyed the idea that the sun circled the earth and proved correct the fundamental concepts of the Pole Copernicus; if the Englishman Newton had not developed calculus and the law of gravitation someone else would have (the German Leibniz developed calculus at almost exactly the same time), Darwin almost lost his well merited recognition as the discoverer of evolution because he was so intent on collecting an abundance of evidence over more than 20 years for The Origin of Species that he was almost beaten to publication by Alfred Russel Wallace who developed the idea after Darwin but was content to publish with infinitely less supporting evidence.

In addition to these fundamental social processes both Smith and Marx’s detailed economics also flows from the implications of the processes analysed above.

Xi Jinping and the ‘community of common destiny’

Evidently Xi Jinping’s ‘community of common destiny’, and its associated concepts, are the expression in more popular language of the fundamental conclusions analysed above. Because Xi Jinping is the president of a country, speaking to a mass audience, including countries in which Marxism is scarcely understood  such as the US, and he is not an academic giving a university seminar, Xi Jinping naturally does not intersperse speeches at events such as Davos or the One Belt One Road seminary with long quotations from Marx. But, speaking in language understandable to a mass, including a non-Marxist, audience Xi Jinping precisely expresses and develops these ideas of Marx.

·        The idea frequently expressed in Xi Jinping’s speeches that ‘one plus one is greater than two’ precisely expresses in a popularly understandable way the fundamental concept that via division of labour productivity is increased: ‘By engaging in close cooperation and drawing on each other’s strengths to make up for respective shortcomings, we can show to the world that one plus one can be greater than two.’[30]

·        The concept of ‘win-win’ is not an empty psychological ‘feel good’ phrase but expresses the fact that because division of labour, including international division of labour, increases productivity all those participating in it gain – division of labour is literally not a zero-sum game either nationally or internationally. Xi Jinping’s comments on this on the US and Africa have already been noted so here can be added his comments on BRICS. ‘The BRICS cooperation is an innovation, which transcends the old pattern of political and military alliance and pursues partnerships rather than alliances.” And: “The BRICS mechanism surpasses the old mindset of zero-sum game and practices a new concept of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.”[31]

·        It clearly follows from the above analysis that China supports globalisation – the international expression of the division of Labour. Again, expressed in popular form in Xi Jinping Davos speech: ‘Whether you like it or not, the global economy is the big ocean that you cannot escape from. Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies, and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible. Indeed, it runs counter to the historical trend.’[32] Or, in a counterposition widely analysed in the international media, as Martin Wolf noted: ‘‘Donald Trump, US president, asserts that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength”. In contrast, President Xi Jinping of China insists that “we must promote trade and investment, liberalisation and facilitation through opening up — and say no to protectionism”’

·        Xi Jinping clearly notes, following the analysis of Marx and Smith, that the more advanced is global development the greater the international division of labour: As Xi Jinping put it at the Beijing OBOR summit: ‘Never have we seen such close interdependence among countries as today, such fervent desire of people for a better life, and never have we had so many means to prevail over difficulties.’[33]

·        Specific initiatives such as OBOR evidently constitute part of China’s practical contemporary way to promote globalisation. As Xi Jinping put it at the Beijing OBOR summit: ‘In the autumn of 2013, respectively in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, I proposed the building of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which I call the Belt and Road Initiative… Four years on, over 100 countries and international organizations have supported and got involved in this initiative… Thanks to our efforts, the vision of the Belt and Road Initiative is becoming a reality and bearing rich fruit… the Belt and Road Initiative responds to the trend of the times, conforms to the law of development, and meets the people’s interests…’ And: ‘In the face of the profoundly changed international landscape and the objective need for the world to rally together like passengers in the same boat, all countries should join hands in building a new model of international relations featuring cooperation and mutual benefit, and all peoples should work together to safeguard world peace and promote common development.’ [34]

·        This point clearly demonstrates that current initiatives by China such as OBOR, or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are not separate or isolated – they are interrelated by the fundamental underlying ideas of the ‘community of common destiny’ and the concepts associated with it put forward by Xi Jinping.

The current major strengthening of China’s international position noted above therefore lies precisely in the interrelation of China’s economic success, which is in turn created by the correctness of the concepts of China’s economic reform, and China’s success in the international ‘battle of ideas’ due to new practical and ideological initiatives since Xi Jinping became President. It can also be seen why the concepts put forward by the CPC, Xi Jinping, and Chinese Marxism have been shown in international discussion to be far superior and more correct than those in the West.

Xi Jinping and the development of the Marxism in China

The above points also clearly illustrate the further development and general dynamic of China’s Marxism. The ideas of ‘community of common destiny’, ’win-win’, OBOR etc are clearly formulated in concepts originated by Marx – as already analysed. But they are not simply a restatement of Marx – who naturally never developed ideas related to OBOR, current relations between China and the US etc. These concepts of Xi Jinping are an application and development of Marxism in the new period of both China and the global economy. They therefore flow from a correct analysis of the situation and dynamic both of China and the international situation. This correspondence to the practical dynamics of the international situation, and therefore their international impact analysed above, confirms that Chinese Marxism is the most advanced framework of thinking in the world today.

The errors of McMaster/Cohn

The above analysis makes clear the correctness of the ideas of Xi Jinping and China’s Marxism, in particular of the ‘community of common destiny’, and the errors of McMaster/Cohn, the ‘Trump doctrine’, and ideas from Western neo-classical economics which underlie them. As shown, the same principle applies on both national and international level:

·        Far from their being a fundamental contradiction between the interests of the individual and the interests of society the well-being of each individual in reality depends on the massive social division of labour – on society. This naturally does not mean there are no conflicts of individual interest, but this social division of labour is far more powerful in producing the well-being of the individual than any efforts by any individual themselves – without this social division of labour the life of the individual would be ‘primitive, brutal and very short’. The maximum well-being of the individual can therefore only be achieved by developing this social division of labour – that is the fundamental interests of the individual do not contradict, but fundamentally coincide, with the common interest of developing this social division of labour. This shows on the national level not only that Thatcher’s claim that ‘‘there is no such thing as society… There are individual men and women’ is false but that society is a far more powerful force in securing the well-being of the individual than any efforts possible by that individual themselves.

·        The same principle underlies the international s well as the national level. The maximum prosperity of a single country depends on an international division of labour. The more developed an economy, and the more developed the global economy, the greater is this international division of labour -and therefore a country’s dependence on it. This does not mean, of course, that there cannot be particular contradictions between individual interests of individual countries, or between individual countries and general interests, but it means that securing the maximum prosperity and well-being of an individual country coincides with the common interest of developing this international division of labour. There is, therefore precisely common international interests – an international community of interests. The interests of humanity, and of international countries, in maximising their well-being therefore lies in developing this common international division of labour. The claim by McMaster/Cohn that ‘the world is not a “global community”’ but there is simply ‘an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage’ is false. Or as Xi Jinping put it: ‘‘Mankind, by living in the same global village in the same era where history and reality meet, has increasingly emerged as a community of common destiny in which everyone has in himself a little bit of others.’ [35]

Conclusion

The practical conclusion of the above is clear. Xi Jinping is correct in the concept of a ‘community of common destiny’, and McMaster/Cohn wrong in their assertion there is no such thing as community. McMaster/Cohn merely repeat on the international level Thatcher false claim on the national terrain that: ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.’ In the clash of international ideas the Marxism of China and Xi Jinping clearly shows itself superior to the West in its thinking.
This fundamental difference in ideas underpins and helps leads to the growing influence of China analysed above. The practical implications as they affect other countries, and therefore their effects on foreign policy and relations with other countries, can be summarised simply.

For McMaster/Cohn the role of US foreign policy is simply to express US interests: ‘the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. Therefore: ‘America First signals the restoration of American leadership and our government’s traditional role overseas—to use the diplomatic, economic and military resources of the U.S. to enhance American security, promote American prosperity, and extend American influence around the world.’
For China on the contrary it is to simultaneously benefit from and contribute to human society. As Xi Jinping put it: ‘Throughout 5,000 years of development, the Chinese nation has made significant contributions to the progress of human civilization… Our responsibility is… to pursue the goal of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, so that China can stand firmer and stronger among the world’s nations, and make new and greater contributions to mankind.’[36]

These words of Xi Jinping are eloquent, but even more important they are true. China’s maximum well-being and prosperity cannot be achieved without participation in the international division of labour, both economic and intellectual, and simultaneously and reciprocally China’s maximisation of its own development benefits other countries. This is why China’s relations with other countries are win-win – and also why China’s Marxism is increasingly openly winning the ‘battle of ideas.’

Finally, on a more minor matter, this does pose an issue. Given that the ideas of Western neo-classicism and neo-liberalism are clearly wrong for the reasons given why is there the situation that some Chinese universities continue to teach these errors when China itself possesses far more advanced ideas? It is rather ridiculous that when China is globally winning the ‘battle of ideas’ such patently false ideas continue to be taught in China. This apparently corresponds to the logic that ‘China cannot be murdered so it must be persuaded to commit suicide’. While the ideas of neo-liberalism are justly losing the battle with China’s Marxist ideas and influence on the international terrain it is rather foolish and damaging such ideas are being taught in China.

However, this is not the main point. The main point, as analysed here China is winning not only the struggle for international influence due to its economic strength. It is now clearly winning in the international ‘battle of ideas’ – particularly due to the further development of Chinese Marxism under Xi Jinping.

Appendix

This article was finished in English at the end of June. Publication was delayed while it was translated and edited into Chinese. On 12 July Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, published an article also analysing the McMaster and Cohn article and US foreign policy concepts ‘Donald Trump’s clash of civilisations versus the global community’. Martin Wolf was entirely correct to understand the fundamental nature of the McMaster and Cohn article and its concepts. What Wolf did not do is to state that the most fundamental opposition and alternative to the ideas of McMaster and Cohn, and the ‘Trump doctrine’, is the concepts of Xi Jinping. China and Xi Jinping were stating these ideas as central for years before Martin Wolf. China was showing ‘thought leadership’ and the Financial Times is following.

Bibliography

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McMaster, H. R., & Cohn, G. D. (2017, May 30). America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone. Retrieved June 4, 2017, from Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-first-doesnt-mean-america-alone-1496187426
Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1.
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Thatcher, M. (1987, October 31). Epitaph for the eighties? “there is no such thing as society’. Women’s Own. Retrieved from http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm

Notes

[1] Thatcher, M. (1987, October 31). ‘Epitaph for the eighties? “there is no such thing as society”’. Women’s Own. Retrieved from http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm

[2] McMaster, H. R., & Cohn, G. D. ‘ America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone ‘, Wall Street Journal 2017, May 30

[3] Xi Jinping, ‘Follow the Trend of the Times and Promote Global Peace and Development’, 23 March 2013.

[4] Xi Jinping, ‘Follow the Trend of the Times and Promote Global Peace and Development’, 23 March 2013.

[5] Smith, A. (1790). The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1982 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc p9.

[6] Smith, A. (1790). The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1982 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc p9.

[7] Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations (Optimized for Kindle) (Kindle Locations 314-319). Kindle Edition.

[8] (Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 29 March 1763 p. 340-341 – English spelling modernised)

[9] (Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 29 March 1763 p. 341 – English spelling modernised)

[10] Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p24.

[11] (Smith, 1776, p. 13).

[12] In greater detail Smith’s analysis reads: ‘To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations… have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed… Those ten persons… could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.’ Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p14-15

[13] Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p15

[14]   Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p22.

[15] As Smith analysed it in detail: ‘Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or daylabourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people, of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country? How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world? What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brickmaker, the bricklayer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen-grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him, perhaps, by a long sea and a long land-carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveniencies’
Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p22.

[16] Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p22.

[17] Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1981 ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Edition Volume 1 p15

[18] (Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 29 March 1763 p. 341 – English spelling modernised)

[19] (Marx, ‘Justification of the Correspondent from Mosel’ Collected Works Vol1 p. 333)

[20] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 46-48)

[21] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 46-48)

[22] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 46-48)

[23] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 46-48)

[24] (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 1844, p. 240)

[25] (Marx Comments on James Mill, Élémens d’Économie Politique. In K. Marx, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels Collected Works (1975 ed., Vol. 3, pp. 211-228). Moscow: Progress Publishers.

[26] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 48-49)

[27] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 48-49)

[28] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 48-49)

[29] (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845, pp. 51-52)

[30] Xi, J. (2014). Follow the Trend of the Times and Promote Global Peace and Development. In J. Xi, The Governance of China (Kindle Edition) (pp. Location 4059-4060). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

[31] Cited in ‘Xi: BRICS cooperation will usher in new ‘golden decade’ http://china.org.cn/world/2017-06/20/content_41059451.htm

[32] ‘President Xi’s speech to Davos in full’ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/full-text-of-xi-jinping-keynote-at-the-world-economic-forum

[33] ‘Full text of President Xi’s speech at opening of Belt and Road forum’ http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1046925.shtml

[34] Xi, J. (2014). Follow the Trend of the Times and Promote Global Peace and Development. In J. Xi, The Governance of China (Kindle Edition) (pp. Location 4000). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

[35] Xi, J. (2014). Follow the Trend of the Times and Promote Global Peace and Development. In J. Xi, The Governance of China (Kindle Edition) (pp. Location 3993). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

[36] (Xi J. , The People’s Wish for a Good Life is Our Goal, 2014, pp. Location 137-144)

The challenge of Amin’s call for an Internationale of workers and peoples

By William I. Robinson
Globalizations

Samir Amin, a leading scholar and co-founder of the world-systems tradition, died on August 12, 2018. Just before his death, he published, along with close allies, a call for ‘workers and the people’ to establish a ‘fifth international’ [https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/letter-intent-inaugural-meeting-international-workers-and-peoples] to coordinate support to progressive movements. To honor Samir Amin’s invaluable contribution to world-systems scholarship, we are pleased to present readers with a selection of essays responding to Amin’s final message for today’s anti-systemic movements. This forum is being co-published between Globalizations [https://www.tandfonline.com/rglo], the Journal of World-Systems Research [http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/issue/view/75] and Pambazuka News [https://www.pambazuka.org/]. Additional essays and commentary can be found in these outlets.

Aug 27, 2019 – Samir Amin’s call for an ‘Internationale of workers and peoples’ could not be timelier. If we are to face the onslaught of the neo-fascist right, the left worldwide must urgently renovate a revolutionary project and a plan for refounding the state. It must do so across borders under an umbrella organization that puts forth a minimum program around which popular and working-class forces can unite, and that establishes mechanisms for transnational struggle. While I concur with much of Amin’s call I also have some significant differences as well as specifications with respect to the call that I will attempt to explicate below.

Global capitalism is facing a spiraling crisis of hegemony that appears to be approaching a general crisis of capitalist rule. In the face of this crisis there has been a sharp polarization in global society between insurgent left and popular forces, on the one hand, and an insurgent far right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies (Robinson, 2019 Robinson, W. I. (2019). Global capitalist crisis and twenty-first century fascism: Beyond the Trump hype.). Yet the far-right has been more effective in the past few years than the left in mobilizing disaffected populations around the world and has made significant political and institutional inroads. It would seem that Rosa Luxemburg’s dire warning at the start of the World War I that we face ‘socialism or barbarism’ is as or even more relevant today than when she issued it, given the magnitude of the means of violence worldwide and the threat of ecological holocaust. If left, popular, and working-class forces are to regain the initiative and beat back barbarism they need a transnational umbrella organization with a minimum program against global capitalism around which they can coordinate national and regional struggles and transnationalize the fightback.

The international of capital and the specter of 21st century fascism

The theme of transnational struggles from below has been discussed at great length for several decades now. Capital has achieved a newfound transnational mobility yet labor remains territorially bound by the nation-state. In the wake of the structural crisis of the 1970s, emergent transnational capital went global as a strategy to reconstitute its social power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation, to do away with Fordist-Keynesian redistributive arrangements, and to beat back the tide of revolution in the Third World.

The corporate class and its agents identified the mass struggles and demands of popular and working classes and state regulation as fetters to its freedom to make profits and accumulate wealth as the rate of profit declined in the 1970s. As an emergent transnational capitalist class (TCC) congealed, it put in place a new transnational corporate order and went on the offensive in its class warfare against working and popular classes. Globalization enhanced the structural power of transnational capital over states and popular classes worldwide. Behind this alleged ‘loss of state sovereignty’, capitalist globalization changed the correlation of class forces worldwide in favor of the TCC. Transnational capital has been able to exercise a newfound structural power over states and territorially bound working classes, which has undermined the ability of states to capture and redistribute surpluses, and with it, the logic and basis for social democratic projects. This is the backdrop to what Amin identifies as the political neutering of traditional unions and left-wing parties and their organizations.

We should be clear that, despite nationalist and populist rhetoric, the forces of 21st century fascism do not constitute a departure from global capitalism but, to the contrary, their program advances the interests of transnational capital in the face of overaccumulation and stagnation in the global economy, as I have discussed at length elsewhere (see, inter-alia, Robinson, 2014 Robinson, W. I. (2014). Global capitalism and the crisis of humanity. New York, NY: Cambridge., 2018 Robinson, W. I. (2018).

The next economic crisis: Digital capitalism and global police state. Race and Class,

The fight against fascism is necessarily a fight against the TCC. The core of 21st century fascism is the triangulation of transnational capital with reactionary and repressive political power in the state and neo-fascist forces in civil society. Emergent 21st century fascist projects are a response to the crisis. Escalating inequalities and the inability of global capitalism to assure the survival of billions of people have thrown states into crises of legitimacy and now push the system towards more openly repressive means of social control and domination that exacerbate political and social conflict and international tensions. Neo-fascist projects are a contradictory attempt to refound state legitimacy under the destabilizing conditions of capitalist globalization.

Trumpism in the United States, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and to varying degrees other far-right movements around the world, represent the extension of capitalist globalization by other means, namely by an expanding global police state and a neo-fascist mobilization. They seek to create a new balance of political forces in the face of the breakdown of the short-lived global capitalist historic bloc. What is emerging is an Internationale of 21st century fascism. Far-right and neo-fascist groups around the world, for instance, celebrated the October 2018 electoral victory of Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro. Former Trump advisor and neo-fascist organizer Steven Bannon served as an adviser to the Bolsonaro campaign, while Italy’s extreme-right interior minister Matteo Salvini declared in an exuberant tweet that was shared by U.S. neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer that ‘even in Brazil, the citizens have sent the left packing’. The Guardian of London warned in its headline coverage that ‘Trump joy over Bolsonaro suggests new rightwing axis in Americas and beyond’ (The Guardian, 2018 The Guardian. (2018). Trump joy over Bolsonaro suggests new rightwing axis in Americas and beyond.

Beyond such political agents of a 21st century fascism as Bannon or Salvini, the TCC had banked (literally) on Bolsonaro and was delighted with his victory. As in the United States under Trump, Bolsonaro proposed the wholesale privatization and deregulation of the economy, opening up the amazon to lumber, mining and transnational agribusiness interests, regressive taxation and general austerity, alongside mass repression and criminalization of social movements and vulnerable communities that may oppose this program. As Johnson (2018 Johnson, J. (2018). After win by Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro, world’s capitalists salivate over ‘new investment opportunities’.) noted the day after Bolsonaro’s victory, the ‘world’s capitalists are salivating over the new investment opportunities’ that Bolsonaro promises. Capital markets and Brazilian funds spiked on the world’s stock exchanges the day after his electoral victory. Here we see the ‘wages of fascism’ for a global capitalism in crisis.

A new Internationale and a united front against 21st century fascism

The right has drawn on the well-known nationalist, populist, xenophobic, and racist repertoire to channel rising anxieties and transform mass anti-systemic sentiment into support for its neo-fascist program. We should be clear, however, that it has been the inability of the left to confront global capitalism and to put forth a clear leftist alternative that has paved the way for the neo-fascist right. The case of Brazil is particularly indicative. During its 14 years in power the Workers Party courted national and transnational capital, overseeing a dramatic expansion of capitalist globalization in the country (Robinson, 2017 Robinson, W. I. (2017). Passive revolution: The transnational capitalist class unravels Latin America’s pink tide. Truthout, 6 June. It demobilized the mass movements that had brought it to power and absorbed its leaders into the state. Its renowned social welfare programs depended entirely on mild redistribution during the boom period of high prices for the country’s commodities exports. Once the prices collapsed in 2014 and the economy tanked, the far-right, with the backing of the TCC in Brazil and abroad, moved on the offensive (see Fogel, 2018 Fogel, B. (2018). Brazil’s never-ending crisis. Catalyst, 3(2), 73–99.

The lessons from Brazil, Latin America, the United States, and elsewhere are clear. When faced with the inability of moderate reform to stabilize capitalism or neo-fascism, the political and economic elite will embrace the latter. And when a program of mild reform alongside capitalist globalization fails to resolve the plight of masses of people, some of these masses will embrace the fascist alternative. This is why the new Internationale that Amin calls for must stake out a clear position in frontal attack against global capitalism.

These lessons have been particularly painful in Latin America, where the Pink Tide (left turn) starting in the new century raised great hopes and expectations. As has now been discussed at some length by many, myself included, the left in state power (with the partial exception of Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia) did not undertake structural transformations; it did not challenge the prevailing property relations and class structure. Social assistance programs depended on the whims of the global market controlled by the TCC. When the price of the region’s commodities exports collapsed, starting in 2011, the left lost the very basis for its mildly reformist project.

The popular masses were clamoring for more substantial transformations. But under the pretext of attracting transnational corporate investment to bring about development, the demands from below for deeper transformation were often suppressed. Social movements were demobilized, their leaders absorbed by the institutional left in government and the capitalist state, and their mass bases subordinated to the left parties’ electoralism. There is now an evident disjuncture throughout Latin America between mass social movements that are at this time resurgent, and the institutional and party left that is losing power and influence by the day. This disjuncture must be closed and the relationship between political organizations and social movements needs to be clarified as part of the work of a new Internationale.

Here is where we need a new Internationale that puts forth a unified minimal program coordinated across borders and across regions. The World Social Forum (WSF) explicitly rejected a political program and thus contributed to the separation of left political parties from mass social movements. For a fightback to be successful, we need to build a united front against fascism and a program around which such a united front can be organized. Infighting within the ruling groups is escalating as the global capitalist historic bloc constructed in the heyday of neo-liberalism from the 1990s until the financial collapse of 2008 now unravels (more broadly, the whole post-WWII international system is collapsing, but that is a discussion to take up elsewhere). Such infighting may present opportunities for the popular classes to build broad political alliances in the struggle against fascism.

Historically such fronts have subordinated the left to the reform-oriented and ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie. This time around, in my view, any strategy of broad anti-fascist alliances must foreground a clear and sharp analysis of global capitalism and its crisis and strive for popular and working-class forces to exercise their hegemony over such alliances. For this we need an Internationale with a program. Amin notes that such an Internationale would require several years before giving any tangible results. We should not be under any illusions that a new Internationale as called for by Amin will be free of conflict. All to the contrary, we will push forward in the midst of sharp debate among many different and even antagonistic positions. In the real course of history this is inevitable.

The challenge of Amin’s call for an Internationale of workers and peoples

But the construction of programs must also involve debate over the analysis of global capitalism that is at once political and theoretical. It is here that I have significant disagreements with Amin. He correctly, in my view, notes the extreme concentration of capital worldwide and the centralization of power. However, I disagree with his confused insistence on a territorial (rather than a class/social) concentration of that capital and power, and with his insistence on a ‘triad’ (United States, Europe, Japan) framework that ignores the worldwide transnationalization of capital and the rise of powerful contingents of the TCC in the former Third World.

Amin is blind-sighted by his nation-state/triad framework. It is illustrative anecdotally that the most recent report issued by the Swiss bank UBS on the world’s rich notes that most of the world’s billionaires are in the United States but the number of ultra-wealthy people is growing fastest throughout Asia. In China, which now accounts for one in five of the world’s billionaires, two new billionaires are minted every week (Neate, 2018 Neate, R. (2018). World’s billionaires became 20% richer in 2017, report reveals.

China’s economic role in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now appears structurally the same as the traditional triad countries. Brazilian, Mexican, Indian, Saudi, Egyptian, and other capitalists who belong to the TCC now also invest worldwide in these same structures, including extensive investment in the triad countries. Another report by Forbes noted that wealth is growing faster among the super-rich in the former Third World than elsewhere. ‘Between 2012 and 2017, Bangladesh saw its ultra-rich club grow by 17.3%’, it noted. ‘Over the same time period, growth in China was 13.4% while in Vietnam it was 12.7%. Kenya and India were among the other nations recording double-digit growth of 11.7 and 10.7% respectively. The U.S. came tenth overall for UHNWI [ultra-high net worth individuals] population growth at 8.1% from 2012 to 2017’ (McCarthy, 2018 McCarthy, N. (2018). Where super rich populations are growing fastest. Forbes, 27 September.  Amin is simply wrong when he asserts that ‘the oligarchs of the triad are the only ones that count’.

Amin’s tenacious nation-state/interstate framework of analysis of world political dynamics ignores both the ‘Thirdworldization’ of significant sectors of the First World working classes and the rise of TCC contingents in the former Third World that are now globally active and part of the global investor class. It is in fact the downward mobility and destabilization of working classes in the former First World, the destruction of the old labor aristocracies, that provides the recruiting grounds for 21st century fascism but also establishes fertile new opportunities for transnational North-South solidarities (yet another reason why Amin’s call for a new Internationale is so urgent).

These are not merely analytical or theoretical differences. They have political implications insofar as we must banish any lingering illusions about a ‘progressive’ or ‘nationalist’ bourgeoisie in the former Third World with which one could ally against global capital. There may have been one in the bygone era of colonialism and the heyday of national liberation struggles in the 20th century but the interests of the leading contingents of capital and their political representatives in the former Third World now lie in the defense and consolidation of global capitalism. The ‘re-colonization’ of the world by what Amin refers to as the ‘collective imperialism’ of the triad countries is in actuality a re-colonization by transnational capital, by the TCC, not by some nation-states of other nation-states, notwithstanding that the most powerful contingents of the TCC are still located in the old triad countries and now in China as well.

The worldwide struggle from below of a new Internationale – which must be simultaneously national and transnational – must identify and prioritize the class antagonisms within and across countries and regions over core-periphery or Global North-South contradictions, even though these latter contradictions are still very much relevant, if increasingly secondary. The irony is that Amin’s ‘triad against the Global South’ framework of analysis is in direct contradiction with his entirely correct assertion that ‘the possibility of substantial progressive reforms of capitalism in its current stage is only an illusion’.

Of course, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals were all umbrella international organizations for socialist political parties, whereas the WSF prohibited political parties from participating. I concur fully with Amin that we need to ‘establish a new Organization and not just a “movement”’ or a ‘discussion forum’. At this time, in my view, it is necessary for a new Internationale to incorporate both social movements and left political organizations and parties. This is to say that a new Internationale would be quite distinct from the first four and also from the WSF, which was an international of social movements only. Commitment to a ‘minimum program’ and to joining forces around such a program with political parties may be tough for social movements to swallow. It is absolutely true that the vanguardist model of revolution in the 20th century (as an aside – this was less due to Lenin’s approach than to a fetishization of that approach) involved control of social movements from below by political parties that sought to snuff out their autonomy, and moreover, that some left political organizations in and out of the state in the new century continue to seek such control over social movements from below.

Clearly, a new Internationale must put forth a model of revolutionary struggle in which social movements from below exercise complete autonomy from political parties and from states that may be captured by such parties. If the Left attempts to control or place brakes on mass mobilization and on autonomous social movements from below, if it suppresses the demands of the popular masses in the name of ‘governance’ or electoral strategies, it will be betraying what it means to be left. It is only such mobilization from below that can impose a counterweight to the control that transnational capital and the global market exercise from above over capitalist states around the world.

Finally, any new Internationale will have to deal with the matter of elections and of the capitalist state. We have learned that subordinating the popular agenda to winning elections will only set us up for defeat even if we must participate in electoral processes when possible and expedient. But we have also learned from recent experience of Syriza in Greece and the Pink Tide governments in Latin America, as well as social democratic governments that came to office around the world in the late 20th century, that once a left force wins government office (which is not the same as state power?…?state power is imposed structurally by transnational capital) it is tasked with administering the capitalist state and its crisis and is pushed into defending that state and its dependence on transnational capital for its reproduction, which places it at odds with the same popular classes and social movements that brought it to power.

There is no ready solution to this (these) dilemma(s). But certainly, a new Internationale of workers and peoples that entails ‘an actual organization with statutes and a renovated socialist project’ is integral to a solution. Amin is right that ‘we are now in the phase of the ‘autumn of capitalism’ without this being strengthened by the emergence of ‘the people’s spring’ and a socialist perspective.’

References

Fogel, B. (2018). Brazil’s never-ending crisis. Catalyst, 3(2), 73–99. [Google Scholar]
Johnson, J. (2018). After win by Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsonaro, world’s capitalists salivate over ‘new investment opportunities’. Common Dreams, 29 October. Retrieved from https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/29/after-win-brazilian-fascist-jair-bolsonaro-worlds-capitalists-salivate-over-new [Google Scholar]
McCarthy, N. (2018). Where super rich populations are growing fastest. Forbes, 27 September. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/09/27/where-super-rich-populations-are-growing-fastest-infographic/#17ac328e4ce3 [Google Scholar]
Neate, R. (2018). World’s billionaires became 20% richer in 2017, report reveals. The Guardian, 26 October. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/26/worlds-billionaires-became-20-richer-in-2017-report-reveals [Google Scholar]
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William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global, and international studies, and Latin American and Iberian studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism, released by Haymarket Books in 2018.

Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment

By Fareed Zakaria
Foreign Affairs, July-August 2019

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.

As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet. Remember that the phrase “Third World” derived from the tripartite division of the globe, the First World being the United States and Western Europe, and the Second World, the communist countries. The Third World was everywhere else, where each country was choosing between U.S. and Soviet influence. For much of the world’s population, from Poland to China, the century hardly looked American.

The United States’ post–Cold War supremacy was initially hard to detect. As I pointed out in The New Yorker in 2002, most participants missed it. In 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that the world was dividing into three political spheres, dominated by the dollar, the yen, and the deutsche mark. Henry Kissinger’s 1994 book, Diplomacy, predicted the dawn of a new multipolar age. Certainly in the United States, there was little triumphalism. The 1992 presidential campaign was marked by a sense of weakness and weariness. “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won,” the Democratic hopeful Paul Tsongas said again and again. Asia hands had already begun to speak of “the Pacific century.”

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire.

There was one exception to this analysis, a prescient essay in the pages of this magazine by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The Unipolar Moment,” which was published in 1990. But even this triumphalist take was limited in its expansiveness, as its title suggests. “The unipolar moment will be brief,” Krauthammer admitted, predicting in a Washington Post column that within a very short time, Germany and Japan, the two emerging “regional superpowers,” would be pursuing foreign policies independent of the United States.

Policymakers welcomed the waning of unipolarity, which they assumed was imminent. In 1991, as the Balkan wars began, Jacques Poos, the president of the Council of the European Union, declared, “This is the hour of Europe.” He explained: “If one problem can be solved by Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country, and it is not up to the Americans.” But it turned out that only the United States had the combined power and influence to intervene effectively and tackle the crisis.

Similarly, toward the end of the 1990s, when a series of economic panics sent East Asian economies into tailspins, only the United States could stabilize the global financial system. It organized a $120 billion international bailout for the worst-hit countries, resolving the crisis. Time magazine put three Americans, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, on its cover with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Just as American hegemony grew in the early 1990s while no one was noticing, so in the late 1990s did the forces that would undermine it, even as people had begun to speak of the United States as “the indispensable nation” and “the world’s sole superpower.” First and foremost, there was the rise of China. It is easy to see in retrospect that Beijing would become the only serious rival to Washington, but it was not as apparent a quarter century ago. Although China had grown speedily since the 1980s, it had done so from a very low base. Few countries had been able to continue that process for more than a couple of decades. China’s strange mixture of capitalism and Leninism seemed fragile, as the Tiananmen Square uprising had revealed.

But China’s rise persisted, and the country became the new great power on the block, one with the might and the ambition to match the United States. Russia, for its part, went from being both weak and quiescent in the early 1990s to being a revanchist power, a spoiler with enough capability and cunning to be disruptive. With two major global players outside the U.S.-constructed international system, the world had entered a post-American phase. Today, the United States is still the most powerful country on the planet, but it exists in a world of global and regional powers that can—and frequently do—push back.

The 9/11 attacks and the rise of Islamic terrorism played a dual role in the decline of U.S. hegemony. At first, the attacks seem to galvanize Washington and mobilize its power. In 2001, the United States, still larger economically than the next five countries put together, chose to ramp up its annual defense spending by an amount—almost $50 billion—that was larger than the United Kingdom’s entire yearly defense budget. When Washington intervened in Afghanistan, it was able to get overwhelming support for the campaign, including from Russia. Two years later, despite many objections, it was still able to put together a large international coalition for an invasion of Iraq. The early years of this century marked the high point of the American imperium, as Washington tried to remake wholly alien nations—Afghanistan and Iraq—thousands of miles away, despite the rest of the world’s reluctant acquiescence or active opposition.

Iraq in particular marked a turning point. The United States embarked on a war of choice despite misgivings expressed in the rest of world. It tried to get the UN to rubber-stamp its mission, and when that proved arduous, it dispensed with the organization altogether. It ignored the Powell Doctrine—the idea, promulgated by General Colin Powell while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, that a war was worth entering only if vital national interests were at stake and overwhelming victory assured. The Bush administration insisted that the vast challenge of occupying Iraq could be undertaken with a small number of troops and a light touch. Iraq, it was said, would pay for itself. And once in Baghdad, Washington decided to destroy the Iraqi state, disbanding the army and purging the bureaucracy, which produced chaos and helped fuel an insurgency. Any one of these mistakes might have been overcome. But together they ensured that Iraq became a costly fiasco.

After 9/11, Washington made major, consequential decisions that continue to haunt it, but it made all of them hastily and in fear. It saw itself as in mortal danger, needing to do whatever it took to defend itself—from invading Iraq to spending untold sums on homeland security to employing torture. The rest of the world saw a country that was experiencing a kind of terrorism that many had lived with for years and yet was thrashing around like a wounded lion, tearing down international alliances and norms. In its first two years, the George W. Bush administration walked away from more international agreements than any previous administration had. (Undoubtedly, that record has now been surpassed under President Donald Trump.) American behavior abroad during the Bush administration shattered the moral and political authority of the United States, as long-standing allies such as Canada and France found themselves at odds with it on the substance, morality, and style of its foreign policy.

So which was it that eroded American hegemony—the rise of new challengers or imperial overreach? As with any large and complex historical phenomenon, it was probably all of the above. China’s rise was one of those tectonic shifts in international life that would have eroded any hegemon’s unrivaled power, no matter how skillful its diplomacy. The return of Russia, however, was a more complex affair. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early 1990s, leaders in Moscow were determined to turn their country into a liberal democracy, a European nation, and an ally of sorts of the West. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was foreign minister during the final years of the Soviet Union, supported the United States’ 1990–91 war against Iraq. And after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was an even more ardent liberal, an internationalist, and a vigorous supporter of human rights.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment was to simply stop paying attention.
Who lost Russia is a question for another article. But it is worth noting that although Washington gave Moscow some status and respect—expanding the G-7 into the G-8, for example—it never truly took Russia’s security concerns seriously. It enlarged NATO fast and furiously, a process that might have been necessary for countries such as Poland, historically insecure and threatened by Russia, but one that has continued on unthinkingly, with little concern for Russian sensitivities, and now even extends to Macedonia. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior makes every action taken against his country seem justified, but it’s worth asking, What forces produced the rise of Putin and his foreign policy in the first place? Undoubtedly, they were mostly internal to Russia, but to the extent that U.S. actions had an effect, they appear to have been damaging, helping stoke the forces of revenge and revanchism in Russia.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment, with Russia and more generally, was to simply stop paying attention. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans wanted to go home, and they did. During the Cold War, the United States had stayed deeply interested in events in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait, and even Angola and Namibia. By the mid-1990s, it had lost all interest in the world. Foreign-bureau broadcasts by NBC fell from 1,013 minutes in 1988 to 327 minutes in 1996. (Today, the three main networks combined devote roughly the same amount of time to foreign-bureau stories as each individual network did in 1988.) Both the White House and Congress during the George H. W. Bush administration had no appetite for an ambitious effort to transform Russia, no interest in rolling out a new version of the Marshall Plan or becoming deeply engaged in the country. Even amid the foreign economic crises that hit during the Clinton administration, U.S. policymakers had to scramble and improvise, knowing that Congress would appropriate no funds to rescue Mexico or Thailand or Indonesia. They offered advice, most of it designed to require little assistance from Washington, but their attitude was one of a distant well-wisher, not an engaged superpower.

Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm, limited in its scope, endorsed by major powers and legitimized by international law. But right at the time of all these positive developments, the United States lost interest. U.S. policymakers still wanted to transform the world in the 1990s, but on the cheap. They did not have the political capital or resources to throw themselves into the effort. That was one reason Washington’s advice to foreign countries was always the same: economic shock therapy and instant democracy. Anything slower or more complex—anything, in other words, that resembled the manner in which the West itself had liberalized its economy and democratized its politics—was unacceptable. Before 9/11, when confronting challenges, the American tactic was mostly to attack from afar, hence the twin approaches of economic sanctions and precision air strikes. Both of these, as the political scientist Eliot Cohen wrote of airpower, had the characteristics of modern courtship: “gratification without commitment.”

Of course, these limits on the United States’ willingness to pay prices and bear burdens never changed its rhetoric, which is why, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, I pointed out that U.S. foreign policy was defined by “the rhetoric of transformation but the reality of accommodation.” The result, I said, was “a hollow hegemony.” That hollowness has persisted ever since.

THE FINAL BLOW

The Trump administration has hollowed out U.S. foreign policy even further. Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are screwing the United States. He is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he has abandoned the field. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and from engaging with Asia more generally. It is uncoupling itself from its 70-year partnership with Europe. It has dealt with Latin America through the prism of either keeping immigrants out or winning votes in Florida. It has even managed to alienate Canadians (no mean feat). And it has subcontracted Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a few impulsive exceptions—such as the narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea—what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.

When the United Kingdom was the superpower of its day, its hegemony eroded because of many large structural forces—the rise of Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union. But it also lost control of its empire through overreach and hubris. In 1900, with a quarter of the world’s population under British rule, most of the United Kingdom’s major colonies were asking only for limited autonomy—“dominion status” or “home rule,” in the terms of the day. Had the country quickly granted that to all its colonies, who knows whether it would have been able to extend its imperial life for decades? But it didn’t, insisting on its narrow, selfish interests rather than accommodating itself to the interests of the broader empire.

There is an analogy here with the United States. Had the country acted more consistently in the pursuit of broader interests and ideas, it could have continued its influence for decades (albeit in a different form). The rule for extending liberal hegemony seems simple: be more liberal and less hegemonic. But too often and too obviously, Washington pursued its narrow self-interests, alienating its allies and emboldening its foes. Unlike the United Kingdom at the end of its reign, the United States is not bankrupt or imperially overextended. It remains the single most powerful country on the planet. It will continue to wield immense influence, more than any other nation. But it will no longer define and dominate the international system the way it did for almost three decades.

What remains, then, are American ideas. The United States has been a unique hegemon in that it expanded its influence to establish a new world order, one dreamed of by President Woodrow Wilson and most fully conceived of by President Franklin Roosevelt. It is the world that was half-created after 1945, sometimes called “the liberal international order,” from which the Soviet Union soon defected to build its own sphere. But the free world persisted through the Cold War, and after 1991, it expanded to encompass much of the globe. The ideas behind it have produced stability and prosperity over the last three-quarters of a century. The question now is whether, as American power wanes, the international system it sponsored—the rules, norms, and values—will survive. Or will America also watch the decline of its empire of ideas?

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October 2018:An exchange prompted by the essay 

The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class? 

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Bill Fletcher
Taking a long view of precariousness as an inherent feature of capitalism can shed light on the contemporary debate on “the precariat.” Read

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Nancy Folbre
The focus on “the precariat” is useful but limited: the fight over distribution isn’t just between labor and capital. Read

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Azfar Khan
A universal basic income is key to delivering security and autonomy to people in a precarious world. Read

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Alexandra Köves
Beyond policies like a universal basic income, a transition to a equitable and sustainable society requires the redefinition of well-being, needs, and work itself. Read

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George Liodakis
There is no “precariat,” per se—the working class as-a-whole remains the necessary agent for transformation. Read

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Ronaldo Munck
Work in the Global South has always been precarious, but the resurgence of global labor organizing offers a way forward. Read

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William I. Robinson
The “precariat,” rather than a new class, is part of the global proletariat, on whose struggle with transnational capital our fate depends. Read

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Pritam Singh
A basic income alone is not transformative, but a feature of a broader ecosocialist vision of dismantling capitalism. Read

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Eva-Maria Swidler
Workers in the Global North have a lot to learn from the past struggles of workers in the Global South (as well as in their own countries). Read

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Alison Tate and Evelyn Astor
Labor unions must continue to play an important role in the fight for economic justice and against precariousness. Read

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Author’s Response
Guy Standing addresses points raised by the contributors to this roundtable. Read
 

By Guy Standing

October 2018