Category: Articles

“Lukács and the Tragedy of Revolution,” Monthly Review 73, no. 9 (February 2022), pp. 1-12.

In his 20s and early 30s, Georg Lukács emerged as one of Europe’s towering intellectuals, the author of the two-volume A History of the Development of Modern Drama (1908, 1911), Soul and Form (1910), Aesthetic Culture (1913), The Theory of the Novel(1916), and Heidelberg Aesthetics (1916–18). While Lukács’s primary field was aesthetics, the philosophical basis of his thought was neo-Kantian, dividing subject and object, facts and values, empirical reality and utopian free will, and society and nature. Writing in the years leading up to and including the First World War, Lukács was torn by what he perceived as a contradiction between a dominant world of vulgarity, decadence, and inauthenticity, versus a merely potential alternative lifeworld of authenticity. Although this contradiction was mediated in the cultural objectifications of art, it could not be transcended on the plane of historical practice. Politically and ethically, Lukács in these years adhered to a kind of revolutionary Dostoevskian-Tolstoyan existentialism.¹ Though critical of German social democracy from the left, the dominant motif in his thought was one of tragedy borne of neo-Kantian dualism, and the perceived impossibility of revolution, constituting a tragedy of inaction. The only authentic individual actions appeared to be the recourse to religion or suicide.²

This tragedy of inaction, as perceived by Lukács, was shattered by the Russian Revolution in 1917. Suddenly, revolutionary action, which seemed so far removed before, was conceivable. This created a period of intense internal conflict within Lukács, evident particularly in his essays “Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem” (1918) and “Tactics and Ethics” (1919). In the first of these two essays, he rejected Bolshevism on ethical grounds, as still representing a tragedy of inaction. In the second, which announced his conversion to communism, he embraced Bolshevism on ethical grounds that were, if anything, more poignantly tragic, but taking the form of a tragedy of action.³ This reflected Lukács’s recognition of the acute problems of the individual faced with the challenge posed by both action and inaction in a revolutionary situation. His solution to this problem in 1919 was to foreshadow his great work of Hegelian-Marxian dialectical synthesis, History and Class Consciousness (1923), in which he sought to transcend his previous neo-Kantian frame based on a theory of the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat.⁴

“Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem” embodies the tragic dilemma that Lukács, still embracing both neo-Kantian epistemology and a radical Tolstoyan commitment to nonviolence, found himself in when faced with the reality of the October Revolution. Although sympathizing with the Bolshevik cause, he found himself confronted by what he called the “metaphysical assumption that good can issue from evil.” Here, he referred to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment regarding the question of murder, even if, as Raskolnikov in the novel misguidedly tells himself, it is for a good cause. Hence, for Lukács writing in 1918, “at the root of Bolshevism [is] an insoluble ethical dilemma.” “Democracy,” or the pursuit of change through legal forms, requires “only superhuman self-abnegation and self-sacrifice,” since one must in the end lay aside one’s convictions and surrender to the result, running “the risk that most of humanity is disinterested in the new world.” In contrast, “Bolshevism’s moral problem” lies deeper since it is based on action. Inaction in the face of revolution seems to avoid the full severity of the ethical dilemma that confronts anyone who chooses to act. Lukács concludes that one should not bloody one’s hands through revolutionary action, particularly given an uncertain future. Tyranny and class rule, he argues, cannot be justified—even if introduced by the proletariat or the party with the aim of combating an oppressive tyranny and regressive class rule, based on the mere faith that this will negate “the endless, senseless chain of struggle.”⁵

A dramatic instance of the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity can be seen in a comparison of the argument of “Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem,” which Lukács describes as “my last hesitations before making my final, irrevocable choice,” with that of “Tactics and Ethics,” written only a few months later between January and March 1919.⁶ In the latter essay, he publicly declared his commitment to the revolutionary cause after joining the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1918 (at a time when there were less than one hundred members), inverting his earlier position on the ethics of Bolshevism.⁷ Rather than simply rejecting his previous argument on ethics and revolution, he sought to transcend it dialectically, “in the direction of praxis.”⁸

The same ethical dilemma as before was in many ways still evident, but what had formerly been, for Lukács, the tragedy of inaction now took the form of the tragedy of action. However, the shift in his underlying theoretical position could not have been more different. He first clearly indicated this by arguing that “the Marxist theory of class struggle, which in this respect is wholly derived from [G. W. F.] Hegel’s conceptual system, changes the transcendent objective into an immanent one; the class struggle of the proletariat is at once the objective itself and its realization.”⁹ This gave rise, in Lukács’s conception, to an objective historico-philosophical tendency (or logic of history) that could be directly ascertained by a revolutionary class consciousness—an argument that he developed fully in History and Class Consciousness.

Indeed, for Lukács—who retained much of the neo-Kantian problematic after December 1918 and throughout his life, coexisting inharmoniously with his Hegelian-Marxian synthesis—the ethical problem of individual action/inaction remained, if now seen from the opposite standpoint from what he presented only months before in “Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem.” Hence, an individual was now called on to accept the need for the moral sacrifice inherent in revolutionary action in line with class-based historico-philosophical necessity. Replacing his previous Tolstoyan pacificism, then, was an ethic that openly acknowledged the necessity for sin, in the form of acts of violence and “murder,” even if on the field of battle.¹⁰

Inaction was now seen as carrying an ultimate moral responsibility just as great as action, since standing by and acquiescing could only mean the support of the dominant reality. “The individual’s conscience and sense of responsibility,” Lukács wrote, “are confronted with the postulate that he must act as if on his action or inaction depended the changing of the world’s destiny.”¹¹ Indeed, it was proletarian revolutionary action aimed at the realization of the objective potential of the class, including its promotion in the end of classlessness, that carried the entire moral force dedicated to “the changing of the world’s destiny.”

Nevertheless, tragedy at the individual ethical level was inherent in the dedication to struggle, rather than the mystic’s mere surrender.¹² Lukács reintroduced the classic issue seen, for example, in Sophocles’s Antigone—that of “a primary ethic (obligation toward institutions) and a secondary ethic (obligation toward the soul).” The primacy of the secondary (second) ethic over the primary (first) ethic, he argued, “always takes on a peculiar dialectical complexity when the soul is not sufficient unto itself but is involved in mankind—as in the case of political man, of the revolutionary. Here, if the soul is to be saved, the soul must be sacrificed: starting from a mystical ethic one is forced to become a brutal Realpolitiker and to violate the absolute commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ which entails no obligations to institutions.”¹³

Referring to the novels of Boris Savinkov, a terrorist leader in the Russian Revolution of 1905—viewing these novels as “documents” rather than works of art—Lukács indicated that, according to Savinkov, “the ultimate moral basis of the terrorist’s act” was “the sacrifice for his brethren, not only of his life, but also of his purity, his morals, his very soul.”¹⁴ The point was that an immoral deed in terms of the primary ethic could turn out in terms of the secondary ethic, when combined with sacrifice for the collective cause, to be “truly—and tragically—moral.” Not content to leave matters there, in the “Luciferic” form of the second ethic represented by clearly terrorist action, Lukács ends his essay by juxtaposing this to the quite different heroine’s act represented in the biblical tradition by Judith.¹⁵ Thus, it was possible, he stated, “to express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of [Friedrich] Hebbel’s Judith: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me—who am I to be able to escape it?’”¹⁶

It is in Hebbel’s Judith that we find the aesthetic key to the sense of “profound human tragedy” that accompanied Lukács’s sudden conversion to revolutionary praxis. Only months after he wrote “Tactics and Ethics,” during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, when Lukács was deputy minister (People’s Commissar of Education and Culture), what was called the “ethical group” within the party leadership gathered around him and discussed Hebbel’s Judith and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (from the Brothers Karamazov) in the residential hall of the House of the Soviet, presumably talking late into the night. As communist writer József Lengyel indicated in his memoirs, it was determined in these discussions that “we communists should take the sins of the world upon ourselves, so that we may be capable of saving the world. And why should we take the sins of the world upon us? Once again there was a very ‘clear’ answer, one taken from Hebbel’s Judith.… Just as God could order Judith to kill Holophernes—that is, to commit a sin—so may he order the communists to destroy the bourgeoisie, both metaphorically and physically.”¹⁷

The Sword of Judith and Lukács’s Second Ethic

As Walter Benjamin wrote in his Illuminations: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender itself completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”¹⁸

The Book of Judith is one of several deuterocanonical books included in the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) and the Old Testament of both the Catholic Bible and the Eastern Orthodox Bible, but excluded from the Hebrew Old Testament canon, while Protestants assign it to the Apocrypha. Nevertheless, it is one of the most famous biblical stories. Over the last two millennia, since the Book of Judith first appeared in c. 135–78 BCE, the Judith story has been the subject of sculptors, painters, playwrights, and poets. The famous sword or scimitar with which Judith beheaded the general Holofernes is forever associated with her.

The Book of Judith—generally believed to be ahistorical—focuses on Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians, sending his general Holofernes on a mission to punish those who did not support his war on Arphaxad, king of the Medes. All nations submit to Holofernes except the Hebrews, with the Jews of Bethulia forced to block the path of the Assyrian army to the temple in Jerusalem. The brutal Holofernes places a siege on the city, cutting off their water supplies. The population of the city is weakened and demoralized. At this point, the beautiful widow Judith prays to God and decides to take matters into her own hands. She adorns herself so that she is “dressed to kill,” promising to the population of Bethulia that all will be decided in five days. She leaves for the Assyrian camp accompanied only by her own maid, determined to kill Holofernes. God meanwhile enhances her beauty. Judith, who is sharp-witted, cleverly deceives Holofernes about her true interests and intentions, with double-edged statements. The story is filled with sexual tensions. On the fourth night, Holofernes invites Judith to his tent to seduce her but ends up drinking so much wine that he collapses on the bed. Judith then cuts off his head with his own sword and puts the head in a bag, also seizing the canopy on his bed. Upon her return to Bethulia, Achior the Ammonite is converted to Judaism on recognizing Holofernes’s head. The Jews, following Judith’s advice, hang Holofernes’s head on the city walls and take the offensive against the Assyrians who are dismayed at finding the headless body of their general, resulting in a Jewish victory. Judith is praised and lives as a widow until the age of 105. Her death is mourned by all of Israel.¹⁹

In contrast, Hebbel’s Judith, written in 1840, gives to the tale of Judith a psychological as well as moral character, focusing on the questions of sin, human freedom, fate, redemption, and the absolute. Although a widow, Judith remains a virgin, as her extraordinary beauty had overwhelmed her husband and driven him mad. He died six months into the marriage after returning from working in the field, without their having consummated their marriage, leaving her entirely chaste. Hebbel then adds Holofernes’s brutal rape of Judith (along with her repressed sexuality) to the story, complicating her motivations, which in the moment of carrying out the deed are animated more by revenge than by the liberation of her people and the carrying out of God’s will. Confronting her maid with the reality of the rape and Holofernes’s sleeping body, she exclaims, “I will be repaid for the annihilation which I suffered in his arms; now that I will avenge myself for his brutal attack on my humanity.… If I have forfeited in my degradation the right to exist, I will win it back with this sword.… See, Mirza, there lies his head. Ha, Holofernes, dost thou respect me now?”²⁰

On arriving back in Bethulia, Judith confronts a population that through thirst and hunger has fallen to the brink of degradation, with one mother suspected of having already eaten her own child. Forbidding the people from putting Holofernes’s head on a pike—a warlike practice of the time, and one that Holofernes in his brutal psychology would have undoubtedly wanted—Judith has it ignominiously buried in the ground. She insists that it no longer takes courage to defeat an enemy that has already lost. Upon being praised by the people of the city, she elicits, in the closing scene, a promise that they will kill her if she so requests, fearing a pregnancy that would result in her giving birth to the evil Holofernes’s child. Hebbel’s Judith emerges, if possible, as an even greater heroine than in the actual biblical story, having so clearly taken the sins of the world upon herself in carrying out her deed.²¹

It is in the passage from Hebbel’s Judith that Lukács described as “incomparably beautiful,” quoted here at greater length, that Judith first resolves to carry out the murder of Holofernes, prior to setting out for the Assyrian camp:

I thank Thee, I thank Thee, Lord! Thou makest clear mine eyes. In Thy sight the impure becomes pure. If Thou didst place a sin between me and my deed, who am I that I should contend with Thee, that I should draw back from Thee? Is not my deed worth as much as it costs me? May I love my honor, my immaculate body more than Thee? Oh the knot within me is untied! Thou madest me beautiful; now I know wherefore. Thou didst deny me a child; now I feel why and rejoice that I have not to love my own self in another. What I formerly held a curse, now appears to me a blessing! (She steps before a mirror.) I greet thee, my likeness! For shame, cheeks, that you do not yet glow! Is the way from you to my heart so long? Eyes, I praise you; you have drunk fire and are intoxicated. Poor mouth, I do not take it ill of thee that thou art pale; thou shalt kiss Horror. Holofernes, all is thine; I have no longer share in it. I have withdrawn to the inmost depths of my soul. Take it, but tremble when thou hast it. I shall emerge at an hour when thou dost not expect it, like a sword from the scabbard, and pay myself with thy life. If I must kiss thee, I will imagine that it is with poisoned lips; if I embrace thee, I will think I am strangling thee. God, let him commit atrocities before my eyes, bloody atrocities, but save me from seeing aught good in him!²²

Lukács referred to the moral issue that he drew from Hebbel’s Judith as “the ethical conflict, of how it is possible to act unethically and yet rightly.”²³ He devoted a chapter of his A History of the Development of Modern Drama to Hebbel’s tragedies, examining, in the words of Margit Koves, how “Hebbel’s protagonists, driven by inner forces clash with the moral order and institutions of their time.”²⁴ In his plays, Hebbel’s greatest heroines, Mariamne of Herod and Mariamne and Judith, were women who found themselves in conflict with male protagonists and exhibited, according to Lukács, the conflicts associated with the “freedom of the will” and the “ethical world order” when confronted with what Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) called “the Age of absolute indifference towards all truth…the State of complete sinfulness.”²⁵

Hebbel’s brilliance in his tragedies (particularly Herod and Mariamne and Gyges and His Ring) was that he was already pointing to the “Nora” problem of Henrik Ibsen’s famous play, and potentially toward the liberation of women. But rather than seeing this as a historical problem subject to change, Hebbel presented it as a universal tragic problem, and thus remained conservative in outlook.²⁶ Here, it is noteworthy that Bertolt Brecht—who, like Lukács, was influenced by Hebbel—incorporated the Judith story (and the conflict between individual ethics and social forms) in a number of his plays: The Bible (written in 1914, when he was 15), Baal(1918), The Jewish Wife (a vignette, part of the play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich [1938]), and The Judith of Shimoda (1940).²⁷ For Lukács himself, It was precisely his historical and dialectical approach to such ethical problems that drew him toward communism. As he explained, “My interest in ethics led me to the revolution.”²⁸

The Social Ontology of Ethics

“It is always dangerous, if not arbitrary,” István Mészáros wrote in Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, “to parcel up philosophers as ‘the young X’ and ‘the mature X’ for sake of opposing one parcel to another.… Even a genuine conversion from ‘idealism’ to ‘materialism’ does not necessarily imply a radical rejection or repression of the original synthesizing idea.… A striking case in point in the twentieth century is Georg Lukács. His post-idealist works reveal in his approach to all major problems the same structure of thought, even though he had genuinely left behind his original idealistic positions.”²⁹

In this sense, it is often more difficult to perceive the essential continuity in the structure of Lukács’s thought than the discontinuities, recognizing that there must always remain a dialectical relation between the two, no matter how great the theoretical transformation. Although Lukács is best known for his Hegelian-Marxist synthesis regarding proletarian class consciousness in History and Class Consciousness, which transcended his early neo-Kantian phase and its individualistic ethic, many of the issues of his earlier years remained and took on a transformed relationship in the development of his Marxian views. This can be seen in his struggles over the dialectics of nature, which governed his later excursions into social ontology.³⁰ But it can also be seen in his continuing attempts (not unrelated to his ontology) to define an ethics of the relation of “self to selfhood,” that is, the individual’s active connection to suprahistorical forces (totality)—a concern that permeated all of his thought.³¹ If the revolutionary proletariat represented a de-reified class consciousness, the role of the intellectual (and the party) was to ease the proletarian’s way into this by focusing on the “consciousness of consciousness,” connecting individual, class, and totality.³²

In Lukács’s focus on dialectical objectivity, there is also always a struggle with what he considered “bad objectivity,” subsuming the subject. Related to this, however, was a kind of non-dialectical duality in his thought, such that he never fully transcended the subject-object problem of epistemology that animated his deepest inquiries. It was this, in fact, that eventually propelled him to seek the answer in a deeper, ontological perspective.³³ As he wrote late in life: “Society is an extraordinary complex of complexes, in which there are two opposite poles. On the one hand there is the totality of society, which ultimately determines the interactions of the individual complexes, and on the other there is the complex individual man, who constitutes an irreducible minimal unity within the process. In this process, man finally becomes man;…the aspect of freedom acquires a significance which is ever greater, ever more comprehensive, embracing the whole of humanity.”³⁴ It was this emphasis on what he was to call “the genuinely independent personality, whose possibility had been created by previous economic development,” that was central to Lukács’s philosophy, and determined his whole conception of an ethics based on the individual as a “irreducible minimal unity” existing in a mediated relation to the historical totality.³⁵

For Lukács in “Tactics and Ethics,” “ethics relate to the individual” but is mediated by class, giving rise to a historically generated totality.³⁶ This focus on the “complex of the individual” remained crucial to his thought and governed his overall conception of ethics. The stakes in the consideration of the ethical as the primary mediation of the individual and society could not be higher. “Ethics,” he wrote in his Aesthetics, “is the crucial field of the fundamental, all-deciding struggle between this-worldliness and other-worldliness, of the real superseding/preserving transformation of human particularity.”³⁷ Insofar as the genuine individual was a historical product, it was necessary, in developing an ethics in historical-materialist terms, to ground this in the historical process in its deepest sense—that is, in a social ontology. Thus, we find Lukács devoting himself to writing an Ethics (originally entitled The Place of Ethics in the System of Human Activities) at the end of his life, following the completion of his Aesthetics in 1962. He decided that this needed to be preceded by (grounded in) an ontological introduction, which quickly developed into a lengthy work, The Ontology of Social Being (and the Prolegomena to a Social Ontology attached to it), without the planned work on Ethics ever being written.³⁸ The explanation for this, as Cornel West observes, is that Lukács sought all along to provide a new objectivist (or neo-foundationalist) basis for ethics. In this he failed to take his cue from Karl Marx himself, who, untroubled with accusations of relativism, saw ethics as thoroughly historical, arising from the class struggle itself.³⁹

However, Lukács’s need to ground his ethics in ontology also had to do with his long struggle to overcome what he saw as the defects of History and Class Consciousness, partly due to its still neo-Kantian epistemological hesitations before a dialectic of nature. This was not conceived primarily in Frederick Engels’s sense, which Lukács had criticized, but in what he came to see as Marx’s sense of the metabolism of labor with nature, as the objective basis of human possibility as well as of alienation under capitalism’s second-order mediations. Reconstructing historical materialism thus meant reconstructing it on the basis of the social ontology of labor as the ground of social being.

Here, we are presented with another anomaly in Lukács, arising from the nature of his situation, compelling him to write an Ethics without having first written a Politics (a philosophy of right), despite their inextricable connection in the historical-materialist view—somehow conceiving it as possible to transcend this objective necessity. His proposed Ethics was to arise from his social ontology of labor, mediating the complexes of the individual and the totality, apparently without any systematic critique of the state, which in Lukács’s case would have necessarily meant engaging with the state of “actually existing socialism.”

In many ways, the tragedy of Lukács’s intellectual life was that explicit politics and a far-reaching critique of the state became impossible for him, evident in the fate of his famous work, the Blum Theses, dealing with the problem of a democratic transition in a proletarian revolution, which was suppressed by the party.⁴⁰ Although Lukács continued to work on political issues, he was unable in his circumstances to address in a coherent way the theory of the state. In the last decade and a half of his life—following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in which he had played a significant role as minister of culture in Imre Nagy’s extremely short-lived government (crushed by an invasion from the Soviet Union)—he refrained from politics and even political critique, placing an enormous obstacle in the way of his planned Ethics.⁴¹

Nevertheless, it was characteristic of Lukács’s approach to see ethics as partly autonomous from politics, having deeper ontological roots in the “complex of the individual.” This was signaled early on by his contention in “Tactics and Ethics” that “Hegel’s system is devoid of ethics,” a position that only made sense (even if one were to ignore Hegel’s System of Ethical Life) if one were to see ethics, as Lukács did at that time, as rooted ultimately in the individual. Such a view excluded Hegel’s attempt in The Philosophy of Right to portray the dialectics of ethical life as an objective phenomenon based in the family, civil society, and the state.⁴²Lukács was later to rectify this judgment on Hegel in the chapter on ethics in The Young Hegel, where he presented a sophisticated mapping of Hegel’s ethics.⁴³ Here, he focused, characteristically, on the notion of “tragedy in the realm of the ethical,” presented by Hegel in his early essay on Natural Law. “Tragedy,” Hegel wrote in relation to Aeschylus’s Eumenides (the last part of the Oresteia or Orestes cycle), “consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature (in order not to become embroiled in it), as a fate, and places it outside itself; and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as the unity of both.”⁴⁴ It was this conception of ethics as the reconciliation of the individual and the absolute in the context of the individual’s struggle against “externalizing/alienating” reality (a concept that he also took from Hegel) that forced Lukács to move back to social ontology, rooted in labor. In this way, “the tragedy in the realm of the ethical” becomes revealed as “nothing but the contradictory path of human progress in the history of class societies—a great and real tragedy.”⁴⁵

In his various aesthetic analyses, Lukács was highly critical of the growing tendency of cultural figures, with the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany, to “replace the objective portrayal of world-historical conflict by the subjective insight of the tragic hero into the tragic necessity of his fate”—a regressive tendency he found, for example, in the later work of Hebbel. Such an approach encouraged a reversion to the static notion of the “condition humaine” (human condition) and reconciliation with a decadent reality, leading to the impoverishment of tragedy.⁴⁶ Indeed, Hebbel himself had moved toward a philosophy of “pan-tragism,” meaning that “each ‘tragedy’ in history had to be acknowledged as an ‘eternal’ decree of fate,” the liquidation of the Hegelian concept of historical progress and the growth of irrationalism.⁴⁷ It was thus the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany that for Lukács was the basis for the growing irrationalism within much of German culture leading to the tragedy of the 1930s, which he was to dissect in The Destruction of Reason.

Revolution represented for Lukács the realm of the objectively possible. He saw the tragedy of action associated with his second ethic as a necessary element in a movement toward greater human freedom synonymous with historical necessity. One can easily read his brilliant, short book on Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought (1924) and the description there of “revolutionary Realpolitik,” and see in Lenin, through Lukács’s eyes, a world-historical figure who took on the burden of Judith: “Even if God has placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me—whom am I to be able to escape it?”⁴⁸ This is the tragedy of revolution, which is only ethically acceptable insofar as it is directly tied to a second ethic grounded objectively and subjectively in the possibility (and the historical necessity) of human liberation.

Notes

1. ↩ See the brilliant essay by Cornel West, “Lukács: A Reassessment,” Minnesota Review 19 (1982): 86–102; and Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 91–144.
2. ↩ The question of suicide was central to Lukács’s short literary work of 1912, “On Poverty of Spirit,” which Max Weber compared to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Georg Lukács, “On Poverty of Spirit,” in The Lukács Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 42–56.
3. ↩ Konstantinos Kavoulakos, Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 157.
4. ↩ The dialectic of the proletariat as the subject and object of history in History and Class Consciousness temporarily displaced the ethical problem for Lukács. As Mészáros wrote, “In the period when the essays of History and Class Consciousness were written, ethics itself could be conceived by Lukács as unproblematically and directly political because politics was seen as directly ethical.” István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 408. This could not stand up, however, to Lukács’s own ruthless criticism of his ideas, and the ethical problem was to reappear in his thought.
5. ↩ Georg Lukács,” “Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem,” in The Lukács Reader, 216–21.
6. ↩ Georg Lukács, preface to History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1968), xi.; Georg Lukács “Tactics and Ethics,” in Tactics and Ethics (London: New Left Books, 1972), 3–11; Andrew Arato and Peter Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury, 1979), 82.
7. ↩ István Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic (London: Merlin, 1972), 127.
8. ↩ Lukács, preface to History and Class Consciousness, xi.
9. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 5.
10. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 10.
11. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 8.
12. ↩ See Lukács’s early statements in “The Metaphysics of Tragedy” (1910), as quoted in Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 286–87.
13. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 10; Kavoulakos, Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis, 153–57, 160. In Sophocles’s Antigone, Creon represents the state and hence the institutional bases of ethics, while Antigone stands for the soul, spirit, and kinship, and thus a more traditional and religious ethic. In this essentially religious, classical-Greek conception, it is the ethic of the state—which, as Antigone says, demands that she transgress “the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws”—that was to be regarded as secondary; while the ethic derived from the gods “and no one knows their origin in time” is to be seen as primary. Nevertheless, the state demands absolute adherence in war, creating a conflict between the two ethics, in which the state as absolute ruler enforces the tragic consequences. Lukács’s second ethic, in contrast, which opposes the ethic of the existing state, is essentially a revolutionary ethic, meant to transcend social rather than religious alienation, and aimed at construction of a new historical totality. Sophocles, Oedipus the King/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 174. Lukács himself addressed the nature of this ethical dilemma in Antigone in relation to Hegel’s analysis of it in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1966), 411–12; G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 261–63.
14. ↩ Lukács was doubtless unaware, in referring to Boris Savinkov in “Tactics and Ethics,” that the latter was responsible for an anti-Bolshevik uprising in Russia, which would soon lead him to support the White Army.
15. ↩ Kavoulakos, Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis, 157, 160; Rodney Livingstone, introduction to Lukács, Tactics and Ethics, xiii.
16. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 11. In the edition of Hebbel’s Judith translated by Carl Van Doren, this passage reads: “If Thou didst place a sin between me and my deed, who am I that I should contend with Thee, that I should draw back from Thee?” Friedrich Hebbel, Judith: A Tragedy in Five Acts, trans. Carl Van Doren (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1914), 275.
17. ↩ Löwy, Georg Lukács, 134–37; Daniel Andrés López, Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019), 5.
18. ↩ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 90.
19. ↩ Deborah Levine Gera, “The Jewish Textual Traditions,” in The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines, ed. Kevin R. Brine, Elena Ciletti, and Henrike Lähnemann (Cambridge: Open Books, 2010), 23–24; The Book of Judith, Old Deuterocanonical Books, Old Testament, Holy Bible, available at st-takla.org.
20. ↩ Hebbel, Judith, 310, 312.
21. ↩ In his questionable intellectual biography of Lukács, Arpad Kadarkay was so eager to utilize the former’s allusions to Hebbel’s Judith as a basis for diagnosing what he calls “Lukács’s dementia” that he seriously distorted aspects of Hebbel’s play to criticize Lukács more fully. Thus, he claimed that Judith actively “forfeits her innocence” to Holofernes, rather than being raped, which is in fact a central feature of Hebbel’s play. Holofernes is said to have “reached into her humanity,” rather than, as in Hebbel’s play, brutalizing and “annihilating” her humanity, for which she takes revenge and thus absolves herself in her own eyes and those of God. Likewise, we are told that “Judith decides to kill the child in her womb,” rather than, as in the play, eliciting a promise from the population that she be killed at her request (thus sacrificing both herself and the fetus) if the evil should appear in her womb. Kadarkay’s distortions were meant to impose on the character of Judith a sense of intense “guilt,” allowing him to claim that Lukács’s own sense of “guilt” converges with that of Judith. Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). In Hebbel’s play, Judith is absolved from her sin by the higher ethic embodied in her deed itself, the sin nevertheless remains and falls upon her, as Lukács understood. Nothing therefore could be more absurd—insofar as Judith itself is concerned—than Lee Congden’s contention that, in Hebbel’s “tragic dramas the concept of sin was unknown; so fated were his characters that their actions could not be subjected to moral judgment.” Lee Congdon, “For Neoclassical Tragedy: György Lukács’s Drama Book,” Studies in Eastern European Thought (2008): 48. In fact, Hebbel’s Judith is concerned with conflicting ethical principles in the manner of Greek tragedy.
22. ↩ Hebbel, Judith, 275.
23. ↩ Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiography (London: Verso, 1983), 53.
24. ↩ Margit Koves, “Anthropology in the Aesthetics of the Young Lukács,” Social Scientist 29, no. 7/8 (2001): 71.
25. ↩ Koves, “Anthropology in the Aesthetics of the Young Lukács,” 71; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Characteristics of the Present Age (Washington DC: University Publications of America, 1977), 9; Friedrich Hebbel, “Herod and Mariamne: A Tragedy in Five Acts,” in Three Plays (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), 67–184.
26. ↩ Georg Lukács, Conversations with Lukács (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1975), 93.
27. ↩ Gary Neil Garner, “Bertolt Brecht’s Use of the Bible and Christianity in Representative Dramatic Works” (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1970), 45–52, 72.
28. ↩ Lukács, Record of a Life, 53.
29. ↩ Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, 17–18.
30. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 16–21; Georg Lukács, Labour (London: Merlin, 1978); Kavoulakos, Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Praxis, 213–18.
31. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 286. See also Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, 135.
32. ↩ Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 47.
33. ↩ Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, 43; Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, 76.
34. ↩ Lukács, quoted in Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, 43–44.
35. ↩ Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, 44–45.
36. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 8.
37. ↩ Lukács, quoted in Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 400.
38. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 407; Mészáros, Lukács’s Concept of Dialectic, 150–51.
39. ↩ Cornel West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), 138–66.
40. ↩ Georg Lukács, “The Blum Theses 1928–1929,” in Tactics and Ethics, 227–53.
41. ↩ Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 406.
42. ↩ Lukács, “Tactics and Ethics,” 7; G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970); G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 105–10; Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 408–9.
43. ↩ Lukács, The Young Hegel, 299.
44. ↩ W. F. Hegel, Natural Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 104–5; Aeschylus, Eumenides, in The Oresteia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 93–127.
45. ↩ Lukács, The Young Hegel, 413, 417. Hegel in Natural Law followed Aristotle in contending that “the state comes by nature before the individual” and the child is thus “suckled at the breast of universal ethical life,” from which derived his “tragedy in the realm of the ethical” that had to contend with the contradiction between the elemental principles of the soul (and inorganic life) and civilization/the state, seen in almost classical Greek terms. Lukács, in contrast, followed Marx in seeking to develop an ontology of social labor (also implicit in Hegel’s corpus) that served to ground the “tragedy in the realm of the ethical” in the contradictions of the individual in class society. Hegel, Natural Law, 104, 113–15.
46. ↩ Georg Lukács, “Marx and the Problem of Ideological Decay,” in Essays on Realism(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1980), 157; Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, 94.
47. ↩ Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin, 1980), 570. This contrasts with Lukács’s conception of Hebbel at his best, where “the fate of Hebbel’s heroes is the tragically impotent struggle of real men for the perfect humanity of men who live in the formal works of art.” Georg Lukács, Soul and Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 198.
48. ↩ Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), 70–85.

“The New Cold War on China,” Monthly Review, vol. 73, o. 3 (July-August 2021), pp. 1-20.

On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that “the [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.”¹ Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen optimistically indicated, would actually materialize, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumably back away from Trump’s extreme policies toward China given its “vital position in the global value chain.”² Beijing could not be seen as an aggressive power in ideological or geopolitical terms, but was simply interested in economic competition.

Yet, what Christensen’s analysis excluded was any mention of the imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, which is now threatened by China’s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project.³ In this respect, the Trump administration’s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China’s rise and the end of Washington’s unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared a Cold War against the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s and ’50s, as part of a grand strategy to secure its global hegemony in the immediate post-Second World War era, today it is declaring a New Cold War on China in the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony.

Indeed, days before Christensen’s Foreign Affairs article went to print declaring that there would be no New Cold War, the Biden administration made it clear that it not only intended to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it, pushing it to greater heights. This was evident in the first high-level bilateral talks between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China following the election of Biden as U.S. president, held on March 18, 2021, in the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, with U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan sitting across from China’s director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.⁴

In the week prior to this high-level meeting, Washington had set the stage, signaling through its actions its intention to promote a hyper-aggressive Cold War 2.0 directed at China. Thus, on March 12, Biden met with the heads of state of Japan, India, and Australia, representing the new Quad military-strategic alliance led by the United States, widely seen as an attempt to construct an Asian analogue to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Quad issued a joint statement the entire subtext of which was enmity toward China.⁵ On the same day, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission blacklisted five Chinese companies including Huawei.⁶ Late on March 16, less than two days before the bilateral talks with China were set to begin, the Biden administration renewed sanctions against twenty-four officials of the Chinese government, in response to the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong.⁷

In a break with diplomatic protocol, Blinken started off the March 18 bilateral talks in Anchorage by bluntly stating that he and the U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin had just returned from a meeting with their counterparts in Japan and Korea, two U.S. leading military allies that share many of Washington’s concerns with regard to China. Washington’s goal, he said, was “to advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order.” He then entered into a direct challenge to Beijing, referring to “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” The United States was ready not only to be competitive, and in some areas “collaborative,” with China, but also to be strongly “adversarial” where necessary.

Sullivan followed up by pointedly referring to Biden’s hosting of “the Quad leaders’ summit” the previous week, and the Quad military alliance’s security concerns in the Indo-Pacific, thereby foregrounding the warlike pact being formed in Asia against Beijing. He added that U.S. allies and partners had expressed “areas of concern” with respect to China’s use of “economic and military coercion” in its “assaults on basic values” and that the United States would welcome “stiff competition” with China, but that it was also, he intimated, prepared for full-scale conflict.⁸

Yang responded by insisting that China firmly upheld “the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries [as] the so-called rules-based international order.” “The Chinese people,” he said, “are wholly rallying around the Communist Party of China. Our values are the same as the common values of humanity. Those are: peace, development, fairness, justice, freedom, and democracy.” He stressed the quite different conceptions of democracy represented by China and the United States. Contrasting Beijing’s foreign policy to that of Washington, both historically and in the present, he stated:

We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries.… The United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched [its] national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.… With [respect to] Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, they are [each] an inalienable part of China’s territory. China is firmly opposed to U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs. We have expressed our staunch opposition to such interference, and we will take firm actions in response.

Yang insisted that Washington had no basis to lecture Beijing on human rights given its own record, as symbolized by the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The United States itself does not represent international public opinion, and neither does the Western world.” With respect to “cyberattacks,” he stated, “whether it’s the ability to launch cyberattacks or the technologies that could be deployed, the United States is the champion in this regard. You can’t blame this problem on somebody else.”

Wang, in turn, indicated that

China urges the U.S. side to fully abandon the hegemonic practice of willfully interfering in China’s internal affairs.… And in particular on the 17th of March [the day before the meeting], the United States escalated its so-called sanctions on China regarding Hong Kong, and the Chinese people are outraged by this gross interference in China’s internal affairs and the Chinese side is firmly opposed to it.… Just the other day, before our departure, the United States passed these new sanctions. This is not supposed to be the way one should welcome his guests [in these bilateral talks taking place in Alaska], and we wonder if this is a decision made by the United States to try to gain some advantage in dealing with China.⁹

Blinken retorted by referring again to questions raised by U.S. allies and partners with respect to China’s actions in violation of the rules-based international order. He emphasized Washington’s determination to build strategic alliances directed at China. Sullivan then touted U.S. technological prowess and its landing, a couple weeks before, of another rover on Mars, working with its allies in Europe—a comment designed to deflate in advance China’s planned landing of its rover Tianwen [Questions to Heaven] 1 on Mars, to take place in May. He harshly criticized the Chinese delegation for its “lectures” and “long, winding statements.”¹⁰

Yang responded that he had “felt compelled to make this speech because of the tone on the U.S. side,” in which the U.S. diplomats chose “to speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength,” with all the appearance of having carefully “planned” and “orchestrated” this confrontation. Wang followed by returning to Blinken’s veiled reference to Japan and South Korea regarding their concerns about coercion from China. He indicated that it was not clear whether this was actually coming from these countries themselves or was simply a U.S. projection.¹¹

“For an astonished press, witnessing the [entire] exchange,” as Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, observed shortly after in the Atlantic, it “was like being present at the dawn of a new cold war.”¹² Indeed, as David Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Trump, and Dan Negrea, senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote ten days later in the National Interest: “Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the world finds itself in a new cold war” centered on China.¹³

Washington continued in the following weeks with its aggressive attacks on China:

• March 22: The United States, along with the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada, issued sanctions on four Chinese officials over alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang.¹⁴
• March 24: The foreign ministers of NATO’s thirty states declared that they were ready to oppose the “authoritarian threats to the rules-based international order,” in cooperation with their allies and partnerships in the Asia-Pacific, thereby singling out China as a common foe.
• March 25: A week after the bilateral talks, Biden in a press conference declared that “Xi [Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China], doesn’t have a democratic—with a small ‘d’—bone in his body” and referred to him as an “autocrat.”¹⁵
• March 28: U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai announced that the United States had no intention of removing the tariffs that Trump had imposed on Chinese goods imported to the United States, affecting a majority of Chinese exports to the United States, and designed to get multinational corporations to delink their value chains from China.¹⁶
• March 30: The Biden administration unilaterally accused China of “genocide and crimes against humanity,” presenting this formally in its annual human rights report, though lacking any credible evidence to support its charges.¹⁷
• April 8: Washington blacklisted seven Chinese supercomputing firms.¹⁸
• April 30: The Biden administration arranged a public meeting between official U.S. State Department representatives and their Taiwan counterparts. This broke with the agreement with China, going back to the 1970s—known as the Three Communiques—according to which the United States would avoid all official contacts with Taiwan, which China considers to be part of One China, with two governing systems.¹⁹
• May 5: The Group of Seven core capitalist nations, consisting of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada, presented itself as the global guarantor of the “rules-based international order,” strongly criticizing China over its domestic affairs.²⁰
• May 7: In a UN Security Council meeting chaired by Wang Yi, Blinken criticized China and Russia for flouting international law, and while not actually referring to China by name, which he has repeatedly accused of genocide, he stated: “Asserting domestic jurisdiction doesn’t give any state a blank check to enslave, torture, disappear, ethnically cleanse their people, or violate human rights in any other way.”²¹
• May 26: (1) Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the laboratory theory of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 in China; (2) Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, Biden’s Asia tsar, declared that “the period that was broadly described as engagement [with China] has come to an end.”²²

In its first one hundred days, the Biden administration wasted no time in ratcheting up U.S. military pressure on China. From January to April 2021, U.S. military activity along China’s borders increased sharply, with incursions of U.S. military ships in Chinese-claimed territorial waters rising by 20 percent and U.S. military aircraft incursions in Chinese air space growing by 40 percent. In March, Germany deployed a warship in the South China Sea aimed at China, with Washington welcoming “Germany’s support for a rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific.” In April, the United States sent an additional carrier strike group to bolster its forces in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Britain is sending its Queen Elizabeth II carrier strike group into the South China Sea in a tilt to the Indo-Pacific. The United States currently has four hundred military bases and some 375,000 command personnel (military and civilian) in the Indo-Pacific encircling China, including more than eighty thousand troops stationed in Japan and South Korea.²³

Viewed in this overall context, the confrontation between Washington and Beijing in Anchorage, rather than simply constituting an angry exchange between irate diplomats, can be seen as revealing the basic contours of the U.S. imperial grand strategy with respect to China, along with the nature of China’s strategic response. Washington’s insistence on what it calls a “rules-based international order,” in contrast to Beijing’s advocacy of a broad UN-based order of sovereign states underpinned by international law (traditionally referred to as the Westphalian system), is more than a dispute over phraseology. Rather, it stands for the current U.S. strategy of compelling China to comply with the hegemonic political-economic order imposed by an alliance of major powers under U.S. leadership, so as to “lock in” current imperial power relationships.²⁴ As China has indicated, if the “rules-based order” is “set by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather ‘hegemonic rules.’… If it refers to rules set by the US and a handful of other countries, then it cannot be called international rules either, but rather ‘clique rules,’ which run counter to the principle of democracy and won’t be accepted by the majority of countries in the world.”²⁵

In particular, the United States and the other capitalist economies at the apex of the world system, notably the triad of the United States/Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, are committed to preserving not only the hegemonic institutions forged in the Cold War era, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, coupled with the system of U.S.-dominated military alliances, but also what is referred to as the post-Westphalian system or liberal international order that emerged during the era of “naked imperialism” from the 1990s to the present, made possible by the vacuum created by the Soviet Union’s disappearance from the world stage and the resulting U.S. “unipolar moment.”²⁶ During the post-Cold War era, a continuing stream of “humanitarian interventions” in the affairs of other states have been carried out by the United States and its allies, generating an era of perpetual war—beginning with the expansion of U.S. (and NATO) power in Eastern Europe with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, as well as military interventions in the Middle East and Africa—in violation of the sovereignty of states.²⁷ This new aggressive imperial posture has been legitimated in terms of the “responsibility to protect” and the promotion of “democracy” and “humanitarian” values—as these are determined by the United States and other core capitalist powers, standing in for the “rules-based international order.”²⁸

The strategic objective of the New Cold War on China from the standpoint of the United States and its allies is not so much to contain China economically, politically, and militarily, which is not possible, but rather to find ways to constrain it, making it impossible for it to effect changes in the global order despite its emerging power position. The new imperial grand strategy is thus designed to replicate on a global scale (and in the thermonuclear age) the famous “gunboat diplomacy” imposed on the Qing dynasty by the leading imperial powers during China’s “Century of Humiliation,” stretching from the Opium Wars up to the Second World War.²⁹ This was symbolized above all by the British destruction of the emperor’s Summer Palace in 1860, designed to humiliate the Qing dynasty. In 1900, during the so-called Boxer Rebellion (Yihetuan Movement), the great powers invaded China in what was referred to as the Eight-Nation Alliance (then consisting of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Russia), imposing their authority on the Qing dynasty and forcing further unequal treaties on the country.³⁰ Part of the justification given at the time was that China needed to conform to international rules of trade and conduct.³¹

In an analogous fashion to the treatment of China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China today, according to current U.S. imperial grand strategy, is to be economically, geopolitically, and militarily constrained by a broad alliance of imperial powers. The object is ultimately that of bringing about the demise of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and tightly binding China to the imperial order of global monopoly-finance capital, while reducing it to permanent subaltern status. The principal means of achieving this will be a system of unequal treaties—the rules-based international order—imposed by a coalition of great powers, with the United States at the top.³²

The chief mechanism for defeating China was spelled out in 2017 by Harvard foreign policy analyst Graham Allison, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his book Destined for War: Can America Escape the Thucydides Trap?, a work highly praised by Biden, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and former CIA director and former commander of the U.S. Central Command David Petraeus. In Allison’s words:

US forces could covertly train and support separatist insurgents. Fissures in the Chinese state already exist. Tibet is essentially occupied territory. Xinjiang, a traditionally Islamic region in western China, already harbors an active Uighur separatist movement responsible for waging a low-level insurgency against Beijing. And Taiwanese who watch Beijing’s heavy-handedness in Hong Kong hardly require encouragement to oppose reunification with this increasingly authoritarian government. Could US support for these separatists draw Beijing into conflicts with radical Islamist groups throughout Central Asia and the Middle East? If so, could these become quagmires, mirroring the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan where U.S.-supported mujahideen “freedom fighters” bled the Soviet Union?

A subtle but concentrated effort to accentuate the contradictions at the core of Chinese Communist ideology…could, over time, undermine the regime and encourage independence movements in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. By splintering China at home and keeping Beijing embroiled in maintaining domestic stability, the US could avert, or at least substantially delay, China’s challenge to American dominance.³³

All of this is now New Cold War policy.³⁴ Moreover, by attacking China with allegations of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” in relation to its internal populations, the United States is able to justify its New Cold War on China, including its actual hybrid warfare, combining an array of political, economic, financial, technological, cyber, and more traditional overt and covert military means.³⁵

The ”Rules-Based Order” and New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy

The foremost U.S. theorist of the rules-based international order is G. John Ikenberry, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose work has had a strong influence on the Biden administration.³⁶ In a famous 2004 essay on “Liberalism and Empire,” Ikenberry—although not denying that the U.S. past and present had often been characterized by imperial domination (even going so far as to cite leading left revisionist historians such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and Joyce Kolko)—nonetheless argued strongly against those in U.S. foreign policy circles who believed that the United States should openly comport itself as an empire.³⁷ A more effective hegemonic strategy, Ikenberry argued at the time, would be to utilize the unipolar moment to establish a rules-based international order that would secure U.S. and Western global domination as a fait accompli well into the future, even in the face of eventual declining U.S. power.³⁸

As China’s historic rise became more apparent, Ikenberry wrote a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairson “The Rise of China and the Future of the West,” in which he insisted that the “globalized capitalist system” and the Western liberal international order could only be preserved if direct U.S. hegemony gave way to the rules-based order enforced by the collective weight of the United States together with its major allies.³⁹ In this way, an “American-led liberal hegemonic order” could be secured indefinitely.⁴⁰ As U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton put it, it was essential to prevent a more “multi-polar world” from emerging by instituting in its stead a “multi-partner world,” a set of U.S.-led alliances and partnerships that would guarantee Washington’s continued dominance in the twenty-first century.⁴¹

This conception of a rules-based order as means of organizing a global counterrevolution found strong bipartisan support in the United States and, most significantly, within the Pentagon. For Trump’s secretary of defense James N. Mattis (known as Mad Dog Mattis), speaking to cabinet secretaries and the joint chiefs of staff on July 20, 2017, “the greatest gift the greatest generation left us was the rules-based postwar international order,” which he illustrated by pointing to “color representations of NATO, capital markets and various trade deals to which the United States is signatory,” standing not for international law—certainly not the UN system—but rather for the U.S./NATO-dominated liberal international and strategic order.⁴²

Thus, central to the whole conception of a hegemonic rules-based international order, according to Ikenberry, is the surmounting of a UN-based system geared to the sovereign equality of states and a polycentric world, and which includes China and Russia as permanent members of the Security Council. Instead, the rules-based international order is meant to codify the changes introduced in the 1990s, establishing the “contingent character of sovereignty,” such that the great powers have a “a right—even a moral obligation—to intervene in troubled states to prevent genocide and mass killing. NATO’s interventions in the Balkans and the war against Serbia,” he wrote, “were defining actions of this sort.”⁴³ The doctrine of humanitarian imperialism based on “the right to protect” thus became key to the definition of the rules-based international order.

This notion of the contingent character of sovereignty was clarified by Richard Haass, former deputy secretary of state in charge of policy planning in the George W. Bush presidency and current head of the Council on Foreign Relations, who explained that the shift to more limited conceptions of sovereignty reflected the new hegemonic view that “sovereignty is not a blank check. Rather, sovereign status is contingent on the fulfillment by each state of certain fundamental obligations, both to its own citizens and to the international community. When a regime fails to live up to these responsibilities or abuses its prerogatives, it risks forfeiting its sovereign privileges including, in extreme cases, its immunity from armed intervention.”⁴⁴ And when it comes to armed intervention, as Haass famously argued elsewhere, the United States is the self-appointed “sheriff” of the international order, while the remainder of the triad is the “posse.”⁴⁵ Although the United States has recently complained of Chinese aggression and its growing global threat, due to its one foreign military base located in Djibouti in Africa, Washington as the global sheriff has up to a thousand military bases spanning the entire globe, many of these surrounding China.⁴⁶

The doctrine of a rules-based international order has been used to justify the continual U.S./NATO military interventions and U.S.-sponsored coups directed at populations in five of the six inhabited continents since the 1990s—all in the name of the promotion of democracy and human rights.⁴⁷ “Liberal internationalism,” Ikenberry, its strongest intellectual defender, indicates in his latest work, “is implicated in almost constant military interventions during the era of American global dominance,” while under neoliberalism, the economic counterpart of this has become a mere “platform of rules and institutions for capitalist transactions,” invariably favoring the powers-that-be.⁴⁸

The People’s Republic of China: An Emerging Sovereign Superpower

Commenting in January 1850 on the first stirrings of the Taiping Revolution (1850–64) in China, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels pointed to the birth of “Chinese socialism.” European reactionaries with their armies, they indicated, might someday arrive at the frontiers of China only to “find there the inscription”:

République Chinoise,

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité⁴⁹

Marx and Engels’s extraordinarily prescient insight was a century premature. Six years after they wrote this, the British and French armies attacked China again in the Second Opium War, taking advantage of the disorder created by the Taiping Revolution to extend the European imposition of unequal treaties on China. Here they built on a process initiated by the British in the First Opium War in 1839, at the end of which China had been compelled to cede Hong Kong to Britain in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.⁵⁰ The Opium Wars introduced the Century of Humiliation in China that was to last until the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China.⁵¹ The period of humiliation is seen as having finally ended with Mao Zedong’s speech “The Chinese People Have Stood Up,” on September 21, 1949, his opening address at the First Plenary of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. On that occasion, Mao declared:

The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors, including the Revolution of 1911 led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, our great forerunner in the Chinese revolution.… We have closed our ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign enemies through the People’s War of Liberation and the great people’s revolution, and now we are proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China.… Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.… Our national defense will be consolidated and no imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land.… Hail the founding of the People’s Republic of China!⁵²

Today, the People’s Republic of China remains focused—through what is now seen as a century-long struggle, to culminate in 2049—on overcoming the remaining traces of what Mao called the “history of insult and humiliation” going back to the Opium Wars.⁵³ In doing so, it has initiated a course known as “China’s Dream,” enunciated by Xi in November 2012, but reflecting the entire path of Chinese postrevolutionary development. “Only by upholding socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Xi has declared, “can we bring together and lead the whole Party, the whole nation and the people of all ethnic groups in realizing a moderately prosperous society by the centenary of the CPC in 2021 and in turning China into a prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious socialist country by the centenary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049.”⁵⁴ To this has been added the longer term objective of creating an ecological civilization and a beautiful China, with ecology seen as “the most inclusive form of public wellbeing.”⁵⁵ The first centenary goal, that of 2021, is now seen as fulfilled. But the second centenary goal still needs to be achieved. The centenary of the People’s Republic of China, 2049, is to mark via “socialist modernization” the “national rejuvenation” of China, having finally triumphed over the century or more of foreign and domestic oppression that produced the great divergence between China and the West.⁵⁶

Driven by this sovereign historical project, China has remained an enemy of imperialism and a strong, unswerving defender of the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, not only in terms of the original Peace of Westphalia and the UN Charter, but also backing the anti-imperialist objectives of the Third World Bandung Conference of 1955, which, based partly on V. I. Lenin’s principle of the self-determination of nations, asserted the equal rights of developing countries, and the importance of a polycentric world.⁵⁷ Xi articulated this anti-imperialist stance in 2017:

From the principles of equality and sovereignty established in the Peace of Westphalia over 360 years ago to international humanitarianism affirmed in the Geneva Convention more than 150 years ago; from the four purposes and seven principles enshrined in the UN Charter more than 70 years ago to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence championed by the Bandung Conference over 60 years ago, many principles have emerged in the evolution of international relations and have been widely accepted. These principles should guide us in building a community of shared future for [hu]mankind.

Sovereign equality has been the most important norm governing state-to-state relations over the past centuries, and the cardinal principle observed by the United Nations and its agencies and institutions. The essence of sovereign equality is that the sovereignty and dignity of all nations, whether big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, must be respected; their internal affairs brook no interference, and they have the right to independently choose their social system and development path.⁵⁸

China’s anti-imperialist stance is tied up with its whole developmental path. Its extraordinary advance, including the more than quadrupling of its economy since the late 1970s and the recent elimination of absolute poverty, has been dependent not only on its growing integration into the world economy, but also, and no less importantly, on the limitations that it has been able to impose on the capitalist nature of that integration.⁵⁹ Crucial in this regard is the existence of a number of key socialist-oriented elements distinguishing the Chinese system: (1) social ownership of land, which in the countryside is still partially managed collectively by village communities; (2) state control of money and finance; (3) state ownership of key sectors of industry, including banks, allowing for high rates of investment; and (4) a planning system, complementing the market economy, directed by the CPC by means of five-year plans. There is a continuing emphasis within the CPC on Marxist and dialectical conceptions, which are seen as keys to the fulfillment of China’s sovereign project of the creation of a modern, developed “socialist democracy” with Chinese characteristics. A core element in Chinese revolutionary theory, practice, and conception of socialist democracy is the mass line, or the notion of “from the masses to the masses.”⁶⁰ Together, these traits mark China as a postrevolutionary society that is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist, but that is following an overall developmental path that holds open the possibility of continued movement toward the latter.⁶¹

The internal dynamism of the Chinese economy, its highly developed infrastructure, and its low unit labor costs (often entailing extreme exploitation in export industries) has attracted enormous investments by multinational corporations, allowing China to become the new workshop of the world in what has been called the Third Industrial Revolution, based on digital technology.⁶² Due to the strength of its planning system, China was able to retain a larger portion of overall surplus value generated than in the case of most developing countries, and to create partnerships with multinationals that allowed it to acquire advanced technology.⁶³

While still a poor country, with per capita income one-fifth that of the United States, China has managed to move to the forefront of what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has called the Fourth Industrial Revolution characterized by new technologies that are designed to fuse the physical, digital, and biological worlds.⁶⁴ It is China’s technological prowess, its financial controls that limit the power of the U.S.-dominated imperial order, and its geopolitical assertion of a One China, which includes recapturing its historic territory, that have most disturbed the core capitalist countries. The United States and its chief imperial allies would like to see China tightly bound within what Thomas Friedman called the “golden straitjacket” of the prevailing globalized order, which is designed to place constraints on the political and economic freedoms of nations (particularly those outside the core), preventing them from going against the existing rules and relations of global power.⁶⁵

Part of the present rejuvenation of China’s historical role as a civilization, as conceived by Beijing today, is the resurrection of the ancient Silk Road, a trade route that extended from China to South Asia and the Middle East all the way to Europe. In fall 2013, Xi proposed his vast One Belt, One Road project (known in the West as the Belt and Road Initiative) involving building a Silk Road Economic Belt, extending from South and Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe, coupled with a Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road that would connect China to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe via various sea lanes. In 2017, China further extended its Maritime Silk Road to Latin America. China was to be the principal initiator and founder of One Belt, One Road, providing the seed money, but other countries were invited to join with the financing and planning of infrastructure. Thirty-nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa, thirty-four in Europe and Central Asia, twenty-five in East Asia and the Pacific, eighteen in Latin America and the Caribbean, seventeen in the Middle East and North Africa, and six in South Asia are now affiliated with One Belt, One Road. All told, the Belt and Road Initiative encompasses 139 countries and close to two-thirds of the world population. As the Council of Foreign Relations noted to its chagrin, “Xi Jinping invites heads of state to China for Belt and Road forums, contributing to the view that Beijing is an economic power on par with the United States.”⁶⁶

At the Anchorage meeting between the top U.S. and Chinese diplomats in March 2021, Blinken lauded the efforts of the present U.S. administration at gaining control of the COVID-19 pandemic.⁶⁷ His Chinese counterparts were no doubt unimpressed. In May 2021, the United States has seen over six hundred thousand deaths from COVID-19, a mortality rate of over 1,800 deaths per million. In contrast, China had experienced less than five thousand deaths, a rate of 3 deaths per million.⁶⁸ The Chinese government years before, at the highest level, had stressed the dangers of new pandemics emerging, and was consequently far better prepared. In 2017, Xi declared before the UN General Assembly: “Pandemic diseases such as bird flu, Ebola and Zika have sounded the alarm for international health security. The WHO [World Health Organization] should play a leadership role in strengthening epidemic monitoring and in sharing information, best practices and technologies. The international community should step up support and assistance for public health in African countries and other developing countries.”⁶⁹ Confronted with the emergence of a novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2), the Chinese government made various false steps (at the local level) in the initial days, followed by the Chinese state attacking the epidemic full force, in cooperation with the population, which self-mobilized on the model of “people’s revolutionary war,” involving self-organization in localities. This revolutionary mobilization in response to the epidemic was a resounding success, pointing to the internal solidity of the polity and the vast potential revolutionary protagonism of the Chinese people.⁷⁰

China has declared that its COVID-19 vaccines constitute a “public good.” Already by April 2021 China had donated and exported 48 percent of its domestically manufactured vaccines—donating the vaccines to eighty countries and exporting to forty. The United States and United Kingdom had meanwhile shared their vaccines with zero countries, while insisting on maintaining international patent restrictions on the vaccines. By June 1, China had shared (exports and donations) 323.3 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccines with other countries, the European Union had shared 143.8 million doses, mostly with other developed countries, and the United States had shared a mere 7.5 million doses.⁷¹ Washington has accused China of “vaccine diplomacy” and has suggested that it is breaking the rules-based order to “outcompete the United States and its allies” in the international market for COVID-19 vaccines.⁷² China has geared up its production of COVID-19 vaccines to around five billion doses a year, most of which it plans to share as an international public good with the developing world.⁷³

China’s Third Revolution and the U.S.-Led Global Counterrevolution

In his October 18, 2017, report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CPC, Xi stated that “the Chinese nation, which since modern times began had endured so much for so long [an allusion to the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation], has achieved a tremendous transformation: it has stood up, become better off, and grown in strength; it has come to embrace the brilliant prospects of rejuvenation.”⁷⁴ For those aware of the history of the People’s Republic of China, it was clear that Xi was speaking of the entire revolutionary process of national rejuvenation. Mao famously declared that, with the Chinese Revolution, China had stood up. The Deng Xiaoping era, often referred to as the second era in the process of national rejuvenation, was just as clearly about China becoming better off, through rapid economic development and integration within the capitalist world economy. The New Era, in the period of Xi’s leadership, has been directed toward constructing a strong, self-sufficient, and sustainable Chinese system, aimed at “building a moderately prosperous society in all respects” by 2021, and “of moving on to all-out efforts to build a great modern socialist country” by 2049.⁷⁵

Each stage in the Chinese Revolution has meant a major shift in the revolutionary process, so that the Mao, Deng, and Xi periods are sometimes referred to as China’s First, Second, and Third Revolutions.⁷⁶ The “principal contradiction” in the New Era (or Third Revolution), the surmounting of which is necessary if China is to achieve its objectives, according to Xi, is the “unbalanced” or uneven and thus “inadequate” nature of Chinese development, characteristic of the capitalist growth model. This is manifested in deepening class inequality, divisions between rural and urban areas, promotion of economic development at the expense of cultural development, and an unsustainable human relation to the environment.⁷⁷ Hence, a socialist-motivated shift toward greater economic equality, national self-sufficiency, ecological civilization, rural revitalization, cultural development, and the forging of a “dual circulation” model (designed to reduce China’s dependence on foreign markets and technology) are all seen as crucial to China’s emergence as a “great modern socialist society.”⁷⁸

The CPC leadership has continued to define China as “the world’s largest developing country,” albeit one in “the primary stage of socialism,” thus emphasizing its direct connections to the Global South of which it sees itself a part. Its official international stance is dictated by the “five principles of peaceful coexistence,” defined as: (1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, (2) mutual nonaggression, (3) mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence.⁷⁹ Although China as an emerging global power has been increasingly accused of setting a new agenda and seeking to overturn the existing rules-based international order imposed by the core capitalist states, this, rather than presaging anarchy or “might makes right,” as indicated by Blinken at the March 18 bilateral meetings, has largely taken the form of a strong defense of the concept of sovereign equality, which necessarily goes against the structure of the existing imperial system.⁸⁰

The path forward in China’s Third Revolution will not of course be easy, and what Xi has referred to as the “principal contradiction” in the form of uneven development is evident in vast struggles taking place at all levels in the society—and in China’s external relations.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that China’s Third Revolution has been greeted by the United States and the other core capitalist powers with a combination of disbelief, shock, and anger. Unaccustomed to thinking historically and dialectically, relying on mere formalistic frames of analysis, and believing in the inevitable triumph of capitalism, the dominant ideology in the West has been one quite literally of “the end of history.”⁸¹ The idea that China’s sovereign project would eventually lead to a critical challenge to, rather than absorption within, the existing capitalist and imperialist order was thus scarcely entertained in Washington. As Kurt M. Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs in the Barack Obama administration, and Ely Ratner, Biden’s nominee for assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, wrote in “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations” in Foreign Affairs in February 2018, the notion that “U.S. power and hegemony” would fail to “mold China to the United States’ liking” was until recently completely foreign to the U.S. establishment. Even more shocking was the discovery that China’s New Era, associated with Xi, would begin to look in many ways more like the revolutionary China of Mao than the reform era of Deng.⁸²

The enraged response of the U.S. power elite to China’s undeterred pursuit of its own sovereign project has been to launch the New Cold War centered on China (also encompassing its allies like Russia and Iran). This is now seen in U.S. ruling class circles as a new war for hegemony—though minus any genuine historical analysis, which would require an honest assessment of imperialism past and present. Rather, Allison’s Destined for War, which directly influenced Biden, drew its supposed historical frame, not from a conception of the capitalist world system, or from an understanding of the imperial imposition of unequal treaties on China. Instead, it turned to a transhistorical law of conflict associated with the “realist” perspective on international relations, derived from Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, who wrote in 411 BCE: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”⁸³

In contrast, from a Marxian perspective, any meaningful assessment of hegemonic transition in the context of the modern world must be seen as a product of the internal dynamics of the capitalist world economy, which has been characterized throughout its history by the imperialism of the core directed at the periphery and by periodic wars over imperial hegemony: the only “answer” that the capitalist system is capable of providing to the question of world power.⁸⁴

Reflecting this logic, the New Cold War on China initiated by the United States seeks to draw together the leading imperial capitalist states in a global alliance aimed at binding Beijing, together with its allies and the entire periphery of the capitalist system, to the rules-based international order controlled by the triad, while at the same time keeping the Chinese economy, the motor of world economic growth, going. China, it is recognized, is too big simply to be conquered, and too big economically to be allowed to fail. What is required, therefore, according to the ruling Washington Consensus, is a counterrevolution unleashed by the reigning powers directed at reimposing a new global set of unequal treaties on China, along with the bulk of the developing world. The object is less to contain than to constrain China. Ultimately, such a strategy is to be backed up by military force. This was what Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright was to call “assertive multilateralism.” For Hillary Clinton, speaking at Chatham House on May 6, 2021, it is essential in this context for the United States to “take back the means of production” from China to ensure that the latter is kept in a perpetual subaltern state.⁸⁵

To say that these conditions puts the world’s population in an era of almost unprecedented danger would be an understatement. No New Cold War can take place without a nuclear arms race and increased danger of thermonuclear war. China, whose nuclear warheads are in the low 200s, compared to the 1,400 deployed nuclear warheads of the United States, is seeking to double its number of warheads by 2030. The United States, for its part, is currently committed to spending $500 billion on its nuclear forces alone over the next decade, $50 billion a year. This includes $100 billion on its so-called Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, a land-based nuclear missile system designed to replace the aging Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system. The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles will be capable of traveling six thousand miles with greater throw weight and accuracy, each one carrying a warhead twenty times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.⁸⁶

The world survived the Cold War. We do not know if it will survive the New Cold War. Twenty-first-century humanity is now faced, in every sphere of its existence, with an inescapable choice: “ruin or revolution.”⁸⁷

Notes

1. ↩ Thomas J. Christensen, “There Will Not Be a New Cold War,” Foreign Affairs, Mach 24, 2021. On the Council on Foreign Relations and the Biden administration, see Laurence H. Shoup, “The Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes,” Monthly Review73, no. 1 (May 2021): 1–21.
2. ↩ Christensen, “There Will Not Be a New Cold War.” Most of Christensen’s arguments rely on the unspoken assumption that a New Cold War would take exactly the same form as the old Cold War. This is of course a misnomer. History does not repeat itself in that way.
3. ↩ For a persuasive depiction of the prevailing imperialist order, see Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin, “Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism,” Monthly Review 73, no. 1 (May 2021): 22–58.
4. ↩ “How It Happened: Transcript of the U.S.-China Opening Remarks in Alaska,” NIKKEI Asia, March 19, 2021.
5. ↩ “Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement: ‘The Spirit of the Quad,’” White House, March 12, 2021.
6. ↩ “US-China Relations in the Biden-Era: A Timeline,” China Briefing, May 13, 2021.
7. ↩ “US Sanctions 24 China and Hong Kong Officials Ahead of Talks,” S. News, March 17, 2021.
8. ↩ “How It Happened.”
9. ↩ “How It Happened.”
10. ↩ “How It Happened.”
11. ↩ “How It Happened.”
12. ↩ Thomas Wright, “The U.S. and China Finally Get Real with Each Other,” Atlantic, March 21, 2021.
13. ↩ David Stilwell and Dan Negrea, “Wanted: Alliance Networks for a New Cold War,” National Interest, March 28, 2021.
14. ↩ “US-China Relations in the Biden-Era.”
15. ↩ “Biden: China’s Xi Jinping Doesn’t Have ‘a Democratic…Bone in His Body,’” USA Today, March 25, 2021.
16. ↩ “Trade War: Biden Administration Not Ready to ‘Yank’ China Tariffs, but Open to Talks,” Forbes, March 28, 2021; “Biden Has Left Trump’s China Tariffs in Place,” CNN, March 25, 2021; John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72 no. 2 (June 2020): 14–15.
17. ↩ “In Report, Biden Administration Formalizes Genocide Declaration in China,” Seattle Times, March 30, 2021. To say that charges of genocide are false is not of course to deny that repression has taken place. But the issue remains the former. Claims of Chinese “genocide” in Xinjiang constitutes one of the most extreme instances of the Big Lie propaganda technique in modern times. Although repression has been exercised by China in its Xinjiang Autonomous Region in response to terrorist activity in the region, the evidence points to a reality far removed from anything resembling genocide. See “Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation,” Qiao Collective, September 1, 2020; “The Xinjiang Genocide Determination as Agenda,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, April 27, 2021; Kim Petersen, “Does the West Repeating Claims That China Committed Genocide in Xinjiang Reify It?,” Dissident Voice, February 22, 2021. Even the Council of Foreign Relations has noted that what indications of repression there are hardly fit the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention. John B. Bellinger III, “China’s Abuse of the Uighurs: Does the Genocide Label Fit?,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 3, 2021. For an informative discussion of conditions in China today, see Keith Lamb (interviewed by Alexander Norton), “All the Questions Socialists Have About China but Were Too Afraid to Ask,” Challenge, May 24, 2021.
18. ↩ “US-China Relations in the Biden-Era.”
19. ↩ “China Slams U.S.-China Meeting as Biden Flexes New Diplomatic Muscle Against Beijing,” S. News, May 3, 2021; Peter Beinart, “Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless,” New York Times, May 5, 2021; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2018), 2; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 26.
20. ↩ “G7 Foreign and Development Ministers’ Meeting: Communiqué,” European Union External Action, May 5, 2021.
21. ↩ “U.S., Russia, China Poke Each Other at UN Security Council,” Reuters, May 7, 2021.
22. ↩ “Biden Orders Review of COVID Origins as Lab Leak Theory Debated,” Reuters, May 27, 2021; “Biden’s Asia Czar Says Era of Engagement with China Is Over,” Bloomberg, May 26, 2021.
23. ↩ “China Says US Increasing Military Activity Directed at It,” Associated Press News, April 29, 2021; “U.S. Military Activity on China’s Borders Has ‘Sharply Increased’ Since Biden Took Charge,” Morning Star, April, 6, 2021; Sam LaGrone, “S. Carrier Strike Group, Amphibious Warships Massed in South China Sea as Regional Tensions Simmer,” USNI News, April 9, 2021; Rick Rozoff, “International Law vs. Rules-Based International Order: China, Russa Call for UN Security Council Summit,” Anti-Bellum, March 23, 2021; “The US Has a Massive Presence in the Asia-Pacific,” The World, August 11, 2017.
24. ↩ John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 97–98, 144, 207, 234, 273; Joe Biden, “Why America Must Lead Again,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (2020); Stephen M. Walt, “China Wants a Rules-Based International Order, Too,” Foreign Policy, March 31, 2021. On China and the Westphalian system, see Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2017), 590.
25. ↩ “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on May 6, 2021,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, May 6, 2021.
26. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
27. ↩ Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006); Horace Campbell, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
28. ↩ “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on May 6, 2021.”
29. ↩ Matt Schiavenza, “How Humiliation Drove Modern Chinese History,” Atlantic, October 25, 2013; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 269–70. Chinese narratives do not emphasize the notion of the Century of Humiliation, since this history is well known and painful, preferring to allude to it indirectly, or referring to the Opium Wars. The emphasis is rather placed on rejuvenation. The notion of China’s Century of Humiliation is, however, a central coordinate of U.S. military discussions of China. See Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3; Major Daniel W. McLaughlin, “Rewriting the Rules: Analyzing the People’s Republic of China’s Efforts to Establish New International Rules,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs: The Department of the Air Force’s Professional Journal for America’s Priority Theater, March 8, 2021.
30. ↩ S. Stavrianos, Global Rift (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 309–32; Dong Wang, “The Discourse of Unequal Treaties in Modern China,” Pacific Affairs 76, no. 3 (2003): 399–425. It would be wrong, as Wang Hui has argued, to say that modernization in China was propelled by the shock of the Opium Wars. Rather, China was already undergoing its own modernization process. Wang Hui, The End of Revolution (London: Verso, 2009), 126–29.
31. ↩ Ironically, this imperialist notion was perhaps best expressed by George Bernard Shaw in his drafting of Fabianism and Empire: A Manifesto by the Fabian Society, where Shaw declared that Britain was correct in its imperialist wars designed to enforce “international rights of trade and travel.… If the Chinese themselves cannot establish order in our sense, the Powers must establish it for them.” George Bernard Shaw, Fabianism and Empire: A Manifesto of the Fabian Society (London: Grant Richards, 1900), 44–47.
32. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “China 2020: An Introduction,” Monthly Review 72, no. 5 (October 2020): 1–5.
33. ↩ Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap?(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 224–25.
34. ↩ Vijay Prashad and Jie Xiong, “Why Xinjiang Is Emerging as the Epicenter of the US War on China,” People’s Dispatch, April 17, 2021; “’Wipe Out China’: US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Gun-Toting Foot Soldiers for Empire,” Grayzone, March 31, 2021.
35. ↩ On the bogus, evidence-less “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” charges directed at China with respect to Xinjiang, and the relation of this to U.S. imperial grand strategy, see Max Blumenthal, “Xinjiang Shakedown: U.S. Anti-China Lobby Cashed in on ‘Forced Labor’ Campaign that Cost Uyghur Worker Their Jobs,” Grayzone, April 30, 2021; Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal, “US State Department Accusation of China ‘Genocide’ Relied on Data Abuse and Baseless Claims by Far-Right Ideologue,” Grayzone, February 18, 2021.
36. ↩ Michael Hirsh, “Why Liberal Internationalism Is Still Indispensable and Fixable,” Foreign Policy, December 5, 2012.
37. ↩ John Ikenberry, “Liberalism and Empire: Logics of Order in the American Unipolar Age,” Review of International Studies 30, no. 4 (2004): 611; Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 297; William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1972); Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
38. ↩ See “Australia’s Security and the Rules-Based Order,” Lowy Institute, March 12, 2021.
39. ↩ John Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1 (2008): 32–34.
40. ↩ Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 281.
41. ↩ Hillary Clinton (speech, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington DC, July 15, 2009), quoted in Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 325.
42. ↩ Robert F. Worth, “Can Jim Mattis Hold the Line in Trump’s War Cabinet?,” New York Times Magazine, March, 26, 2018. Trump’s policy from the start was to engage in a New Cold War with China, while reaching a détente with Russia. In the end, the bipartisan result was to attack both China and Russia, treated as a two-headed monster, but with the New Cold War with China as the principal directive of the administration. Although Mattis, as Trump’s secretary of defense, sought to weaponize the notion of the rules-based international order, Trump himself did not subscribe to the notion—and was strongly opposed not only by Mattis but also by Blinken, Biden’s now secretary of state, on that basis. Steve Bannon, Trump’s White House advisor, referring to Mattis’s presentation, reportedly stated: “if you stood up and threatened to shoot [Trump] he couldn’t say postwar rules-based international order.” “Australia’s Security and the Rules-Based Order”; Antony Blinken, “Bannon’s Vision of the World Isn’t What Makes America Great,” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2017; John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 32, 51–52, 84–85.
43. ↩ Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 247; Samuel Moyn, “Soft Sells: On Liberal Internationalism,” Nation, October 3, 2011, 43.
44. ↩ Richard Haass, “Sovereignty: Existing Rights, Evolving Responsibilities” (lecture, Georgetown University, January 4, 2003), quoted in Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 249. On Haass, see Foster, Naked Imperialism, 97–106.
45. ↩ Foster, Naked Imperialism, 115–16; Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997), 54, 93.
46. ↩ Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner, “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (2018); Nick Turse, “Does the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases,” Guernica, January 9, 2011; “US General Warns China Is Actively Seeking to Set Up an Atlantic Naval Base,” The Hill, May 7, 2021; John Reed, “Surrounded: How the U.S. Is Encircling China with Military Bases,” Foreign Policy, August 20, 2013; Economy, The Third Revolution, 213.
47. ↩ Ikenberry has recently argued that the new opening to so-called humanitarian interventions is itself built on the Westphalian system of the sovereignty of states. But this goes against the widespread sense that these interventions, which have led to continual warfare under U.S. auspices since the 1990s, constitute in fact a fundamental change in the international order, identified with the notion of the rules-based international order. Perhaps because of the conflict that this poses for Ikenberry’s own conception of liberal internationalism, he has, in his latest work, largely abandoned the term rules-based order that he himself did so much to promote, and that is now associated with a system of liberal-interventionist hegemony enforced by the United States and its allies. Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy, 298.
48. ↩ Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy, 245, 253, 276.
49. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 266–67, 672–73. Compare Samir Amin, “China 2013,” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013): 25. On the Taiping Revolution, see John Newsinger, “The Taiping Peasant Revolt,” Monthly Review 52, no. 5 (October 2000): 29–37.
50. ↩ Marx was perhaps the foremost European critic of the Second Opium War. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 112–25, 212–25, 231–49; Samir Amin, “Forerunners of the Contemporary World: The Paris Commune (1871) and the Taiping Revolution (1851–1864),” International Critical Thought 3, no. 2 (2013): 159–64.
51. ↩ Amin, “China 2013,” 25–26.
52. ↩ Mao Zedong, “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!” (opening address, First Plenary Session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultive Conference, Beijing, September 21, 1949), available at china.usc.edu.
53. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 37; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 14; Allison, Destined for War, 122.
54. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 6–22; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 269.
55. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 6, 20, 25, 417–24.
56. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
57. ↩ Vijay Prashad, “The Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism,” MR Online, August 10, 2020.
58. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 590.
59. ↩ Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West,” 26; “What Does It Mean to Eradicate Absolute Poverty?,” Qiao Collective, December 3, 2020; “China’s Economic Development in 40 Years,” China Daily, accessed June 4, 2021.
60. ↩ Amin, “China 2013,” 14–28; Foster, “China 2020”; Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century(London: Verso, 2016), 140; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 311–17, 352–58. Xi indicates in the foregoing pages his admiration for Robert Heilbroner’s Marxism: For and Against (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). See also Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 96–98.
61. ↩ Amin, “China 2013,” 26; Paul M. Sweezy, “Post-Revolutionary Society,” Monthly Review 32, no. 6 (November 1980). China’s political-economic system is sometimes referred to as “state capitalist.” Amin adopted this term, for the sake of argument, as a useful but somewhat misleading designation, recognizing that it tended to oversimplify. For Amin, state capitalism was a necessary phase in the development of socialism for developing countries. What mattered was the particular character of state capitalism, which in the Chinese case was seen as part of the long route to socialism. More recently, the “state capitalist” designation for China has been embraced by the Council on Foreign Relations. Others, such as Lowell Dittmer, an East Asian specialist at Berkeley, refer to China’s present reality, particularly in the Xi era, as “an adoptive Chinese form of state socialism, with limited (and closely monitored) capitalist characteristics.” Neither characterization quite captures the complexity of the current Chinese social formation, which the Chinese leadership refer to as a society in the primary stage of socialism. See Amin, “China 2013,” 20; Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris, War by Other Means (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 36–37; Lowell Dittmer, “Transformation of the Chinese Political Economy in the New Era,” in China’s Political Economy in the Xi Jinping Epoch, ed. Lowell Ditmer (Singapore: World Scientifixa Publishing, 2021), 6–8.
62. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 155–83; Intan Suwandi, Value Chains (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 42–67.
63. ↩ Peter A. Petri, “Technological Rivalry,” in China 2049, ed. David Dollar, Yiping Huang, and Yang Yao (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2020), 278–301; Amin, “China 2013,” 24, 27.
64. ↩ Klaus Schwab, Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Currency, 2018); “Comparing United States and China by Economy,” Statistical Times, May 15, 2021; “How It Happened”; Xi, The Governance of China, 523.
65. ↩ Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000), 101–11. For China, its historic territory includes not only Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, but also islands in the South China Sea that were long recognized as belonging to China. See “Historical Support for China’s South China Sea Territorial Stance,” Maritime Executive, August 10, 2019.
66. ↩ David Sacks, “Countries in China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” Council on Foreign Relations, May 24, 2021; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 315–24; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 544–49.
67. ↩ “How It Happened.”
68. ↩ “Reported Cases and Deaths by Country or Territory,” COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, Worldometer, accessed June 1, 2021.
69. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 594.
70. ↩ Wang Hui, “Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory: Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday,” Reading the China Dream (blog), April 21, 2020.
71. ↩ “Why China’s Vaccine Internationalism Matters,” Qiao Collective, April 8, 2021 [updated June 2021]; “EU Vaccine Exports Outstrip Number of Shots Given to Its Own People,” Bloomberg, April 14, 2021; “EU Vaccines: Millions Exported to Rich Countries, Less to Poor Countries,” Brussels Times, May 8, 2021.
72. ↩ “US Secretary of State Antony Blinken Talks to FT Editor Roula Khalaf,” Financial Times, May 4, 2021; “State of the Order: Assessing February 2021,” Atlantic Council, March 16, 2021.
73. ↩ “China Close to Producing 5 Billion COVID-19 Vaccine Doses Per Year,” CGTN, April 21, 2021.
74. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 12.
75. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 12.
76. ↩ Economy, The Third Revolution, 10–12.
77. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20. The translation in the text here follows an earlier official translation of Xi’s speech, which used the term principal contradiction rather than principal challenge. See Xi, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” Xinhua, October 18, 2017, 16.
78. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20; “What We Know About China’s ‘Dual Circulation’ Economic Strategy,” Reuters, September 15, 2020.
79. ↩ Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 13, 79. In recent years, it has been frequently charged by Western power elites and media that China has instituted predatory loans in Africa and other developing countries, designed to acquire assets from these countries. However, a study at Johns Hopkins University showed the opposite to be true, demonstrating that China is more lenient with respect to lending and conditionalities in interactions with developing countries than Western financial institutions and governments. See Kevin Acker, Deborah Brautigam, and Yufan Huang, “Debt Relief with Chinese Characteristics” (working paper no. 39, China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, June 2020).
80. ↩ “How It Happened.”
81. ↩ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
82. ↩ Campbell and Ratner, “The China Reckoning”; Orville Schell, “Crackdown in China: Worse and Worse,” New York Times Magazine, April 21, 2016.
83. ↩ Allison, Destined for War, vii.
84. ↩ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37–46.
85. ↩ Rick Rozoff, “NATO Headquarters: Foreign Ministers of One Billion People Throw Down Gauntlet to China, Russia,” Anti-Bellum, March 24, 2021; Rozoff, “International Law vs. Rules-Based International Order”; Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff, 54, 93; Clinton quoted in Danny Haiphong, “Off the Rails: New Report by Coorporate-Funded Think-Tank Reveals How Profit-Driven Moteives Drive New Cold War Against China,” Covert Action Magazine, June 5, 2021.
86. ↩ Jeremy Kuzmarov, “What’s Behind the Biden Administration’s New $100 Billion Nuclear Missile System?,” Covert Action, March 9, 2021; “Defense Primer: Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) Capabilities,” Congressional Research Service, November 10, 2020.
87. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 153.