From Anti-Globalism to an Alternative Global Paradigm
By Peter Wilberg,
On 24 October 2017, at its 19th Party Congress, the Communist Party of China approved the incorporation of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ into its Constitution, recognising it as a continuation of Marxism, Mao Zedong Thought and - though this is really a gross contradiction - Deng Xiaoping Theory. For it was this theory which opened the way, after Mao, to de-collectivisation and the exploitation through gross wage slavery, by companies like Apple and Foxconn, of hundreds of millions of migrant workers from the countryside. On the other hand, it is interesting to note also the strong effect on Xi Jinping of his formative years in the poor village that he was sent to work in during Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This time of his life seems to have had a lasting effect on his outlook, one still reflected in his thinking. This aims at correcting the growing contradictions remaining from all the many phases of development of the PRC, despite it having lifted 700,000 people out of poverty in 40 years - and even more since 1949.
In addition to international challenges, there is still the challenge of overcoming very real class contradictions, huge wealth inequalities in wealth, and tackling poverty in China’s huge but still much poorer and more isolated inland rural regions, towns and villages. Xi’s policies therefore include new ecological measures such as cleaning up the Yangtze river and tackling other forms of pollution that arose during the unbridled economic growth decades (for example through the protection of forests, the prevention of soil erosion and the increased use of natural fertilisers. Xi has also already introduced important elements of party reform and expanded anti-corruption campaigns, as well as bringing in legal measures which allow local citizens to bring their complaints not just to the local level but to provincial and higher levels of party and government. To what extent these measures are purely cosmetic is impossible to say. But the key to China’s overall success has its basis in the predominance of nationalised banking. This allows massive state-bank investment in China’s infrastructure and public welfare - of which China’s extraordinary and unrivalled network of high-speed bullet trains and new roads to connect cities and towns, and also link them to expanded maritime trading ports, are just one of many expressions.
Such forms of infrastructure investment are a far cry from the short-termism of Western profit-seeking corporations, failed ‘Public Private Partnerships’ and the so-called ‘aid’ programmes. So whilst China’s infrastructure blooms, America’s moribund infrastructure is in such bad shape that it cannot even afford to replace particular key bridges - the failure of just one of which would cost it 10 billion dollars per day in GDP.
Thanks to its own success in state-funded economic and infrastructure development, China now offers to extend its success in infrastructure building to almost every region and continent in the world through China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. This is perhaps probably the largest global infrastructure project in human history - embracing as it does not only whole continents or regions such as Eurasia and Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia, but many nations of Europe - the latest to join up being Austria. This Belt and Road Initiative even embrace individual cities such as Venice - a hub of the ancient Silk Road - and is also being studied hope by run-down cities and states in the U.S., which are being dramatically let down by their own government and the private sector.
Unlike failed Western ‘globalism’, based on colonialism, neo-colonialism and a parasitic global monetary and financial system, the new ‘Silk Road Spirit’ is based on Xi’s concept of a global “community of shared destiny” for the whole of mankind - not just the BRICS countries - and certainly not one designed to exercise a new form of U.S. style and Wall St. driven unipolar hegemony achieved by military force and proxy wars - a form of geopolitics which runs contrary to China’s entire cultural and civilisational tradition. Xi’s ‘alt-globalism’ is form of cooperative inter-nationalism and inter-nationalism - based, at least for now, on non-interference and full respect for the sovereignty of all participating nations.
This alternative ‘globalist’ project, also known as the World Land-Bridge, is also of particular relevance and benefit to those continents and nations of the world, such as Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan - where destructive Western policies and wars have already ruined national infrastructures in Libya, Iraq and Syria, held back much-needed development in Africa - and in this way also led directly to growing mass migration waves towards Europe.
Unfortunately, China’s new Silk Road project, supported and embraced by Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Kenya and over 60 other countries, is seen as representing a dire threat to the entire Western-Atlanticist military-financial complex and the warmongering US-Anglo-Israeli and Saudi alliance. Hence the increasing drive for an Israeli war on Iran - which has large oil reserves which it is now selling to China without use of the Petrodollar - another provocation to the U.S. Western-style globalists fear of the China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This has led to it becoming ‘subjugated knowledge’ - almost completely ignored by the Western mainstream media, or else subject to disinformation campaigns.
Finally, whilst it is true that modern China is a science- and technology-based society, it is also true to say that it is one of few countries with an ethically-based and non-theistic (neither monotheistic nor polytheistic) concept of the divine - one which embraces cultural and spiritual traditions such as those of Confucius that are undergoing a significant renaissance. Yet for Xi Jinping, Marxist thought still “shines with the light of truth”. He has once again hailed Marx as the "teacher of revolution for the proletariat [my italics] and the greatest thinker of modern times.” He also used a mass rally in celebration of the bicentenary of Marx’s birth to stress the central importance of Marxism in analysing and meeting China’s future challenges. These arise from the fact that China now has the largest and most concentrated proletariat in the world - one whose interests it must now promote in truly class-based way, for example by supporting - and not suppressing - the struggle of the Chinese working class against Apple-type factory ‘i-slavery’ and now also their struggle against the mass unemployment that China faces now that it is no longer the cheapest source of labour. Yet ‘class’ has become an ‘unword’ in CPC vocabulary, and the cultural legacy of Deng Xiaoping - in which making money and getting rich in any way - now almost completely pervades Chinese youth, middle class and billionaire business culture.
Implications of an Alternative Global Paradigm for Socialist Parties in Britain
All this does not mean that China’s successes and its global Belt and Road Initiative can be ignored. On the contrary, for Britain to redefine its future geopolitical position in the interests of working people requires far more than just bickering over Brexit, with or without which Britain will not move one iota closer to socialism. Instead, the single most important fact to recognise is that not only Britain but Europe itself is ever-increasingly caught in the midst of the most fundamental geopolitical struggle that defines today’s world. This is the struggle between, on the one hand, the new multipolar global paradigm of Eurasianism’ and what Xi Jinping calls a “community of shared destiny” for humanity, and, on the other hand, the aggressive and warmongering Anglo-Zionist defenders of ‘Atlanticism’, i.e. the maintenance of monopolar U.S. hegemony in all respects - military, monetary, political, economic, corporate and cultural - and at any price, including wars of aggression. This struggle is shown by responses by Germany and France, Turkey and EU representatives to Trump’s unilateral pull-out of the treaty with Iran. France’s economy minister urged Europe to stop acting like “US vassals”. Similar sentiments have been echoes by Der Spiegel - which urged Europe to “stand up to the United States”, leading politicians in Germany, including Merkel, and even more strongly by Juncker. On the other hand, the British ruling elite has shown time and time again that it sides fully with the criminal US-Zionist-Saudi alliance and its military, corporate and oil interests. Indeed, Britain itself is now pouring money into the establishment of new imperialist military bases in support of this “alliance of evil”. In contrast, many other nations and cities of Europe are now glad to be able to participate in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. This is designed to usher in a new era of harmonious and balanced economic development and free trade across the globe and on a ‘win-win’ basis, i.e. not exclusively based on serving U.S. corporate and military-industrial interests alone, not based on new forms of neo-colonial exploitation, and also not based on aggressive sanctions, trade wars or wars of aggression - and the mass migration waves that these have created in their wake, which have weakened both European national economies and threaten European ethnic and cultural identity.
Yet alongside this new Eurasianist and alternative global paradigm I see the need for a new theoretical paradigm for socialist parties and movements - not least in Britain. The first step I would argue they need to take is to make a decisive turn towards ‘Fourth Political Theory’. This means placing issues connected with today’s global geopolitical developments and struggles at the centre rather than at the fringe of their national agendas and policies - as well as at the frontline of their propaganda - particularly given the growing need to challenge corporate media lies and censorship. It also means applying Marxist theory to study and learn from the very real contradictions, internal divisions and questions now faced also by nations such as Iran, China and Russia. Xi Jinping’s call for a renewed study and application of Marxist theory and practice is of note in this context, since it is a recognition - if only in principle and not yet in practice - that Marxism and socialist are now the only way of preventing China and the CPC eventually collapsing under the weight of growing economic, political and social contradictions.
In this context, one issue that needs emphasising from a Marxist perspective is the key role of global and national monetary and central banking systems - which can be used to either promote investment in the productive economy and the welfare of the people - or else to bleed entire nations dry through debt-driven austerity, outsourcing of cheap labour, land degradation through agro-industry - and the channelling of corporate profits into the ‘casino economy’. The People’s Bank of China - with its power even over the commercial banking sector, has so far resolved this question (unless it now gives way to further financial ‘opening up’ and the likes of Goldman Sachs.
Thus to speak of the Chinese economy as nationalist form of ‘state capitalism’, whilst correct, fails to recognise a important dimension to China’s particular form of state capitalism, in which the remaining powers of central control over the money supply and money creation exercised by the People’s Bank of China make the Chinese economy a a state directed capitalist economy - one which not only maintains state-owned enterprises (albeit already part-privatised) but also potentially and it actuality allows the state to steer investment, both public and private in any direction it chooses, including rural cooperatives, national infrastructure projects - and now also global ones.
As for China’s supposed ‘national debt’, this is a purely notional term, since People’s Bank ‘debt’ is not actually ‘owed’ to global financial markets or foreign central banks but is debt owed only to itself - and is thus effectively a form of nationalised and sovereign money creation. In contrast, the U.S., like most capitalist countries is a private-bank controlled capitalist economy run by Wall St. and its organ - the Federal Reserve - which ‘prints money’ only for Wall St and not for the real economy. The importance of this difference cannot be overemphasised. (See Ellen Brown on Funding Infrastructure: why China is running circles around America )
A further question for Marxists is how to move towards, create or maintain new socialist relations of production and national monetary systems in the face of the ever-accelerating pace of development of forces of production - particularly through new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence guided Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics (GNR). The aim of the current financialist global elite is to (a) weaponise these technologies (for example by genetically designing biological weapons which will kill only Russians) and (b) robotise all manufacturing and even service industries - but purely for profit rather than the people (c) design a new slave race of man-machine hybrids - one which will turn all natural biological human beings into ‘useless eaters’ that can be dispensed with through global depopulation. See this Corbett Report: https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-185-the-singularity-cometh/
Socialist parties which fail to theoretically analyse and address such global trends, dangers and struggles but instead retreat into insularism - focussing obsessively and introvertedly on purely national issues and events such as Brexit - cannot truly serve the present or future interests of either their peoples or their nations. Hence the need for an ideological turn towards the geopolitical orientation of Fourth Political Theory (4PT), albeit one that must retain a strong place for Marxism within it. For it was Marx who long ago anticipated what today goes by the name of ‘globalisation’ - but was also acutely aware of its geopolitical dimensions (of whose importance he often appealed to other socialists to recognise). Both 4PT and Marxism are, historically, also of particular historic relevance and significance to British socialists - and this for a whole number of reasons which I can list here only briefly:
- Because it was precisely in Britain that the Judeo-Dutch seeds of capitalism, private central banking and global imperialism first found fertile ground for rapid development.
- Because it was this that allowed Marx to use Britain as a powerful case study in his analysis of the dynamics of capitalism in general.
- Because it was in the 19th century that Britain started playing ‘The Great Game’ against Russia for control of Central Asia - leading to the first British-Afghan war (and sowing the seeds of WW1).
- Because it was Tory-Jewish Prime Minister Disraeli who fostered these seeds and also advanced the thesis of both Jewish and ‘Aryan’ racial-biological supremacy.
- Because it was in Britain (1905) that the imperial geopolitics of ‘The Great Game’ - was first laid out theoretically and through the geostrategic world-map of Halford Mackinder, who saw a united Eurasian ‘Heartland’ as a major geopolitical threat to British imperialism - an idea still shared with U.S. imperialism today.
- Because it was Churchill and his Jewish backers who led the drive for a 2nd World War, even suggesting that Poland invade Germany rather than accept peace offers from Germany.
- Because in all the following quotations from Churchill the names Putin, Assad or Khameini - and the countries called Russia, Syria and Iran - could currently replace the names ‘Hitler’ and ‘Germany’:
"We will force this war upon Hitler, whether he wants it or not." Churchill, 1936
“We could have, if we had intended so, prevented this war from breaking out without doing one shot, but we didn't want to." Churchill to Truman, 1946
“Germany’s most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profit.”
War or Peace?
The keyword in the Churchill quotations above is ‘war’ - WORLD WAR. That is why Churchill’s words - and their all-too-obvious geopolitical echoes today - are a reason why the single most important word that should be at the forefront of any British socialist party and its policies must be ‘peace’ - GLOBAL PEACE - not least given the threat of a Third World War coming from US-NATO encirclement of Russia, intensified U.S. sanctions and Israeli attacks on Iran, the military build up in the Ukraine for an attack on Russia - and the US naval build-up in the Asia Pacific - which has long been aimed at preparing for war with China. A new socialist peace campaign require will need to concentrate on exposing and challenging the warmongering US-Anglo-Zionist-Saudi alliance, 2. exposing and countering massive media disinformation about China, Russia and Iran, and 3. countering media suppression of information about the alternative and above all peaceful ‘Global Paradigm’ initiated by China (supported by Russia and many other countries, including many countries of Europe) and that even though the aims of China’s peaceful initiatives are by no means purely altruistic but based on national-capitalist interests and deep contradictions now arising from the reign of Deng Xiaoping’s revisionist policies of capitalist restoration.
Postscript
Though it does not cover many other serious and related philosophical, theoretical, political and economic questions - including more detailed questions relating to both Britain and deep and the perhaps irresolvable contradictions now facing the Communist Party China - I have nevertheless put forward this paper for study, critical commentary and questioning by the SMPBI and other socialist parties. This is for one very simple reason: namely that there is at present still not a single party in Britain of any stripe or colour, socialist or otherwise, which puts what is clearly the single and most obviously pressing issue - that of a new global war or global peace - at the spearhead of its campaigning aims and activities. For without peace, what future is there, not just for Britain, but for Europe and humanity as a whole? For make no mistake: the goal of US-Anglo-Zionist Atlanticist alliance IS war. This has become only too clear through the now hysterical Russophobia of both the American media and the no less Russophobic propaganda of Theresa May around the concocted Skripal poisoning affair. And the fact that the US media are now not only talking of Russia having launched an attack on America through its mythical election interference - but are even comparing this ‘attack’ with both 9/11 and Pearl Harbour - something that should give us all pause for thought.
Meanwhile however, Putin’s popularity ratings in Russia itself have shrunk to an all-time low of 34%. This is partly because just because of mass disdain at the new policy (introduced at the start of the World Cup) of raising the age of retirement to a level at which many Russian males are already dead. But it is also because Putin is increasingly seen as not fully ‘coming out of his corner’ and actually calling a spade a spade when it comes to Russia’s difficult so-called “partners”, i.e. U.S. imperialism and Zionist criminals. Highly intelligent strategic, tactical and diplomatic maneuvering (including secret deals with Israel) will eventually run its course - and already does little more than outrage Russia’s crazed and irrational enemies even more. The rampant U.S.-Zionist warmongers or the Zio-Atlanticist wing of the Russian power elite may therefore yet win out - unless the socialist and communist Left in Russia restores its own vigour and once again acts and speaks out more aggressively under the banner of socialism and ‘National Bolshevism’.
Yet as the contradictions of capitalism rise to ever greater intensity across the continents, we increasingly see them transformed into a new type of political irrationalism of the sort symbolised - but by no means monopolised - by both Trump and his enemies in America, i.e. a refusal to recognise contradictions even on the level of simple logic - or else an attempt to hide them through media lies, contain them through Chinese-style police-state surveillance and suppression of their popular expression, or just ‘disappear’ through incremental genocide (Israel). Given this, even ‘alt-globalisation’ or the revival of Marxist socialism may be too late to prevent the contradictions of global capitalism leading to its descent into global insanity - an insanity which has a long history behind it, and which perhaps demands a deeper historical understanding of a sort that totally transcend mere political or even geopolitical analyses and solutions.
Some video Links:
President Xi Jinping: Why I proposed the Belt and Road
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNKTbMx8PFk&t=38s
Xi Jinping: Why are we called Communist Party of China?
Xi Jinping commemorates 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth
Putin salutes China’s initiative:
The World Land Bridge:
Critical Chinese Marxist and Maoist site
Note on the Syria and China’s Belt and Road Initiative
“The Golan has oil – billions of barrels of it says the Economist, more than in Saudi Arabia say others. Unlike in Iraq and Libya, I haven’t seen oil grabs as a significant motive for the West’s assault, direct and by proxy, on Syria in the name of aiding a heroic and only slightly Islamist (foreign too, but let’s not be pedantic) resistance to tyranny. Oil is an aspect but less by its presence in Syria, modest to negligible, than in the matter of which pipeline will supply Europe, the world’s biggest energy market. Even then, the pipeline is not key to understanding Syria’s ordeal. It is pipped by bigger questions of US ability to maintain regional and even global hegemony in the face of threats from China’s One Belt One Road project…” Philip Roddis Off-Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment