Sup comrades,
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve heard more and more comrades posit something along the lines of: Multipolarity is a material reality resulting from increased levels of global socialization of production.
I think it’s an interesting explanation, because it leads us away from the vague, normative position many liberals and right-wingers are currently adopting when talking about multipolarity.
But here’s my question/issue: On the regional/national level increased socialization of production leads to greater interdependencies between regions, industries, etc. Okay, we’re seeing this on a global scale too. Problem is, from my understanding, these interdependencies and other mechanisms led to increasing levels of centralization of capital. Arguably we’ve seen this over time leading to the large, centralized modern bourgeois nation-states and monopolies. So the question is - how would this result in anything but unipolarity over time?
In fact, we’ve seen this happen in the first half of the 20th century. Centralization on the national level led to the development of multiple competing “poles” before WW1, then WW2 and then after 1945. However, these, as argued, developed exactly one thing: unipolarity after 1990 and up until today (questionable).
So how does an increase in socialization of production globally explain a move away from unipolarity and centralization of capital and power?
Is the contradiction between socialized production vs privatized appropriation that, as marxism argues, brings forth the necessity of socialization of ownership on the regional/national level sufficient to explain this phenomenon globally or what am I missing?
I think the biggest difference between now and the 1900s is that this time, one of the geopolitical poles isn’t competing. That is, it’s not invading, not inciting revolutions, not creating monopolies, not making countries pick a side. Plus it has the relative security of having basically the entire planet relying on its production, especially the other poles.
I’d argue that the multipolarity of the past was destroyed by the profit drive of capitalist superpowers. But there’s no reason why socialist multipolarity would lead to the same global infighting.
Capitalists rely on uni-polarity to maintain peace and order because they focus on conflicts, coercion, deception, and plunder of the majority of the 99% by the rich 1%. Mutual cooperation for mutual benefit could only exist between a very small minority in Capitalism. Socialism emphasis cooperative relation by the people so peace and order is possible in Socialist multi-polarity.