Thinking About Capitalism

Sven Beckert is a Harvard economic historian noted for his masterful study of the rise and dominance (and fall) of cotton manufactory in the global economy: The Empire of Cotton, A Global History (2014). Beckert situates cotton’s emergence as a leading commodity in the world economy within the framework of capitalism’s evolution over several centuries.

Building on the subtext of capitalism’s “shape-shifting” that accompanied cotton’s rise and fall, Beckert has recently published an ambitious history of capitalism: Capitalism, A Global History (2025). In 1087 pages and 255 pages of extensive, supplemental notes, Beckert offers a well-researched, detailed account of capitalism’s trajectory-- from the early efforts of traders-for-profit to today’s global reach of giant, multinational corporations, from modest merchant purses of accumulated capital to unimaginable troves of capital concentrated in only a few privileged hands.

Beckert’s work is impressive, placing capitalism’s rise in a global context, finding seeds of its emergence throughout the world, and denying the chauvinist view that capitalism could only emerge in a European setting. At the same time, he does not deny that capitalism did reach its critical mass when certain vital conditions were met in Europe.

He goes to great lengths to show how “[t]hroughout history, it has been difficult to persuade people to work willingly for the benefit of others.” To drive home this seriously understated point-- a point central to understanding how capitalism differs from other modes of production-- Beckert chronicles in great detail the role of coercion in establishing capitalism. That “persuasion” began with chattel slavery and indentured labor. Even with the decline and abolition of slavery, indentures - coerced through contracts-- were transported to work under slave-like conditions. Beckert claims that in South Asia “[t]he number of people transported this way was greater than the number bought and sold by the Atlantic slave trade…”

This fact only underscores the often-overlooked long march from physically coerced labor to the circumstantially coerced “free labor” of today.

There is much that is insightful and suggestive in Beckert’s history, but nothing that deeply challenges Marx and Engels’ theory of capitalism’s birth and rise. Despite Beckert’s avowed distance from Marxism, Capitalism, A Global History does not contradict historical materialism. Beckert does accuse Marx of dismissing merchant capitalism, but that criticism dissolves when we understand that Marx and Beckert are engaged in two different projects. The object of Marx’s study is a mode of production (and circulation) centered on the commodity and on labor exploitation. Beckert, on the other hand, is constructing a chronological narrative beginning with the earliest sprouts of features that were later to be commonplace with mature capitalism, features that were found in proto-capitalism without capitalists, in primitive profit taking, in the earliest connection between buyer and seller, etc.

Perhaps Michael Roberts said it best: “But the book’s de-merit is its lack of any systematic understanding of capitalism. Indeed, it is like the work of Adam Tooze – namely, it is ‘more the how, than the why’.” [emphasis added]. Marx is concerned with the ‘why’ of capitalism; Beckert is searching for the ‘how’ of its journey.

Others besides Roberts have offered useful reviews of Beckert’s book. I would recommend Nelson Lichtenstein’s straight-forward, appreciative, and fairly comprehensive presentation of the book’s content in Jacobin.

But that is not my purpose here. Instead, I would like to examine whether Beckert’s findings have any bearing on current left perspectives and controversies.

Beckert finds an essential and ever-growing role for the state in capitalism’s trajectory: "...capital needed state support to control its masses of workers and access materials and markets. Capital thus became newly attached to the nation-state and the nation-state to capital. And because states competed with one another, this process was contagious.”

But the state is not an obsolete or a parasitic attachment to capital as some on the left argued in the wake of the rise of so-called globalization and still others have argued from the right with the intent of dramatically reducing its role. Beckert states early in his Introduction:

Capitalism, this book argues, is an extraordinarily statist form of economic life. Though the state changed over time; developed different institutional forms; grew in scale, scope, and territorial extent; and occupied more or less powerful positions within an international system of states, it always remained an essential ingredient in the capitalist revolution.

It is this bond between the state and capitalism that birthed an even more intimate relationship between the monopoly stage of capitalism and the modern state-- a stage where cartels and monopolies dominate the state and the state works primarily for the benefit of the monopolies and the cartels. This stage-- often usefully called state-monopoly capitalism-- reigned throughout the twentieth century and continues today; the grip on the state by capital and capital's dependence on the state is even tighter now. The state is, thus, an enabler and not a hindrance to the continuing maintenance of capitalism.

Capital may be transnational, but it still needs and controls the state.

*****

Unlike most of his academic counterparts, Beckert fully understands the powerful historical role of the Soviet Union in bending and shaping the trajectory of twentieth century capitalism:

...it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of global communism were not Russian but Western European and American workers. Labor politics might have seemed local, but they played out on a global stage, just like capitalism more broadly. Capital was politically weakened by communism’s removal of people and territories from the capitalist world, and by the bargain it made with an increasingly powerful state and mobilized workers…[E]ven some conservative Western policymakers supported social democratic policies and unions-- if only to weaken their communist competitors… It was Eisenhower who supported Reuther’s Treaty of Detroit, and who oversaw the massive public works program that built the nation’s Interstate Highway System. This coalition was the mold that formed the unprecedented political economy of the golden age [1945-1973, an era when workers’ wages tended to march in lockstep with productivity gains].

Too often, Cold War bias tends to blind commentators from understanding that the Communist alternative drove ruling classes to accept a tempered capitalism-with-a-more-human-face in the post-war period. Communism “...domesticated capitalism at the exact moment that the system faced its greatest challenges.”

The demise of the Soviet Union consequently undomesticated capitalism, unleashing its raw, brutal character under the banner of “shock therapy.” The so-called end of history-- the disappearance of the USSR and the PRC’s embrace of capitalist reforms-- opened the door wide to attacks on the gains made by working people. Austerity became the watchword for official policy. Beckert acknowledges:

The political space for the new policies emerged in part because two of the core pillars of the golden age wobbled: Labor weakened, and the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence disintegrated. These changes which came in the 1990s, undermined the need for capital owners and the state to accommodate labor, as they had been forced to do during the golden age….

The single most important postcapitalist project-- the North Star of global politics, either as friend or foe, for many decades-- suddenly unraveled with astounding celerity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Overnight, the political calculus in the capitalist world changed. Even more consequentially, capitalism gained new breathing room by expanding into vast new areas of the globe-- into the homes, workplaces, and public spaces of billions of Russians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans.

It is impossible to understand the raw, brutal edge of today’s global politics without grasping the impact of the demise of the Soviet Union.

*****

For those investing in a future shaped by the BRICS alternative, Beckert reminds us of the earlier promise advanced by OPEC, the coalition of oil producers: “The ‘oil revolution’ in the Global South for its promise to redistribute some of the world’s wealth, was a turning point, the first time that a group of countries from the Global South used their control over an essential raw material to shift the global economy’s basic structure… By building new solidarities, the resource rich countries of the Global South attained a more powerful voice not just in their own affairs but also in the affairs of the world economy at large.”

Spurred by the US and European support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Middle Eastern states acted to reduce oil shipments to Israel’s allies. This united act of solidarity with those fighting for the cause of Palestine demonstrated the potential of joint action for empowerment. But the fate of Palestine was advanced no further. And, as Beckert shows, the “solidarity” succeeded in producing the further integration of the oil-producing states into the global capitalist system, into securing for themselves a greater share of the oil booty for those states, but achieving little advancement-- even regression-- for the Global South as a whole. Today, the Middle Eastern oil producing countries, with the exception of Iran, stand on the sidelines or support Israel in the genocidal destruction of Gaza. The fractures in an expanded OPEC existing today-- the political impotence, the failure to act in concert, or to honor quotas-- demonstrate the limits of concerted action by countries deeply embedded in a competitive global market economy and guided by overriding self-interest.

It’s no surprise that an alignment made up of countries with a strong commitment to capitalism and with even more diverse interests, like today’s BRICS, is proving to have even less collective impact on global inequalities and political conflicts.

*****

Sven Beckert’s Global South of the twenty-first century is unrecognizable from the Global South depicted by far too many leftists in the Global North.

Among the most extraordinary changes was the formation of new modes of capital: Local capital owners and international investors forged new agglomerations of capital in what came to be called the Global South. Building upon the novel nodes of state power that had emerged in the wake of decolonialization, these superclusters of capital powered the world’s most significant industrialization ever. In the process, the world’s working class expanded at lightning speed… [my emphasis]

At first, the so-called Four Tigers-- Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore-- were in the vanguard, but other countries swiftly industrialized as well, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil. No part of the world, however, industrialized as quickly and as radically as China. The value of the world’s manufacturing output increased almost five times in the years between 1973 and 2008, most of it coming from the Global South, with China contributing a stunning 31.5 percent by 2008. That year, China manufacturing added more value than the whole world had produced in 1973, a time when scholars in the North Atlantic area were convinced that Europe’s marked manufacturing prowess gave it an enduring global advantage. In retrospect, the theories they developed then to explain such a divergence seem like dated artifacts, better relegated to the status of a window on Western self-fashioning than to social science analysis.

Unfortunately, much of the North Atlantic left is under a similar spell, viewing the Global South as though they were still backward colonies. Having given up on workers in the Global North (they constitute an “aristocracy of labor”!), left intellectuals cling to an outdated, stereotypical picture of a river of wealth only flowing North to wealthy countries (and their workers!), while draining the South of its wealth (and that of its workers). As Beckert shows, that is not an accurate picture of the Global South or the North. Largely neglected in left conversations are the many multinationals based in the Global South like The Gerdau Group (Brazil), Ambev (Brazil), ARAMCO (Saudi Arabia), Tata (India), Dr. Reddy’s laboratories (India), to name a few.

To be sure, the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation of the Global South are still often legacies, organizations controlled by capital based in wealthier countries. Indeed, many monopolies, or near monopolies are the product of more than a century of concentration, beginning in the Global North. But to miss the story that Beckert tells is to underestimate the adaptability of capitalism and to misunderstand its logic.

Beckert offers the following telling note on capitalism’s mutation: “The richest 1 percent in India now control more of India’s income than the richest 1 percent (Indian and British) had under British colonial rule, 22.6.”

Thus, while corporations located in the Global North continue to exploit resources and workers of the Global South, many rapidly growing, industrialized countries of the Global South have become class societies mimicking those of the Global North. With often-unprecedented growth, their economies have distributed that wealth according to the logic of capitalism, leaving their working people far behind.

Despite the remarkable economic growth in Asia, especially the PRC and India, “almost half of the world’s people-- 46.4 percent, or a total of 3.6 billion-- live on $6.85 or less a day.”

Certainly, the legacy of colonialism plays a significant role in explaining this tragic fact. However, capitalist social relations-- class inequalities-- explain why that fact remains stubbornly with us today in the face of the enormous economic growth enjoyed by the Global South. The rapacious US and European corporations continue to exploit the Global South at every opportunity. But understand that the class societies constructed on the decades of explosive growth in the Global South owe as much or more to exploitation of workers by their own domestic capitalists. In the end, it is not some amorphous, class-neutral identity called the “Global North” that drains all the wealth and impoverishes working people in the Global South, but the capitalist system in general. Wherever it takes root-- North or South, East or West-- it reproduces class societies, inequalities, and injustices.

A final word from Sven Beckert:

The reemergence of Asia was a rebuke not just to generations of racist analysis that had posited a transhistorical superiority of Western civilization but also to some neo-Marxist theorizing of the 1960s and 1970s, which had seen the world economy as structured in ways that would not allow for the emergence of prosperity outside the Western industrial heartlands. As it turned out, the opposite was true….

Of course, it is vital that the EuroAmerican left defy their own ruling classes to stand against the aggressive action directed at the former colonies, the so-called Global South. It is the highest form of internationalism to defend the right of nations and states to self-determination in the face of domination and aggression by other countries, even if they are ruled by tyrants, theocracies, or a cabal of capitalists, as is true in the Global South.

It is another thing entirely to overlook or underplay the role of capitalism in creating the misery and injustice visited upon the working people of the Global South. To ascribe that misery and injustice to a vague geographical identity like the Global North is to deflect attention from the mechanism that systematically and historically extracted the product of labor in both the Global North and South. Labor exploitation knows no geographical limits, nor does it grant favoritism to its subjects. It extracts all it can from everyone within its scope.

Capitalism is the enemy of the Global South. Socialism is the answer to global capitalism.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Debate Behind the Debate: Is the Exploitation of the Global South by the Global North the Main Contradiction of our Time?

When it comes to debates among Marxist intellectuals, it is often difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Some of the more arcane disputes have absolutely no bearing on Marxist practice-- the actual class struggle. 

The so-called “Transformation problem” debated among political economists, for example, is not a problem, unless you accept the assumptions that graduate students in economics departments are told must be attended if Marxism is to be taken seriously. Marxism, however, advances a powerful, effective critique of capitalism without accepting those assumptions or deferring to the manufactured problem. Failure to deduct fluctuating prices from exchange values no more derails the Marxist project than failure to deduct actual thought from brain events or neural processes derails the scientific project of neurophysiology.  

But the outcomes of some “theoretical” debates have real practical consequences. Still others are stalking horses for controversies within our political movements.

A recent dust-up between Vivek Chibber and Vijay Prashad is an example of both, along with a heavy dose of pettifoggery.  

Chibber spurred the debate with an interview posted in Jacobin magazine in mid-December. His thesis-- set out explicitly in the interview’s title-- is: “Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism.” To the query of whether “colonial plunder was essentially responsible for bringing about capitalism,” Chibber responds with characteristic bluntness: “The idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder can’t even get off the ground.” 

In March, Vijay Prashad responded sharply to Chibber in a long piece in Monthly Review. After chastising Chibber for not being serious: “It would have been better if Chibber wanted to initiate a discussion on the issues of the origin of capitalism and the role of colonialism for this origin to have produced something other than a podcast as an incitement to debate…” He regrets that Chibber’s thoughts were not presented “as a major written text with citations.” 

This would appear to be a specious charge, coming from an intellectual whose stature and broad appeal come largely from podcasts, interviews, and popular writing, and not from his academic work.

Further, Prashad unabashedly concedes in his article that “No serious scholar says that colonialism created capitalism.”

With that concession, the contest would appear to be closed-- there really is no disagreement. Anyone innocent of the often-acrimonious debates on the left would wonder why there was a dispute at all.

Why does Chibber feel it necessary to deny that colonial plunder created capitalism? Is “colonialism-created-capitalism” a straw man? If Prashad is right and no serious scholar believes it, who is Chibber’s argument directed towards? Why is Prashad so agitated by Chibber’s intervention?

Is this another instance of seminar-room Marxism? Of résumé padding? Of dispute-for-dispute’s-sake?

In fact, there is a seething backstory to both positions--- a long, contentious ideological battle that erupts frequently on the academic stage.

Chibber takes issue with a left trend prevalent among many Marxists to locate the nexus of exploitation in national inequalities, specifically between the most advanced capitalist countries and the less developed countries. He says:

In the 1960s and ’70s, it had come back in the form of what’s called “Third Worldism,” which was this idea that the Global North collectively exploits the Global South. And you can see how that’s an extension of the view that capitalism in the West came out of the plunder of the Global South. You can just extend it to say that the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South…

It’s transforming a class argument into a racial and national argument. And in today’s left, nationalism and racialism are the dominant ideologies. It’s quite striking to me how this trope, this “global white supremacy” has become so current on the Left. And it’s utterly nonsensical. It has literally no connection to reality.

But it’s become fashionable on the Left because it allows you to align radicalism with the current wave of racial identity politics. And the core of this is whatever divisions there might be within the races, pale — no pun intended — in relation to the divisions between the races.

In essence, Chibber believes that he is defending class analysis against a left that has abandoned class, a left viewing global oppression only through the lens of nationalism and racialism. 

Writers like Prashad frame the principal contradiction in today’s world as between the “Global North” and the “Global South,” abstractions constructed from a rough division of the world between the former colonizing states and the post-colonial states.

The appeal of the Global North versus Global South analysis should be readily apparent. Since well before the birth of capitalism, powerful empires have subjected, exploited, oppressed, and enslaved peoples to the benefit of the empires. In the pre-industrial mercantile era, principalities, city-states, kingdoms, and other centers of power continued to extract wealth from those unable to resist. And soon after the maturation of capitalism and the full development of the modern nation-state, the monopoly capitalist corporations of the great powers continued the subjugation, pillage, plunder, and rape of weaker peoples through the colonial system.

There is nothing new or original, however, in affirming that powerful nations, organizations, institutions, groups, individuals, etc. periodically or even systemically exploit their weaker counterparts. There is nothing new or especially insightful about recognizing asymmetries of power in global relations. Certainly, there is nothing specifically Marxist about such a claim.

But Prashad wants to go further. He wants to specifically link nation-states to capitalist exploitation. Where the Marxism of Marx and Engels fundamentally located exploitation in the relationship between those who own the means of production and workers-- two distinct classes-- Prashad sees exploitation as a relationship between nation-states: the original colonizing states and the colonial subjects. And today, he and others argue that exploitation remains fundamentally grounded in the relations of nation-states: the privileged former colonizers and the former colonies. Granting that inequalities are certainly, at least in part, the legacy of colonialism, the fact that national inequalities exist today further demonstrates that this exploitative relationship exists, according to Prashad and others of like mind.

Prashad cites counterfactual studies-- identifying where wealth might have gone if events had taken a different course-- as further showing that exploitive relations account for the continuing inequalities between South and North, without mentioning the relations of production-- capitalism-- that actually enable these inequalities. Class relations-- relations privileging exploitative advantages of the foreign and domestic bourgeoisies-- go unmentioned. Do we conclude, by comparison, that the US North exploits the US South based on the existence of persisting inequalities? Or do we say that-- due to uneven, disparate development-- corporate capitalism exploits them both, but differently? I think we agree it’s the latter.

Paradoxically, Prashad says:

This ceaseless drain provides a continuous stream of plunder into the Western-controlled financial systems whose power remains intact despite the great changes taking place with the center of gravity of the world economy shifting to Asia.

This curious statement suggests that the global North is systematically plundering the global South, while the weight of the global economy-- its future and fortunes-- lie in Asia, the economic powerhouse of the Global South. How can he have it both ways? How can Prashad and others celebrate the fact that the core of the South-- the BRICS+ countries-- have together surpassed the economic product of the G7 and also maintain that the North continues to systematically plunder its wealth?

The fact is that capitalist social relations-- struggle between classes over the fruits of labor-- have entirely penetrated both the Global North and Global South. It is monopoly corporations-- social entities that respect no state boundaries-- that “plunder” anywhere and everywhere.

 Rather than uncritically submitting its fate to the direction of international capitalist institutions, their loans, or foreign investment, rather than seek some compensatory justice to the crimes of colonialism, the post-colonial states should consider the insights argued by Paul Baran in his opus at the height of the colonial independence movement:

The principal insights, which must not be obscured by matters of secondary or tertiary importance, are two. The first is that, if what is sought is rapid economic development, comprehensive economic planning is indispensable… The second insight of crucial importance is that no planning worth the name is possible in a society in which the means of production remain under the control of private interests which administer them with a view to their owners’ maximum profits (or security or other private advantage) ... (xxviii-xxix, Foreword to 1962 printing) The Political Economy of Growth, Paul A. Baran [emphasis added]

Baran is unabashedly advocating for a socialist escape from the legacy of colonialism and the fate of neocolonialism-- a position that has fallen out of fashion, but remains the only authentically Marxist answer for workers in the so-called global South. As an ideological godfather of many who stress the North/South exploitation divide, it is odd that this conclusion is rarely cited by those who owe their lineage to Baran.

Neither Prashad nor Chibber acknowledge this solution. Prashad, citing Samir Amin, mischaracterizes contemporary imperialism:

In the Marxist tradition, there are a variety of interpretations of the idea of originary accumulation, but what the facts show—and has been established in, for example, the oeuvre of Samir Amin, among others—is that imperialism is not an outgrowth of capitalism, but is foundational to capitalism itself. [emphasis added]

Today’s imperialism is driven by protecting and expanding spheres of influence, energy and rare metal acquisition, market access and expansion, and dominating labor markets. Behind the endless Great Power conflicts, civil wars, and regime changes is inescapably capitalist competition. 

Capitalism is foundational to imperialism itself. And if we lose sight of that fact-- the class perspective-- we will lose sight of who are the perpetrators and who are the victims.

But class alone does not explain exploitation and imperialism, as one might think from reading Chibber. Nationalism and racialism have always been capable tools in misguiding, thwarting, or taming class struggle. Capitalism’s long life and resilience owes much to the insidious, but masterful manipulation of race and nationhood by the capitalist class to deflect attention from the war between the class exploiters and the exploited. Deafness and insensitivity to race and national identity only exacerbates and multiplies the harsh lash of class exploitation.

Debate is most useful when it shines a light on the way forward.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Bogus Anti-imperialism and the Fight for Peace

Where VI Lenin in 1916 wove together a theory of imperialism that placed capitalist exploitation and accumulation at its core, explaining competition between greater and lesser powers and their coalitions and alliances as leading to war, a prominent Marxist, Karl Kautsky, asserted that war or the threat of war would persuade states to coexist, to put aside rivalries and create-- in Kautsky’s words-- “...a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.” 

Lenin believed that competition between great powers will inevitably result in war; Kautsky believed that competition between great powers will inevitably bring a settled peace.

Similarly, today’s advocates of multipolarity argue that the only obstacle to the world imagined by Kautsky is the United States. As the former Cold War leader of the capitalist order, the US is now the meddler, war monger, aggressor, and imperialist standing in the way of a multipolar world that will establish a more tolerant, cooperative, and peaceful world. 

Advocates see the agency for this Kautskyian utopia in the BRICS coalition, established formally in 2009, subsequently adding new members and partners along the way. Its supporters remind us that BRICS+ commands a greater share of global GDP than does the G7 nations or the EU. The original BRICS economies grew by a stunning 356.27% between 1990 and 2019. 

Despite these impressive economic numbers, BRICS’s most zealous proponents posture the alliance as representative of the peripheral “Global South” --as the arm of the ‘have-nots’-- in the struggle against the ‘haves’ of the core-- the US and its Eurasian allies.

While this may make a soothing story, a popular source of hope for peace and social justice, it completely fails the test presented by the realities of this moment. Measured by any rigorous standards of inquiry, multipolarity is a fraud.

On its face, the idea that an alleged powerhouse economic bloc is the advocate, the savior for the poorest, most disadvantaged countries is surely paradoxical. No one would take a similar claim seriously if it came from the mouths of foreign ministers of the G7 or the EU.

But the failure of the BRICS fantasy is best shown by examining BRICS and its member states' response to recent monumental world events.  

On the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza by Israeli forces: BRICS and its member states voiced some stern objections, but took no substantial measures to stop it or to punish Israel. In fact, they continued their substantial economic relations with the rogue state, failed to defy the Israeli blockade, and offered no material aid to the Palestinians.

On the aggression against Venezuelan sovereignty: BRICS and some of its member states raised objections, but took no concrete action; some benefitted from the US action, some were set back by it. Security agents from material-poor Cuba heroically gave their lives resisting the invasion.

On the attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran (a BRICS member state) by the US and Israel: BRICS and its member states again voiced objections, but offered little or no material support. As The Wall Street Journal noted “Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.” 

On the escalating aggression against Cuba, suffering acute energy crises under the intensified US blockade: old beneficiaries of Cuban internationalist sacrifices-- including BRICS members and partners-- are offering marginal support for socialist Cuba as it faces possibly its worst existential crisis. 

If BRICS is the guarantor of the interests of the so-called Global South against US and Israeli aggression, if this is the counterforce to imperialism that US and European leftists imagine, then much of the world needs new, more militant friends. The facts contradict the false theory of multipolarity and its embodiment in the BRICS alliance. Rather than exhibiting a new spirit of cooperation, mutual interest, internationalism, and solidarity, the BRICS members seem bent on basing foreign policy on narrow self-interest.

Critics are, however, stepping forward, some with doubts, some with sharp and incisive rebukes of the multipolarity dogma and the BRICS myth. 

Many doubters were repelled by the recent UN Security Council vote crafted by the US and condemning Iran’s retaliation against US allies on the Arabian Peninsula, without calling out the war’s initiators, the US and Israel.

Betwa Sharma, writing in Consortium News, protests that “both Moscow and Beijing abandoned Tehran by abstaining on a March 11 U.N. Security Council resolution that falsely portrayed Iran as the aggressor. China and Russia’s own interests took precedence over a BRICS partner under attack.”

She concludes: 

The war on Iran has exposed the fragility of BRICS as a rising alternative to the U.S.-led global order.

U.S. economic pressure and geopolitical shocks, especially the attack on Iran, have revealed BRICS less as a unified bloc with a common strategic goal, than a collection of countries with overlapping interests that diverge sharply under pressure.

Focusing mainly on Gaza, Patrick Bond recently wrote a detailed, scathing exposé of BRICS hypocrisy.

Bond acknowledges that BRIC member, South Africa, provided 15% of Israel’s coal needs as of 2025. As for another BRICS founding member, “...in addition to wheat and metals, Russia sells coal and – in just the two years since the genocide began in 2023 – made 105 oil transfers comprising 30% of Israel’s total crude and 45% of refined petroleum imported, via Novorossiysk (originating from BRICS-partner Kazakhstan.”

Bond reports on another founding member: "Chinese drones (tens of thousands by now) made by DJI and Autel buzz Gaza and the West Bank, and are used to drop grenades on civilians… and moreover, a Chinese parastatal owns the new Haifa Bayport while another built the ‘union-busting’ Ashdod harbour, which together have facilitated a 5% annual increase in bilateral trade since 2021, confirming Netanyahu’s 2017 term for the two economies, namely, a 'marriage made in heaven.'"

Further: “New Delhi assures a strengthened Israeli-Indian military alliance, the September 2025 Bilateral Investment Treaty, and Modi’s ‘Special Strategic Partnership’ solidaristic visit to the Knesset featuring ‘immense progress’ in ‘defence, security, and more.’”

Bond reveals similar embarrassing economic ties between other BRICS members and Israel, including with Brazil, UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. He concludes by asserting that, in fact, the “BRICS Promote Global-Corporate Power Under the Cover of Multipolarism.” 

Facts, facts, facts… they often make for stubborn, unfriendly encounters with cherished theories and opinions. At least some of our friends on the left are paying attention.

In a moving “j’accuse”, Josué Veloz Serrade writes in his article translated and posted on Black Agenda Report of “un multilaterismo hipócrita”-- a hypocritical multilateralism toward Cuba.

Veloz Serrade casts scorn on all of the nations that could respond to Cuba’s abandonment before an existential threat from the US Empire, especially those who preach multipolarity and hail BRICS as the anti-Empire:

In their rhetoric, Russia and China demand an end to unipolarity, the construction of a multipolar world, respect for international law, and, in particular, for the sovereignty of each country. But their real desire, revealed by their actions rather than their words, is the gradual integration into the rules of the very system they claim to contest…

As bitter as it may be to hear, by abandoning Cuba, they are not simply being pragmatic; they are admitting that their real goal is not the transformation of the world order, but the negotiation of a more comfortable place within it…

…they have incorporated the logic of the imperial playing field—its institutions, its markets, its values, its rules, its default ideology—to such an extent that they have become incapable of imagining political action that breaks with that field, even though they proclaim it necessary in their rhetoric…

The Empire supports its allies to the very end because it understands that loyalty to its own is a condition of its own power. But Cuba’s allies do the opposite: they abandon it when the political cost of supporting Cuba outweighs the benefit of not doing so…

Those who today are abandoning Cuba are not only calculating their own narrow interests; they are also, in a way, renouncing their own desire for transformation. The abandonment of Cuba is the renunciation of the possibility of another world… 

Progressive Latin American governments, the BRICS, American and Western European left-wing parties, solidarity organizations that today look the other way: all have found, in one way or another, their niche within the order. They have obtained their share of recognition, their space for comfortable dissent, their permitted or simply tolerated gestures. And in that process, they have ceased to see Cuba as a mirror of what they could be, instead viewing it as an uncomfortable reminder of what they have ceased to be, but above all of what they never were…

Those who today betray Cuba are betraying themselves. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a strategic one. A world order that claims to be multipolar but fails to protect the most vulnerable when the Master tightens the screws is not an alternative order; it is a decentralized extension of unipolarity, a system in which the ritual invocation of multipolarity is a rhetorical exercise in futility… 

Veloz Serrade’s bitter eloquence speaks not only to the fraud of multipolarity and the hypocrisy of BRICS, but to the possible loss of the last outpost of authentic solidarity, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. The hope of a just world may well be extinguished for millions who saw Cuba as a beacon.

Multipolarity is neither anti-imperialist nor a substitute for fighting the imperialist system. Those who are invested in multipolarity and the ‘promise’ of BRICS do grave disservice to the fight for global justice and for peace. The shame of BRICS failure to resist brazen, death-dealing aggression against weaker parties will fall on them as well.

There can be no effective anti-war movement in this time without clarity on the imperialist system. Peace is only attainable if we understand and resist the causes of war, while not deferring or relying on a group of countries committed to protecting or improving their place in that system. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Decline of Trumpism and the Crisis of Capitalism

The chaotic Trump reign over US politics is showing critical signs of weakening on many fronts: Trumponomics is failing: Trumpian immigration policy has stirred a powerful backlash; Teflon Trump has been tarnished by his clumsy, slippery handling of the Epstein scandal; his foreign-policy contradictions and outrages have confused both international friends and foes alike; and his violation of his “end to endless wars” campaign has caused a break with some of his most ardent supporters.

It is easy to forget that this Trump regime has been in power for only a little more than a year, while enjoying a majority in both the House and the Senate, as well as a favorable majority in the Supreme Court. In such a short time, he and his cohorts have managed to do extraordinary damage.

Unlike in his first term, where Trump included some of the Republican Party old guard, the new administration was outfitted with hard-core MAGA-- a cabal that proved to be craven sycophants, unhinged racists and nationalists, and intellectual reactionaries.

Whatever traction Trump may have gotten with those angry with two-party betrayal, his already shattered promises are reflected in his falling poll numbers. With the mid-term elections coming, significant numbers within his coalition are questioning his policies or distancing themselves from his positions despite his brazen threats to destroy them politically for their heresy.

It would be more than misleading to credit the decline of Trumpism to the resistance, the Democrats, or the broad left. For sure, there have been remarkable centers of mass struggle against Trump’s policies, most notably, the impressive Minneapolis resistance to ICE that successfully organized tens of thousands into a powerful force driving the Trump forces into an embarrassing retreat. Those hoping to reverse the Trump onslaught would do well to study the Minnesota phenomenon rather than deferring to Democratic Party leadership.

The labor unions-- potentially a formidable adversary to Trumpism-- are paralyzed by a leadership afraid to defy their members who might support Trump. They are willing to close their eyes to MAGA’s clearly anti-union program in order to maintain the internal tranquility of business unionism. As support for Trumpism declines with working people, careerist union leaders remain on the sidelines. When union organizers and leaders have stood up in the past, they have made the difference between surrendering to reaction or defending the interests of working people. The left-led CIO unions of the thirties were the bulwarks of the resistance to the far-right “answers” to the Great Depression.

Similarly, the Democratic Party has demonstrated both its inability and unwillingness to defeat the Trump steamroller. Trump’s reelection itself proves that the Democratic Party has failed to create a program that will deliver voters from the fears and anxieties that animate Trump support. Tolerating-- if not welcoming-- the admission of billionaires, war mongers, spies, hucksters, and careerists into their inner circle, Democratic Party leaders are counting on Republican failure and Epstein-sleaze to propel them back to power, instead of developing a popular agenda. 

Recent local and by-elections have shown a hunger among Democratic Party voters for progressive, populist candidates of the Sanders/Mamdani ilk, but party functionaries have sought to cultivate ex-military, CIA, FBI hawks with corporate-friendly agendas to fill their electoral slates. The Democratic Party has evolved into a massive fund-raising machine more than willing to wait its turn in the two-party back-and-forth. Candidates of substance have no place in the strategic vision of their bankrupt leaders.

The Democratic Party response to the ongoing war against Iran (and the recent invasion of Venezuela) evidences its cynical, corrupted posture. Sensing a vulnerability with Trump’s naked aggression, they attack the Republicans-- not on moral or humanitarian grounds-- but on procedure! The slaughter of the innocent victims of Israeli and US bombs is passed on uncritically, but the failure to consult Congress counts as a grievous sin!

This is a party that long left its New Deal image in the rear-view mirror.

But because of the deeply entrenched two-party system, expressions of popular struggle, of resistance, of progressive change too often feel it necessary to tether to a corrupted Democratic Party.

Especially after the shock and awe of massive deindustrialization and a devastating economic crisis, many mistakenly envisioned Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party as a possible break from the indifference of the elites leading both parties. Trump presented himself as such, trading on desperate hope and the desire for change, just as his Democratic Party predecessor stirred a wave of optimism based on vague promises. With economic inequality-- the benchmark for all kinds of inequality-- relentlessly advancing, Trump’s empty promise of restoring manufacturing jobs nonetheless resonated with the disenchanted.

He promoted the idea that a heavy dose of sanctions, tariffs, and other forms of arm-twisting would secure for the citizens a bounty of wealth that had been cheated from them, stolen from them, or given away by the treacherous Democrats. This let’s-make-a-deal economic policy was the basis for the delusion that billions of lost wealth would be recovered for the public good. 

Couple these fantasies with a regressive tax policy to appease the hard-headed corporate bosses, and you have the essence of Trump’s economic plan.

Meanwhile, the serious problems of stagnation and inflation carried over from the Biden administration remain unattended.

Like the Democrats, Trump had no immigration policy that balanced guaranteeing labor-market stability with humanitarian concerns. Instead, he chose to not only expel all undocumented immigrants, but to also whip up hysterical waves of xenophobia, much of it rabidly racist. Unleashing a Gestapo-like ICE on communities and cities played poorly in even the corporate media, costing him dearly in support.

The Epstein scandal-- unlike other exposures of ruling-class libertinism and debauchery-- will not go away because both the Democrats and Republicans will not let it go away. Both parties are thoroughly devoted to throwing slime on their opponents, since both parties own prominent friends of Epstein. However, the Epstein affair has done serious and costly damage to Trump because he already exhibits extraordinary vulgarity, he has clumsily mishandled suspicions of his involvement, and his attorney general has botched the investigation. 

Despite running on a nationalist platform disclaiming foreign entanglements, Trump has been baited by the neo-conservative, Marco Rubio wing of MAGA to embrace regime change. After the Venezuela invasion, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro Moros and Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, and the government’s subsequent capitulation, Trump grew “dizzy” with his perceived success. The Wall Street Journal has dubbed his novel regime-change strategy as “decapitate and delegate.” Now Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has wooed Trump into applying the strategy to Iran, launching a joint war that threatens to escalate into a regional war with profound implications for the global economy.

Trumpism’s decline comes at a time of the deepening crisis of capitalism. Since the devastating economic crash of 2007-2009, the world economy has failed to recover fully from financial stress, stagnation, and inflation. 

Under the management of political and central bank leaders, rapidly rising inequality, deteriorating standards of living, social stress, and widely expressed dissatisfaction afflict all the advanced capitalist countries. The most dramatic mass expression of this rising discontent is the growing rejection of centrist political parties—parties that have shared rule in most countries for many generations of voters. Trumpism and other, European and Asian, right-wing populist parties and movements reflect this bitter discontent with conventional governance.

Some of the so-called lower-middle or higher-middle-income capitalist or capitalist-accommodating countries have high growth rates that-- in spite of great inequality-- have generated growing middle strata and relative political stability. Insofar as they enjoy high growth from the migration of capital and industrial production to their economies, they also sustain high rates of labor exploitation along with modestly rising living standards. Their ruling classes have traded extreme labor exploitation for a competitive advantage against the advanced capitalist countries. 

Of course, the poorest countries remain tragically stunted from the legacy of European colonialism, denied any but the grimmest future in the capitalist economy.  

Competition between the advanced capitalist countries, rivalry with the emerging economies, and the desperate conflict between the have-nots for a place in the imperialist system constitute a global tinder box. 

Headlines understandably report US-Israeli aggression in the Middle East (now engaging nearly all of the countries in the region) or US brazen meddling in the Americas. 

Less acknowledged are the wars, conflicts, and civil wars stoked and conducted in nearly every region: Russia-Ukraine, Pakistan-Afghanistan, China-India, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Rwanda-DRCongo, Sudan, Thailand-Cambodia, Sahel, Myanmar, China-Taiwan, China-Japan, China-Philippines, Haiti, Colombia, are part of a list that grows almost weekly. Millions of lives have been affected by, even sacrificed to national ambitions to acquire markets, to attain resources, or to secure advantage over others directly or indirectly.

While the US remains the biggest capitalist bully in the imperialist system, it is simplistic and misleading to assume that its action is the only global expression of capital’s ruination upon the world’s people. Nor should it be forgotten that capital oppresses and immiserates the people of the US as well. It is an entire system in dysfunction.

As more and more people recognize that the current system and its managers are failing us, they will necessarily look for a more radical alternative. It should be apparent that recycling the same leaders, the same ideas, the same parties will simply not do. 

Yet there are those who insist that bringing down Trump or his global counterparts is enough. They see Trumpism and right-wing populism as a plague that visits the world periodically and must be collectively turned back to restore some kind of normalcy. They conjure an idyllic past that Trump and his ilk disturbed. This is the fantasy of privileged elites who have not felt the sting of inequality, insecurity, and misery persistently and increasingly inflicted by capital on many millions and for many generations.

To escape the trap of nostalgia for a decadent past and to avoid the return of right-wing snake charmers, socialism must be pressed on the people’s agenda. Socialism must not be pushed down the road as an ideal, as a far-off destination. The fact that polls show a popular acceptance of socialism, even a preference-- especially with the young-- for socialism, should demand its serious advocacy. 

The future can be brighter.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mr. Ip and the Wall Street Journal Discover Wealth Inequality

It was in 2013 that Thomas Piketty rediscovered the problem of wealth inequality with his celebrated book Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Published by Harvard University Press and selling several million copies, the book turned prevailing mainstream economic thinking on its head. Academic economists and capitalist apologists had long assured us that capitalism persistently created wealth and distributed it fairly to all the factors of production, with deviations from this fair distribution attributable to unusual or exceptional intervention in the process.

But Piketty’s look at all the available, relevant data showed just the opposite: capitalism-- absent any external or exceptional circumstances-- invariably generated growing inequality. Using sources dating to the eighteenth century, Piketty showed that, with the exception of the destruction of capital or the rare active measures to redistribute it, wealth inequality was bound to grow. Piketty offered no deep explanation of why this is a feature of capitalism, but he did offer the usual social democratic panacea-- tax the rich!

Coming only four years after the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Piketty’s opus was well received by a wide audience. As a consequence, one might think that the idea of overthrowing the system responsible for more than two centuries of growing inequality would accordingly enter the popular conversation.

But it was not to be. Though a new gilded age of conspicuous consumption, new manifestations of privilege, and raging demand for luxury emerged, no serious threat to the capitalist system sprung forth. Anger was contained effectively in the US by a rotten, corrupt two-party system. Fear and a deeply ingrained hostility to socialism gripped older generations. And younger people-- facing a desperate future-- were open to an alternative to capitalism, but saw no clear road for it.

Now, thirteen years later, The Wall Street Journal’s top economic commentator, Greg Ip, has again rediscovered inequality. He writes about today’s economy:

Its rewards are going disproportionately toward capital instead of labor. Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more. The result: Capital, which includes businesses, shareholders and superstar employees, is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains.

The divergence between capital and labor helps explain the disconnect between a buoyant economy and pessimistic households. It will also play an outsize role in where the economy goes from here.

The brute financial force of all that wealth means market fluctuations, like last week’s, matter more for consumer spending. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence could funnel even more of economic output toward capital instead of labor. Last week may be a taste. Amid reports that layoffs are climbing and job openings plunging, especially for professionals exposed to AI, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 50000 for the first time…

The shift to capital from labor has actually been under way for more than 40 years. Labor received 58% of the total proceeds of economic output, as measured by gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP), in 1980. By the third quarter of last year that had plummeted to 51.4%. Profits’ share, meanwhile, rose from 7% to 11.7%.

Ip’s charts show that S&P 500 profit margins have doubled over the last 15 years, with corporate profits rising 43% since the end of 2019.

Where Ip tells us that this is an alarming trend over the last 40 years, Piketty tells us that growth in inequality is the long-term trajectory of the capitalist economy. Both are right.

What is disconcerting is that the victims of this trend, the vast mass of working people, have no voice, no representation, no program to address this inevitable-- if we are to believe Piketty-- consequence of a capitalist system.

What is even more disconcerting is that voices on the left that purport to advocate for working people offer such unimaginative, weak alternatives.

Now Ip only raises the specter of growing inequality to alert ruling circles of the danger that the masses will sharpen their pitchforks and rebel against the privileges of capital. Piketty proposes redistributing wealth through mechanisms-- like taxation-- that the system controls with its most loyal agents. The idea that bourgeois political parties will substantially tax the bourgeoisie is truly fantastic. 

Unions-- one of the few remaining mass organizations supporting workers-- offer a poor record of staunching the flow of wealth to capital, even in industries where unions are well represented and strong. And union leaders seldom have any vision beyond that offered by center-left parties. 

Sadly, too many of the left’s public intellectuals are mired in side shows: cooperatives as an answer to international monopolies, romanticizing the capitalist order existing before Thatcher and Reagan, or cheering on an abstract “global south” bringing capitalism to its knees. 

Others paint a dire picture of wealth being cannibalized by a cabal of rentiers, scorning the Marxist theory of bourgeois and exploited proletariat. This novelty finds currency in the fashionable, but deeply incoherent idea of “technofeudalism.”

Missing from these distractive theories is any understanding of capitalism’s fundamental logic: the contradiction between workers and capital. Oddly enough, a capitalist apologist, a conservative writer, Greg Ip, understands this contradiction all too well in his observations about growing inequality, as does Piketty in his writings. 

For many of those offering their thoughts to working people, the working class is inconsequential or decimated by deindustrialization in their relatively small part of the world (typically, English speaking or Eurocentric). As a result, they spin arcane theories of inequality or oppressions. They overlook the reality that there are over a billion and a half workers in Asia alone, most of whom are working under conditions of capitalist exploitation as described by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. They have forgotten that while industry has shifted globally, while there is a constant change in the global division of labor, the material wealth is still created by working people. 

The mobility of production and the division of labor are permanent features of capitalism that have only accelerated in recent decades. New technologies and industries have sprung up, where older technologies and industries migrated to areas of cheaper labor. A country like the United States is hollowing out, with a diminishing manufacturing sector, but a high-value, high-income technology sector at one level and a precarious, lower-income service sector at another level. Workers at all levels in all countries where capital employs labor are exploited by capital. 

The lengths to which so many supposed leftists go to ignore or deny the fundamental relationship between workers and capitalists-- the ultimate cause of growing inequalities-- is startling. The dawn of the industrial age gave new meaning to the word “exploitation.” Marx and Engels refined that meaning, giving it a rigorous role at the center of their analysis. And it remains essential to our understanding of the world today.  

Workers are exploited.

Reformers seek to blunt exploitation’s sting.

Revolutionaries act to eliminate it.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com