ToxicAcne posted:

What's Vijay Prashad's beef with David Harvey about China? Harvey seems to be relatively pro-China based on what I've read on him and what he says in his podcast. He certainly seems to say that a Cold War with China would be catastrophic.

quote:

Since the 1950s, Marxist scholars have greatly deepened our understanding of imperialism by exploring underdevelopment and the center-periphery, or dependency relationship, in world capitalism.2 Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth is one of the earliest and best analyses of how feudal, imperialist, and comprador interests, as well as other unproductive uses of economic surplus, have kept back the third world. Later writers such as Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein each developed a distinct but related approach to the rise of capitalism. Instead of focusing on just Western Europe and the United States, they also explored how the global division of labor and the more general world system, or imperialist system, transferred surplus from the periphery to the center, thus creating both development and underdevelopment simultaneously.

Given this high tide of Marxist writings on imperialism in the 1960s and ’70s, the disappearance of imperialism from leftist discussion is quite remarkable. According to Google Books data (see Chart 1), the frequency of the term imperialism in a large sample of English-language books declined by more than 50 percent between 1974 and 1990. Even before the demise of the Soviet Union or neoliberal transitions in much of the world, analyses of imperialism were already disappearing in the United States and elsewhere.



Patnaik suggested that this waning might be because of the very strengthening and consolidation of imperialism after the Vietnam War.3 This was evident from the tyranny of the global division of labor as well as the destructive functions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Besides these, there was also a more direct development among Western liberal and leftist intellectuals, which aimed politically to diminish anti-imperialist writings. Since the 1970s, well-known leftist writers such as Bill Warren, Robert Brenner, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and David Harvey have contributed to this kind of intellectual counterrevolution.

...


Warren and the Disappearance of Analyses of Imperialism
One of the early critiques of the Marxist anti-imperialist tradition came from Warren, a former British Communist Party member who later joined the British and Irish Communist Organization. In 1973, Warren published a long article, “Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialization,” in the New Left Review.4 In the article, Warren sought to challenge the then common anti-imperialist view that imperialism, and more generally the expansion of capitalist relations globally, created dependency and underdevelopment in the third world. Warren was eager to show that the expansion of capitalism and imperialism brought progress (industrial and otherwise) to the third world. In Warren’s words, “empirical observations suggest that the prospects for successful capitalist economic development [implying industrialization] of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good.” Although Warren acknowledged the existence of imperialism and even suggested his thesis was the same as Lenin’s, he argued that “Lenin’s general theory of imperialism was theoretically misconceived and historically inaccurate.”

Warren’s empirical results were reflective, on the one hand, of the postwar boom and the widespread national industrialization projects undertaken by newly independent nations, and, on the other hand, of the rise of a few protégés of imperialism such as Taiwan and South Korea. But Warren was not content with just noting postwar prosperity. He went on to argue that the third world was undergoing independent industrialization, with development increasingly domestically based and funded, encompassing a wide range of industries and the fading of Western technological superiority. He argued that, in the postwar era, the drain of surplus value from the periphery to the center does not mean anything, since it may simply be the price paid for the establishment of productive facilities. After all, “exploitation is the reverse side of the advance of productive forces.”

Warren’s anti-anti-imperialist politics were clear. He argued that socialists needed to examine the character of the anti-imperialist struggle much more closely and called for more attention to be paid to domestic class struggles in the third world. If the center-periphery relationship was increasingly a thing of the past, then naturally anti-imperialism became simply a cover for intercapitalist quarrels and bargaining.

Contrary to Warren’s false optimism, the development of capitalism has produced a persistent, if not increasing, gap between the center and periphery. Soon after, Arghiri Emmanuel wrote a response to Warren, arguing that the latter overlooked the vast difference in industrialization and agricultural mechanization between rich countries and the third world.5 Emmanuel argued that imperialism was self-reproducing rather than self-destructive, as Warren supposed, and it could only be attacked and destroyed by the working class outside the home countries of imperialism. In another response, Philip McMichael, James Petras, and Robert Rhodes not only showed that there was little evidence for independent industrialization in the Global South, but also (correctly) forewarned the coming crisis of balance of payments in the underdeveloped world.6 In conclusion, the three authors strongly argued that the growth of the third world depended on a small number of countries, for the benefit of a small fraction of their populations, which can only be understood in the context of imperialism. David Slater later pointed out a number of weaknesses in Warren’s thesis, including Warren’s Eurocentrism, bland acceptance of capitalist exploitation, and highly selective readings of Marxian texts.7

The actual development thus far does not substantiate Warren’s thesis. Chart 2 plots the per capita national incomes measured in constant 2010 dollars in 1960 against the values in 2015. The clear pattern suggests that the hierarchy and ranks within the capitalist world remained largely intact during the fifty-five years of so-called development. The rich countries in 1960 are still at the top in 2015, while the poor countries back then still tended to be at the bottom a half century later. Based on the same data, the top twenty richest countries’ average per capita income was a staggering 32 times the average income of the poorest twenty countries back in 1960; by 2015, the ratio had risen to 123.



Of course, with imperialism supposedly “gone,” the center’s development and the periphery’s underdevelopment would seem totally independent. Thus, Warren’s thesis produced two main political implications. First, the lack of development or underdevelopment is each country’s own problem. It probably comes from the refusal to join productive force-advancing globalization, or from certain types of corruption, or from bad institutions or culture, or more precisely from poverty itself. Second, although the Global South or third world, from Lenin’s time or even earlier, was the center of revolution and experiments of socialism, for Warren, it became a burden of development and aid, and a student of Western societies. The kind of Euro- or West-centric view that persisted in the global capitalist market echoed among the left.

Brenner’s Intervention in the Transition Debate
If Warren’s thesis signaled the conservative turn of Western leftists on more contemporary and global issues, then Robert Brenner, a trained historian, greatly enriched the story by reaffirming Eurocentrism and conservatism in the history of the transition to capitalism in Europe. This was clear from Brenner’s long polemical piece, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” in the New Left Review in 1977.8

Brenner’s article was partly a reappraisal of the famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism between Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, and other Marxist scholars in the 1950s in Science and Society. Among other things, Sweezy and Dobb, while agreeing that both internal (class conflicts) and external (trade and towns) forces played important and interactive roles in the transition to capitalism, disagreed on the “primary emphasis” (Dobb) or “prime mover” (Sweezy). Sweezy argued that the driving force behind the transition in Western Europe was external, while Dobb maintained that internal forces determined the form and direction of the effects of trade and the market.9 Sweezy, who sparked the discussion, was looking for answers to political questions. In his words: “Now, I have a pretty good idea about the nature of the prime mover in the capitalist case, why the process of development which it generates leads to crisis, and why socialism is necessarily the successor form of society. But I was not at all clear about any of these factors in the feudal case when I sat down to Dobb’s book.”10 But overall, it is not clear that the original debate in itself was explicitly related to left politics in the postwar era. Nevertheless, the inspiration from and intellectual space generated by the debate probably facilitated later discussions on imperialism, dependency, and world-systems.

Aside from this debate, Sweezy, Baran, and Monthly Review authors paid great attention to the struggles and revolutions in the Global South. Writing in the late 1970s, Brenner clearly considered Frank and Wallerstein the main targets, but his article started with a critique of Sweezy’s position from the 1950s. However, unlike anyone who took part in the original debate, including Dobb, Brenner completely rejected the role of trade and towns, and only accepted the role of agrarian change in bringing about capitalist social relations. He argued that trade would not by itself transform feudal social relations or serfdom, and only an autonomous change in class relations in the countryside would push trade toward capitalism. Following this, Brenner argued that Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein presumed the existence of capitalism when talking about the role of trade, division of labor, “competition,” and “surplus maximization.” Brenner even called the focus on exchange (Sweezy) and division of labor (Frank and Wallerstein) neo-Smithian.

...

Harvey and others have produced a weaker version of the Bernstein/Warren/Brenner thesis. Namely, that there may be still imperialism and surplus transfer from the periphery to the core, but either the core is constantly recruiting new members, or the core and periphery relationship can be reversed thanks to capitalist development. For example, Harvey believes that the draining of net wealth from the East to the West has been largely reversed in recent decades.55 Based on his own work on superexploitation and imperialism, Smith put forth a powerful critique of Harvey’s denial of imperialism.56 In his response, Harvey claimed that traditional (fixed and rigid) Marxian theory of imperialism was inadequate for understanding the complexity of capitalism.57 However, Harvey’s proposed method basically treats trade surplus or faster gross domestic product growth as evidence of imperialism. This is rather superficial and reductive, as imperialism does not refer to fast growth or export gains, but to the relationship between the core and the rest of the world. As is well known, at times, colonies or peripheries can have huge surpluses from trade, such as Jamaica due to slavery. In terms of income growth rates, between 1850 and 1900, countries such as Poland and Chile maintained about a 2 percent growth rate of per capita gross domestic product, almost 100 percent higher than the British or French growth rate during this early imperialist phase.58

Harvey defines imperialism as a contradictory fusion of a territory-based political project and the expansion of capitalism through space and time. The first part refers to an abstract and ahistorical territorial logic while the second implies a diffusionist view of capitalism. Without any mention of the center-periphery relationship or the transfer of surplus, the flat-world fluid capitalism in Harvey’s understanding of what he calls The New Imperialism is virtually the same as Warren’s, Brenner’s, and that of the Second International theorists. 59 Precisely because of this starting point, it is easy for Harvey to treat any geographical change in industrial activities as the changing center of imperialism. For example, Harvey now talks about East Asia as a rising imperialist force, but, as Smith points out, in earlier writings Harvey was already talking about the power shift to the so-called newly industrializing countries such as India, Egypt, and Hungary.60

Many of these discussions (including Harvey’s) explicitly or implicitly refer to China as a rising imperialist power, even rivaling the United States in some accounts. It has become somewhat bipartisan fashion among conservatives and liberals to stand against so-called imperialist China. Interestingly, the U.S. State Department also emphasizes China’s imperialism in its official statements.61 The peculiar consensus is itself a result of the confusion and distortion on the imperialism question since the 1970s.

quote:

In addition to the flag of Slovenia and the European Union, the NATO flag has been flying in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since yesterday. No, this is not a one-day media show on the 17th anniversary of Slovenia's accession to this military alliance, but the dark blue flag will hang there 24/7, 365 days a year, as announced by Foreign Minister Anže Logar. The symbolic militarization of foreign policy, of course, serves only as another depiction of kneeling or, more modernly, Logar’s simping for the United States. The actions, which can best be described as pathetic, primarily lead the casual reader to cringe, but their consequences can be far-reaching.

The United States and China are in the Cold War. This is far from reaching the intensity of the previous version, when the role of the US rival was played by the Soviet Union, which does not mean that it will not eventually lead to a conflict of similar relations. Slovenia has already chosen its side in this global muscle measurement. As a representative of a real peripheral country without its own agenda, the current government was happy to fulfill the wish of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and sign a declaration on 5G technology, the sole purpose of which is to oust Chinese giant Huawei from the global market. Although the EU as a whole has not been prepared to follow Trump's aspirations for a trade war with China, it is clear that it has no intention of pretending to be neutral in this war to preserve the West, the United States, as the world's leading power.

The European Union thus imposed sanctions last week because Chinese authorities allegedly violated the rights of the Uighur Muslim minority. The issue of this minority in the northwestern region of Xinjiang is increasingly becoming an ammunition for Western diplomats, who for years have been building a narrative about China as the next empire to occupy Hong Kong first, then Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the world. It seems that for the duration of this pandemic, this modern Red Scare is becoming more and more popular in the Western media, from which Slovenian journalists also draw.

Reports of what is happening in Xinjiang seem… dubious. If skepticism about the CGTN or other Chinese media outlets is justified, we can expect at least the same, if not even greater, caution from journalists when quoting media that are not close to what is happening at all. Instead, we can read and listen to articles in the mainstream media about 'independent reports on events', which the Multimedia Center of RTV Slovenia recently offered to its readers. Of course, five minutes of googling leads everyone to the conclusion that the first signatory researcher Azeem Ibrahim is a former member of the American British paratroopers and now, among other things, a lecturer at an institute that is part of the US Army War College. In media appearances, Ibrahim describes the Chinese leadership as“Architects of genocide” . It is a serious accusation, which both the USA and Canada have formally recognized as the truth, and with a non-binding resolution, the Dutch parliament also nodded to them from the EU.

The genocide was allegedly carried out by the Chinese authorities through a mass prison-camp campaign and the forced sterilization of women, although the sources for such allegations remain highly questionable and in some places worthless for any serious search for the truth. The fact that many independent human rights organizations are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy or, in other words, the U.S. Congress is also not exactly a thing that could simply be ignored. All the activities of countries in the 'war on terror' are worthy of detailed consideration and special attention when there is a possible violation of human rights, and this also applies to Shinjiang, but the flat use of the term genocide can be nothing but a political move. But the story of American imperialism is already really long and predictable, even if in the meantime they have sophisticated methods of asserting their own will.

American imperialism is the meeting point of the elites there and the two main parties, the only difference is the way. While Donald Trump has used phrases like “Chinese virus” or even “kung flu,” Biden, the UK, and the EU are stepping up the war with China in other ways. During the corona crisis, the West again accuses China of 'vaccination diplomacy', saying that the Communist Party there or, as we like to call all West-unfriendly governments - the regime - is exploiting the pandemic to spread geopolitical influence by bargaining or donating vaccines.To substantiate this thesis, various commentators point to the fact that China has not yet vaccinated its own population at all, so that obviously its geopolitical interest is more crucial than the lives of its own people. But this thesis ignores the numbers, which show that there have been only a few dozen infections in China in recent days, compared to thousands in ' developed ' countries, who have no choice but to try to vaccinate the population as soon as possible.

Former and declining empires are thus actively slandering China with accusations of imperialism in the global south. The economic model of privatization and economic reform on the notes of the International Monetary Fund has left devastation behind in Latin America or Africa, so don’t blame us if we don’t take the British or French ’concern for the welfare of Africans as completely sincere. But maybe in this version of the Cold War, we can get at least a vaccination match, instead of an arms race. In the latter case, the United States will in any case be long ahead of the rest of the world, trying to convince you that they are the ones defending the defense on the principle of that worn-out meme "look how close the Chinese have placed their country to our aircraft carriers . "

Truga posted:

one of the bigger radios here doing a ~genocide denial~ lmao https://radiostudent.si/politika/off-komentar/kitajski-virus

google translate because i'm lazy

ToxicAcne posted:

Thanks for the post. It really cleared up the confusion. I guess what a guy like Chibber would argue is that the imperialist focussed perspective ignores how awful the local bourgeoisie can be.

I wonder what you guys think about this?

Edit: By the way what is the source for that post?

Koos Group posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

this is good

Centrist Committee posted:

certainly gives a new perspective to the end of history

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

. the "dark" weirdos of the right are inherently suspect to the militia guys and get beat up for being effete and reading yukio mishima novels. like nick land or somebody like that. but more often, i think those guys play at being cultured, like "i'm listening to beethoven because it's 'my culture'" and play at being deep but it's part of the same decadent philistine stuff which nietzsche took a giant poo poo on
https://samirchopra.com/2016/03/10/gramsci-and-nietzsche-as-philosophers-of-culture/

Finicums Wake posted:

this is so true lol

ToxicAcne posted:

That passage sounded shockingly modern in what it was talking about. I have to read more Gramsci.

Does anyone know where to start?

Edit: It describes Ben Shapiro to a T.

Gene Hackman Fan posted:

grifting idea: reprinting mao's "combatting liberalism" but it's designed to look like it was written by a loving chud.

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

having way too much fun with this now

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

having way too much fun with this now