Quick reflections on Trump and the world today

All comments welcome.

In the 1980s, Thatcher proclaimed TINA, China took the path of capitalist economic reform, and, soon after, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc fell apart. Although the UN system of international law emerging out of WW2 was created under U.S. auspices, subsequent U.S. governments never felt comfortable in it. The U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia under Clinton and, more nakedly, NATO’s eastward expansion under Bush Jr, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and the post-9/11 U.S. wars made it clear that the global hegemon would not restrain itself under any “rules-based order,” let alone the more widely recognized system of international law.

In the midst of this unruly global Zeitgeist, spectacularly, in a few decades under Communist rule, China became the world’s industrial powerhouse and began to dispute global technological leadership. Putin’s Russia restored more than a modicum of its economic and military viability. Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its “special military operation” in Ukraine ended all pretense. The maniac efforts of Blinken to maintain the illusion of a unipolar “rules-based order” notwithstanding, multipolarity — in the “realist” sense of an uneasy international power balance — has been the name of the global game in modern times. Ignoring all diplomatic kabuki, Trump has now proclaimed MAGA versions of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, reclaiming the Panama Canal and staking claims on Greenland and even — tongue in cheek — Canada. Rubio just admitted that unipolarity had been a post-Cold War Hegelian illusion of the epoch.

What about socialism? For half a century now, it has been obvious that it failed. Socialism failed, though — as Hugo Chavez famously said — it did so “for the time being.” Said differently, the powerful enemies of socialism were able to derail, frustrate, or stall these attempts — for now. And, of course, not in all of its actual forms. At the very least, the pragmatic Communist parties of China and Vietnam would beg to differ. Most importantly, if defined as the actual historical struggle of the immediate producers of the modern world to control the social production of their lives, socialism can change form, but cannot die for as long as these producers retain an atom of humanity. Obviously, what changes — somewhat — is the historical terrain on which they conduct their struggle.

The Communist Manifesto warned that, “not in substance, but in form,” the enlightened class struggle of the workers had to be “at first” a struggle for the nation, i.e. for the political representation of the nation: the state. Marx and Engels remarked that, first off, the workers of each nation “must settle matters with their own bourgeoisie.” Marx could not honor his promise to logically erect a proper theory of nation-states and their mutual economic relations atop the theory of a “pure” capitalist social structure he sketched in Capital. However, for over a century and a half after his death, his followers, compelled by historical circumstance, grappled with the issue, much of it under the rubric of “imperialism.” Furthermore, it is under the banner of their socialism that a first practical attempt was ever made to stitch together a true multinational state: the Soviet Union. (Let’s remember that even the 1931 predecessor of modern Red China was a Soviet: the Jiangxi Soviet.)

In trying to critically synthesize and update the theory of imperialism, one must note the now obvious latency of intermediate layers of historical cross- and multinational proto-statehood. Yes, there’s West vs East, North vs South, and all that. But, also, roughly, at some level, the global configuration now jelling on top of the mosaic of more or less solidly constituted nation-states, is that of a few larger ethno-political formations: multinational, supranational, or just national in a larger sense. They are distinctive though they also combine in interesting mixtures on their edges of contact.

The White nation, Western European in its original core, which headed the modern world is now led and thrown into disarray by Trump, stands in one pole. On the other pole, the Sino-Asian or Yellow nation, led by China. Rejected by the West, White Russia (not in the sense of Bjelorussia), with its historically Yellow and Turkic geographic underbelly, has been rapidly forging an alliance with China, the core of the Yellow nation. Finally, the Indian, Arabic, Turkic, Persian, Latin-American, and pan-African or Black nations, still too fragmented and lacking the economic muscle requisite for serious autonomous agency in today’s multipolar world. And, as they say, if you are not at the table, then you are in the menu.

This is the vexing terrain on which the socialist class struggle is being waged today, and will be waged in the near future. The collisions resulting from any significant shift in the balance of international and supranational forces will create opportunities for advance. The socialist emphasis, as always, is on the need for the global unity of the direct producers, in spite of the myriad seemingly unsurmountable obstacles, objective and subjective, that their unifying efforts may encounter.

A few final points:

1. Vis-à-vis the world, Trump is a contradictory and disruptive phenomenon. In part, at least in his understanding of the U.S. relation with China and Russia, he seems genuinely interested in forging a stable sort of multipolarity. As the danger of nuclear mayhem looms large in the world scene, this is a positive stance. (The neoliberal and neoconservative blocs, the latter with a more aggressive yet delusional claim to absolute hegemony, are on the defensive, but comebacks are not to be ruled out if Trump implodes.) In his attitude toward the old U.S. allies, Canada and Western Europe, Trump must think that “tough love” is good love or perhaps this is just part of his particular brand of stupidity. With regard to the self-respecting part of Latin America, he is in a direct collision course.
2. In his own domestic setting, Trump with his xenophobic and fascist streak, is rushing into a serious constitutional crisis in at least two fronts: control over the federal purse and birthright citizenship — that is, if Congress and the Supreme Court have any shame left. His policies contain an explosive mixture of contractionary and expansionary, deflationary and inflationary elements. If this concoction erupts into, say, a stagflationary crisis, always a likely scenario, his fragile social basis of support (digital and fossil-energy oligarchs, on one side, and white MAGA lower classes, on the other), which for now afford him some Bonapartist space from the Deep State and direct oligarchical reign, may split.
3. China is also, in a different sense and scale, a contradictory phenomenon. Its economic expansion is the most important progressive event in history. In spite of size and coastal prosperity, in per-capita terms, it is still catching up with the West and Japan. Its short-run agenda is still national economic modernization, technological leadership, and its full emergence as a respected grand nation in the world. If history is any guide, there’s little if any impetus in China for the historically familiar rapacious type of imperialism. It continues to be led by a Communist Party with deep revolutionary roots and, for now, a high degree of popular support. Even most important in the long run and however one may appraise China’s social formation today, its rise has shattered the ideology of White supremacy over the world. The 1804 Black Haitian independence revolution began to dismantle the myth, paying a gigantic price for it. Now China is about closing for good that historical loop. If tensions don’t spin out of control in the immediate future, the human cost will be minimal.
4. Again, it is through their national struggles that the workers of each nation can prepare themselves for a global unity of equals and build communism. As Marx suggested, even if nations cannot skip altogether the stages of their own development, they can certainly learn from the painful historical experience of others and minimize the human cost of their development. Of course, in history, carbon copies don’t work, but it’s the gist of it that matters. In this light, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of China’s historical experience in the future development of the workers in the Indian, African, Latin American, Arabic, Persian, and Turkic nations.
5. Last but not least, technology is rapidly shrinking global society and integrating human culture, disrupting almost continuously any seemingly crusty social conditions. All that is solid is melting into air, but now at hypersonic speeds! Socialism may not seem politically practicable now. But the old debate on its economic viability is going to appear increasingly irrelevant. The prospect of socialism has never been more necessary and promising.