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6. Halting the Doomsday Clock's explosion Saving the world means stopping the Third World War, mostly. Which means seeing where it will come from, and developing effective intervention, within sufficient time. A great clash of cultures gathers steam daily, underpinned by a host of degenerating, lesser national contests. We speak of US-China relations, in the main, and so must complete our summary of capital accumulation geography. Capitalism was born of piracy, where mercantile traders competed for import goods and gold to market. Naval protection was engendered, giving birth to the European nation-states. The competition was continued on a grander scale, between those states, and observable was migration of capital's capital, from Portugal to Spain, France, Holland, and across the Atlantic seaboard. England won, through cultural differences like an entrenched, open and unified national market, backed by refined legal, educational, and political institutions, and driven by science and industrial invention. Their bourgeois revolution had reached a pact with feudalism in 1660 - a century and some before any such war settlement in Europe. Consequently, Brittania ruled the waves (distribution channels) throughout the nineteenth century, and became the dominant coloniser and market unifier on a global scale once France's Bonaparte was defeated. World Wars I and II saw off the German, then Japanese challenges. But in the struggle went the prize, and capital's capital migrated once again, across the Atlantic, to New York. This overview helps us relate specific political forms to their recent periods, to understand history - in order to change it. After American succession of 'world policeman' status from Britain, the twentieth century turned mostly around interaction between two new industrial monoliths: the USA and the USSR. A quarter billion people each, both new markets exceeded old Europe in scale, whose outmoded industrial plant was scrapped en masse by World War Two. Bigger state aggregations, by a factor of four or five, ruled the new market era. Logically, China's twenty-first century conversion to 'capitalism in all but name' poses a direct challenge to US economic power, through its scale of unified market intersecting with modern industrial and mercantile development. How this emergence impacts the planet depends upon mentally grasping the potentiality of the competing political forms. As indicated in section 5 above, the format is clearly outlined as the next World War being a higher stage in the battle between national socialist models. A little further history substantiates the content. Soviet socialism imprinted on China in 1949. Stalin's dictated leadership cult multiplied into Mao. Both headed an unstable social form: peasant-sourced, military bureaucracies leaping slowly from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Much tension pent up, restraining emergent proletariats. The smaller was dispossessed of its putative state in 1989. The larger awaits democracy of any form. The combination of nationalism and socialism legitimates betrayal of an enthused majority by the enriching minority. Refined internationally mid-Depression, national socialism's highest form was New Deal state intervention to reemploy restive workers: "FDR.. was a virulent fascist in his deeds and programs" [Bob_Robertson lxer.com, citing the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute]. Mobilisation into uniform is the automatic next step, of proletariat dismemberment. Round two was enjoined, hot then cold. [To be continued.]. |
Green Future offers a practical programme for connecting the Green politics of today with a salvaged, surviveable ecosystem of the near Future. US hegemony brings global stability, yet in 2006 'geopolitical uncertainty' still surprisingly grows, inflating oil prices. Or does it? [Publishing Excuses for "obvious gouging of consumer confidence" 29Oct2005]. The PRC state showed zero interest in format change, when a recent "anti-corruption and self-construction.. meeting called on all party members and the entire Chinese people to make joint efforts for the establishment of a 'harmonious socialist society' and the full implementation of the 'scientific concept of development'" (Meeting of CPC discipline watchdog issues communique People's Daily Online 07Jan2006). "The system of supervision and prevention should be improved to eliminate any hint of corruption," said Hu Jintao; so is that the corruption, or any word of it, that will be stopped? "Chinese capitalism is not like, and will not necessarily approach, the Western model. It is under state control - often erratic, to be sure, yet always threatening. The steel industry, the automotive industry, and the others were created from the top down. Goals are still set from on high, in five-year plans, and in detail. The men at the top are a new generation, intelligent, determined, relatively young. No question that they have learned from history - but not the lessons Western observers would like them to learn. Hu Jintao is paramount leader. He and his colleagues have attacked what they call 'neoliberalism,' specifically, laissez-faire policies. They admit no correlation between economic growth and any flowering of democracy. What had looked like a gradual relaxation of controls over press and television reporting has been reversed, sharply and increasingly." (The Great Chinese Experiment MIT Technology Review Dec2005). [To be continued.]. Judges liken terror laws to Nazi Germany "The Independent" UK 16Oct05 The increasing loss of civil rights to 'state protection' now quickly exposes the fascist nature of those states. Building a Green Future means completing the anti-fascist contest with national socialism, once and for all. Begun in 1939, it is yet to be brought home. 'Majority rule', as well as supplying fascist authority, thus far merely rotates governance duty between the two party fascist wings, which emphasise either the nationalist or the socialist aspect of their national socialist compact. Reform choice is electorally pitched as either repressive or progressive, but turns out at best a mixture of the two, because the capitalist-bureaucrat duopoly shifts not outside of the fascist compact for managing worker exploitation. This is an international cause, to be advanced politically, popularly, and democratically - more democratically than fascism is ever able to answer. |