1 October 2020 — Monthly Review

by John Bellamy Foster

The history of capitalism has been punctuated by periodic struggles for hegemony over the world economy, leading to a centuries-long series of world wars.[1] In the twenty-first century, all signs are pointing to another such period of hegemonic struggle, this time between the United States and China, although complicated in this case by the unique, indeterminate aspects of the post-revolutionary Chinese social formation, which is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist. In the words of the influential president of the Council of Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, a key architect of the “Imperial America” strategy of the George W. Bush administration, writing in August 2020, the “chances of a second cold war [with China] are far higher than they were just months ago. Even worse, the chances of an actual war…are also greater.” Nor is there any real doubt in Haass’s mind about the cause, which he refers to as the inevitable “friction between established and rising powers.”[2] The current U.S. trade war against China is explicitly designed to compel the multinational corporations in the triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan to remove the key production links in their global commodity chains from China and relocate them in low-wage countries subject to the dominant imperial sphere, such as India and Mexico, in an attempt to weaken China and reestablish unrivaled U.S. hegemony over the world economy.[3] Continue reading →