american imperialism: dropping bombs on refugee camps, couping democratically elected heads of state, starting decades-long wars on the other side of the planet for the sake of profit

chinese imperialism: building airports in africa

Death to America

Marxist theories of imperialism — both the classic ones advanced by Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin and the modern ones, such as David Harvey’s theory of the “new imperialism” — link aggressive foreign policy to the contradictions of capital accumulation. In this view, interimperialist rivalries have a structural cause that is irreducible to messianic imperialist ideologies or the search for security that creates insecurities for other states, as in the realist accounts of the “security dilemma.” According to the Marxist interpretation, domestic industrial overcapacity and the overaccumulation of capital compel the national bourgeoisie to seek external expansion. In this endeavor, capital enlists the help of the state to protect its overseas investments, markets, and trade routes. The clash between nation-based capitals over markets and profitable outlets for investment leads to interimperialist rivalries. Some argue that such conflicts are obsolete due to the emergence of the transnational capitalist class (TCC), with the nascent “transnational state” to serve its interests. However, the TCC thesis looks increasingly problematic from an empirical standpoint. Research shows that global capitalist networks remain highly regionalized and uneven, with limited interlocking between the Global North and other countries, including China. The concept of the “transnational state” seems even more far-fetched, with rising militarization, protectionism, trade wars, and conflicting geopolitical visions such as the US “Pivot to Asia” versus the Chinese “Belt and Road Initiative.”

One might respond that the US-China rivalry could be driven by national security elites and their competing visions of the “national interest,” rather than by capitalist elites who would have otherwise preferred the globalized accumulation regime without the national divisions. In other words, due to the relative autonomy of the state from capitalist interests, interimperialist rivalries may have noneconomic causes. While this argument cannot be dismissed in principle (and, as we shall see, it plays a central role in explaining the US-Russian confrontation), it is hardly applicable to the US-China rivalry. Based on the historical record and Chinese strategic thinking, we might well deduce that China in particular is a reluctant imperialist nation, with a certain tradition of avoiding confrontation. Nevertheless, its relentless search for markets and investment opportunities abroad, driven by domestic overcapacity and capital overaccumulation, almost mechanically leads it to expand its global military presence as well, creating both the economic and the security tensions with the United States. Facing the threat of expanding Chinese capital (which is tightly interwoven with the state), factions of the US capitalist class have embraced a more confrontational stance toward China despite the economic interdependence between the two countries and the importance of the vast Chinese market for American businesses. The stage is set for the inter-imperialist rivalry that will define the twenty-first century.

This is, basically, where the “Soviet Union = imperialist” model gets you. I don’t even disagree with a lot of the analysis on a theoretical basis, I just think that doing all this and then immediately, almost instinctively lumping China in as just another imperialist because they like, have markets and sell stuff to developing countries, leads to incorrect predictions and conclusions from otherwise good theory.

From Chapter 2 of Desai’s Geopolitical Economy:

[UCD = uneven and combined development, a theory which held sway during the time of the Bolsheviks]

Postwar developments made UCD and the classical theories of imperialism more, not less, relevant. If capitalist competition did not lead to further world wars, this was substantially because the USSR became part of UCD’s further unfolding. As a revolutionary state founded on UCD’s understanding of the capitalist world order, it took opposition to imperialism beyond national (capitalist) opposition to imperialism to encompass working-class opposition as well. As such it represented the strongest form of combined development: rather than trying to hasten capitalist development it sought to skip capitalism entirely. That communist China did so too, and survived to rank as the strongest of the so-called BRIC contender countries in the early twenty-first century, is also telling.

The significance of Soviet combined development was not confined to its borders. After its decisive role in the defeat of fascism in the Second World War, the USSR ensured decolonization and supported combined development in newly independent countries, strengthening resistance to imperial pressure among many ex-colonies. The USSR’s existence also ensured that combined development, as well as ‘full employment’ and welfarist policies, had to be tolerated in recovering economies. As Chapter 7 will show, by the time the USSR disintegrated, sufficient combined development had taken place among recovering and developing countries to make the US ‘victory’ in the cold war pyrrhic.

Not saying that current-day China and the USSR are one-to-one matches; China seems less willing to supply weaponry to revolutionary movements (or if they are, it’s done so secretly that not even the US has found a way to accuse them of doing it much). But they play a remarkably similar role given the different historical conditions that we’re in, 35 years on from the collapse of the USSR and like 75 years on from the time of Stalin.

the most striking example is Russia’s support of the murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad

Who must go?

Left in form. Right in essence.

DPRK my beloved