On Sun, Mar 2, 2025 at 11:52 AM, Ed George wrote:
>
> I wrote about this some years ago (<
> https://edgeorgesotherblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/through-what-stage-are-we-passing.pdf
> >; I wouldn't use all the same formulations now as I did then, but, in its
> essential structure, I still see the substantial argument as sound.
>
Given that this essay itself came out of a discussion on this list in 2002
involving myself and the late Mark Jones, I thought it would be useful to post
two of Mark's contribtutions from that time (I don't have any of the others
saved), since they still seem to me relevant to current events and our
discussions on them.
***
Subject: thinking out loud
From: Mark Jones <markjones...@tiscali.co.uk>
Date: 23/07/2002 22:30
To: a-list <a-l...@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Reply-to: marx...@lists.panix.com
This is just thinking out loud, apologies for lack of originality, sense,
footnotes, scholarship etc.
What is the nature of the current crisis, where is it heading, what are the
possible outcomes? The world system is holistic and overdetermined, but is
composed of discrete elements articulated in different ways and with differing
degrees of partial or relative autonomy. Different regions are subject to
different dynamics and rates of growth and relative or absolute decline
obviously differ. A G Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein and others have argued that
the main trend in the world today is the decline of Anglo-Saxon hegemony and
the re-ascent of Asia and above China. Will this be a new American Century, or
is US hegemony as profoundly challenged as many now argue? Will China achieve
regional hegemony, and is it capable of going on to true global hegemony? Or
will China collapse when the sources of growth (easily identifiable and not the
result of magic) fade and underlying demographic, ecological, resource and
interethnic strains start to tell, possibly destroying the unitary Chinese
socio-economic space just as the USSR was destroyed by its failure in global
competition?
Second group of questions: if there is a transition from one global hegemon
(the US) to another (China) and a transition from the present Anglo-Saxon world
system to a differently-ordered world with Asia as the centre of gravity and
the propulsive dynamic, how will this transition occur/be effected? Is a world
war thinkable? It should be borne in mind that the transition from a declining
to an ascendant hegemon can and has happened historically not by means of war
but with the consent and active participation of the declining power, which in
some cases may even push forward the claims of the ascendant power,
surrendering its own hegemonic status and also freely giving up many strategic
and economic possessions. There are examples of this from antiquity and in the
middle ages, and the modern example is of the surrender by Britain of its
global-hegemonic status to an initially-unwilling, isolationist USA during the
1930s-1940s. This process to some degree did falsify or at any rate qualify V I
Lenin's thesis about inter-imperialist rivalry always leading to war, although
arguably it was Lenin's own success in creating the USSR which caused this, by
forcing the British to take a defeatist view of their own prospects. Is it
thinkable that the US might surrender hegemony to China? Maybe it is more
thinkable than we realise, once we canvas the alternatives, and once we look
beyond the rabid posturings and imperialistic breast-beating of the US ruling
class.
It is salutary to compare modern attitudes with those that were prevalent in
Victorian Britain, during the period of unquestioned British global supremacy.
Check out Rudyard Kiplingthe British were at least as sure of the manifest
destiny of their imperial, civilising mission and just as or far more
arrogantly confident about the empire on which the sun would never set, and
about the racial superiority of their kind. Nevertheless the time was not that
long in coming before the British abandoned imperial pretensions and packed
their colonial kit and left. Winston Churchill, in his desperate attempts to
lever the US out of its isolationist neutrality in 1940, gave away many key
strategic assets to Roosevelt, including not on the British and S African gold
reserve, but the global network of island bases on which its imperial
communications systems depended (and this was actually the hub or backbone of
the information systems which then supported the world market).
The middle decades of the last century might best be seen as an interregnum,
during which time the declining and the ascendant imperialisms, Britain and the
US, colluded to see off rivals (Japan, Germany) and put down risings
(Bolshevism). Once US hegemony was assured (by 1943-46) it was relatively
straightforward to restructure the global system on the new, US-dominated
basis, and to create the parastatal and international institutions and he
framework of international law, which secured unchallenged US hegemony (the
USSR ceased to be a serious challenge after 1945, except for two brief periods
during the Korean War and Vietnam War).
The British surrendered their empire in pursuit of their own best interests and
indeed of national survival. But the psychological trauma and the bitter taint
of defeat scarred a whole generation of people not merely in the British ruling
elites, either, but among wider social layers and classes which had a
sentimental interest in the empire or had been bought off one way or
anotherthis included very wide sections of the British working class,
especially the so-called aristocracy of labour, which followed shared the
racist assumptions behind the ideology of empire and which had benefited
materially from so-called 'social imperialism' from the military
keynesian/welfare state reforms of the early postwar period.
In its heyday the British Empire was a more powerful and effective one than the
US empire has been or is. The British did not only move around people in huge
numbers, they also moved around vegetation. The British did more to transplant
itherto alien flora and fauna from one continent to another, thus
reconstructing whole ecosystems, than any other empire (although the Romans did
a lot more in that sphere than most people realise). It takes a lot of
arrogance and a lot of certainty to do the kinds of things the British
ever-so-freely took it on themselves to do. They reshaped whole continents,
from Australasia to Africa to Latin America. And the successive waves of
emigration from the homeland created a whole English-speaking world of which
the US was to begin with only a subset and which it finally inherited, but did
not create. The British ploughed their way through every precapitalist social
formation they encountered and either wiped it out or through colonialism,
totally reconstructed it. Nevertheless, despite its grandiose achievements, the
British Empire, which seemed so enduring, was ephemeral. There is nothing to
suggest that the seeming permanence of the US imperium should not be any more
fleeting. There is also no reason to suppose that sheer self-interest might not
drive Americans themselves into a recognition that the price of domination
alone and unchallenged, is too high, and that therefore an accommodation must
eventually be made with a rival who might one day become a successor. Since
world war 2, the US has in fact made a practise of co-opting present and
potential rivals into junior partnership. It has done this not only to Britain,
but also to Germany (1960s), Japan (1970s-1980s) and latterly even to Russia.
The US is now functionally organically locked into Chinese industrial
capitalism; the two states are in a tight embrace, performing a minuet which is
part dance of death and part marriage of necessity and of mutual elite interest.
Both states face many common problems and both need each other because of
complementarities and useful asymmetries. However, the radical contradictions
between them do make them imperial rivals. And the balance of power between
them appears to be changing. The US has not been growing as much as it hoped or
declared; China has been growing faster and has now entered a decisive phase of
industrialisation, where its industry is so diverse, deep, broadly-based and
synergistic that it appears to be crossing a threshold and is emerging as the
world's premier industrial power, eclipsing all others, and with an R&D
capability equivalent to that of the US or Japan. Some estimates say that
Chinese industrial production will outstrip the US during the present decade.
It seems clear that Asia as a whole is poised on the cusp of precipitous
changes, and that the US is clearly now the declining regional hegemon and
China the rising regional hegemon. It is surely arguable and likely that China
will become the dominant power in Asia without the need for war and without the
USA being able to prevent this. Once the economic facts are in place, can the
geopolitical consequences be far behind? What can prevent the binding together
and fusion of Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese industry and capital, but under
Chinese hegemonic control?
Thus for the first time in its history, the US now faces the distinct
possibility of the partial eclipse of its global power. I have no idea what
will happen and I doubt if anybody can know, but it is surely plausible that
the US will be obliged to accept with good grace, this strategic defeat, this
seismic change in its status and position, because the US is simply no longer
powerful enough to fight it. The rise of China to at least regional Asian
ascendancy seems to be already in the script, and inevitable and unalterable
outcome of present trends.
I know lots of caveats and objections can be entered here and I've thought of a
few myself. For one thing, it may really be true that US technological and
military supremacy is now so great that it will be impossible for China ever to
*effectuate* its latent regional supremacy, impossible for China to ever take
advantage of its potential power during some future world crisis which frees up
the various logjams. In this case presumably the world economy will enter a
very protracted period of stagnation and decline. Also, China may indeed go
into crisis on one of a number of fronts: demography, ecology, resource
depletion (energy/water etc).
A crucial indicator will be which state/regions comes out of a depression
first; I think Gunder Frank dwelt on this a lot. Under present circumstances,
it seems unlikely that the global bourses will recover very quickly and the
present bear market might be very prolonged. It might be 15-20 years before
the Dow hits 10,000 again, on historical precedent. Surely this means that
growth is likely to be constrained, and we may still get a severe slump, as
happened in 1931 following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It is said that this
will not happen because mistakes made then will not be repeated: protectionism,
futile and counter-productive attempts to balance budgets etc. But the same
people who say this also often said there would never be another bear market
and the New Economy was a Paradigm Change, blah-blah. Greenspan himself
twittered on like this, remember? In any case, a slump can happen whatever
kinds of Keynesian demand management is attempted. Deficit spending does not
overcome modern deflationary crises. So, as Wynne Godley has just been arguing,
a real and perhaps catastrophic slump, a real meltdown of the US economy in
particular, is a distinct possibility, even a probability. In this case, we met
get a decade or even more of mass unemployment and hell knows what besides,
check the History Channel for details.
The region which emerges first from such a slump (and a slump is surely on
balance more likely now, than not) will be well placed to move out of mere
regional dominance and to assay the chances of becoming new global hegemon. If
China survives the shocks and strains caused by a global slump in demand, than
it must be well-placed to emerge first from the subsequent trough. It is this
line of thinking which leads me to argue that we probably are, as Frank says,
in the throes of transition between hegemons, and that indeed the present world
economic crisis may itself be symptomatic of this crisis of transition, just as
global collapse in the 1920s was symptomatic of the final decay of British
power. China is more competitive, and this is the bottom line. Sooner or later
the capitalist world economy is likely to emerge from any economic setback, and
the power which has the underlying competitive edge will come out first. It
will then be in pole position to begin the process of institutional and
legal-framework restructuring which can entrench its hegemony and make it
normative.
There is one huge caveat to this whole line of argument, which is that it does
not take account of underlying modal problems which afflict the world system
and which may mean we are entering a still more radical and decisive epoch of
historical challenge, upheaval and gross transformation of everything from
geopolitics to everyday life. I'm talking here about the colossal threats posed
by that cruel and compelling system of adverse factors: anthropogenic climate
change, mass extinction of species, destruction of the biosphere, and loss of
energy supplies. In my opinion these factors form a vast backdrop to all
world-system or economic calculus and to all considerations at the level of
inter-imperial rivalry a la Lenin. But before attempting to integrate this
domains of issues into the discussion, let us consider again this big what-if:
what if China emerges first, in 5,7, 10 years or so, from an impending global
economic slump?
The coming slump (if it does come) is likely, so some argue, to hit the US
especially hard. The dollar will decline, industrial output will shrink, and
living standards and the wage will be impacted. The US economy is wildly out of
equilibrium and its external payments deficit is likely to get much worse
before it gets better, and it will get better only at the price of consumption
levels. Obviously this collapse in US demand will hit major exporters, China
above all. China will then have over time to find other sources of demand,
which means domestic demand and by export to other regions which may be doing a
little better: India, Russia, Europe and perhaps above all, the big
middle-eastern oil states.
The collapse of the dollar (if it happens) may take the US out of this game for
a very long time. We now have a situation where the US, too, must export its
way out of trouble. Now we shall really see just how competitive the New
Economy is and how much US productivity did increase. But is anyone betting
that the US can beat China at its own game? Walk round your house and mentally
eliminate everything made in China, and see what's left. Now look for
everything with Made in USA on it. I have a Coleman camping lamp. I think
that's about all.
Once you strip out dollar hegemony and the advantages of being the global
currency of last resort, you are left with a very naked emperor: except for his
weaponry, control of the skies and sealanes and info networks, he has few cards
left. Take away dollar hegemony and you have just another regional economy with
lots of internal problems (soil exhaustion, aquifer-depletion, lack of
indigenous energy supplies, polluted environment, poor infrastructure,
badly-designed and highly expensive-to-maintain urban environment). If the US
has to compete on a level playing field with the rest of the world, then it may
find that its urban infrastructure is just as uneconomic and unsustainable as
was the Soviet Union's loss-making endeavour to base itself on the
industrialisation of the Urals and Siberia. The USA currently uses twice as
much energy and raw materials per capita as does for example, the United
Kingdom. Over ten times more than China. It is desperately uncompetitive. When
its dollar bill has to be backed up by real values, US per capita GNP may fall
by half. It is hard for me at least, to see how the US can then hope to
maintain its global reach, its unique hegemonic position.
Since China will be beset by achingly-serious problems of its own, and since
the collapse of the world market must increase internal social instability, the
Chinese regime will not be waiting around passively for the US to put the world
to rights. It must produce and export or die.
During the 1930s the two states who were first out of the depression were
Germany and the USSR and they broke free on the basis of colossal military
spending. Undoubtedly this is the first option large militarised states think
of as the path to reflation, full employment and re-emergence in still more
powerful form onto the world scene. There is great scope here for China too,
for it is only just beginning a vast programme of defence spending and force
expansion and modernisation. American defence spending is by comparison much
less sustainable at present, let alone projected, levels, once you get a
serious recession and a dollar decline. Moreover, the baroque nature of US arms
means that defence spending doesn't do much to galvanise the wider economy.
That is not yet true of China. Therefore in a major world depression, the
Chinese are surely likely to dramatically increase defence spending as a way of
boosting the economy as well as to reinforce growing regional hegemony. It is
already true that the Chinese navy exercises much gunboat diplomacy in the
coastal states of Asia. The Chinese will surely seek to emerge from a
depression by means of strategic and economic domination of Asia as a whole, by
saturating its markets and by hegemonising its skies, seas and info-nets.
I believe that some kind of Sino-American joint global hegemony must be the
strategic direction both states will want or be enjoined to follow, for want of
a more appetising alternative. No-one really wants war, and fear of Bolshevism
remains a great restraint on inter-imperial rivalry. I believe that this
century may drift towards the outcome which leaves the US as the junior partner
to ascendant Chinese world hegemony. This may be a very protracted process and
American attempts to stave off the inevitable may produce long periods of
terrible stagnation. The US however is the declining hegemon. US imperialism
greatly benefited from the defeat of the USSR and waxed spectacularly fat on
the plunder it looted from the former Soviet bloc.
The last ten years have seen the greatest unforced capitulation in history (the
unconditional surrender of the USSR) exploited by the biggest ponzi fraud in
history (as Wynne Godley was just now saying in the FT), all helping to create
the biggest stockmarket bubble in history. The present bear market is not just
a correction to that gigantic and unprecedented sequence of human folly, unless
you call Alaric's visit to ancient Rome a 'correction'. This is surely the
beginning of the end, not just of equity-culture in our lifetime, but of global
Anglo-Saxon suzerainty. Andre Gunder Frank was right, the pendulum is swinging
back to Asia but it is doing so in conditions of the final blow-out of the
resource-mining accumulation model of petroleum capitalism. It's therefore
about transition between different modes of production as well as transition
between the old declining and new rising hegemon.
If on the other hand, we are set on a course of global war, which was the
outcome for the great depressions before 1914 and during the 1930s, then the
Americas have only a very small window of opportunity (like Hitler enjoyed in
1939) before the military advantage swings against them as has the economic
already, and this is the real meaning of Bush's 'pre-emptive strikes'. It is
China they must pre-empt. The Islamic world, broken-backed as it is and will
remain, is not the problem. This will be a war for the survival not just of the
American Century but of that more precious icon, the place where people
actually live-- the 'burbs--the greatest agglomeration of ostentatious
consumption especially of energy consumption--and the biggest assembly of
hostage-populations ever in history.
Even in his own lifetime it became clear to Lenin that his original assumptions
about the necessity of inter-imperial warfare and the certainty of wars being
followed by proletarian revolutions, would have to be qualified in the light
both of experience and of new realities. When the science-fiction writer H G
Wells visited Lenin in his Kremlin office in (I think) 1921, Wells told Lenin
that although he did not know what weapons the next war would be fought with,
he was quite sure that the one after it would be fought with bows and arrows.
Lenin did not disagree: it was already apparent, before the advent of nuclear
weapons, that modern warfare imposed intolerable costs on civilisation. It was
this realisation above all which prompted Lenin's notions of peaceful
coexistence: what use would the proletarian revolution be, if it inherited a
wasteland? The effects of civil war and war of intervention on the young Soviet
Russia in 1919-1921 was completely catastrophic, almost as bad as nuclear war.
And the USSR never recovered from world war 2, as Mark Harrison has shown in
his admirable studies of Soviet economic development. The propensity of the
bourgeois to destroy the earth rather than let the workers inherit it, presents
a conundrum which neither Lenin nor any other revolutionary has thus far wholly
managed to solve. But in the 20th century the bourgeoisie also learned a
terrible lesson. This is why we should not assume that war between the USA and
China is inevitable. Nevertheless the inner dynamic and logic of history shows
that what IS inevitable is the decline of US hegemony and what is highly likely
is the rise of China.
I think it is clear to both these powers, and to everyone else with an interest
, that the keystone in the arch of US global power is the middle east, and that
the sine qua non of US hegemony is control over oil. That was true throughout
the last century and is even more true today when the US is no longer
self-sufficient in energy but indeed is facing severe energy supply
difficulties. Inn the short to medium term these energy supply difficulties can
be met in part by conservation measures, for the phenomenal wastefulness of US
society leaves much scope for saving. But this is not necessarily compatible
with robust economic growth, despite what people like the Lovins brothers may
think. And the USA cannot afford to lose the economic race with China.
Nevertheless, it is almost certainly losing that race, and as mentioned
earlier, Chinese gross (not per capita) industrial output will likely exceed
that of the US (and Japan, and Europe) sometime this decade. This will leave
military control of Arabian oil as almost the only remaining critical strategic
asset (together with some military, intelligence and electronic technologies)
left for the US to shore up its global position. The US's pre-emptive move on
Iraq, if it happens, will be largely designed to pre-empt the day when China
will assert its power in the middle east and become economically, and finally
strategically dominant there too. Can this US strategy succeed?
Looking further ahead, ie three to five decades, can Chinese hegemony
consolidate itself? I think this would bring us back to consideration of what I
playfully call, a la chinois, the Five Great Evils: anthropogenic climate
change, mass extinction of species, destruction of the biosphere,
resource-depletion and loss of energy supplies. But the Five Great Evils have
no meaning by themselves, not historically-speaking anyway. It is how people
respond to them that matters, and this is shown by the form and intensity of
class-struggle. At the moment class struggle has almost no political form of
appearance, and proletarian self-consciousness is largely conspicuous by its
absence. But that does not mean there is no class struggle; instead it takes
the fetishistic, mystificatory form of national and inter-imperial rivalries.
Only when this form-of-appearance is exploded by events, by sudden and
unresolvable and acute general crisis, does class struggle appear directly on
the historical stage, undisguised and visible to all.
~~~~~~
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***
Subject: Re: thinking out loud
From: Mark Jones <markjones...@tiscali.co.uk>
Date: 25/07/2002 19:05
To: marx...@lists.panix.com
Reply-to: marx...@lists.panix.com
Ed, I agree with most of what you say altho might cavil a bit about when the '
heyday of British [=pan-European] international economic dominance' began.
Earlier than the 1840s at any rate.
I take your point about the real depth of Chinese industrialisation being still
an unknown, but I should have thought that a key difference with soviet
industrialisation is the way the Chinese economy forms part of the world
market; the USSR never tried to compete on that terrain. Europe also is
obviously a potential threat to US hegemony, but Europe is not as competitive
as China, and it's the relentless and savage competition between Chinese and
other capitals which underlies the extreme ferocity and prolonged severity of
the present world deflation. Deflation is the Chinese secret weapon in its
silent war with the west, if it isn't too melodramatic to put it like this.
I also agree that there may not be a smooth transition to a successor hegemon,
there may be chaos, joint condominium, and in either case an upswing
concurrently. There was a partial recovery in the 1930s B-phase and this was
precisely the period (and most people do not remember) when crucial new
industries developed: plastics, agri-chem, pharmaceuticals, electronics,
automobiles, industrial food processing etc. That seems to be the most likely
outcome, ie that a prolonged and distinct phase of capitalist history may ensue
when US hegemony is fading with no obvious successor in sight. In fact we
appear already to be well into this phase. But where I most strongly agree with
you is that what is unique about the American imperium is that it may be
impossible to reproduce, ie, it may be most probable that no capitalist power
or constellation of powers could ever succeed it and that therefore this is the
capitalist endgame. I strongly believe this. The most compelling thing about
the current world system is not that it is volatile, unstable and grossly
inequitable, but that above all it is profoundly, physically,
unsustainable--and the pursuit of chimerical will-o-the-whisps of 'sustainable
capitalism' only serves to illustrate that fact. Capitalist accumulation has
already reached a planetary limit-point.
This is important to argue from an agitational, organisational point of view
and not just as a matter of theory. There is huge and growing scope for
political organisation and for the founding and development of working class
and revolutionary organisations and parties during this period of endemic slump
and stagnation and of bitter and black political reaction. The massification
and concentration of political knowledge, the formation of durable and reliable
political networks, the creation of common platforms and shared assumptions,
are the tasks before us all, from whatever background we hail. And IMO we
should abandon false and blind dichotomies between caricaturised alternative
traditions ('Leninism' v. spontaneism etc) because it is absolutely obvious
that there must be and there will be organisation, and command-centres--the
more the merrier, let our systems have huge built in redundancy. It is obvious
that there will be terrific power struggles within the movement and that errors
and worse will be committed: that is inevitable but it is no reason to fear
organisation or to be passive. There will be blinkered sectarianism of the type
which Lou excoriates as Zinovievist, but there can be and there will be genuine
political organisations as well, and fear of sectarianism should not blind us
to the need for real organisation. Organizations may emerge spontaneously and
haphazardly thru genuine struggles but only when our political organisations
acquire a permanent and authentic life of their own, will we progress beyond
accidental and contingent struggles on terrain not of our own choosing, and
only then will we really take the battle to the enemy. But this is all obvious
in present company so I won't go on.
Mark
At 25/07/2002 16:07, you wrote:
> Mark: first of all, as I said before, I thought your post was really
> very thought-provoking and useful. It has seemed to me before that we
> need to have this kind of 'through what stage are we passing' discussion
> a little more often than we do. So though I might add caveats to what
> you say and criticise certain aspects, please treat this as another
> piece of thinking out loud.
~~~~~~~
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