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| US Cannot Stop China's Rise: Interesting Article |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
5-31-23
Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation. *
I was in my mid 30’s before I learned that Japan never simply woke up one morning and decided to bomb the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. There was a war that preceded this event; a trade war. The US and European powers were concerned about the growth of Japan as an industrial nation. In 1905 Japan had defeated Russia in a war as both nations were beginning to increase their influence in Asia and the world but by the 1930’s Japan was becoming a more serious threat.
No capitalist state appreciates a rival. After all, capitalism is a war to the death. It is a war that never ends as the capitalists of nation states are forced to do whatever they can to stay on top. In the Pacific, East Asia sphere, Japan was becoming a threat to western domination. Plus, Japan was an ally of Germany which had a long history of association with the Island nation. Japan annexed Korea in 1910, occupied Manchuria in 1931 and in 1937 invaded China proper. My father was stationed in Hong Kong at the time and talked to me about that period.
But there was one positive aspect of this global competition that favored the western European powers; Japan imported most of its raw materials from Europe, or European colonies and the US. It also imported significant energy needs. It was this need for vital resources that drove the Japanese expansion.
The US was not about to yield its growing influence on the world stage and the Asian Pacific to Japan
By 1940, the situation had worsened. As Robert Higgs points out, quoting George Morgenstern in The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor, “Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials. Under this authority, o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted. Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere. Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.”
Japan had to do something.
That capitalism is always in a state of war is not hard to see. The European states competing for the plunder of the African continent understood this violent self-destructive nature of their system and met at the Berlin Conference in 1882 to try and arrange some rules between this den of thieves. It was an attempt to divide the African continent up so everyone could get a share of the loot and avoid internal conflict.
Thirty five years later this so-called treaty entered the dustbin of history. Two world wars barely 20 years apart shows how impossible such treaties between capitalist states are. Their diplomacy is bogus, is a lie as all competitors for market share are enemies. Their talk of cooperation? Perhaps on an individual level they mean it. Who’s to say? Regardless, the reality is that capitalism has laws unto itself and no amount of promises can change that. It is inherently a system of war and devastation as I pointed it with regard to Professor Richard Wolff’s recent comments on the Katie Halper show.
This is why Wikileaks is demonized and Julian Assange, its founder, is incarcerated and why the US wants him dead. He exposed this diplomacy to the world. The con we are all aware of to one degree or another became social fact.
As I write, US capitalism, a declining super power, is waging a trade war of unprecedented proportions against its rivals, in particular Russia but most importantly, China; what John Mearsheimer calls a “peer competitor” in a way Russia is not. When we are told via the US mass media of China’s aggression, what they actually mean is China’s threat in the struggle for control of the world’s resources and the rapacious quest for profits. This has to be sold to us workers of course as a military threat alone. China wants to take our freedoms away like Iraq wanted to and Venezuela, and Iran and Cuba, and……
In this most recent trade war, the US has a blacklist Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports. The Commerce Department’s “blacklist” is called the “Entity list” apparently. I am sure all my working class brothers and sisters reading this are aware of what I am about to reveal here as we live in a democracy. This “Entity List” a relatively small affair, was directed at individuals and organizations that US companies could not export technology to without a license.
That list now includes some “600 Chinese entities”.
The US Commerce Department also has a special office that administers this “entity” list. I am sure there is no talk in Congress of shutting funding to this section of government and that workers reading this are already aware of it as we live in a democracy. In addition, there is a newly formed, “Disruptive Technology Strike Force” that will arrest and prosecute any Americans, or US companies that might consider selling technology to the Chinese or Russians. I am also sure workers are familiar with this government agency as we live in a democracy.
This development falls under the category called “Export Controls, a war strategy that precedes the military option that can have unintended consequences and also cost a lot of money and some lives as the victims tend to fight back.
Business Week, a serious journal of a section of the US bourgeois, points out that “since the Russian invaded Ukraine the number of Russian entities on the list has grown by more than 500 bringing the total to nearly 900………US shipments of all goods to Russia have plunged by 90% in value.”. The most disturbing thing about this development is that it has not worked other than increasing misery and starvation in the former colonial world in particular, and to a lesser extent in Europe. The irony of this is that one of the US’s major allies, Germany, is now in recession.
The US is applying the same trade restrictions on China. But China is a different matter altogether. It is the world’s second largest economy after the US. Before the US trade war against Russia, the US exported a meagre $6.4 billion in goods to that country. US exports to China, on the other hand, amounted to $154 billion. China is an extremely important market for many US businesses, Tesla’s largest electric vehicle factory is in China.
China is close to becoming the number two exporter of passenger vehicles behind Japan ahead of the US and Chinese made car exports to the EU rose 156% in 2021 according to Eurostat. All of this is aggression as far as competitors are concerned.
The reality is that a country as large as China (or India or Russia or Brazil) inevitably wants its own industries to grow. Wants its own airline, rail system manufacturing, military, entertainment industry and so on. The high point in the US/China competition at the moment is technology. The US is desperately trying to prevent China’s rise in this sphere through trade wars, export controls and direct sanctions on individuals, businesses and countries that don’t comply with US sanctions. This is what the assault on Huawei is about.
In the end, barring military conflict of course, US politicians and business leaders know very well that China’s rise as an economic superpower can’t be halted, only slowed. “While export controls may slow progress…” says Cordell Hull who led the BIS in the Trump Administration, “…it’s impossible to prevent China from developing its own capabilities in all areas.”
Meanwhile, what is apparently a fruitless war between capitalist states has devastating effects on human communities globally especially the poorest countries as the Ukraine war and the US sanctions show with regard to grain exports as bread is such a staple throughout the former colonial world.
China’s rise and its growing influence on the world stage as the US heads in the other direction is a result of state intervention and the ability to use the resources of the state to direct economic activity, even when the state is in the hands of a bureaucratic clique like the misnamed Chinese Communist Party. The decline of global poverty often boasted about in the big business press is overwhelmingly due to China’s rise. A workers’ state with a democratic plan of production under the control and management of the working class would be far more efficient (in terms of the production of social needs) and managed in a way that exists in harmony with our environment not at war with it. The Chinese workers will settle accounts with the bureaucracy at some point.
I like to think that a nuclear conflict is out of the question but unfortunately not. The capitalists are literally addicted to, drunk with the never-ending quest for profits. They are mad in a sense and let’s not forget that the US ruling class is the only ruling class that has dropped nuclear bombs on urban centers, not once but twice and on a nation already defeated militarily.
There are huge struggles taking place throughout the industrial democracies and also in the former colonial countries. The indigenous populations of the world are in the forefront of the struggle to defend the natural world and their place in it. They are fighting for all of us. These global battles require an international organization to tie them all together, capital is global and they have organizations like the G7, the G20 and others aimed at maintaining a relative peace among themselves and a stable economic environment necessary for it; it’s not going too well for them though as their system is unravelling.
An international organization linking workers and all our struggles together is a vital necessity if we are to prevent an environmental catastrophe or the possibility of a nuclear one.
The trade wars we are witnessing (the economic sanctions are war too) are very similar to other economic warfare that preceded military ones. We must not assume the major players in a degenerating social system that has reached its historical nadir will lead us out of this.
* Karl Marx: The General Formula for Capital
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