August 4, 2023
By Stephen Gowans
I once bet a friend that if he turned up each card in a 52 playing card deck that I could identify all 13 hearts before he turned them up. He thought this impossible and took the bet. He lost. My oracular feat, seemingly brilliant, is only brilliant in the retelling. Yes, it’s true, I accurately predicted when all 13 hearts would turn up, but I did so by guessing that each card was a heart. In effect, I predicted all 52 of the 13 hearts.
Some economists have made a name for themselves by accurately predicting every recession. But they’ve done so by predicting all 95 of the last 10 recessions. It’s easy to predict an event, if your prediction is always that the event will happen.
Some anti-war activists play the same game. They’ve raised the alarm about 73 of the last two world wars. Like religious fanatics who prate endlessly about an imminent Armageddon, fanatics of the imagined ‘peace movement’ keep telling us that WWIII is just around the corner. The reality, however, is that world wars are rare. But if you keep saying a world war is on the horizon, you might eventually get it right.
The hosts of peace movement podcasts and radio shows often portray every minor incident or escalation of tension between world powers as a prelude to a new world war, as if war is the sole means by which countries resolve their differences, and that if differences exist, they must surely lead to a cataclysmic conflict. The Communist Party of Canada has a penchant for including with every statement it issues on war and military affairs a photograph of a mushroom cloud. If the alarmist’s view of drug use is that marijuana is a gateway to heroin, the party’s view is that every outbreak of tension and every dollar spent on arms is a direct path to the Gotterdammerung. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists keeps moving its clock ever closer to midnight. Like the boy who cried wolf, the fear-mongers who sound these alarms are now mostly ignored—for good reason.
Sometimes alarmism has an agenda, personal, often political, usually both. There are two reasons why Friend of Any US-Enemy, Danny Haiphong—to use an example of one antiwar alarmist—might have an irresistible urge to sound tocsins. The first is to attract followers to his social media, a source of personal income, and possibly Danny’s main source. The horror of an impending world war is far more likely to arouse interest, and bring in dollars, than a discussion of why it’s unlikely that tensions between the United States and China will degenerate into open war. Sensational—and simple-minded—content of the kind Danny specializes in, sells subscriptions and generates YouTube advertising revenue. Secondly, Danny is keen to mobilize opposition at home to US foreign policy measures aimed at advancing US interests against those of China and Russia. As an unthinking partisan of any country that is engaged in rivalry with the United States, Danny works hard at filling shoes vacated in the last true world war by Tokyo Rose. His game plan is simple. Depict all US measures that are hostile to Chinese and Russian interests as the road to Golgotha.
No one knows whether tensions between Washington and Moscow and Washington and Beijing will escalate into a world war. It’s possible they will, but there are plenty of cogent reasons to believe they won’t. For one thing, periods of tension among competing powers happen often; world wars don’t. For another, nuclear weapons have significantly altered the cost-benefit ratio of major war. Moreover, as the war in Ukraine has amply demonstrated, neither the United States and its allies, nor Russia or China, have the industrial base to produce the sinews of a major war. This isn’t to say that a world war won’t happen, or that factories to produce tanks and artillery shells won’t be built, only that people who make predictions about recessions and world wars—and those who believe them—vastly overestimate the power of mere mortals to foresee the future. However, some things can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy. One is that economists are often wrong. The other is that world war alarmists are almost always wrong.
Our attraction to sensationalism and the alarmists’ exploitation of it, have created a false sense of insecurity. Danny’s warning that US actions are inevitably leading to Armageddon are no different from the alarmist warnings of his propagandist counterparts on the other side, who labor diligently to stoke fears of North Korea and its nuclear weapons. In both cases, political (and personal) agendas motivate what is essentially an exercise in self-promotion and political propaganda.
It’s not only people like Danny Haiphong, crying wolf on behalf of major powers, who raise false alarms, it’s also the major powers themselves. Alarmism about war is part of the psychological warfare rival powers use against each other. Nation-states can threaten war to announce their red lines, or to bluff about where their red lines really lie. Putin and Medvedev continually remind Washington that Russia is a nuclear-armed power (warnings that incomprehensibly led the Communist Party of Canada to raise an alarm about NATO, not Russia, pushing the world down the path to nuclear Armageddon.) Moscow’s reminders of Russia’s formidable nuclear arsenal—the world’s largest—are a warning to the United States not to push Russia too far. The warning, however, does not necessarily mean that Russia intends to use its nuclear weapons, or that the United States has any intention of breaching Russia’s red lines.
Wars, of course, do happen, even if less frequently than the alarmists’ predictions. They happen because humanity is divided into nation-states, and nation-states have differences. The most basic thing that can be done to eliminate wars between nation-states is to eliminate nation-states. The aim of communists, in Lenin’s view, was to eliminate war by eliminating its causes: the division of humanity into nation-states and the division of humanity into classes.
Differences between nation-states arise for many reasons. The key to reducing the likelihood of inter-state violence is to reduce the number of reasons nation-states can have differences about which they may be inclined to resolve through the use of violence. One major source of tension is economic rivalry. Indeed, economic competition lies at the very heart of the tension between the United States and China. It also lies at the root, though less conspicuously, of the conflict between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine. As an integral part of the Russian economy, Ukraine makes Russia—and the business people at the summit of the Russian economy—more prosperous. Russia without Ukraine means a weaker Russia, less capable of competing with the United States strategically, which in turn means that Russian businesses are less capable of vying with US businesses for profit-making opportunities around the world. There are, then, compelling reasons why Moscow favors a Ukraine within its economic orbit and Washington favors one outside of Russia’s ambit.
If the World War III-alarmists are truly interested in averting the possibility of a major war, they should work towards reducing the economic rivalry that often leads nation-states to war. One way is to take up the socialist project of promoting an economic system that isn’t based on two imperatives of capitalism that exacerbate inter-state tensions: (1) competition among capitalist enterprises and therefore among the capitalist states that represent them on the world stage; (2) the necessity for capitalist enterprises to nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and set up connections everywhere and therefore the necessity of capitalist states to ensure that the enterprises they represent are free to scour the world for profit-making opportunities.
Marx said of capitalists that each threatens the existence of the other; that to counter the threat, each capitalist must expand, and that, therefore, the necessity of self-preservation lies at the heart of capitalist expansion.
The same logic applies to nation-states. Each nation-state is a threat to every other nation-state (or, as Voltaire put it, to be a patriot is to be an enemy to the rest of humanity); to counter the threat, nation-states seek to expand their economic, political, military, and ideological powers, either directly, or through alliance with other powers. Thus, the capitalist-driven necessity of self-preservation lies at the heart of rivalry among nation-states.
None of this resonates for the World War III-alarmists. In their view, the drive to war is an imminent characteristic, not of rivalry among nation-states for economic advantage in an anarchic international order, but finds its source instead in an evil inherent in one nation-state alone, the United States. China and Russia, though capitalist societies themselves, have been liberated by the alarmists’ magical thinking from the capitalist imperatives that hold US society in thrall and drive it to try to prevail in economic competition with other states by using violence. We’re asked to believe—despite Russia’s attempt by means of war to topple the government in Ukraine, and despite Russia’s ongoing violent predations against its neighbor— that the United States is the only state that uses force to achieve its goals.
If Marxists of the past looked for the origins of war in economics, the World War III-alarmists look for the origins of war in a bestiary. The bestiary contains ‘the other’—the ‘other’ being the beastly rival of the heroic power with which one identifies. For the alarmists, the heroic powers, China and Russia, are also, like the ‘beast’, bourgeois powers to be sure, but ones whose capitalist ethos must be covered up lest one get it into their head to take up the Marxist view that inter-state conflict is often inter-capitalist rivalry for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities, and strategic advantage.
So it is that from the day Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, an infantry of propagandists has spun the silly tale that capitalist Russia is the socialist Soviet Union redivivus. Honestly, I don’t know whether these people are morons or just scoundrels prepared to utter any sort of nonsense to rally the credulous to their side. Or is it simply a reflection of a human frailty expressed in the observation that if seeing is believing it’s also true that believing is seeing? If you desperately want to believe that Russia is a heroic state, you see it as the continuation of the USSR. If you want to believe that socialism has a great power as its champion, you see China as socialist.
Meanwhile, the self-declared pro-Beijing propagandists who make up The Friends of Socialist China, have taken on the self-defeating task of proving that China, home to an almost complete list of the world’s largest capitalist enterprises—a country where most production is in private hands, and even where it isn’t, is still based on the appropriation of the surplus produced by commodified labor—that this China, appearances aside, is really a socialist state. How do they prove this? They don’t. Indeed, they don’t even try. As Tesla’s Elon Musk, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, and Apple’s Tim Cook traipse to China to be wined and dined by Xi Jinping and showered with tax breaks, subsidies, and access to cheap commodified labor, the Friends merely say that China has lifted numberless people out of poverty, therefore, it is socialist. By this definition, the United States, whose government also wines and dines Musk, Dimon, and Cook, is a socialist state and always has been, for its people are considerably richer than the Chinese. Indeed, the United States, whose millions were raised out of poverty long ago and to a spectacular height, must be uber-socialist.
To shift the discussion of China and socialism from the field of fantasy to one of sober reflection, a case can be made that China is not socialist now, but is being guided toward socialism by the visible hand of a communist party that aspires to achieve socialism at some time in the future, but must use capitalism to build the means of production to a high degree first. And so, Beijing caters to capitalists in order to build the economy of plenty it requires as the basis of a socialist economy of plenty, one to be embedded in a state that is technologically and militarily advanced enough to survive as a socialist state in the face of the anti-socialist hostility of the United States. Fair enough. But this still presents a problem. No matter how genuine the CPC’s commitment to socialism is, China remains today a capitalist society, transiting the bridge to socialism, but not over it, shaped by the same imperatives of profit-making, exploitation of labor, and capital accumulation that shape every other capitalist society. China can’t opt out of labor exploitation, forebear from competing for markets, or decline to secure access to vital raw materials that can only be obtained abroad, without opting out of the bridge it says it’s crossing to socialism. When we talk of conflict between the United States and China it is therefore perfectly legitimate to talk of competition between two states driven by common capitalist imperatives. The fact that Beijing may aspire at some point to achieve a socialist future for China, doesn’t mean that its interaction with the world today is not capitalist driven; it very much is.
How do we know that the Communist Party of China is really leading Chinese society over a capitalist bridge to socialism, and that China’s future is not just one of more capitalism? We don’t, and won’t, unless China actually arrives at the promised land it says is its eventual destination. Is there reason to doubt that the CPC has really set China on the path to socialism? Beijing’s goals—rebuilding China as a great empire, or ‘civilization’ in the preferred language of China-boosters; overcoming China’s century of humiliation; promoting the spread of Confucianism—appear to be more nationalist than Marxist. Socialism with Chinese characteristics (if China were truly socialist, the modifier ‘with Chinese characteristics’ would be unnecessary) turns out to be the grafting of Marxism onto China’s very un-Marxist culture, and not the other way around. The CPC has taken all recognizable aspects of Marxism and drown them in a sea of Sinicism and capitalist development. Only a Marxist lexicon remains, but the meanings of its words have been turned on their heads. The question of whether Beijing genuinely foresees a future of socialism for China, or simply employs an empty Marxist rhetoric to suggest a continuity between Mao and the China of today, is sub judice. For the moment, however, the reality is that China is a capitalist society and not a socialist one, a fact the CPC, unlike the Friends of Socialist China, concedes. If capitalism pushes nation-states to war, or at least makes war between them more likely, then it is capitalism that is making war between China and the United States more likely. It’s not some flaw of US society, an inborn tendency to worship Mars that has somehow failed to find purchase in Chinese and Russian society, that fuels tension among these states.
To be sure, capitalist competition is not the only catalyst for war. If its citizens are to live at a high level of prosperity, befitting a socialism of plenty, a socialist China of the future, if one emerges, will need to secure access to vital resources it does not have at home. The necessity of obtaining inputs indispensable to the provision of a socialist society of plenty may drive China to employ the threatened or actual use of violence against other states that have the inputs China requires but not the will to furnish them on agreeable terms. Indeed, we can glimpse a hint of this already, in China’s attempt to bully its South China Sea neighbors into acceding to the nine-dash line marking out China’s claim to the lion’s share of the sea’s territory and resources. Socialism in a world in which humanity remains divided into nation-states may still be a world of inter-state violence.
It may be argued that inasmuch as the United States possesses the means of violence to a far greater degree than either Russia or China, that Washington is more likely to use violence to try to get its way in competitions with its rivals. This is indeed true. But the United States can go only so far. If North Korea, with its rudimentary nuclear arsenal can deter the United States from giving it a bloody nose—the term for a limited military strike on the East Asian country considered and later dismissed by the Trump administration—imagine how much more consequential in staying US violence are the much more powerful nuclear deterrents of Russia and China.
The possession by Beijing and Moscow of a sizeable military nuclear apparatus limits US freedom of action. Moreover, the fact that the United States possesses a greater capability for the use of violence to win competitions with its rivals, does not mean that its rivals are not driven by the same capitalist competition or won’t use violence themselves when they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. Circumstances favor the United States at the moment, but circumstances may change and Beijing may, in the future, find itself with a greater means of violence than Washington. States will use whatever advantage lies at hand to win competitions. There is no reason to believe that were it the militarily superior state, that China wouldn’t behave as the United States does today. The cause of war is not to be found in the character of nation-states themselves, but in the character of the international and capitalist systems and the competition among states that is inherent in these systems.
Additionally, it should be pointed out that the underdog status of China and Russia in relation to the United States does not mean that either state is exempt from the capitalist imperatives that drive the United States. US rivals have simply been dealt a less favorable hand in the capitalist game, but the game is the same for all. Dealt a hand as favorable as that of the United States, China and Russia would behave no differently than their more powerful rival conducts itself today. Anyone who believes that a better hand for China and Russia, and a less favorable one for the United States, will change the nature of the game—this is the hope of the apostles of multipolarity—is in the grips of a delusion. The game is the problem; not the fact that one player has been dealt, by geography, history, and sheer contingency, the better cards.
To return to the World War III-alarmists. The world may be heading to World War III, or it may not be, just as the US economy may be heading for a soft landing, or not. We can speculate, but no one, no matter the depth of their prognostic hubris, has any reliable insight into whether the present is pregnant with a world war. Danny Haiphong, and propagandists like him, haven’t a clue whether world war is imminent, but they would like others to believe it is, and that, more significantly, owing to the actions of their hated United States in relation to their beloved Russia and cherished China, that world war lurks menacingly on the horizon. Danny and his fellow spin artists treasure Russia and prize China, and at the same time, revile the United States, because in the great contest for opportunities to exploit labor, the former are underdogs and the latter is not. Love of the bourgeois underdog is not a sound foundation for politics—and certainly not for a socialist politics—any more than is love of the bourgeois top-dog.
Seven years before the outbreak of the first real world war, a resolution on militarism and international conflict, was prepared for the Second International by August Bebel, with amendments by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov. The resolution clearly lays out the Marxist perspective on matters that resonate strongly today.
“Wars between capitalist states are as a rule the consequence of their competition in the world market, for every state is eager not only to preserve its markets but also to conquer new ones, principally by the subjugation of foreign nations and the confiscation of their lands.”
“The outbreak of wars is further promoted by the national prejudices systematically cultivated in the interest of the ruling classes, in order to divert the masses of the proletariat from their class duties and international solidarity.”
“In case war should break out … [socialists] shall be bound to intervene for its speedy termination, and to employ all their forces to use the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”
Eight years later, one year into the war, with most socialists having renounced their pledge of proletarian solidarity and aligned with one or other of the bourgeois powers in the conflict, Lenin was compelled to issue a reminder to socialists—one that is as relevant today as it was then. “It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robber to rob the older and fatter bandits, but the socialists must utilize the struggle between the bandits to overthrow them all.”
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