The US National Security Strategy 2025: Promoting US Billionaires, Stupefying the Working Class, Exploiting Allies, Stifling China

7 December 2025

“The rich, in particular, are necessarily interested to support that order of things which can alone secure them in the possession of their own advantages.”—Adam Smith

“The enemies of the working class travel in private jets, not migrant dinghies.”—Zarah Sultana

By Stephen Gowans

US National Security Strategy documents are expressions of the interests of the world’s richest country in securing that order of things which can alone secure it in the possession of its own advantages. But more specifically, I think it is fair to say, considering that the ultrarich wield outsize influence over the US state, that US strategy is aimed at securing the advantages of the rich themselves directly, and all other Americans incidentally, if at all. Moreover, to the extent the rich are made richer by the Strategy, it may only be a result of the poor being made poorer. In the view of Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many”; of Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs: “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor”; and Karl Marx in Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.” In line with these arguments, we might expect that in proportion as the Strategy makes the lives of the rich richer, it will make those of the working class meaner.

The National Security Strategy 2025 is a plan, as Trump’s White House puts it, “To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.” We can be sure that when the White House says “America” its means “America’s billionaires,” which the administration includes, in greater numbers than any other in history, and which is openly and unapologetically backed by billionaires and is ardently committed to securing them in the possession of their own advantages, through numerous blessings, from munificent tax cuts, to deregulation, to ample opportunities for corruption.

There are at least a dozen billionaires in Trump’s cabinet and among those appointed to major roles. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Tom Barrack, Trump envoys working on key foreign policy issues, are confirmed billionaires, as is commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is a near billionaire. David Sacks, a near billionaire, oversees AI and crypto, the industries in which he has accumulated his wealth. [See note 1 below.] The world’s richest people contributed to Trump’s re-election campaign, transition, and inauguration.

“There were at least 17 billionaires in attendance at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, collectively worth more than $1 trillion”, according to The Washington Post. They included the world’s top three wealthiest people: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who “took places of honor next to Trump’s family.” Seated nearby were several other billionaires, including Louis Vuitton, the world’s fifth richest person, “Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Marvel owner Isaac Perlmutter and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.”

Billionaires back Trump because he is, himself, a billionaire—the first ever to hold the office of president; because he has loaded his cabinet with their class brethren, other billionaires, who are sure to see the world as they see it and favor their interests; and because he unapologetically caters to billionaire interests. He does so at the expense of the polloi, while aiming to maintain political and social stability by persuading a substantial fraction of the White Christian working class, that he is, notwithstanding the reality, their champion.

This isn’t to say that a cabinet with fewer or no billionaires, or even completely devoid of people of wealth, would produce a national security strategy that is any less ardently committed to securing an order of things that delivers enormous advantages to the wealthy as its priority. Politicians, whether wealthy or not, are dependent on the rich for campaign contributions and post-political-career opportunities. They naturally try to stay on the good side of the rich, and are greatly inclined to lick their boots, since servility to the wealthy eases the road to office.

In addition, the wealthy exercise an enormous sway over public opinion through their control of mass media, think-tanks, public relations firms, and the research agenda at universities. More importantly, their ownership and control of the economy give them the power to make or break governments. The only way governments can act against the interests of the wealthy and for the interests of the working class is by taking capital, enterprises, and investment decisions out of private hands and bringing them under democratic control. What this means is that capitalist control of the state is over-determined. It is affected by the participation of members of the capitalist class in key positions of the state and the class’s control of the ideological environment. But it is also affected by the influence the class exercises through its ownership and control of the economy—a power which allows it to cripple governments that fail to promote its agenda by ceasing to invest or by moving capital to other countries. No government wants to lose major investments and will kowtow to investor needs to keep capital flowing. The abundance of billionaires in the Trump administrations is an instance of the wealthy exercising direct control over public policy and the day-to-day decision-making of the White House, but even without billionaires in the cabinet, the manifold indirect influences of the wealthy class on government constrains the state to pursue capitalist class interests.

The Biden administration had far fewer billionaires and people of significant wealth, but its key players were members of billionaire-controlled and -directed think-tanks, such as The Council on Foreign Relations, and were thus loyal servants of the US capitalist class. The Biden administration’s national security strategy was no less committed to defending and promoting US billionaire interests around the world than the Trump administration’s is, though the means of accomplishing this goal and the justifications were not wholly the same. For example, the Trump White House is quite open about using its security strategy to pursue profit-making opportunities for US investors and businesses, while the Biden administration cloaked its pursuit of advantages for US billionaires and corporate America in the language of defending and promoting democracy. The New York Times, virtually the house organ of the Democratic Party, complained in a headline that “Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy“, an allusion to the allegedly loftier aims of the Biden administration’s national security strategy. In 1966, the songwriter Phil Ochs wrote a song about US national security strategy titled Cops of the World, which contained a line that perfectly anticipated the Biden administration’s approach to presenting how it would use the power of the US military to defend and promote the welfare of the US business class. The line was “the name for our profits is democracy.”

Analysis of the Security Strategy

The National Security Strategy 2025 has, for me, five salient themes.

#1. Washington will prevent any rival state from doing the following in the Western Hemisphere:

Positioning military “forces or other threatening capabilities”; and
Owning or controlling assets that Washington deems strategically vital.

While the document doesn’t spell out who the rival states are, there can be little doubt that they are China and Russia. And while the Strategy doesn’t define what strategically vital assets are, they likely include the Panama Canal and Greenland, at minimum. The White House has titled the pledge to keep competitors out of the Western Hemisphere, The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by President James Monroe in 1823, warned European powers that the United States would not allow them to acquire new territory in the Western Hemisphere or form alliances with hemispheric states. In exchange, the United States would stay out of Europe’s wars.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt updated the doctrine with his eponymous Roosevelt Corollary. Washington, the president warned, would intervene in any country in the Western Hemisphere that engaged in conduct of which it did not approve. Roosevelt’s corollary was a statement of the principle of suprema lex regis voluntas—the supreme law of the Western Hemisphere is the will of the US government, and, I would add, as a matter of sociology, the class that dominates it. It was also, obviously, a statement of informal empire.

Trump’s corollary is not so much a corollary as a restatement of the Monroe Doctrine, aimed not at Europe, as the original was, but at Russia and China.

#2. Washington will continue to engage in a struggle with China over control of sea lanes in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The struggle, from Washington’s point of view, will pivot on preventing Beijing from controlling Taiwan.

Washington, along with its court journalists and intellectuals, is fond of pointing out how much of the world’s shipping flows through the South China Sea. “Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea,” the document declares, disruptions would have “major implications for the U.S. economy.” Were “a potentially hostile power to impose a toll system over one of the world’s most vital lanes of commerce or—worse—to close and reopen it at will,” the consequences could be catastrophic for the US economy. Hence, no US rival (i.e., China) must be allowed to control this body of water.

The tendentious character of the Strategy’s argument is evident if we consider that much of the shipping that passes through the South China Sea flows to and from China. If any state has an interest in keeping the South China Sea open, China is it. Beijing’s planners can reasonably fear that the United States, a competitor, could impose a toll system over this vital (to China) lane of commerce or—worse—close and reopen it at will, severing China’s imports of oil from the Persian Gulf, impeding the flow of raw materials from around the globe, and blocking its exports to foreign markets.

The United States controls the sea lanes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would like to maintain its control, not because US planners are worried about threats to the US economy if control slips away, but because exercising control over the shipping lanes means leverage over China. US control of critical commercial maritime routes comports with a key goal of the Strategy: “To prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.” A China that could be blockaded at any moment by the US military, is not likely to grow large enough to surpass the United States as the world’s supreme economic and military power. Hence, Washington has an interest in projecting prepotent military power into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At the same time, China would like to control the very same maritime routes to protect its own economy from US blockade, disruption, and blackmail, and very likely as well, to gain power over its regional rivals, India and Japan.

The key to this struggle is Taiwan. The Chinese navy is hemmed in by a series of islands, running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines to the Malay Peninsula, known as the First Island Chain. The islands are under the influence and control, to various degrees, of the US military. The weakest link in the chain is Taiwan. There is no meaningful US military presence on the island, and Beijing claims it as its own territory, but has yet to bring the island under its control. If Beijing achieves its ambition to recover Taiwan, it will be able to more readily project its navy into the South China and Philippine Seas, and from there to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, reducing the chances the US Navy will be able to enforce a blockade.

To keep Taiwan out of Beijing’s hands, Washington proposes to:

Preserve “military overmatch”, that is, to deploy greater firepower to the Indo-Pacific region than China can match.
Increase the US military presence in the First Island Chain.
Press Japan, South Korea, and Australia to increase their contributions of military equipment and personnel to US-led alliances in order to strengthen the US effort to keep China bottled up within the First Island Chain.

The plan is, thus, in large part, the outline of a program to use the US military to obtain an ongoing commercial advantage over China.

#3. Washington will pressure its allies to increase their contributions to the maintenance of US global military supremacy. The Strategy argues that the United States counts among its “many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.” It goes on to note that “President Trump has set a new global standard with the Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and which our NATO allies have endorsed and must now meet.”

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Washington is not asking its allies to assume primary responsibility for their regions. Japan, South Korea, and Australia, for example, are not being asked to defend themselves, or lead military efforts, against China. Instead, they are being asked to spend more money on arms (which, owing to the size of the US arms industry means much of the higher military spending will benefit US merchants of death) and on personnel, all of which are part of formal military alliances under the control of the United States. Ancient Roman armies were comprised of legionaries (soldiers from Rome) and auxiliaries (soldiers from allied states) under the command of a Roman general. When allies committed more soldiers, Rome grew in strength. Washington is simply following the same logic. What allies contribute redounds directly to US military power. Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NATO countries are being asked to contribute more money, more soldiers, and more (mainly US-purchased) equipment to their US-led military alliances; hence, to US military projects and supremacy.

The same is true of Europe. Washington makes a pretense of Europe being asked to take on greater responsibility for its defense. But that’s nonsense. The principal European military organization, NATO, is an alliance that is always under the command of a US general, as the NATO charter stipulates. NATO is a US instrument; it always has been and will always remain. Washington isn’t asking Europe to take command of NATO or the defense of Europe, nor the task of confronting Russia. That remains a US leadership responsibility. It’s being asked, nay, told, to contribute more money and troops to what will always be a US-directed project. This will allow the Pentagon to shift a significant part of its forces currently deployed to Europe to the Indo-Pacific region to help impede China’s efforts to recover Taiwan. The project of confronting Russia will remain one in which Europe contributes the bulk of the equipment and personnel, as it always has done, but it will commit more than in the past, and the US contribution will correspondingly diminish, though US leadership will continue.

Two other points, both significant.

First, it is not the case that Washington believes that Europe has underspent on its militaries and has thus left the continent vulnerable to Russian aggression. On the contrary, the Strategy document declares that “European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.” This is obvious to anyone who has taken the time to look at the numbers. What this means is that the discourse favored by the news media, NATO’s secretary-general, and some governments, that European countries must increase their military spending, because Russia stands as a looming threat, is utter nonsense. Even the White House doesn’t believe this.

Second, the Strategy seeks to “restabilize” Europe by seeking to bring about an end to the conflict in Ukraine and, importantly, an end to “the reality of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

#4. The White House believes that Europe is imperiled, not by Russia, but by liberal immigration policies and the suppression of White nationalist political parties and their anti-immigrant discourse. “The larger issues facing Europe,” the strategy document opines, “include”:

“Migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife”, and
“Censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

The Strategy’s authors worry that demographic change in Europe is undermining the continent’s Western Civilizational values, noting that it “is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European” (in other words, majority non-White and Muslim). “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”

The fear of Eastern peoples undermining Western Civilization was a particular concern of the Nazis, who saw Jews and Communists as Eastern. The White House’s concerns about immigration are not only consistent with those of the Nazis and contemporary White nationalist parties in Europe today, but also with the Trump administration’s own racist domestic policy of mass deportations of illegal immigrants and banning immigration from such countries as Afghanistan and Somalia. The Washington Post summarized White House thinking on immigration as: “Somalis are ‘garbage,’ and ‘we don’t want them in our country.’ Migration from ‘all Third World countries’ should be halted. Any foreign national deemed ‘noncompatible with Western civilization’ must be deported.” Like the Nazis, who worked to replace Klassenkampf (the struggle of classes) with Razzenkampf (the struggle of races) in order to divert the working class from its efforts to liberate itself from the miseries and disadvantages of capitalism, the Trump administration is likewise engaged in a project of scapegoating immigrants to keep the White Christian working class from blaming its woes on Trump’s billionaire cohorts and their program of exploitation of the poor and left-behind and indulgence for the rich and comfortable.

#5. The United States will continue to dominate West Asia to ensure the region’s oil resources remain under US supervision, while at the same time maintaining the US position as the world’s top exporter of oil and gas. In this way, Washington will control a vital input into the economies of Japan and Germany, potentially threatening economic competitors, and its top rival, China. Regarding the latter, US strategy stipulates that Washington will control not only West Asia, a major source of energy for China, but also the sea lanes connecting the Middle East to China. This goes a long way toward meeting the major US strategy objective of preventing the emergence of a dominant adversary.

Finally, I will note that, as an obiter dictum, the White House says that it will continue to protect Israel. It doesn’t say why. I can’t help but think that one of the reasons is that Israel is viewed as an outpost of Western Civilization in the East and that, comprising a Jewish master race that is mostly white, it is, as a consequence, a White supremacist regime—one moreover that embodies the most repugnant aspects of the Western tradition (settler colonialism, racism, genocide, imperialism), the very foundations of US wealth and power. Israel is a model of the White nationalist golden age that appears to lie so close to the heart of the US president. In chiding the Europeans for allowing their continent to undergo an immigration-induced demographic change, and then censuring various European powers for repressing anti-immigrant, White nationalist, discourse, the Trump White House poses as a champion of Western (i.e., White Christian) Civilization. This is a civilization which, under the guidance of Trump and his Corollary, aims to keep Eastern power out of the Western Hemisphere, but claims a prerogative to impose Western power on the East. So it is that while re-asserting the Monroe Doctrine, Washington at the same time makes clear that it intends to control the Eastern Hemisphere, especially the sea lanes that connect China to the rest of the world.

The Indo-Pacific region is very important to the Trump White House. It is, the Strategy notes, “already the source of almost half of the world’s GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), and one third based on nominal GDP. That share is certain to grow over the 21st century. Which means that the Indo-Pacific is already and will continue to be among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds. To thrive at home, we must successfully compete there.”

Thriving at home can be taken to mean the US billionaire class growing fatter, while it sucks the blood of the US working class, as it endeavors to keep it in a state of stupefaction by recruiting it to a campaign of saving Western Civilization from the immigration of “garbage” from the global south. Concurrently, the US state will plunder the working class of allied countries that will be forced to contribute money, equipment, and personnel to US-led military projects aimed at making Trump’s fellow US billionaires richer. At the same time, Washington will keep its boot-heel on Chinese energy sources and vital sea lanes, aided amply by its allies. This will be done in the service of the White House’s overarching goal: Ensuring that US investors and corporate America secure possession of the lion’s share of the major profit-making opportunities of the Western Hemisphere and Asia.

The New York Times’ take on the security strategy is that it reflects the “world as seen from the White House”—one in which “America can use its vast powers to make money.” I would amend the assessment somewhat. The strategy reflects a world as seen from a White House that is controlled by a battalion of billionaires, and that uses race and anti-immigrant rhetoric to divert the White Christian working class from the reality that it is being fleeced and immiserated. The world the billionaires see is one in which US investors and major US businesses use the vast power of the US state to cut Chinese enterprises and billionaires out of the action to ensure that the lion’s share of the world’s economic surplus remains in the hands of the Donald Trumps, Steve Witkoffs, Jared Kushners, Howard Luttnicks, and their friends, associates, business and golf partners, and political backers, among them Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—in other words, the US capitalist class.

1. According to The Washington Post, 13 billionaires — including Donald Trump —have held roles in the administration this year. They are:

Donald Trump, President of the United States, Net worth: $5.1 billion
Howard Lutnick, Secretary, Commerce Department, Net worth: $3.2 billion
Linda McMahon, Secretary, Education Department, Net worth: $3 billion
Steve Witkoff, Assistant to the president and special envoy for peace missions, Net worth: $2 billion
Kelly Loeffler, Administrator, Small Business Administration, Net worth: $1.3 billion
Elon Musk, Leader, U.S. DOGE Service (resigned in late May), Net worth: $342 billion
Joe Gebbia, Chief design officer, Net worth: $8.3 billion
Antonio Gracias, Volunteer, DOGE (left in July), Net worth: $2.2 billion
Tilman Fertitta, Ambassador to Italy and San Marino, Net worth: $11.3 billion
Melinda Hildebrand, Ambassador to Costa Rica, Net worth: $7.7 billion
Stephen Feinberg, Deputy secretary, Defense Department, Net worth: $5 billion
Warren Stephens, Ambassador to Britain, Net worth: $3.4 billion,
Paul Atkins, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, Net worth: $1.2 billion

The list omits Jared Kushner and Tom Barrack, who may not be billionaires, but near billionaires.

Capitalism, the US Senate, and the Zionist Genocide of the Palestinians

By Stephen Gowans

19 September 2025

What does this say about the US Senate?

Bernie Sanders is the only US senator to acknowledge the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and even he does so post festum, and grudgingly. Only after a mountain of evidence had been amassed by multiple organizations and experts—from the ICJ to human rights groups and genocide scholars (including Israeli ones) and finally from the United Nations Human Rights Council (to say nothing of what was evident for anyone to see in the overt expressions of genocidal intent and conduct of the Israeli leadership and its revenge-ravening military)—did Senator Sanders, the soi-disant democratic socialist from Vermont, get around to acknowledging that indeed a genocide is in progress. This, after months of being pressed by his supporters to concede the obvious. Having acquiesced to both political pressure and reality, he conciliated the genocidaire by blaming Hamas for the ongoing holocaust of the Palestinians, al-Nakba al-Mustimira. On top of that, he continued to endorse arms shipments to Israel in the form of “defensive arms”, thus drawing a misleading distinction between offensive and defensive weaponry.

But forget Sanders for the moment. What about the 99 other senators who haven’t even grudgingly acknowledged the genocide?

Most senators are millionaires or multimillionaires, who are intimately interconnected familialy, socially, politically, and professionally with the top investors and leading CEOs of the most profitable US companies, on whom they rely for campaign contributions and lucrative post-political-career opportunities. Accordingly, they are devoted to upholding the systems of capitalist exploitation and US imperialist competition—the foundation of their wealth and privilege, and more broadly, the wealth and privilege of their class.

West Asia is important to the senators’ class, and largely for one reason: petroleum. While the United States, the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, draws the bulk of its oil and natural gas from the Americas, the price of energy depends on the unhindered flow of petroleum resources worldwide. Hence, West Asia—and Washington’s outpost in the region, Israel—is vital to the smooth functioning of capital accumulation at home, and therefore to the senators’ core personal and class interests.

Additionally, China depends on access to West Asian oil to fuel its military and keep its economy running. Controlling the region gives Washington considerable strategic leverage over its leading rival. What’s more, Japan and Western Europe—key US subordinates and potential strategic competitors—are also dependent on West Asian petroleum. Controlling the Arab world’s oil and natural gas helps Washington keep these states in line.

Hence, US capitalism has an interest in dominating West Asia and suppressing West Asian expressions of national assertiveness and local sovereignty. Arab and Iranian nationalists, were they allowed to thrive, would seek to turn the region’s petroleum resources to the benefit of local populations at the expense of US capitalist class imperatives. They’ve done it before, and would, if they could, do it again.

A Canadian diplomat once described Israel as an outpost “in the Eastern Mediterranean with close economic and cultural ties with the West generally and in particular with the United States.” Owing to these ties, it is the ideal candidate to assert US strategic interests in its region. As the late US Senator Jesse Helms, Chairman from 1995 to 2001 of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, remarked: “The United States has vital strategic interests in the Middle East, and it is imperative that we have a reliable ally whom we can trust, one who shares our goals and values. Israel is the only state in the Middle East that fits that bill.” What Helms meant by “vital US strategic goals,” is goals that comport with the interests of his class, not the interests of the larger subordinate class of which most US citizens are members.

Now, some would argue that Washington’s foreign policy is controlled by “the Israel lobby,” a group of Christian and Jewish Zionists who advance Israeli goals at the expense of US interests. To be sure, the Israel lobby has enormous influence in Washington, but key parts of this argument—articulated by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—are often left unexamined.

When we say “US interests”, whose interests do we mean? Those of the bulk of the US population, or those of the approximately one percent of the population that owns and controls the economy and dominates the state (including the Senate)? (Mearsheimer and Walt see only one undifferentiated US interest, unmediated by class.)
Are the interests of the bulk of the US population at odds with the Zionist interests of Israel?
Do the interests of the US plutocracy mesh with the Zionist aims of the Jewish settler colonial state?

I would argue that US economic, military, and diplomatic support of Israel is at variance with the interests of the vast majority of US citizens (and therefore would agree with Mearsheimer and Walt, so far as they define “US interests” as the class interests of most US citizens—those of the employee class—as distinct from those of the US economic elite.) At the same time, I would argue that the interests of the US capitalist class mesh well with Zionist interests.

Significantly, the “Israel lobby” is largely made up of major US investors and the top CEOs of the United States’ leading companies. The group of Israel-zealots that Mearsheimer and Walt argue have highjacked US foreign policy, happen to be the elite of US capitalism, according to research by Laurence H. Shoup, whose has specialized in examining the contours of the US ruling class. If the Israel lobby has hijacked US foreign policy, then so too have the leaders of corporate America taken control of the levers of the US Departments of State, National Defense, and Treasury, along with the posts of National Intelligence Director and Ambassador to the UN. Shoup and others have shown that these key posts have long been dominated by the US capitalist elite. The Israel lobby exists, but it is a subset of the corporate lobby, a fact that points to a commonality of interest between the US capitalist class and its outpost in West Asia.

How are US capitalist and Israeli interests alike?

First, it should be noted that Israel is completely dependent on the United States. It could not survive without:

US military and economic subsidies, and US guarantees that the Israeli military will be equipped with a qualitative military edge over every other state in its region.
Unwavering diplomatic support, that allows Israel to act unconstrained by international law and over the objections of international public opinion and the expostulations of the states of the world, including US subordinates, without fear of penalty. (There are two roque states in the world: Israel and the United States. The former acts under the aegis of the latter and the latter under the aegis of its immense power.)

These supports are necessary because Israel is a tiny country, both geographically and demographically, which cannot survive on its own in the middle of a much larger Arab nation, whose enmity is directly traceable to Zionist settler colonialism. Israel’s founding fathers, and “its first leaders worried greatly that without alliances with stronger regional and global powers, the Zionist project would fail.” Today, Israelis acknowledge that the backing of the United States is one reason Israel has survived.

As a consequence of its dependence on the United States, the embattled Zionist state has no option but to pursue US goals as a condition of continuing to receive US support. The US goals it pursues include suppressing any force that might attempt to bring the region’s energy resources under local control for the purpose of uplifting the local population at the expense of aggrandizing the interests of US investors and oil companies and denying Washington control of West Asia, thereby negating US strategic leverage over China, Japan, and Western Europe. Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, is reputed to have said that Israel’s mission is “to be a rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of…Arab nationalism will be broken.” Echoing Dayan, Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote in 1998 that Israel acts as “the West’s policeman in the Middle East.” Referring to states in West Asia that are keen to assert their independence as “militant regimes”, Netanyahu declared that Israel’s role is to “safeguard the broader interests of peace” since no other state in the region can be relied on by Washington to check either the militant states’ “ambitions or obsessive plans for armament.” Safeguarding the broader interests of peace means safeguarding the status quo of US power in West Asia.

This is the fundamental quid-pro-quo of the US-Israeli relationship: Israel helps Washington stop the emergence of another Mohammad Mosaddegh, Gamal-Abdel Nasser, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Hafez or Bashar al-Assad—nationalist leaders who sought to put the interests of their own people above US capitalist class strategic interests and those of US oil companies and investors—and Washington provides Israel with the resources it needs to remain a viable state in West Asia.

It should be added, however, that Washington hardly needs to compel Israel to vigorously oppose West Asia’s nationalists. Whether expressed overtly, as a secular movement under an national liberationist label, or whether it lurks inside Islamist states or movements, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah, West Asian national liberation is irreconcilable with Zionism. The two movements are mutually antagonistic. Israel and the US capitalist elite, thus, share a common enemy. Both parties seek to despoil the peoples of West Asia of their land, labor, and resources, and West Asian nationalist forces seek to overcome the despoliation. To secure both Zionist and US capitalist class goals, West Asian nationalist movements must be crushed or at the very least contained. This makes US plutocrats and Israeli Zionists natural allies.

Adam Hanief, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah make this point well in their pamphlet Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine. They write:

[S]ettler colonies are … typically highly militarized and violent societies, which tend to be reliant upon external support in order to maintain their material privileges in a hostile regional environment. … For this reason, settler colonies are much more dependable partners of Western imperial interests than ‘normal’ client states. In the Middle East, for instance, Arab governments supported by the US (such as today’s Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco) face repeated challenges from political movements within their own borders and are always forced to accommodate and respond to pressures coming from below. This is different from Israel, where the majority of the population views their interests and privileges as dependent upon continued outside support.

In upholding the interests of their class, US senators, then, naturally defend Israel, because it is a US instrument for the fulfillment of a common US capitalist class – Zionist project of dominating West Asia. Israel’s character as a settler colony — from which flows its: multifarious familial, social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States; it’s violent, militaristic character; its complete dependence on US aid and support to survive; and its shared opposition with the US capitalist elite to West Asian national liberation — makes it the ideal candidate to represent US imperialist interests in West Asia.

Given who senators are, and their position at the apex—and as the beneficiaries—of the US capitalist system, it is unthinkable that they would exhibit even the slightest degree of solidarity with the enemies of their class and the targets of their exploitation. We can express outrage that only one senator has even acknowledged the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians, but to do so would fail to recognize the capitalist reality of the United States and its governing class. Expecting senators to concede that a genocide is underway, to say nothing of condemning it and acting to stop it, is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians.

As for Bernie Sanders, his reluctantly conceding that his beloved Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians confirms what is already obvious: he is no socialist. Socialists do not defend settler colonialism, apologize for apartheid, or tolerate Zionism. Nor do they uphold the status quo of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by arguing that Israel has a right to defend itself. (Israeli Zionists have no more right to defend themselves than slave-owners have the right to defend themselves against the uprising of their slaves.) And socialists certainly don’t vote for the continued delivery of arms to genocidaires, in the form of “defensive” weaponry, a sophism that obfuscates the reality that “defensive” weapons have a utility equal to offensive weapons in maintaining Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy. Would a socialist advocate the provisioning of “defensive” weapons to slave-owners to defend themselves from the uprisings of their slaves? As a socialist Bernie is a fraud. As a senator, committed—with the rest of the Senate—to defending the interests of the US capitalist class and its overseas outposts, he’s more believable.

“Socialist” China and Its Many Illusions

Growth that depends in large part on US cooperation goes away when you no longer fulfil the prerequisites of US cooperation.

By Stephen Gowans

August 9, 2023

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “U.S. to Ban Some Investments in China,” and relatedly, China’s recent economic tribulations, prompted the following thoughts on what was not too long ago presented by Sinophiles as the world’s paragon economic model.

The take-off Sinophiles celebrate as the outcome of China’s so-called ‘unique’ economic paradigm, began soon after Beijing decided to transition from its role as communist competitor of the United States to capitalist economic partner of its former enemy.

Deng Xiaoping’s “If you can’t beat them, join them” project, opened the gate to US, European, and Japanese investment, which drove the country’s development.

China was—and remains—an investors’ dream. It offered a vast pool of educated, disciplined, low-wage workers, a stable political environment, a government eager to cater to foreign investors, and a huge market—all the ingredients that investors needed to pull in huge returns.

What made the model unique was China’s history, size, and demography, as well as its Communist Party, which had the legitimacy and Washington’s backing to mold China’s vast population—at that time the largest in the world—to its will of catering to foreign investment. The model couldn’t be transferred to other places, because other places lacked the combination of education, political stability, infrastructure, size, proximity to sea routes, and willingness to collaborate with the United States, that made China the world’s premier investment opportunity.

Times have changed.

Having used Western investment to vault to the first ranks of the global capitalist economy, Beijing has embarked on a second transition, this time from US economic partner to US economic competitor. Chimerica, the integration of China into the US economy, with the US as the union’s finance, R&D, and marketing arm, and China as its manufacturing base, has yielded to China 2025, Beijing’s plan to dominate the industries of the future, provoking Washington’s counter-measures to stop it.

As China challenges US supremacy, its once torrid growth has slowed. Direct U.S. investment into China has hit a 20-year low. U.S. venture-capital investment has hit a 10-year low. Without US commitment to building China as the factory floor of the US, EU, and Japan, China’s economic prospects are no longer as sanguine as they once were.

People’s China, contrary to a myth perpetrated by Sinophiles and apostles of multipolarity, didn’t develop in a world of its own making, insulated and kept separate from capitalism, neo-liberalism, US leadership, and the US economy. It developed precisely because it willingly became a part of all these things.

Now that it’s trying to extricate itself from its former submission to US economic leadership in order to vie with US capital for economic supremacy, foreign and venture capital investment is drying up and China’s torrid growth has disappeared in a puff of political reality, viz., growth that depends in large part on US cooperation goes away when you no longer fulfil the prerequisites of US cooperation.

China’s economic model is not so different from the state-led capitalist development of Germany’s Second and Third Reichs or Meiji-restoration Japan that we should regard it as unique; we certainly shouldn’t regard it as socialist.

Nor, given that China’s rulers have adopted a state-led capitalist development model, guided moreover by a nationalist ambition to restore China to the great civilization it once was, should we harbor illusions about the political project of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not the worldwide proletarian revolution, nor even, it would seem, the proletarian revolution in China, but the vaulting of China to supremacy in the world capitalist market—the same ambition of every other capitalist power with heft.

We should not, therefore, regard the political primacy of the communist party in China as investing the country’s rivalry with the US and EU with a character any different from Germany’s earlier rivalry with Britain for supremacy in Europe or Japan’s erstwhile rivalry with the United States for pre-eminence in the Pacific and East Asia.

China is not a paragon, a model for other countries to emulate. It is just one more capitalist power vying for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities, strategic territory, and the power to shape the global economy to its advantage.

The Era of Ultracheap Labor Is Under Threat

Factories in China and Vietnam are struggling to attract young workers, which is bad news for Western businesses accustomed to offshoring jobs at subsistence-level wages.

August 8, 2023

The world’s largest capitalist enterprises, having located their factory floors in low-wage Asia, are running into a big problem: The young people of China and Vietnam, two Asian giants ruled on behalf of Western businesses by Communist parties, don’t want to work in factories at dehumanizing jobs for subsistence-level wages.

The twilight of ultracheap Asian factory labor is emerging as the latest test of the globalized manufacturing model, which over the past three decades has delivered a cornucopia of profits to wealthy investors around the world. American businesses accustomed to bargain-rate labor in Communist-controlled China and Vietnam might soon be reckoning with higher prices.

“There’s nowhere left on the planet that’s going to be able to give you what you want,” said Paul Norriss, the British co-founder of the Vietnam garment factory, UnAvailable, based in Ho Chi Minh City. CEOs of the world’s largest enterprises are going to have to change their business models.

Workers in their 20s routinely drop out of training programs for low-wage factory jobs. Those who stay often work for just a couple of years.

“Everybody wants to be an Instagrammer or a photographer or a stylist or work at a coffee shop,” rather than a factory worker who toils long hours doing mind-numbing tasks for survival-level pay.

In response to the crisis, Asian factories have had to increase wages and adopt sometimes costly strategies to retain workers, from improving cafeteria fare to building kindergartens for workers’ children.

Toy and game maker Hasbro said this year that labor shortages in Vietnam and China had pushed up costs from subsistence-level to barely above subsistence. Barbie-maker Mattel, which has a large production base in Asia, also is grappling with the pressure of higher labor costs in China on corporate profits and bonuses for its hyper-wealthy CEO. Both companies have raised prices for their products, to protect investors’ profits. Nike, which makes most of its shoes in Asia, flagged in June that its product costs had gone up because of higher labor expenses.

For U.S. businesses that have been accustomed to having low-wage workers as a certain and relatively stable part of their business model, that foundation is going to have to be rejiggered.

Starting in the 1990s, China and then other Asian manufacturing hubs integrated into the global capitalist economy, turning nations of poor farmers into nations of poor factory workers. Labor was available at dirt-cheap wages, allowing businesses to expand their margins and reap a cornucopia of profits off the toil of Communist-led workers reduced to the status of machines for producing surplus value.

Now those manufacturing nations are running up against a generational problem. Younger workers, better-educated than their parents and veterans of Instagram, TikTok and other social media, are deciding their work lives shouldn’t unfold in dehumanized toil inside factory walls at barebones pay for the benefit of billionaires in New York and Shanghai.

Demographic shifts are playing a role. Young people in Asia are having fewer children than their parents did, and at later ages, which means they are under less pressure to earn a steady income in their 20s. A booming services sector offers the option of less-grueling work as store clerks in malls and receptionists at hotels.

The problem is acute in China, where urban youth unemployment hit 21% in June even though factories had labor shortages. Multinational companies have been moving production from China to nations including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and India. Factory owners there said they, too, are struggling to get young people to sign up.

In the past, manufacturers, scouring the globe for workers deprived of all options but to condemn themselves to lives of ceaseless, demeaning toil at wages incapable of supporting their families in anything but conditions of squalor, might simply have moved to less expensive destinations. That’s not so easy these days. There are nations in Africa and South Asia with large labor pools, but many are politically unstable, or lack good infrastructure and trained workforces.

That’s why China has been so attractive to the world’s largest capitalist enterprises. The infrastructure is excellent, the workforce is trained and disciplined, and Chinese workers can be hired to toil long hours for little pay. The Communist Party of China ensures that conditions are highly favorable to investors by making conditions highly unfavorable to workers.

Clothing brands were stung when they expanded into Myanmar and Ethiopia, only to find operations disrupted by unrest and civil war. Bangladesh has been a reliable base for producing clothes, but restrictive trade policies and clogged ports have kept it from making much beyond that.

India has a huge population, and firms seeking alternatives to China are expanding there. But even in India, factory managers are beginning to complain about the difficulties of retaining young workers. Many young people prefer farm life, no matter how gruelling, to equally gruelling lives in factory dormitories in industrial hubs.

Asian factory owners are trying to make the jobs more appealing, including subsidizing kindergartens and funding technical-training programs. Some are moving factories to rural areas where people are more willing to do manual labor, but that puts them farther away from ports and suppliers and forces them to accommodate rural life, including worker absences during harvest.

Christina Chen, the Taiwanese owner of a furniture maker that sells to American retailers such as Lowe’s, decided to move her factory out of southern China four years ago, hoping it would be easier to recruit. She first considered industrial zones near Ho Chi Minh City, but she heard nightmarish stories about workers demanding wages above subsistence levels. How are capitalists to earn fat returns when workers balk at a life of penury?

Young people from developing countries who otherwise might take factory jobs are finding work caring for the growing numbers of the elderly people in developed nations, as well as plugging gaps in those countries’ aging workforces. The pay is low, but above the subsistence-level pay of factory labor back home.

Susi Susanti, a 29-year-old from Indonesia, said she tried factory jobs after graduating from high school. She hated being pressured to work faster by her managers at an electronics factory, and in a second job making shoes. She told her mother she had to do something else.

A six-month training course taught her rudimentary Mandarin, and she set off to work caring for an elderly couple in Taiwan. Her pay is three times as high as she earned in factories back home, she said, and it’s less exhausting. “When the person I’m looking after is doing well,” she said, “I can relax.”

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This article is from The Wall Street Journal of August 7, 2023. It has been edited for class perspective. The original article, written by Jon Emont, is titled “The Era of Ultracheap Stuff Is Under Threat.”

Can France still afford a retirement age of 62?

January 20, 2023

By Stephen Gowans

French president Emmanuel Macron wants to raise his country’s retirement age from its current 62 to 64. According to the French Jupiter, the retirement age must increase, if France is to avoid higher taxes and growing debt.

The Wall Street Journal thinks he has a point.

Reporter Noemie Bisserbe writes that “as people live longer and the population grows older, the ratio of workers to retirees has decreased, putting the system under growing stress and forcing the government to increase its spending on pensions.”

Macron’s move, then, appears to be demanded by demographics. Except it isn’t. The argument Bisserbe offers for the assault on French workers is a Malthusian fallacy.

Malthus feared that the decreasing ratio of arable land to mouths to feed would lead to mass starvation. He reasoned that because the amount of arable land is finite, that as the population grew, the strain on a society’s ability to feed its people would increase.

Needless to say, Malthus was wrong. The world’s population kept growing, but so too did the supply of food—at an even greater rate. The future beheld not mass starvation, but growing plenty. Why? Because, owing to advances in science, technology, and technique, agriculture become stunningly more productive.

Just as agricultural productivity grew, so too did industrial productivity. The secular trend in France’s national income per person is upward, spurred by gains in productivity. That means that while the ratio of retirees to workers is increasing, France grows ever wealthier, and is likely to continue to grow wealthier as advances in science, technology, and technique make workers more productive. Increasing productivity easily offsets the decreasing ratio of workers to retirees, just as growing agricultural productivity offsets the decreasing ratio of land to people.

But here’s the trouble. For decades, productivity gains have been monopolized by the wealthy few. According to the OECD, since the turn of the century “the aggregate growth of real wages was significantly slower than that of aggregate productivity,” including in France.

Data from the St Louis Fed shows that “For a long time, the share of payments to labour relative to total payments to all factors of production was relatively stable. In recent decades, the share of payments to labour has been trending down in many countries,” France among them.

It’s as if all the increased food produced by advances in agricultural productivity was set aside for the sole enjoyment of the rich, while the government distributes the remaining fixed amount of food among a growing population of workers and retirees.

Malthus’s argument makes sense, if you ignore advances in productivity. Likewise, Bisserbe’s explanation make sense, if you ignore the reality that French workers are being denied the benefits of growing productivity.

For the Friends of Socialist China, a Very Bad Week

Would a Plan for a Just Peace in Ukraine Make Any Difference?

December 5, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

Would a peace plan for Ukraine that addresses each parties’ ostensible concerns about security and ethnic rights create a lasting peace?

In my view, it would not.

The parties’ substantive concerns are economic. Concerns about security and ethnic rights, while real, conceal more profound issues.

A plan that addresses the surface concerns but not the substantive ones is bound to fail.

What might the contours of a peace plan for Ukraine look like?

Russia withdraws from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.
Ukraine
- Pledges neutrality, foreswearing membership in any military bloc.
- Agrees to an irrevocable long-term lease of Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol.
- Guarantees languages rights for Russophones and declares Ukraine to be a country for all its citizens, not a national Ukrainian state, and not one in which ethnic Ukrainians have superior rights. Instead, all citizens are guaranteed equal rights regardless of their language, religion, or ethnicity.

This proposal meets Russia’s stated concerns about security and the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine. At the same time, it restores all Ukraine’s territory.

But the plan fails to address key areas of tension.

First, it says nothing about whether the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, built to circumvent Ukraine as a transitway for Russian natural gas, will be re-engaged to fulfill their originally intended role. If so, Ukraine will be denied a major source of revenue in transit fees. After the United States, Ukraine had been the major opponent of the pipelines. Kyiv would be expected to oppose any move to open the pipelines. So too would Washington.

It is unlikely that Moscow would agree to a plan that doesn’t see Russia’s return to Europe as a hydrocarbons vendor. Washington, conversely, is likely to oppose Russia’s re-engagement with Europe as an energy provider, considering that Europe’s renunciation of Russian gas has provided Washington with a much-needed market for US LNG. The United States is now the world’s top LNG exporter.

Second, the plan fails to address perhaps the key issue underlying tensions since 2014: Whether Ukraine’s economy will be oriented toward the West or Russia.

Bearing an antipathy to Russia, a country they see as an historical oppressor, nationalist ethnic Ukrainians have pressured Kiev to orient their country toward the West, not only militarily, but economically. In contrast, Russophone Ukrainians have inclined more strongly to economic integration with Russia. For these reasons, Washington and Brussels have supported nationalist ethnic Ukrainians, and Moscow has backed Russophone Ukrainians. Both ethnic groups are used as tools by their superpower patrons to advance great power goals in Ukraine.

Thus, the cultural struggle between ethnic Ukrainians and Russophone Ukrainians is not only a struggle over nationalism and linguistic rights, but also a struggle over economics, with both the West and Russia intervening in Ukraine’s affairs for self-serving economic ends. A plan that addresses the surface linguistic and cultural concerns, but fails to tackle the key issue of Ukraine’s integration into one or the other economic bloc, will not produce a durable peace.

Cut-throat competition for markets, raw materials, pipeline routes, investment opportunities, and strategic territory is an enduring feature of capitalism. It is unlikely that a workable plan for peace can be found in a world in which capitalist competition is a constant.

To sum up, a peace plan that addresses the ostensible reasons for war will make little difference. Ostensible reasons mask deeper motives—motives whose taproot is capitalist competition.

To end the fighting, one of two things must happen:

Russia, the United States, the European Union, and Ukraine pledge not to conduct themselves as capitalist powers. This isn’t going to happen.
The competition for Ukraine weakens one or both of the sides until one or both decides the potential gains are outweighed by the costs.

That’s how competitions end. In the victory of one side, in both sides simultaneously withdrawing, or in the mutual ruin of both. They don’t end in a just peace.

Engels’ Anti-Duhring and the COVID-19 Calamity

Promoting Development and Fostering the Unity of Humanity, or Dividing Labor to Conquer It?

July 19, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

Microsoft president Brad Smith warns that US companies are facing a new era of growing wage pressure, owing to declining population growth and fewer people entering the workforce.

To most people, upward pressure on wages is not a problem. But to Smith it’s a concern. More for labor means less for capital. And for the Microsoft president and other top corporate executives whose job it is to maximize returns to investors and shareholders, i.e., capitalists, growing labor bargaining power—the outcome of weak population growth—is definitely a problem.

Smith’s concern may have been aroused by the work of economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, who touched off the alarm in their 2020 book The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival.

Goodhart and Pradhan argue that the integration into the global capitalist economy of low wage labor from the highly populous China, vastly expanded the available global labor force, undercutting labor bargaining power in the developed world, and with it the wages, benefits, working conditions, and the economic security of Western labor.

The effective labor supply for capitalist exploitation more than doubled from 1991 to 2018, the years during which China opened its doors and invited foreign investors to exploit the country’s vast, disciplined, and cheap work force. Along with the reincorporation of Eastern Europe into the capitalist economy, the baby boomer demographic wave, and rising participation of women in the labor force, these developments provided what the two economists call an enormous “positive” supply shock to the available labor force in the world’s capitalist trading system.

The supply shock definitely turned out to be favorable to the interests of the world’s captains of industry and sultans of finance, since the result was a weakening in the bargaining power of the Western labor force and a steady decline in private sector union membership with consequent benefits for capital in growing profits and CEO compensation.

“The gainers from all this have been those with capital,” note Goodhart and Pradhan, along with workers in China and Eastern Europe. Workers in North America, Western Europe, and Japan have suffered.

But the tide has turned. With the capitalist integration of China and Eastern Europe now complete, and population growth waning, Goodhart and Pradhan warn business leaders and their representatives in government that labor bargaining power is about to grow stronger.

They recommend the following measures to scotch the profit-limiting trend:

Accelerate automation;
Increase the age of retirement;
Outsource jobs to Africa and India (the last great pools of cheap labor);
Maintain aggressive immigration targets.

Neither Microsoft president Brad Smith, nor economists Goodhart and Pradhan, can abide the idea of labor increasing its bargaining power. Capital will do everything in its means to reverse the trend. More for labor means less for capital, and in a capitalist economy—that is, a society that takes its name from the class its serves, capitalists—less for capital is intolerable.

This ought to raise a question for those of us who rely for our living on employment income: Why tolerate a system that—in deploring better wages and working conditions—is so clearly against our interests?

Goodhart and Pradhan argue that the far right comes closest to acknowledging the reality that capital has used the outsourcing of jobs to China and Vietnam, and aggressive immigration targets, as weapons to undermine the bargaining power of Western labor.

As a consequence, the far right has been able to successfully vie with the left for the working class vote, since the left tends to shun analyses which might be construed as criticism of immigration and therefore misconstrued as racism, while eschewing criticism of China’s and Vietnam’s integration into the global capitalist economy out of a sense of solidarity with the developing world.

As they put it:

“One might have expected the voting support of those who have lost out relatively during the last three decades to go to left-wing parties in their own countries. After all, these parties were usually founded to foster the interests, and to look after the welfare, within the political scene of the working classes. Yet this has not generally happened in Europe and North America…Instead, the support of those left behind has gone in Europe mainly to radical populist right-wing parties.  Why has this been so? One answer is attitudes toward immigration. Left wing political parties are idealists that support the unity of humanity…Moreover, the left-wing parties usually have a large base of immigrants. Thus, it is unlikely that left-wing parties will support tight controls on immigration.”

By contrast, the “right-wing populist position on immigration is far more consonant with the views of those who have been deleteriously affected by globalization than the inclusive position of left-wing parties.”

These analyses, as incendiary as they may appear, only show that:

Capitalism must be understood as a worldwide system and not analyzed in isolation, within national boundaries;
Capital pits labor in one part of the world against labor in another;
Solidarity across national borders, rather than solipsistic struggles within, is the effective counter-response to capital’s strategy of divide and conquer.

Unfortunately, what is construed nowadays as proletarian internationalism amounts to support for capitalist exploitation of low-wage labor in countries that call themselves Communist, rather than the joint struggle of labor across national boundaries against the proletariat’s common enemy, the bourgeoisie. Solidarity with China and Vietnam is not internationalism, and nor is support for aggressive immigration targets, where the purpose of the targets is to increase the supply of labor in order to hold down or decrease its price. Indeed, much of what passes for the far left these days is, with the exception of a few communist parties, a left interested in the boutique issues of multipolarity and Russia’s and China’s inter-imperialist struggles with the United States, rather than the state of the working class globally.

The left does indeed support the unity of humanity and equality of all people. But supporting policies intended to intensify competition for jobs is not support for the unity of humanity—it’s support for the disunity of the proletariat and the growing strength of the bourgeoisie. The better alternative is support for industrialization, cooperative development, and full employment everywhere—a world economy for, of, and by the proletariat, free from exploitation, rather than a global capitalist economy which compels workers in country A to compete with (and often fight against) workers in country B.

So long as labor remains reconciled to the capitalist system, one which fundamentally depends on labor’s exploitation, it will forever be the victim of a strategy of divide and conquer.

Socialist China or Capitalist China? It’s All the Same to the Country’s Communist Rulers

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