In this section, I divided into three parts: first, I discuss the crisis of globalized financial neoliberal capitalism, signaling also the predicament of Euro-Atlantic Modernity. Second, I briefly review and discuss unequal exchange, underdevelopment and how periphery and semi-periphery of Asian countries continue to exploited by the North; Third, I discuss the model of socialist political economy of China as an alternative political project for the Global South, what constitutes a new alternative modernity and its importance for a “long transition” toward world socialism. The third part enables us to respond to whether China is seeking its place as a new Master.
a. Financial Neoliberal Capitalism: Inequality, Austerity and Scarcity
The crisis of Euro-Atlantic modernity today means the crisis of the Euro-American-Japanese finance capital bloc. This "collective imperialism of the triad" is a hegemonic world historical bloc, in which, finance capital plutocracies and the advance capitalist states control and monopolizing strategic sectors and resources on a global scale: natural resources, financial flows, new technologies, communications and weapons of mass destruction (Amin, 2021, p.17). The finance capital today is a merging between centralization and concentration of money, industrial and commercial capital (François Chesnais, 2016).
Today crisis is a condensation of previous historical crises and impasse of capitalism, one of the premises is that world capitalism has not fully recovered from the inevitable and periodic crisis of 2008-09, where the advance capitalist states of the North has persistently stand still in the long depression economy (Michael Roberts, 2016). Despite that, the continuous market access, capital circulation and massive surplus value transfer from Global South to the North allows the metropolis to overcome the stagnation and control inflation
However, the bourgeois economists foster their dogmatism and illusion that there was always a happy-ending economic recovery, boom and prosperity after the crisis, or recession. Consequently, global capitalist imperialism dragged itself into another trap of its own creation, derived from decades since the end of long golden era of capitalism (1945-1975) and five decades of neoliberalism (1970s-present): the excessive spending, growth and moving the capital beyond the ‘actual existing capitalism’ into a non-productive, non-real, ecologically destructive and parasitic sectors of the capitalist economy than ever before in world history: financialization, militarism and rentier digital capitalism.
In addition, these three sectors are currently the dominant strategies of the collective imperialism of the triad and their finance plutocracies to maintain the accumulation and domination amidst its long depression. Instead of boom and prosperity after the crisis, we have more war, crisis, apartheidism, not to count the drained wealth and precarious economic formation of digital “neofeudalism” (Jodi Dean 2020). Today, global capitalist imperialism exploits and oppresses the working masses and threatening the foundation of ecological reproduction mostly in terms of financial-military-rent nexus (See Hudson 2003 & 2016).
In effect, the world has encountered the extreme rise of wealth inequality at the unprecedented global levels, and even within nations of the North and South. The Oxfam Report 2022 shows the top ten richest men of the earth own more than 3.1 billion people combined, and 1% richest people account 70% global wealth. The wealth of the richest 1% doubled since the pandemic, and from 2020-2021, a billionaire appeared every 30 hours, while the incomes of the 99% were declining and one million people pushed into poverty every 33 hours (Oxfam 2022). Almost same, the World Inequality Report (2022) reveal that the bottom 50% people share 2% global wealth, while the plutocracies 1% shows a faster growing of wealth comparing to 10% middle class in the North and rich of Global South is growing slower. For three decades, the top 1% captured 38% of global wealth, socializing 2% to the 50% people at the bottom, and this makes the wealth of 0.1% richest people on earth rise from 7% to 11% in the past thirty years. In addition, the richest in North America and Western Europe collect 35% of national wealth and income while the bottom 50% receive only 19% of national wealth. More extreme is in the Global South, where the richest 10% gains 45-58% of national income, while the poor 50% share only 9-12% of national wealth (Chancel et.al 2022). And the fact is, most of the plutocracies based in the West are coming from the financial, digital and military industrial sectors that coalesce in what we referred above as the most beneficial in our current financial neoliberal capitalism.
Thus, the acute growth of wealth for minority 1% accompanied with stagnant and wealth drain of the majority 99% is a problem of cycle of capitalist underdevelopment and austerity-debt trap that imposed to people and government all over the world, specially the South by financial neoliberal capitalism and the imperialist economic apparatus such as IMF, World Bank and WTO. At least, hundreds of states are being neoliberalized, and persistently follows the western dictate of austerity since the 2008 crisis (Ortiz, Isabel, Cummins et.al, 2015).
These swing of antagonism between the collective imperialism of the triad and its outskirts, within the plutocracies, and the monopolies with their junior national bourgeoisie of the Global South, and between both against the majority popular class and working masses, can be articulated as a battle between contradictory projects and desires of progress and modernity (Tricontinental, 2023). It manifested that, capitalism deepened multiple crises, war, and sustained a transfer of gigantic wealth flowing in colossal amounts into a minority financial-military-rentier complex plutocracies in the North and their junior subordination in the South. In contrast to it, socialist experimentation in the twenty-first century is aimed at the success of material development, productive capacity, and well-being of the majority. At national level, the majority popular class faces scarcity and austerity amidst the transfer of national wealth and abundance to the tiny and oligarchic.
Clearly that, socialism, is a project for new modernity that aims at creating more wealth abundance for many and annihilating the power of the few and corrupted representation. The capitalist imperialism with the face of financial, neoliberal and digital is antithetical to these, and entails a synonymous with a paramount inequality, austerity and scarcity. New socialist modernity shall be developed and built from the advancement and abundance.
So, what has been the response so far from the national, popular and socialist project outside the collective imperialism of the triad? The Rest opposes by launching varied initiatives to contribute to genuine auto-centric industrial development, dedollarized, and multipolar world of peaceful transition toward world socialism. We need a popular counter-hegemonic bloc internationally, and it won't be a working-class movement. It requires a massive composition balancing forces between the broad popular sectors of working people and class, nations, and states. That is why multipolar and internationalism are two sides of the same coin (Ximenes, 2023, p.343). The two sides of projections could advance the people and the working-class movement and states in resistance, for real development, decolonization but also for liberation from unilateral, monocultural and ‘Whiteness’ modernity of capitalist imperialism (Bolivar Echeverria, 2019).
b. Asia: Unequal Exchange, Over-Exploited and Development
Since the crisis of Asian Tigers during the 1990s, people continue to be amazed with another successful history of capitalist triumphalism in Asia, and the name was converted into what some have misappropriated as ‘Chinese Miracle’. Regardless, the world turned attention to Asia, US imperialism redefining the strategy of ‘Asia Rebalance’ and their ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’, signaled a new cold war targeting China that, even, our Western leftist denounce it. Some, continued, referred to this centuries to come as the Asia Century, signaling the shift of center of global political power from Europe to Asia, and reduced the confrontation in Asia simply into the geographical-deterministic fault-line of the clash of civilization (Kaplan 2012 & 2015). Thus, we are dictated to believe that, the oriental despotic autocracies from the continent of rebellion and revolution, has fully embrace the capitalism of the West, set to be the next successor hegemonies of world capitalism, stabilizer power that prevented the monstrous capitalist civilization to collapse.
These ideas are almost legitimate the following erroneous leftist positions: the Asian emerging power, and the capitalist states of the periphery are standing equal with the West, and are about to catch up the North, the emerging power such as China shared the prosperity by extracted and expropriated massive profits with the West from their less, undeveloped neighbor of the South. Second, it permits the idea that the inter-imperialist rivalry is now between Asian Capitalism and Western Capitalism, or Chinese imperialism and North imperialism. Third, it prevented the idea that we are not living in a new cold war of US-led western imperialist alliance to weaken and destroy Chinese socialist alternatives.
Asia was once united, with the African continent, for a common project of decolonization, democracy and auto-centric development demonstrated in the third world initiatives such as Bandung Movement (1950s-80s), that succeeding with the continuous creation of Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) and G77. Today, Asia is a region of diverse, complex, and uneven. The people in it are fragile and encircled and weakened by imperialism, superstitious and religious fanaticism, cultural resurgence, and rising right populism with peculiar backward-looking. Former crony members and family dynasties of previous dictators are reelected in major Southeast Asian countries that self-proclaimed as the biggest democracy of Muslim and catholic dominated archipelagic states such as Indonesia to Philippines.
The major question facing today in Asia is underdevelopment and over-exploitation, rent monopoly and deepening financialization and neofeudalism of economy, and on the other, destruction of land, agriculture and ecology in general. And the West, the North imperialism alone, must bear the full responsibility.
Asia, despite rapid growth, modernization, and overseas expansion through trade and a significant share of global production output, the massive hidden surplus values have relentlessly transferred to the North. Through the asymmetric, unequal international trade exchanges between 1990-2015, the North high income countries appropriated resources and values that sustain their high income and mass consumption from the net exports of ecological resources such as cheap raw materials, labor to energy from the South, in Asia’s most lumpen-development states except China and India (Christian Dorninger et.al. 2021).
We may see a massive number of industries previously in the metropolis are reallocating to Asia due to low wages, and rollback of protective regulatory policies from the state over the labor and resources. However, the final extraction and appropriation of value produced in Asia including the semi-periphery country such as China, or extra-periphery such as India consistently lost by being transferred to the North until nowadays.
In a not long past report from a global south economist, indicated that the South losses more than it can benefit from the North. Two socialist market economies in Asia such as China and Vietnam suffered greater losses due to unequal exchange with the North. China’s absolute loss 2% of its GDP output equivalent to $357 billion are transferred to the North, while Vietnam losses 17% from its output. Despite this, China's transfer to the North declined from 42% from total value transfer from the South to the North in 2005, and by 2017 it accounted for only 16% of the total. This decline of losses is due China’s strong bargaining role in the global economy by resisting the neoliberalization and structural adjustment attempted by the North. Although, removing China from the list, the transfer from the rest of the south is still the same. Thus from 1960-2018, the global south lost $160 trillion to the North, now, each year, the South loses 2.2 trillion USD to the North, an amount that could end massive extreme poverty in the globe. From this number, Asia including China, Southeast Asia to Pacific, from Central Asia to the Middle East are the most exploited regions that developing the North by contributing to the growth, high income and consumption styles of the North. And that exploitation increased exponentially since a period of deepening of neoliberal policies reform and ascendancy of financialisation across the Global South in the 1980s-1990s until the present (Jason Hickel, et.al, 2021).
With these numbers, it is ironic to say that, the North is developing the South, or the bourgeoisie of the North, imperialism is making Asia like the other, in its own image. Because, some still say that, us, the colonized in Asia that now gained national independence was the sole European modern invention: Euro-Atlantic capitalist imperialism with the agency of colonialism. Does a socialist revolution and national liberation invent another modernity? – Doesn't nation and people were born from politics of social struggle, history and the modern subject itself that sovereignty proclaims themselves as a people and nations? – Independence from colonial and neocolonial modernity is a self-determined modern invention of the people of the rest and Asia, not a gift offered by their former colonial power. To affirm that, Asia is not a product of the Cold War (See Alex Taek-Gwang Lee; and Gustavo Oliveira ).
These objective situations led us to conceive the vitality of the national-popular agenda of anti-neoliberal, financial imperialism in Asia, and toward the importance of sovereignty, development and modernization projects of the Asian periphery countries. That is to say, independence is just an initial stage for complete liberation of the people and human freedom – the name is socialist-communist modernity. In this initial stages, independence states and socialist in Asia either chose to build a new productive power and social relations, auto-centric development, and the intellectual and virtuous principles centered on abundance and wealth, or they are adjust and compromise to the demand of the capitalist imperialism that ended up with dancing nowhere with scarcity and dependency, ones that oppose to long complete break with capitalist-imperialism.
Today, Asia has been divided into three formations of nation-states, no matter what ideological representations are dominated in the states: first, is the emerging power seeking to complete break with capitalist imperialism, that is China or Vietnam, using the market as organic component of the socialism to resist the imperialism and choose the path of development; second, is the emerging power of capitalist states of periphery that serving the needs of the center such as India or Indonesia, that is seemed to continue the Western-dictate subservient economy that still posed the elements of lumpen-development; and the last is, the underdeveloped, war-torn states, super-exploited periphery capitalist states of Asia such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Philippine, Timor-Leste, and so on that confine in the cycle of conflict, famine, polarization, mass impoverishment, to a dispossession, dependency, maldevelopment and cheap raw material suppliers. The last two forms of states are certain to fail and be controlled by the Western imperialism. Citizens living in those two forms of states confronted not only a question of building a popular and democratic sovereignty of masses, but the need to overthrow their national elites and oligarchic powers serve as vassals of the imperialist North. While in the former case such as China, what is needed is to repoliticized the masses through popular participation in political-economic governance.
China, as a “model” of socialist market economy, does not join all other emerging powers that serve imperialism, nor can they be categorized as lumpen-development (Cheng Enfu & Xin Xiangyang 2011). Which is why we need to further elaborate in the next final section.
c. China’s Socialist Development and Modernity
The question remains that, is China really not a socialist state, but an emerging global power seeking to replace the old Master as a new imperialist power? Is China doing a dirty imperialist politics of destruction, plundering and dispossessing the others, both people and nations?
China is a semi-periphery country, despite of undertake unequal exchange and exploitative relations with the poor third world of Asia, Africa and Latin America, however, the vast surplus values produced in the South and in China are mostly transferred to the North and their capital monopolies (Minqi Li 2021). Chinese socialist modernization is opposite to Western modernity that is “based on colonisation, plunder, slavery, and predatory exploitation of the natural resources and peoples in the Global South.” However, China has a distinct modernization path that being centered on “principles of shared prosperity among a massive population, material and ethical-cultural progress, harmony between humans and nature, and peaceful development” (Marco Fernandes, 2023, p.7).
On the another, it is right to ask the following questions that, is socialism with each characteristic rooted in social and historical formations of a nation’s more democratic and diverse, potential for pluripolar modernity than a universe of scarcity and poverty standardized uniformly by the world financial-monetary-trading apparatus on behalf of ‘bureaucratic Caesarism’ (Keucheyan & Durand, 2015)’ of the Empires and the financial plutocracies of the North – which is better served for humanity and ecology? Will China inspire and affect Asia as a whole to construct a common project of alternative modernity?
The first wave of socialism (Nineteenth century socialist working class movement) toward second socialist wave (Twenty century with socialist and national liberation), China is now, a leading country of third wave socialism, that characterized as socialist constructions in the twenty-first century marked with the use of market in socialist modernization and development. Yang Ping (2023) wrote:
“At a time when the contemporary capitalist world system is facing tremendous crises, the opportunity for a new global wave of socialism has once again emerged. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is likely to be a key factor in initiating this wave. As China continues to rise and becomes a leading global power, the Chinese path of development will attract more attention as a viable alternative mode of production and way of life, promoting the formation of a new global socialist system and value system that is increasingly accepted by people around the world” ... various forces of international capitalism are mobilising against China. Attacks and smears from liberal, nationalist, and populist political forces are endless. Even some international left-wing forces harshly criticise China on issues of democracy, human rights, and environmental protection, and even question whether China is truly socialist. Since the Biden administration came to power in the United States, alliance politics have ramped up on a global scale. A US-led bourgeois ‘holy alliance’ is rapidly coalescing under the pretext of containing China.”
The Chinese nation-state resists the internal enemies and imperialist powers, the CCP consolidated the power and managed the development in the unequal exchange and asymmetrical world formation, international division of labor and uneven development in the globe. Chinese geopolitical economic resistance against imperialist power is a class struggle of people and nations on a global scale. The sovereignty, territory and resources is a matter of resistance politics of people and nation. As Prabhat Patnaik wrote the route toward “internationalism lies in an anti-imperialist national agenda”, and “nation still remains the only practical point of intervention in the struggle against imperialism”.
Thus, instead of pointed to Chinese Communist Party as the Big Other, Asian Capitalism or Chinese totalitarian capitalism, or perhaps, we start asking different, right questions that, are we in the lumpen-development country of the South nor we the people in the North, has a real choice to choose the genuine leadership and representations aside from right populist, oligarchic and disciple of free market neoliberalism dictated and appointed by the imperialist North? – Nations, people and states that resist the unilateral authoritarianism and totalitarianism of capitalist imperialism are contributing to a discontinuity and break, to genuine progress of real development and democracy, that is to say, objective historical tasks of building a long transition toward a complete liberation and world socialism.
The desire of each big national bourgeoisie in the South is to replace the foreign capital instead of simply becoming an intermediary class. However, the Chinese are not going to replace the foreign masters and Western monopolies as a new hegemonic imperialist power. The logic of Hegelian master-slave is operated, evident in concrete contradictions between China’s new alternative project in the current established imperialist world. China did not seek domination and subordination of the West and the Rest. China is a facticity bound to the Global South in which China stands its destiny with (Yang Ping, 2023 p.12).
Unequal exchanges, and economic expansion of China into the Rest, while continuing to submit to the imperialist North and monopolies, doesn't make China join the established oppressor, or seem to be part of a new oppressor from now on. It was a formation that China posed in this interdependency relations with the master and their combined development project in the imperialist system, where it needed to support the Rest, and at the same time, they needed to detach from the master, and to annihilate the master at the same trajectory. This historical dilemma is described at the end of the Twenty Century that “if getting caught in the vortex of globalized finance is painful, getting out of it is equally painful” (Prabhat Patnaik 1999).
Certainly, the Chinese masses enjoyed considerable satisfaction, productivity, needs and peace since the “reform” (1970s), until the so-called “new era” of socialist modernization. The basis of Chinese existence, and socialist modernization are incompatible with the continuous preservation of the current imperialist system. Unite with imperialists means fatal self-destruction of China, and it required a further transformation of its projection to a higher stages of socialist modernization.As it shows in the ‘delinking’ project and socialist modernization in China today shows a path toward development and decolonization, not dependency nor even a domination (see Amin 1987).
I think that's what the Chinese communist sought to materialize and manage in the extremely barbarous, decadency time of ours. The contradictory nature of socialist construction under the global capitalist imperialism is inevitable. China is in the fight and resistance, development and modernization, consolidation and construction of socialism, to fulfill its own mission, and not to betray: liberation.
People and nations on the tricontinent, always as it was, a source of hope, and Non-Whiteness Modernity can take a germ.
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