https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d22FHguacsrxo7Skwo4UBu0LtsfkW7A8/view
Friday, August 28, 2020
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
THOUGHTS ON IMPERIALISM
Part of an interview on imperialism on March 23, 2017 from the American Herald Tribune:
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your book "International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle" is for me relevant and especially visionary. In your opinion, what are the most effective tools to fight against the ultra-liberalism and imperialism?
Prof. Harry Targ: That book was written to challenge the dominant discourse among those of us who study international relations. Reigning paradigms—realism, liberalism, and behavioral science—did not address imperialism, dominance, and dependency. The book was written in the early 1980s and reflected my growing engagement with theories of imperialism, particularly Lenin, and dependency, primarily scholar/activists from the Global South such as Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Andre Gunter Frank, Fernando Cardoso and others. I wanted researchers and teachers of international relations in North America to incorporate these theories into how we looked at the world. Most importantly, I wanted our students to be confronted with ideas about imperialism and dependency, particularly the predominant imperial power of the United States.
From a historical and theoretical point of view much has changed since then, but yet the main lines of the theoretical argument remain the same. With the collapse of the Socialist Bloc and the dramatic shift at the apex of capitalism from manufacturing to finance, coupled with new technologies, we have seen the coming of the age of neoliberal globalization. And despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, US global hegemony has been increasingly challenged by China, India, various formations in the Global South, and massive uprisings everywhere motivated by opposition to austerity policies, ie. neoliberalism.
We are at a very difficult juncture in the world. Mass movements are springing up everywhere, some of which are rightwing, nationalist, neo-fascist, and others progressive. The US has countered its weakening economic position with an expansion of its military presence: over 700 military bases, private contract armies, new technologies such as drones, and collaborations with some of the world’s most reactionary regimes such as Saudi Arabia.
How to respond? This is the most difficult question. I would argue that the peace movement in the United States needs to connect with the other movements in the country, explaining how war/peace and anti-imperialism are connected to the struggles against racism, sexism, climate disaster and other issues. The peace movement also needs to network more effectively with movements around the world who are struggling for peace and justice; the way Arab Spring, Occupy, revolt in Madison, Wisconsin drew people, particularly the young into solidarity. And, in addition, we in the university need to reintroduce those radical ideas about imperialism and dependency and the interconnections between domestic and international issues into our curricula. It is important in our educational and social movement work to introduce the vision and possibility of creating a twenty-first century socialism. This will take a long time.
Whether it is in your "Constructing Alternative World Futures: Reordering the Planet" or "The Global Political Economy in the 1980s," I note that you have gone beyond your time and that your analyzes have been verified. How did you come to these conclusions especially before some systemic crises of capitalism like the stock market crash of 1987?
Constructing Alternative World Futures was a book a friend and I wrote in the early 1970s. We wanted to make the case that social movements needed to be guided by, even proceeded by, alternative visions of a better future. My part of the book was to survey the visions of a better society proclaimed and experimented with over the centuries. I looked at global visions, regional ones, and local utopian communities. I was particularly impressed with the idea of participatory democracy (ideas from the early New Left in the United States) and the experiments in utopian communities. Ironically much of the thinking about a twenty-first century socialism emphasizes workplace control, cooperatives, establishing real direct democracy, and privileging grassroots movements for change. The vision of community that so animated thinking in the late twentieth century is back. Some of it even has its roots in the early Marx. Today the Cubans are trying to build a new economic system based on worker cooperatives, without negating the supportive role of the state, and with limits, markets.
The expectations about the crises of capitalism, 1987 or 2009, come from my reading of the Marx and Neo-Marxist literature. Data makes it clear that over the last forty years capital accumulation has created an emerging global economic system based on monopolies, grotesque expansion of the gaps between rich and poor, and fundamental contradictions between the qualitative increase in productivity and the inability of workers to buy the goods they produce. Add to the contradictions of capitalism in general, we need to consider the environmental crisis. Most of us were insensitive to the environment forty years ago.
https://ahtribune.com/in-depth/1568-prof-harry-targ.html
Sunday, August 16, 2020
BUILDING A SOCIALIST FUTURE
This essay was written at the outset of Trumpism and the brazen rise of white supremacist movements. Also it was written at a time when social movements, including the Bernie Sanders campaign, had captured the imagination of many young people, people of Color, immigrant activists and others. Most recently George Floyd was murdered by police and the Covid 19 pandemic exposed to all the failures of our economic and political system. While changes are occurring at breakneck speed the analysis of capitalism and the envisioning of socialism described below seem still relevant, even as we approach the November, 2020 elections.
These issues will be among those discussed at the National Convention of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) to be held on Saturday and Sunday August 22,23, 2020. See the link below. Register and attend as we discuss further the crises of capitalism and the prospects of building a better, more humane,world..
https://www.cc-ds.org/2020-convention/
Harry Targ
Introduction
The twenty-first century economic reality has created a new class society with a dominant class of concentrated wealth at one extreme and a growing class of economically insecure in the other. More and more of those in the latter have become political activists, particularly among the young. This new class society in the United States parallels similar economic changes in both rich and poor countries. As a result of the changes in global and domestic economies social movements have arisen everywhere. From Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin, from Greece to Chile, from Syriza and Podemos to the Sanders campaign, the cry for change, often a demand for socialism, is spreading. The outcome of this new activism is unclear but for the first time in a long time, the prospects for positive social and political change look promising.
The New
Class Society
In 1999, Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong published the first of four editions
of a perceptive sociological analysis that identified what the authors
identified as “the new class society.” They employed a Marxist and Weberian
analysis of class that combined workers’ relationships to the means of production
with their organizational position.
Using data reflecting
their synthetic definition of class, these authors concluded that the popular
portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class, a large
“middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically
marginalized people was, by the 1970s, no longer an accurate way to describe
society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s
until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, had
become a class system looking like a “double diamond.”
In the
new class society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged
class” composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and
“professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute
about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working
class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor with the
constant threat of job loss and wage stagnation, some modestly self-employed,
and a large part-time labor force. This is the second diamond representing 80
percent of the population.
In short, the political economy that emerged nearly fifty years ago is one in which a shrinking ruling class that owns or controls capital has accumulated enormous wealth and dominates today’s economy. At the other end an increasingly insecure working class in terms of jobs and income has grown exponentially.
Peter Temin, an MIT economist, confirms the earlier sociological work in his new book “The Vanishing Middle Class.” This book also identifies an emerging two-class society with wealth and power concentrated at the top and poverty and powerlessness at the bottom. In what Temin calls the “dual economy,” the ruling class consists of the finance, technology, and electronics sectors (FTE), representing the top twenty percent as opposed to “the low wage sector;” clerks, assemblers, laborers, and service workers who provide the comforts and profits for the top twenty percent.
In summary, both volumes suggest that in terms of wealth and power conflicts of interest have to be seen not between the one percent and everyone else but between the twenty percent who own/control/ or administer the capitalist system and the eighty percent who constitute increasingly marginalized labor serving the interests of the wealthy and powerful.
The Precariat
Guy Standing, a British economist, has written about the “precariat,” a growing portion of the worldwide work force, Temin’s “ low wage sector,” who live in economic insecurity. The term, precariat, refers to a synthesis of the idea of the proletariat, workers who sell their ability to provide labor to a capitalist for a wage, and precarity, or economic existence that is unpredictable, marginal, and insecure. Job scarcity and wage stagnation increasingly is experienced by workers with professional skills and credentials as well as the traditional working class.
Standing argues that all across the globe workers, particularly young workers, live in situations of economic insecurity and unpredictability, irrespective of credentials, that in the past guaranteed jobs and living wages. Of course, the precariat do not have any of the guarantees of union membership and their skills leave them often working on a part-time contract basis and in isolation from fellow workers. In addition the precariat include workers in the “informal sector.” These are workers who often will do anything to survive from day to day: for example, day labor, street vending, drug dealing, petty crime, or prostitution.
Accumulation by Dispossession
David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, revisited Marx’s description of primitive accumulation in his book, “The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism.” Capitalism was created on the backs of slaves, the slaughter of indigenous people, and the expropriation of already occupied land. In other words, through kidnapping, forced labor, slaughter, and occupation, capitalism was born. The expropriation of resources, people, and land led to the accumulation of wealth that spurred development and growth.
Harvey then argues that the primitive accumulation of the fifteenth century is similar in outcome to the “accumulation by dispossession,” of the twenty-first century. Today workers lose their property and their personal income in a debt system that sucks their scarce earnings and property. Examples include defaults on mortgage loans and bank repossessions and governmental decisions to confiscate property for purposes of urban redevelopment. Accumulation by dispossession, while not as violent as in the era of primitive accumulation, has the same outcome: expropriating the value of the work of the many for the riches of the few.
Growing Economic Inequality and Urban Decay and Gentrification
Virtually every study of the distribution of wealth and income in the United States demonstrates a dramatic increase in inequality. Also studies sponsored by international organizations report that despite declines in worldwide absolute poverty, the trajectory of growing inequality in wealth and income is a central feature of the global economy. In addition, declining inequality between countries, such as that between China and the countries of the European Union, have occurred while inequalities within these countries have widened. In the United States income and wealth inequality which declined from the 1930s until the 1960s has returned to levels not seen since the 1920s.
The patterns of inequality are visible in geographic spaces as well. As more and more people are forced to migrate to cities, what Mike Davis calls “global slums,” demarcations of areas of opulence and poverty become visible. Members of the top twenty percent are consumers of expensive living spaces, elite schools, and vibrant recreational facilities. They also lobby for public funds to create recreational attractions that entice tourists to bolster local economies. Gentrified city spaces are protected by fences and police.
On the other hand, the bottom eighty percent live in varying degrees of poverty. Housing stocks crumble, neighborhoods are overcrowded, public services are increasingly underfunded, and populations are left to lead lives of quiet desperation and intra-community violence. In the new class society different sectors of the population live in isolation from each other, except when political conflict and violence spread across communities.
Also in the new class society youth become pessimistic about their futures. Despite the fact that media and academic studies claim that upward mobility is tied to scholastic achievement, the schools they attend are underfunded. And the cost of higher education, the main source of credentialing the young, has become prohibitively expensive. For those who accumulate massive student debt the experience feels like a modern-day variant of indentured servitude. Jobs for those who do not attend college are scarce and reside primarily in the low-wage service sector. And so-called STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are not as plentiful as college promotional brochures suggest. Along with the precarity of the traditional working class is a rising precarity of a new working class of highly educated but unemployable young people.
Racism
Manning Marable published a perceptive essay in 2006 entitled “Globalization and Racialization.” In it he adapted, based upon the twenty-first century global political economy, the prophetic statement by W. E. B. Du Bois that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line. Marable suggested that the new global political economy was based upon capital flight, as well-paid manufacturing jobs left the United States for sweatshops in the Global South. Unemployment increased in the United States. Downward pressures on wages and benefits paid workers in poor countries reduced the economic conditions of US workers. The decline of organized labor in the United States and the Global South weakened the bargaining position of workers everywhere.
Marable suggested that the people most vulnerable to the massive changes in the global economy were the already marginalized people of color. Unemployment rates in poor and Black communities skyrocketed, particularly among youth. The new gentrification and shift in politics from welfare state capitalism to austerity led to declining public services in poor communities. This has had particularly devastating impacts on educational institutions.
With declining economic opportunities, a growing sense of hopelessness, draconian government policies such as the wars on drugs and crime, literally millions of African Americans, and other people of color, have become victims of mass incarceration, what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow.” Finally, many states have laws that prevent former felons from voting. The Marable framework, which he refers to as “global apartheid” and “the New Racial Domain,” thus links globalization of production to racism; particularly growing unemployment and urban decay, criminalization, mass incarceration, and voter disenfranchisement.
Neoliberalism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism
The so-called “golden age of the US economy,” 1945 to 1968, may have been an anomaly in American history. The United States emerged from World War Two as the economic and military hegemonic power. The war led to a fourfold increase in United States trade compared with the late 1930s. In 1945 it produced about 2/3 of all the industrial goods manufactured in the world and US investments constituted about ¾ of all the world’s investments. With fears of stagnation accompanying the war’s end, the Truman Administration launched a massive program of military investment to forestall declining demand for US goods and services.
In terms of international relations, the United States played an instrumental role in establishing powerful international economic institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It helped rebuild an anti-communist Europe through a massive financial aid system. It later established foreign assistance programs for newly “independent” countries requiring their commitment to the maintenance of a global capitalist system.
At home a United States economy was created that stimulated high mass consumption. People were socialized to believe that their self-worth was determined by the quantity and quality of goods and services they consumed. The new communication medium, television, educated viewers as to the products that were available (as well as the enemies overseas who were the threat to the domestic consumer society).
However, by the late 1960s, markets were glutted and demand for goods lessened even though wages and benefits for some workers increased. Federal and state governments had been increasing services such as education, health care, and transportation. Both profit rates and consumer demand declined. Growing political protest against the Vietnam war and racism across the country added to emerging economic stagnation.
By the 1970s, the squeeze on profits and reduced demand, was exacerbated by Middle East wars and large increases in the price of oil, which made some corporations and banks richer while economic stagnation, including both high inflation and unemployment, ensued. At this point, the United States economy began a shift to what David Harvey calls “financialization.” A small number of banks and corporations, mostly US but also European and Japanese, began to shift from encouraging manufacturing growth to financial speculation. A “new” debt system was encouraged, one in which oil-poor countries borrowed more and more money from bankers to pay for continued oil imports. In exchange debtor nations would promise to carry out new economic policies at home: cut government spending, privatize public institutions, deregulate domestic economies, and shift economic activities from production for domestic use to production for sale in the world market.
Thus, the new era of “neoliberal globalization” was initiated. The new system was driven by financial speculators, declining autonomy of nation-states, and the downsizing of wages and benefits everywhere. At the same time rates of profit for speculators increased and smaller numbers of banks and other financial institutions increasingly dominated the global economy. This system was initiated in the Global South, spread to Western Europe and after the fall of the Soviet Union and its allies to Eastern Europe. In the 1980s neoliberalism was embraced by Prime Minister Thatcher in Great Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. The best way to characterize policy in the age of neoliberal globalization is “austerity,” reducing the economic opportunities of the many for the benefit of the few.
Neoliberal globalization is the systemic source of the new class society (or the dual economy), the rise of the precariat, accumulation by dispossession, growing inequality and urban gentrification, and the expansion of racism.
A Revitalized Interest in Socialism in the Twenty-First Century
As history has shown, the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, or dominant classes, never goes unchecked. The drive for domination breeds resistance. And resistance takes many forms: traditional revolutionary practices, building alternative economic and political institutions, non-violent refusal to obey the institutions that support economic misery and political repression, and where practical, participation in electoral processes. Social change is many-sided and several strategies together are most likely to bring positive results.
History shows also that struggles for change are broadly political, require organization, mass mobilization, and education. Change requires analyses of the causes of the problems needing solution and a vision of what a better future might look like. And there is an inextricable connection between the causes of the problems, the tactics needed to change the situation, and a vision of a better society.
The analyses above highlight the changing character of the global political economy, emerging class structures, and the growing vulnerabilities of literally millions of people: young and old: Black, Brown, and White; female and male; gay and straight; and at all levels of education and training. At the root of the problem is the capitalist system, a system whose reason for being is the maximization of profit. People today are talking about a new society, a socialist society. Socialism implies a political economy in which people contribute their talents, their labors, for the public good and share equitably in the product of their labor. And socialism presumes democratic participation in work places, the political system, and the community.
References
Robert A. Perrucci and Earl Wysong. The New Class Society, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999 (the first of four editions).
Peter
Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,
MIT Press, 2017.
Victor Tan Chen, “The Dual Economy,” Working Class Perspectives, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/the-dual-economy/
Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2017.
Harry Targ, Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and Militarism, Lulu.com, 2006.
Manning Marable, “Globalization and Racialization,” ZNET, zcom.org, March 2, 2009.
Various articles on political economy, social movements, peace and justice in Harry Targ, Diary of a Heartland Radical, www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com
Thursday, August 13, 2020
END THE BLOCKADE: CELEBRATE THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Fidel Castro at 90: US/CUBAN RELATIONS, THE ROAD AHEAD
Sunday, August 9, 2020
Thursday, August 6, 2020
WE HAVE HANDED OUT AUTHORITY "TO MEN WHO WERE INSANE"
Harry Targ
Lyrics from “Presidential Rag,” Arlo Guthrie, 1974
Nobody elected your family,
and we didn't elect your friends,
no one voted for your advisors,
and nobody wants amends,
You're the one we voted for, so you must take the blame,
For handing out authority to men who were insane…
Mothers still are weeping for their boys that went to war
Fathers still are asking what the whole damn thing was for
And People still are hungry and people still are poor,
And an honest week of work these days don't feed the kids no more,
Schools are still like prisons,
cuz we don't learn how to live,
and everybody wants to take, nobody wants to give
Yes you will be remembered, be remembered very well,
and if I live a long life, all the stories I could tell,
A many who are in in poverty of sickness and of grief,
hell yes, you will be remembered, be remembered very well…
August 6, 2020 is 75 years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, incinerating 80,000 people. The accumulated research tells us that the Japanese were near surrender, much of the country had already been bombed into submission, Truman insiders knew this new weapon would transform the world for ever, and military and scientific advisors had advised against using this horrific new weapon. Yet President Truman, with the support of some key advisors, ordered the bombings (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Best estimates are that the Truman decision was made, not because it was required to end the war, but rather because the United States wanted to send a signal to the Soviet Union that it possessed a powerful new weapon. The United States, this perspective suggests, now had the power to establish a new economic and political world order.
In addition, August 6, 2020 occurs in a year in which the United States and the world is experiencing a pandemic of historic proportions. It has required governments everywhere to shut down their usual activities: commerce, production, education, entertainment, and public sociability. The best estimates are that people everywhere need to wear masks, not congregate in crowds, practice social distancing, and when necessary get tested for the corona virus. It seems clear from the example of countries that have adopted these policies to prevent the spread of the virus that they are the only way to diminish this public health disaster. But in the United States the President, some governors, many Senators, some members of Congress, and university and school administrators have been advocating and implementing policies that could spread the pandemic further.
For example, a number of universities and public schools are reopening around the country. Indiana Senator Mike Braun praised the former governor and President of Purdue University for reopening that university. “Thank goodness we have a guy like Mitch Daniels, who never looked at the status quo or the conventional of being the way to do it.” Educational institutions planning in-person education are trying “in a mitigated way, to get back to where you’re most effective; teaching kids, whether it’s in elementary school, secondary or post-secondary.” Braun’s advice to educational leaders around the country was to “take a little risk.” (Dave Bangert, “Sen. Braun to Schools Amid COVID-19: ‘Take A Little Risk,’ Journal and Courier, August 6, 2020).
In Indiana’s Fourth Congressional District, incumbent Jim Baird, in addition to supporting STEM education, bills himself as a “pro-life champion,” supporter of “our law enforcement,” and particularly getting “tough on China.” His campaign literature said that “the Chinese Communist Party has proven time and time again they are a bad actor on the world stage.” To combat China, Baird recommends creating “a national research investment strategy” in quantum computing and artificial intelligence; developing incentive programs to encourage the semiconducting industry to shift all manufacturing to the United States from China; and passing legislation “to end U.S. purchases of pharmaceutical ingredients or prescriptions manufactured in China” (all this from a campaign mailing).
Are there any common threads that run from 1945 to 2020? Looking at the decision to drop the horrific bombs in 1945, several points can be made. First, a small number of politicians, elected and appointed, made decisions of monumental importance to the victims of the bombing and the subsequent danger of nuclear war.
Second, the decisions were made in the face of overwhelming evidence that the use of these horrific bombs was not needed to end the war in Asia.
Third, Truman and his aides made their decisions in contradiction to warnings of the dangers of atomic war for civilization. Opposition came from significant sectors of the scientific community, including some scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb.
Fourth, the decision to use atomic weapons was profoundly political. Demonstrating that the United States had this powerful new weapon sent a message to the Soviet Union. In addition, key decisionmakers including General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project; James Forrestal who would become the first Secretary of Defense; and James Byrnes, Secretary of State, were virulently anti-communist. Also, the decision to drop the bomb, whether a motivation or not, communicated to the American people that President Truman, not seen as particularly qualified for the job, was tough and potentially a great leader. He, like some historians and former advisors, continued to defend the decision for years to follow.
So if we fast-forward to today we see crises of different sorts. Again, decisions are being made by small numbers of individuals, not necessarily representative of the population, or of workers who are affected. Decisions are being made to open educational institutions despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that doing so may be detrimental to public health. Experiences of other countries and statements from the scientific community indicate that opening up the society while the pandemic is still spreading might create a public health disaster. And, most important, critical decisions are being made that are motivated by elections, how to maintain the economy, and/or how to respond to challenges to United States dominance in the world.
To quote another musical voice, Pete Seeger, “Oh when will we ever learn.”
Sunday, August 2, 2020
"PLAYING THE CHINA CARD" (Differently)
Harry Targ
(It is time to change from confrontation to cooperation. End the New Cold War now. 11/15/2021)
Beginning in 1969 President Richard Nixon, guided by his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, fashioned a new policy toward China; what became known as “playing the China card.” It was motivated by a desire to push back and ultimately create regime change in the Soviet Union. Cognizant of growing hostilities between the two large communist states, Nixon and Kissinger developed this plan to play one off against the other. Central to this policy was launching a diplomatic process that led to the1979 US formal diplomatic recognition of China. During the 1970s, the United States and China supported the same political allies in various parts of the world, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia for example. The split in the socialist world between the Soviet Union and China significantly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakening of socialism, for a time, on the world stage. Thus, from a US imperial point of view “playing the China card” worked.
In a speech on Thursday July 23 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the Nixon opening to China was a mistake. “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come: that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.” (Edward Wong, Steven Lee Myers, “Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward Point of No Return,” The New York Times, July 25, 2020). If it is true that the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy toward China did in fact facilitate the weakening of socialism as a world force, why is the Secretary of State now calling “playing the China card” a mistake?
The answer to this question, or more broadly why is United States foreign policy returning to a policy hostile to China, perhaps creating a “New Cold War,” has several parts. First, as Alfred McCoy has described (In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, Haymarket Books, 2017), the United States, relatively speaking, is a declining power. As to economic growth, scientific and technological developments, productivity, and trade, the US, compared to China particularly, is experiencing stagnation or decline. China has engaged in massive global projects in transportation, trade, and scientific advances and by 2030 based on many measures will advance beyond the US.
According to McCoy, the United States has embarked on a path to overcome its declining relative economic hegemony by increasingly investing in military advances: a space force, a new generation of nuclear weapons, cyber security, biometrics, and maintaining or enhancing a global military presence particularly in the Pacific (what Obama spokespersons called “the Asian pivot”). In other words, rather than accommodating to a new multipolar world in the 21st century, the United States is seeking to reestablish its global hegemony through military means.
Second, the United States is desperately seeking to overcome the end of its monopoly on technological advances. In computerization, transportation, pharmaceuticals, it is challenging Chinese innovations, claiming that China’s advances are derived not from its domestic creativity but from “pirating” from United States companies. For example, the prestigious and influential Council on Foreign Relations issued a report last year entitled “Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge.” The report warned that “…the United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.” China is investing significantly in new technologies, CFR claims, which they predict will make China the biggest inventor by 2030. Also, to achieve this goal they are “exploiting” the openness of the US by violating intellectual property rights and spying. Therefore, the CFR concluded, since technological innovation is linked to economic and military advantage and since US leadership in technology and science is at risk, the nation must recommit to rebuilding its scientific prowess.
Third, while the United States is engaged in efforts at regime change around the world and is using brutal economic sanctions to starve people into submission (such as in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and 36 other countries victimized by economic sanctions), China is increasing its economic ties to these countries through investments, trade, and assistance. And China opposes these US policies in international organizations. In broad terms Chinese policy stands with the majority of countries in the Global South while the United States seeks to control developments there.
Fourth, although Trump foreign policy is designed to recreate a Cold War, with China as the target, a policy also embraced by most Democrats, there is at the same time counter-pressure from sectors of the capitalist class who have ties to the Chinese economy: investment, global supply chains, and financial speculation. Moreover, sectors of Chinese capital own or have substantial control over many US corporations and banks. In addition, the Chinese government controls over $1 trillion of US debt. For these sectors of US capital, economic ties with China remain economically critical. In addition some writers, such as Jerry Harris, point to the emergence of a “transnational capitalist class” whose interests are not tied to any nation-state (Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).
Consequently, while the trajectory of US policy is toward a return to cold war, there is some push back by economic and political elites as well. As the New York Times article above put it, “In the United States, tycoons and business executives, who exercise enormous sway among politicians of both parties, will continue to push for a more moderate approach, as members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet who represent Wall Street interests have done.”
Fifth, American domestic politics provide the immediate cause of the transformation of US/China policy. Candidate Donald Trump’s popularity is declining dramatically because of the spread of the covid pandemic, its impacts on the US economy, and the rise of racial tensions in the country. A classic antidote for politicians experiencing declining popularity is to construct an external enemy, “an other,” which can redirect the attention of the public from their personal troubles. President Trump has sought to deflect the cause of the spreading pandemic onto the Chinese. It is this external enemy that is the source of our domestic problems. In this context the President is talking tough with the “enemy” of the United States, and, as Secretary of State Pompeo suggests, it is about time that the US government gives up illusions about working with China. Only a Trump administration, he suggested, would be capable of doing this (forget President Obama’s “Asian pivot”).
Finally, the ideological package of racism, white supremacy, and American Exceptionalism so prevalent in United States history has resurfaced in dramatic ways as the Trump administration and its allies have opposed nationwide protests against police violence and structural racism. White supremacy at home is inextricably connected with American Exceptionalism abroad. For example President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 claimed that the white race has been critical to civilization. Years later Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration (and more recently President Barack Obama) spoke about the United States as the “indispensable nation,”a model of economics and politics for the world. Pompeo continues this tradition claiming that the United States stands for a “free 21st century.” This sense of omniscience has been basic to the ideological justification of United States imperial rule.
Each of these elements, from the changing shape of economic and military capabilities, to political exigencies, to the pathologies of culture, require a peace and justice movement that stands for peaceful coexistence, demilitarization, building a world of economic justice and the rights of people to determine their own destiny, and inalterable opposition to racism, white supremacy, and exceptionalisms of all kinds.
Panel: China-US relations at turning point? http://chinaplus.cri.cn/podcast/detail/1/232452
The Bookshelf
CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ
Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.
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