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’d suggest that we’ve just about reached the limits of imperialism. It will be with us for some time, still. But it cannot sustain itself for much longer. Not to say it’s decline will be smooth or pretty. And it could always be rebuilt, although the planet would likely not survive it.
Capitalism is cracking apart under the weight of it’s own contradictions. Such as the US having the power to instruct Europe to deindustrualise and implode, backfiring and strengthening the Ruble, etc. This would not have been possible even a hundred years ago – Britain, then, for example, might have had the power to force it’s dependencies to destroy themselves, but not multiple advanced capitalist core states all at the same time. No state, back then, could have done to the whole of Europe what the US has done this last year.
The difference between now and earlier epochs is that today there are powerful socialist forces in place to prevent a return to unipolarity (once multipolarity is ‘complete’). Socialist thought is also more popular than it might seem according to ‘official’ sources. We’ll soon be at the stage where liberalism not only cannot offer solutions but cannot give the appearance of offering solutions, either.
Once the world fully pivots away from the US and the global north loses easy access to all the things that make living relatively affordable, even liberals in the global north will have to start answering the question of how to sustain their quality of life without socialism. The stark reality will start to destroy the Anglo-European exceptionalism that goes hand in hand with chauvinism.
This is an optimistic assessment, I admit. But it’s either this, nuclear war, or climate catastrophe. And we probably aren’t surviving the latter two, so there’s no point worrying about what that would look like (unless we’re worrying about it so as to prevent it).
Capitalism could still exist in the USA even after they lose their free riding privilege as long as they make the USA into a puppet state of another powerful country like Russia or China.
I can see it continuing almost everywhere for another few decades, maybe even a century. But things will improve so long as the emerging socialist states prevent capitalism from turning into imperialism again as it declines.