Our civilization is undergoing a radical shift in political consciousness. Neoliberalism and globalization have been discredited in popular opinion, and capitalism is falling out of favor among most young people. This growing hostility towards the ruling class and its ideology is correlating with the accelerating decline of American power, and with the subsequent rise of China and its partners in socialism and anti-imperialism.
The opportunities for Marxist social development in the 21st century run through China
This China-led coalition for global class liberation consists of China’s socialist allies Cuba, Nicaragua, and the DPRK, as well as Venezuela, Syria, Iran and Russia by proxy (since they’re also fighting off U.S. imperialist aggression). Nations like Laos and Ecuador are part of it too, since they’ve been struggling against American-imposed debt slavery and China has been working to help them escape from this financial entrapment. While most of these countries aren’t socialist, they have the potential to experience workers revolutions in the coming decades, and the biggest catalyst event for these revolutions will be the collapse of American power.
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are well aware of this worldwide geopolitical and cultural shift that’s going on in their favor. And they’re developing plans to leverage it into creating a new wave of anti-capitalist revolutions. Xi Jinping and his colleagues are advancing discussions of what they call “Project 2035,” a vision for making China into a basically modernized society by 2035 in preparation for building a strong, prosperous, and fully democratized socialist country by mid-century. This project is intertwined with the task of socialists worldwide.
Our job is tied in with that of the CCP, because both in China and around the world, socialists will need to make their movements into a vastly powerful force by the time the U.S. empire has fully collapsed. And all of America’s antagonist countries, including the ones that aren’t socialist, will have a role to play in this global campaign to defeat capitalism and imperialism.
Given current trends, this collapse of U.S. power and subsequent disappearance of international faith in America’s authority is set to come by 2030. When this happens, global socialists will have an opening to create a new wave of workers revolutions, one which gains popular support by presenting Marxism as an alternative to the failed paradigm of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism.
In the post-U.S. empire era of the 2030s (which is when the world will be trying to recover from the vast economic downturn that’s certain to happen between now and then), the people of many nations will be desiring freedom from capitalism and from ongoing colonial oppression. If the socialist movement is strong enough by then, it will be able to make massive inroads. And this political progress will be connected to the economic developments that the CCP is helping bring to the countries which have suffered under Western exploitation.
Throughout the next century-especially after the U.S. has lost its ability to intimidate other nations into submission-many third world countries are going to start openly following the Chinese economic model. This is a high probability, given the clear path towards third world modernization that the China model has provided.
As a result of this evolution from neoliberal globalization towards a socialistic paradigm, the capitalist class will continue to lose its economic leverage, and the global working class will gain more bargaining power. This reversal of the power balance between the global rich and the global poor will be facilitated by the leveling off of the discrepancy between the productive powers of the first and third worlds, which the proliferation of the China model will bring about. The rise of the China model, and the agricultural and economic developments that it will create, is ultimately going to reverse the trend of global inequality that Western neo-colonialism has created throughout the last century.
However, even after all of these gains happen, the path to global communism will be a long way to go, and we’ll need to take drastic action to bring the world’s political situation to this point. The ecological crisis will be causing increasing amounts of calamity for civilization in the coming decades, and the socialist movement will of course have to fight off capitalist reaction for as long as capitalism exists. These obstacles can be dealt with in the coming generations. But right now we need to take urgent and specific steps in order to bring imperialism and capitalism to heel.
The need to combat capitalist reaction and imperialist narratives
To succeed, the socialist movement will need to maintain strong international solidarity with the existing socialist states, especially with China. And the forces of imperialism are doing all they can to prevent this solidarity from developing.
It’s no coincidence that the Trotskyite movement, which preaches the demonization of China and history’s other existing socialist states, has an agenda which intersects with the one of the neoconservative imperialists. As a consequence of Trotskyism’s campaign against the USSR, the movement embraced the United States as a tool for fighting the Soviet Union, which has resulted in the Trotskyites historically backing U.S. imperialism. This has since enabled the U.S. to use variations of Trotsky’s rhetoric in its regime change propaganda.
The inaccurate claims from today’s Trotskyists that China “isn’t truly socialist” are continuing this dangerous trend of self-proclaimed socialists aiding imperialist narratives. The embrace of anti-Chinese propaganda from Trotskyite groups has inevitably been turning into Trotskyite support for America’s regime change efforts in China, such as when the vociferously Trotskyist World Socialist Website featured an article last month which effectively endorsed the recent U.S. efforts to destabilize Hong Kong.
Our task throughout the next decade is to stop the Trotskyites from hijacking the narrative about China and other existing socialist states. When the time is ripe in the 2030s, the socialist movement must be ready to advance the CCP’s vision for world anti-capitalist revolution. Combatting the imperialist narratives about these countries is crucial towards accomplishing this.
For this reason, we need to work to educate people not just about the evils of capitalism, but about the Sinophobic narratives that the capitalist class is using to sabotage the potential for successful socialist revolution. Before the capitalists use violence to put down rebellion, they use propaganda to deceive the people into not effectively rebelling. And while I hold no illusions about the need for socialists to defend themselves from capitalist violence in the coming years, it’s more immediately important for us to combat the ruling class in the arena of narrative.
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Your critique of Trotskyism also applies to so-called "democratic socialists" such as Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on the Imperial Left who are equivalent to the social imperialists of the 2nd International.
ReplyDeleteI hope you are right!
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