This is the fifth in a seven-part, multi-week series of commentary on the COVID-19 crisis entitled “What is to be Done? A Manifesto for Politics Amid the Pandemic and Beyond.”
International relations amid the pandemic suddenly acquired definition when the United States launched its new Cold War against China. No Trumpian discontinuity, it follows Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ signalling defeat after decades trying to win China over to neoliberal capitalism. Like the original Cold War, the new one responds to an existential threat. Only stupefying ‘end-of-history’ triumphalism prevents most from recalling the seriousness of the Soviet threat and the strenuousness of the West’s original Cold War. The challenge of China today is even more serious.
Understanding the new Cold War against China therefore requires explaining how neoliberal financialized capitalism and the world creditocracy emerged. … By the mid-twentieth century, most critical observers believed capitalism had matured to the point where its private property form was no longer compatible with progress. Conscious popular control–effectively some form of socialism–were both possible and necessary.
History vindicated this consensus at least partially. The post-war world of productive ‘organized’ Keynesian welfare state capitalism, actually existing socialism and developmentalism leaned towards socialism. Only a twist of history reincarnated archaic, predatory financialized capitalism, complete with a world creditocracy, in the late twentieth century US. Four destructive decades later, however, we find history smoothing out that twist as more productive regulated economies once again outpace the liberal ones. The new Cold War against the most powerful of the more regulated economies, China, is only the US’s desperate attempt to appeal history’s inevitable verdict.
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