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 do not know what you mean by ‘socialization’ of production. If you meant democratization or decentralization of production, then it is becoming possible with the rising power of Russia under Populist Putin and China under Xi Jinping which allow former European colonies to gain development through other means than bootlicking foreign free riders with imperialist agenda. Donald Trump also did move America away from the American government’s monopoly over the global public sector with the conflict between conservative elites and metrpolitan elites in the USA.
Also, the current centralized modern bourgeois nation-states arise from free riding and forced dependencies on states and institutions from Western Europeans and Western European emigrants who use the very government intervention by Western European emigrants that they complained about to oppose government by colored people; I do not see how the centralization of capital is from socialization as much as it has to do with authoritarianism by Western European diaspora.
The Western European empires and countries of Western European emigrants gain their success through the plunder of resource, industrial technology, fruit of the labor by colored people, and horticultural skills from enslaved colored people that allow them to become great power in the global scale. They then maintain their uni-polarity through the destruction of the civilization of the colonized people and the credit thief of what is left of the civilization from the people that they colonized.
Going to go on a limb and say they meant socialisation of production in a Marxist sense. As in, it takes many people to produce things, hence the separation of labor, etc.
As the other comrade said, I mean socialization of production in the Marxist sense - the historical process of production developing from an individual activity (mostly isolated, small scale subsistence under feudalism) into a social, increasingly collective process. The production of any given good now becomes a social act. As they said, it emerges from and demands division of labour and equally brings forth and necessitates increasingly centralized education, wide-spread infrastructure, longer and longer supply chains, thus creating and being dependant upon increasing connection and interdependencies between regions, etc etc.
I mean but authoritarianism emerging from what? From changes in the base structure, namely the socialization of production which creates the bourgeoisie itself and subsequently the need for and the means to an “authoritarianism of the Western European bourgeoisie”.
Sure, but that’s not the point I’m questioning in OP. The question is which changes in the base structure of global imperialism create a multipolar world and why we’re seeing a decentralization of capital when the common understanding of the socialization of production is that it leads to centralization of capital.