Geo-economic bipolarization and global class struggle

 

For a Marxist, class struggle can only be analyzed on a global scale. However, we have to admit that there is a lack of understanding within the Communist Left:

• On taking into account capitalism’s capacity to develop and generate a new geoeconomic bipolarization of the world, in particular with the shift of its center of gravity towards Asia.
• On the implications of this new configuration: (a) on the imperialist level, with a new geopolitical bipolarization around Washington and Beijing, and (b) in terms of class struggle, with an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of this region, which now accounts for three-fifths of the manufacturing proletariat.

This delay stems from a dogmatic conservatism in a Communist Left that remains generally clinging to the conclusion drawn by the Third International: that the mode of production entered its supposed phase of decadence with the outbreak of the First World War. This dogmatic conservatism contrasts with the political courage of Marx and Engels who, despite having stated the advent of the obsolescence of capitalism four times during their existence [1], nevertheless had the political courage to admit they were wrong [2]. This is something that groups claiming to be part of the Gauche Communiste have not yet managed to do, with the exception of the Cercle de discussion de Paris [3] and the collective Robin Goodfellow [4].

However, although the latter two clearly broke with the 3rd International’s diagnosis of the decadence of capitalism, they failed to draw the implications for its geo-economic and geopolitical evolution. The former because it did not pursue its seminal work, and the latter because it mechanically relegates Marx and Engels’ analyses to the 20th and 21st centuries.

There are many reasons for this pervasive conservatism, but one of them is terribly damaging, because it reveals a misunderstanding of the method of historical materialism: "Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts. The Communists do not base themselves on this or that philosophy as their point of departure but on the whole course of previous history and specifically its actual results in the civilised countries at the present time“ because ”Herr Heinzen [the Communist Left groups] imagines communism is a certain doctrine which proceeds from a definite theoretical principle as its core [the doctrine of decadence in 1914] and draws further conclusions from that. Herr Heinzen [the Communist Left groups] is very much mistaken." Engels, The Communists and Karl Heinzen, Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung No. 80, October 7, 1847.

Unfortunately, like Karl Heinzen, these groups regard their acquired clarity as an intangible doctrine, forgetting to confront it constantly with facts, the evolutions of capitalism, “the whole course of previous history and specifically its actual results in the civilised countries”, in short, they forget to evolve their theories with the “movement” of society as Engels put it. Instead, they cling to old rotten planks, “imagines communism is a certain doctrine which proceeds from a definite theoretical principle as its core [the doctrine of decadence in 1914] and draws further conclusions from that” ... whereas the facts have massively invalidated this diagnosis [5].

From then on, by constantly talking about the ’decadence of capitalism since 1914’, its irretrievable bankruptcy and the exhaustion of all palliatives to keep it alive ... it’s not surprising that it took several decades for the groups of the Communist Left to recognize that something was moving in Asia, and even then, this recognition is done with lip service and a great deal of reluctance. Let’s examine these facts as Engels enjoins us:

 

From a capitalism limited to its original Euro-American area ...

 

Until the Second World War (2nd GM), the development of capitalism remained confined to the European and North American area (plus Japan, Australia and New Zealand) to the detriment of the rest of the world. The “West”, which accounted for just 30% of world GDP at the start of modern capitalism (1825), accounted for two-thirds (66%) in the wake of the 2nd World War (graph 1), and almost 80% if we include the formerly developed Asian countries [6], a near threefold increase in their relative share. At the same time, India and China, which accounted for half of the total in 1820, had shrunk to 10% by 1945, a fivefold reduction! This is what economic historians call ‘the great divergence’ brought about by the industrial revolution and Western colonialism. (graph 2).

In other words, contrary to Marx’s prediction in the Manifesto (and tirelessly repeated dogmatically by all CG groups [7]), capitalism did not develop everywhere in the world. If it did colonize the entire planet, it was to control it for the sole benefit of a dozen or so Euro-American countries. In many places, notably China and India, this colonial world was plundered and destroyed to the extent that their GDP per capita fell for two centuries (graph 2). Capitalism and its imperialist laws dominated the world in 1914, but that doesn’t mean they developed local productive forces, and when they did (ports, rail networks, colonial cities...), it was very limited and with the primary aim of plundering colonial resources. Just look at a map of the colonized world, and you’ll see that almost all their capitals are ports, and that the very weak rail network is organized to drain wealth from the mines to the metropolises (Map 3). It is also significant that some ex-colonies have moved their capitals to new cities in the center of their countries in order to symbolically break with this past and rebalance their development inwards (cf. Abuja in Nigeria or Brasilia in Brazil...).

Graph 1: Distribution of global GDP between different countries and regions of the world.

Graph 2: The great divergence

Map 3: Railway network in sub-Saharan Africa

It was in the aftermath of the 2nd World War that the geo-economic polarization of the world reached its peak, mainly to the benefit of the United States alone after the weakening of Europe between 1914 and 1945: it doubled its share of world GDP from 18% to 36%, while Europe fell from 38% to 30%. American domination was even greater in the industrial sector, where they alone accounted for half in 1945. Economically and militarily super-powerful, this country was determined to maintain this supremacy, as Zbigniew Brezinski summed up: “It is imperative that no competing Eurasian power capable of dominating Eurasia should emerge and thus challenge America”. This is why the Americans plan to transform post-war Europe into a protectorate, and Germany and Japan into agropastoral countries for their agri-food multinationals!

Thus, as early as 1941-42, Washington was planning to impose a protectorate status on the liberated countries, governed by an AMGOT (allied military government of occupied territories). This American military government of the occupied territories was to abolish all sovereignty, including the right to mint currency, on the model provided by the Darlan-Clark agreements of November 1942. A specific and much more drastic plan for Germany was devised in the 1940s by Henry Morgenthau, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. The version of this plan adopted by Roosevelt and Churchill in September 1944 envisaged “transforming Germany into a predominantly agricultural and pastoral nation, with no industry” Wikipedia. Roosevelt made it clear that "Germany is not occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as an enemy nation. It must be disarmed, denazified and decentralized. Fraternization between occupiers and occupied will be strongly discouraged. Main industries will be controlled or suppressed". The same applied to Japan.

All these plans were implemented immediately after liberation, but with varying degrees of success, given the resistance that arose among the various national bourgeoisies. In fact, it was the emergence of the Cold War in Europe, Mao Zedong’s victory in China and its entry into the Soviet bloc, as well as the Korean War, and thus the straitjacket of the world’s organization into two opposing imperialist blocs, that redirected American plans to stem these Eastern bloc advances by favoring economic development in Europe, Japan, the NICs - Newly Industrialized Countries : South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore (graph 4), SE Asia (graph 5) and China from the 1970s onwards (graph 2) [8]. The Morgenthau plan was finally abandoned in September 1946, but only in 1951 for factory dismantling and strict production limitations! It was to be replaced by the Marshall Plan, which was to contribute to the recovery of Europe, particularly Germany, which was at the forefront of the Soviet threat.

Graph 4: Newly industrialized countries

Graph 5: Southeast Asia

This confinement of Western capitalism coupled with the pauperization of the rest of the world is well illustrated by the following graph showing that, for almost a century and a half (1820-1950), capitalism was never able to raise the majority growth of the population above the physiological threshold of absolute poverty. In other words, until the Second World War, capitalism led to the absolute impoverishment of the world’s population and numerous famines.

Graph 6: Absolute impoverishment threshold

On the other hand, the adoption of conventional state capitalism after 1945, the imperatives imposed by the Cold War, then the neoliberal turn around 1970-80 and the ensuing globalization, would change this configuration: more and more countries around the world (especially in Asia) would develop, real wages would rise and famines would diminish... Evolutions incomprehensible to the dogmatism of the Communist Left groups, the prototypical caricature of which is represented by the ICC, which asserted all its absolute certainties with the faith of a coalman:

"The period of capitalist decadence is characterised by the impossibility of any new industrialised nations emerging. The countries which didn’t make up for lost time before World War I were subsequently doomed to stagnate in a state of total underdevelopment, or to remain chronically backward in relation to the countries at the top of the sandcastle. This has been the case with big nations like India or China, whose ‘national independence’ or even their so-called ‘revolution’ (read the setting up of a draconian form of state capitalism) didn’t allow them to break out of underdevelopment or destitution." [9].

Such assertions were already laughable at the time (1980), since it had been three decades since China had emerged from its multi-century stagnation (Charts 2 and 7), but it still took +/- 35 years for the militants of the Gauche Communiste de France, and then the ICC itself, to realize that one of the poorest countries on the planet was becoming an economic power capable of rivaling the USA and posing as the leader of an imperialist proto-bloc! For an organization that regularly touts the power of its ’Marxist’ analysis and prides itself on being in the vanguard ... they break all records for blindness resulting from their outdated dogmatism. This is still true today of India and most of Asia: since the 1950s for the NICs (graph 4) and SE Asia (graph 5), since the 1980s for India (graph 8)! Thus, after asserting in 1980 that it was strictly impossible for “India or China” to “emerge from underdevelopment and destitution”, the ICC repeats this kind of laughable prognosis today: “Nor does India offer a viable long-term alternative that could play a role equivalent to China’s in the 1990s and 2000s; the circumstances that made the ’miracle of China’s emergence’ possible are no longer present, and such a prospect is now impossible” Revue Internationale n°172 . ... while India has been in the midst of a miracle for almost five decades (graph 8 and 2)!!!!

Graph 7 : China – Real GDP/capita growth

Graph 8: India - Real GDP/capita growth

Let’s hammer home the point. The ICC has consistently ridiculed the development of emerging countries. In summer 2012, it still wrote that the growth of these countries was a myth: "The acronym ‘BRICs’ refers to the four countries whose economies have flourished the most in recent years: Brazil, Russia, India and China.” But like El Dorado, this good health is more myth than reality". A year later, in its resolution on the international situation at its 20th congress, he paid lip service to the fact that the BRICS had ”...growth rates still well above those of the USA, Japan or Western Europe.... “, but this performance was not recognized as real development, as it was merely a communicating vessel, attributed "to the ‘delocalization’ of considerable sections of the productive apparatus of the old industrial countries (automobiles, textiles and clothing, electronics, etc.) to regions where workers’ wages were lower. ) to regions where workers’ wages are incomparably lower"! Three years later, in 2016, the ICC finally admitted the existence of “a real development of the productive forces in what had hitherto been the peripheral countries of capitalism”, but immediately attributed it to the parenthesis of opportunity opened up by the collapse of the Eastern bloc: “...the current stage of ‘globalization’ of state capitalism, already introduced beforehand, has made possible, in the post-1989 context, a real development of the productive forces in what had hitherto been countries peripheral to capitalism” Revue Internationale n°157 [10].

What is the reality? It wasn’t after 1989, but since the interwar period, that the BRICS began to break with their secular stagnation, then very clearly after the Second World War and even more so during the globalization phase (graph 9). So, if we follow the ICC narrative, it took 27 years (from 1989 to 2016) for it to recognize “a real development of the productive forces in what had hitherto been countries peripheral to capitalism” ... but if we look at the real data, it’s been 65 years (1950-2016) since the ancestors of the ICC, and then the ICC, were blind ... since the growth of the BRICS began well after the Second World War! But are we sure that the ICC is really aware of this today? Nothing is less certain, since the organization’s ideological schemes still refer to the BRICS as the “periphery of capitalism”, whereas the actual data show that these countries have overtaken the old industrialized West! This is what we examine in the next chapter.

Graph 9: BRICS - Real GDP/capita growth

 

... to today’s globalized capitalism

 

These successive developments in capitalism after the Second World War are all the more spectacular in that they all took place very quickly, much faster than the developments during the industrial revolutions in the 19th century during the so-called ’ascendancy’ of capitalism. To see this for ourselves, let’s take another look at the facts as Engels enjoins us, looking at what has happened over the last three decades ... i.e. the supposed ’terminal’ phase of capitalism’s decomposition according to the ICC :

1- If we compare the evolution of the share of the ’historic’ developed countries with that of the emerging + developing countries, calculated in purchasing power parity [11], we see a rapid and spectacular inversion, with the latter catching up with and overtaking the former:

Graph 10: Distribution of world GDP by zone

2- And if we now look at the two economic blocs vying with each other for hegemony on the world market, the same observation emerges: a spectacular inversion over the last three decades:

Graph 11: BRICS, BRICS+ and Western countries

In other words, the facts show us that it’s not capitalism that’s decomposing, but said ICC ’theory’ on the ’decadence and terminal phase of capitalism’. In fact, in the space of three-quarters of a century (1950-2025), unlike in Marx’s time, capitalism has really developed in breadth and depth all over the world (especially in Asia, but not only there).

 

The shift of capitalism’s center of gravity to Asia

 

If we now take a closer look at the geographical distribution of this growth, we notice that Asia is the main receptacle (Charts 12 and 13). Once again, we see a rapid inversion of dynamics between the former ’developed West’ and emerging Asia, to the point of witnessing a shift in capitalism’s center of gravity towards the Middle Kingdom:

Graph 12: Share in global GDP between Asia, the West and the rest of the world.

This shift is even more spectacular if we focus on manufacturing production alone (Graph 13): just 25 years ago, the G7 still accounted for two-thirds of the world’s manufacturing output, with Asia accounting for just one-tenth. Today, the G7 accounts for just one-third, with Asia accounting for over 40%:

Graph 13: Share of world manufacturing output: Blue = G7: US, Canada, Japan, ALL, UK, France, Italy; Orange = I6: China, India, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil; Black = rest of the world.

As a result, not only has the heart of capitalism shifted to Asia, but so have the main strongholds of the world proletariat, since 3/5ths of the manufacturing proletariat working on assembly lines are found there [12] ... it’s a fact that the Communist Left has not yet fully grasped, either economically or politically, let alone socially!!!!

 

Plead for a global appreciation of class struggle

 

If, so far, we have endeavored to describe facts relating to the geographical and structural evolutions of capitalism, it’s because the introductory text to the first item on the agenda of the international meeting in Arezzo (cf. p.18 of n°8 of our review Controverses) only considers issues relating to the evolution of class struggle in Western countries, and overlooks other parts of the world. This stems from the Communist Left’s entrapment in the old dogmatic schemes of the ’decadence in 1914’ doctrine, which prevent it from seeing the evolutions of real capitalism in all its dimensions. Thus, convinced that capitalism has been decadent since 1914, and that it has exhausted all its palliatives and recipes of state capitalism to keep itself alive (Keynesianism, indebtedness, Quantitave Easing, etc. ), the author of this introductory text is unable to see that all the spectacular developments we have seen since the Second World War, from Germany and Japan during the Thirty Glorious Years, through the Newly Industrialized Countries (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore), SE Asia and China to today’s emerging Asia... all of these developments have taken place within the framework of state capitalism ... and even crypto-Stalinist capitalism, as in China, Laos, Vietnam and certain former Eastern Bloc countries! State capitalism exhausted?

If we have to appreciate the state of the global balance of power, we must at the very least analyze the state of the class struggle in Asia! And this analysis is important for two reasons: to assess the proletariat’s ability to make revolution on a global scale, and also to assess its ability to resist the warlike incursion of both Beijing and Washington. To this end, we propose below a number of general characteristics that should play a part in this assessment. Still too lapidary, they need to be completed and critically discussed.

POSITIVE factors :

• As well as being numerically large and young, the proletariat in Asia is also highly concentrated, unlike anything we have seen in the West … think of the 450,000 employees at the Foxconn industrial site in Shenzhen! !
• It’s also an essentially manufacturing proletariat, working on assembly lines, which has only slightly been affected by the tertiarization–fragmentation phenomenon [13].
• If the scant information available is to be believed, it is also a proletariat which is still combative (Graphs 14 & 15) and which has not been affected by the profound decline of the Western proletariat over the last half-century (Graph 16).
• Finally, the working class in Asia is much better educated and concentrated and lives in a much more developed society than that of Russia in October 1917 (where the proletariat was a minority in a society that was still largely agricultural).

NEGATIVE factors :

The proletariat in Asia has little historical experience and still has many illusions about democracy, ’free’ trade unions, the pursuit of economic prosperity…, particularly in China, but not only.

Nevertheless, our feeling is that, despite these undeniable negative factors, they do not wipe out the enormous revolutionary potential of this industrial proletariat, which is numerous, concentrated, educated and combative. As in the case of the proletariat in Russia in 1917, its youth and the lack of influence of a reformist social democracy, as in the West, could even make it an asset. Admittedly, this fraction of the world proletariat will need the contribution of the experiences of its historical sectors (just as the revolution in Russia needed its extension to the West), but its weaknesses must not be overestimated.

Graph 14: Strikes in China – 1978-2013

Graph 15 : Number of strikes in China – 2011-2023

The geo-economic and imperialist tilting of the world around the China-USA bipolarization confers a new responsibility on the proletariat of these two great powers, all the more so as the proletariat in Europe has suffered a profound retreat of more than half a century (Graph 16) [14]. What’s more, this ’historic’ proletariat of Western Europe finds itself terribly weakened and in a less central position than before, squeezed as it is, economically, socially and politically, between these two powers, the United States and China. On the other hand, the proletariat of these two superpowers is characterized by two historical weaknesses: (1) although for different reasons, it is bathed in a viscerally ’anti-communist’ atmosphere and (2) it has historically contributed little to the international workers’ movement.

Graph 16 : Strikes in 16 developed countries [15]

C.Mcl, August 2024 - This article expands on our contribution written in June 2024 for the international meeting in Arezzo.