And this new stage, already laced with the looming possibility of climate disaster and now pandemic illness, is the most dangerous since WW2. Inevitably and positively though, it will at least coincide with a second wave of socialism in the West.
The alternative to Trump, Biden, is simply that. Nothing but an alternative. The chance that Biden will significantly turn away from Trump’s really crucial policy, if Trump falls, is slight. Biden, and his Vice President, will have the dismal decoration of being the second and third-worst Presidents for a century.
I suggest the ‘new stage’ of history and its dangers, coupled with the possibility of new, socialist advances' for a good reason. The relation of forces across the globe do not favour modern capitalism. And a new socialist wave (there really isn’t any other rounded social alternative) will, like Trump’s engagements, tangle with the pandemic, the ecological crisis, Black Lives Matter, etc, etc, and will challenge the new door opened by Trump that threatens fear and fury across the world.
What is the new stage? It’s not difficult to see. There is already a massive battle underway between the US and China. It began with Obama, who broke the Nixon connection with China building a vast, new military cordon sanitaire, but now the real battle has started. It has world-wide implications already and it will dominate the next historical phase, hopefully for decades, which at least would mean that the nuclear option has been avoided.
This is where modern, global capitalism has come to. What is hidden, like the nurse’s demonstrations for decent wages rather that the handclaps outside the Prime Minister’s house, is the tremendous social and political upsurge that will become the real engine room, fighting the new crisis, already obvious in the Black Lives Matter campaign.
What then is Trump doing (despite moaning his personal laments)? Trump has mobilised a vast range of industrial policy instruments to squeeze China’s exports across the globe. The trade war has been the main, consistent policy since 2016. It is presented by Trump as the defence of the US’s blue-collar workers. (But that really is ‘fake news.) Serious analyses show that overall Chinese imports to the US reduced US workers by 2.5 million, 20% of the manufacturing labour force. That China ‘shock’ has been elevated in the US and, critically, it pulled in key states in the 2016 election.
But is it about trade? Here is a summary of four recent US-based books, recently written by experts in the field.
(A trade war) might have been plausible a few years back , but today’s tensions go far beyond economic issues. Even in the trade arena what dominates the discussions isn’t soy beans or blue-collar industrial jobs, but microchips, cloud computing, 5G, and intelligence gathering by way of TikTok. What is at stake is technological leadership and national security.
US business have already changed their pro-China investment tune. Some have even stopped the investment flow to China. They stand back from their ‘globalist’ background, still wary of the Trump team’s extreme approaches, but supporting whatever Trump can extract from China. So far China has tried to pally. It accepted Trump’s Phase 1 deal signed in January when they committed to buy $200 billion from the US. But the cease-fire has not lasted, mainly because the computer chip companies based in the US wanted no part. Phase 1 looks like collapsing. And the US deficit over Chinese trade remains the painful sore in US economics and politics. The American government is asking a range of institutions, including universities, to treat Chinese partners with suspicion.
Hal Brands (a conservative historian) says
‘If this is a new Cold War, then America needs to rally the Home Front.’ Adam Tooze (LRB 30 July – ‘Whose Century?’) suggests today’s hawks, looking back at this period, see it as the national security counterpart of the American elite’s economic betrayal. While China rose, America slept. For them the Trump administration is a moment of long overdue awakening.
This is not just Trump’s. battle. A powerful section of the American ruling class is mobilising, Frankly, they couldn’t care less about Trump or, for that matter Biden. But they do want to win the war with China. We can already see this emerging daily in the UK’s pro-US politics. And most of the US’s followers across the world will do the same (despite their loathing of Trump.) But there is a huge, majority bloc of peoples and nations who do not want this war and that is the platform for a new common sense that also shifts the power of societies to break their link with the disastrous and lethal political and economic competition to come.
Stephen Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of the 2014 book "Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China."
His views on Trump's initiative are, sadly, now pretty marginal.
The Gang of Four has now spoken. Over the past month or so, in a virulent polemic against communism reminiscent of the Red-baiting of the 1950s, four top officials of the Trump administration have delivered a series of well-orchestrated tirades against China.
National security adviser Robert O'Brien initially focused on China as an ideological threat. FBI Director Christopher Wray next addressed espionage. Attorney General William Barr did the economics piece. And then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo batted cleanup and pulled it all together in a full frontal attack delivered on July 23 at the Nixon Library in California -- providing an uncomfortable bookend to the opening up of US-China relations that President Richard Nixon initiated with his historic visit to China in 1972.
And the socialist wave that will have to contest the new world war?
Well, it starts with the end. Capitalism's sound and glory, its domination of all of the main continents, its impervious imperialism, is weakening. Capitalism's main state, the USA, is declining - rapidly. Globalisation has not renovated capitalist development. Instead it has already created one devastating economic crisis in 2008. It has reduced the living standards of the vast majority of the western population, because it cannot do anything else. Globalisation is not based on investment, except in terms of wealth. It is not responded to the desperate need for reform, politically and socially, in the main western capitalist nations, because it is not structured to do so.
Instead the Chinese Communist leadership have created a China economic development base and used its capitalism (which in previous days would have been completely in the hands of the West) to provide trade and investment. The Chinese regime of state capitalism has been able to use the growing weakness of the West, and the US in particular, to build its state, and, as the regime would claim, its society. When the West's weakness opened up (not just in China but also in India, in Central America and the Middle East) China opened up their controlled capitalist economy, first through lower industrial wages and today by investment, both internally and internationally. But it was never a part of the West's globalisation. Chinese capitalism WAS structured, via the Chinese state, to provoke rapid internal development, which has worked economically and in raising Chinese living standards dramatically.
However, the Chinese system cannot revive international capitalism either (which is what the US now fears the most.) It is solely related to the Chinese state and its satellites. The US could, in the end, simply steal the $3 trillion of China's 'savings' in the US Fed. Chinese billionaires, already fighting for key posts inside the Chinese Communist Party, are reorganising their regions and building new areas across China. Corruption is deepening. The Chinese Army is beginning to 'hold' key assets. Chinese capitalism is beginning to break out of its state control. And Chinese growth, previously virtually immune from Western economic crises, is faltering.
This is the background for the new wave of socialism.
In the West, most states are now almost simultaneously forced to break up or transform their traditional political parties as capitalism becomes more vicious. The classic examples are in the US, the UK, France, Italy and Spain. But this will not work and most of the traditional ruling classes in those countries know it. At the moment, especially in the context of the pandemic, the fatuous, unanchored and undirected politicians and governments are able to hide aspects of their fragile future. The reality is that as capitalism gets fiercer and more cut off from societies so will the movements demanding changes rise from those societies. Indeed, the bottom 90% of society will become the place that will end up deciding the change it needs. And the politicians will be rinsed as they are tested, failing at each more ridiculous and least democratic step, refusing to face and grapple with the fundamentals of the capitalist order.
Particularly in the western countries, we see the demands for a different sort of politics, of economics and of society, apparently thrown up as a result of the pandemic. Without exception the politicians demand a 'return to normal'. They are desperate to maintain their slippy footfall and want to stop discussions on a different tomorrow. But they are the weakest barrier, and the servants of the state, the military, the police and the secret services are also having their own confusions and convulsions. Lenin once remarked that revolution in under-developed countries would be much easier but achieving socialism much harder. And while revolution would be more difficult in the developed countries, socialism would come much easier. Perhaps the the next revolution in the West (with the exception of the US) will turn out to be the easiest advance? After all, the big majority of society is already actively beginning to shape a different sort of society than the one that is flaking to pieces.