Antonio Gramsci: Theirs and Ours

It has been forty-eight years since Eric Hobsbawm delivered a paper, Gramsci and Political Theory, before the Gramsci Conference held on March 5-6, 1977 (Reprinted as an article in Marxism Today, July, 1977).

Hobsbawm, contemplatively, reviews the forty years that had transpired since Antonio Gramsci’s death in 1937 after over a decade in a fascist prison. For the first ten years (1937-1947) Gramsci was virtually unknown outside of Italy, where Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti sought to integrate Gramsci-thought into the PCI’s work. 

The next decade (1947-1957) found Gramsci’s influence in Italy expanding even beyond Communist circles, establishing him as an important national cultural figure. 

It is with the third decade (1957-1967) that Gramsci became familiar to many people outside of Italy, with interest especially strong in the English-speaking world as noted by Hobsbawm. The recent strong critique of Stalin in the world Communist movement and the post-war strength and independence of the Gramsci-influenced PCI played a role in expanding the influence of Gramsci. Though not mentioned by Hobsbawm, the first (1957) limited US publication of Gramsci’s works was a brief (64 page) translation/commentary by Carl Marzani, Man and Society, published by the indomitable, Cold War-defiant publisher Cameron Associates. Marzani’s admiration and view of Gramsci as a model and contrast to Soviet practices is readily apparent.

With the fourth decade (1967-1977), Hobsbawm maintains that “Gramsci has become part of our intellectual universe. His stature as an original Marxist thinker-- in my view the most original such thinker produced in the west since 1917-- is pretty generally admitted… Such typically Gramscian terms as ‘hegemony’ occur in Marxist and even in non-Marxist, discussions of politics and history as casually, and sometimes as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars”. 

By 1977, Hobsbawm’s thinking was converging with the emergent school of Eurocommunism, perhaps helping to explain his estimation of Gramsci’s importance.

Would Hobsbawm-- if he were alive today-- be surprised that, nearly a half century after he made his address in London, Antonio Gramsci’s most influential admirers were thinkers on the Trump right? Would he be shocked to see an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Meet MAGA’s Favorite Communist? 

The WSJ reports:

Christopher Rufo is perhaps the most potent conservative activist in the U.S… For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Author Kevin T. Dugan notes that many international right-populist leaders pay homage to Gramsci, including Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Jair Bolsonaro, while Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, told Tucker Carlson that “he had to wage a culture war every single day” against opponents who “have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques; seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content.”

Other right-wing intellectuals have adopted Gramsci, according to the WSJ:

Gramsci’s name appears in the writing of paleoconservative thinkers Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming and Sam Francis, who influenced Pat Buchanan’s Republican presidential bids in the 1990s. One of Gramsci’s biggest proponents in the pre-Trump era was Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, who quoted his axiom that “politics is downstream of culture.”

More recently, far-right writers like Curtis Yarvin, who’s influenced Vice President JD Vance, have talked about how to capture power through a culture war.

Regardless of how selectively MAGA appropriates Gramsci-thought, however differently right-populists interpret Gramsci from his original intent, the mere fact that Gramsci is taken far more seriously by the right than by all but the Marxist left is cause for deep reflection. 

The right sees politics as a contest-- even a war-- over how people interpret the world. They borrow this notion from how Gramsci writes about ideology. They intend to conduct that war with fervor. 

Conversely, the center-left and even some “Marxists” embrace a market-model that imagines a forum of idea-sellers, who fairly exchange and value ideas. In this fantasy, everyone has an equal voice. They imagine that institutions like universities and media forms are neutral social and political instruments that objectively pursue, project, and protect the unvarnished truth.

Like Gramsci, the populist-right recognizes that the ideological superstructure-- what the right broadly and cynically calls “culture” -- is always captured by social forces. For Gramsci, following Marx, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Gramsci roughly quotes this from memory often, throughout The Prison Notebooks). Unlike the populist-right, Gramsci sees the forces shaping ideas as those constructed and maintained by the ruling capitalists.

When “Reaganism” arrived on the scene decades ago, astute left observers noted that “class war had broken out, with only one side fighting,” a commentary on the ineffectual labor movement. 

Today, with the Trump-right attacking the universities, public media, school books, publishers, law firms, and other aspects of the superstructure, it can be said that “cultural” war has broken out, with only one side fighting, a commentary on the ineffectual center-left.  

Quite obvious, the populist-right has-- crudely appropriating Gramsci-- launched a cultural war on hollow, complacent institutions blind to their own vulnerability.

Lessons for the Left

As Hobsbawm points out, by 1977 Gramsci-thought was becoming as popular and used “as loosely, as Freudian terms did between the wars.” Subsequently, Gramsci quote-mongering became fashionable and academic hipness was often assured by grounding discourse in the more enigmatic writings of Gramsci. “Hegemony” became one of the most used and misused words in the academic lexicon. Since most of Gramsci’s prison writings were necessarily cast in coded language, his thought lent itself to broad interpretation and misinterpretation. 

Too often “hegemony” was understood as a writer’s personal interpretation of ruling-class dominance: something richer and more extensive than the simple statement in the Manifesto that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Gramsci is explicit in exposing “the hegemony of a social group [‘beyond the dictatorship of coercive apparatus’] over the entire national society exercised through the so-called private organizations such as the church, the trade unions, the schools, etc.” -- not exactly an earth-shaking conclusion for Leninists in his time, but well worth endorsing. 

As Hobsbawm points out: “What is new in Gramsci is the observation that even bourgeois hegemony is not automatic but achieved through conscious political action and organization.” That is the lesson that the MAGA right draws, even if Gramsci’s left acolytes miss it.

In addition, hegemony is not merely an analytic tool for understanding capitalist-class rule, but, in Hobsbawm’s words, it is a “struggle to turn the working class into a potential ruling class” that “must be waged before the transition to power, as well as during and after it.” Liberals and social democrats who pay homage to Gramsci’s grasp of the mechanisms of class power, show no interest in Gramsci’s primary interest in establishing competitive, alternative mechanisms: media, entertainment, schools, activities, recreation, governance, and social life. He saw a need for preserving and protecting what was good and useful in existing working-class ethos and culture, while constructing what was even better for the future. Togliatti and the PCI sought to establish that hegemony in Italy’s Red Belt with different degrees of success. Italian Communist--influenced cinema, from Giuseppe De Santis’ 1949 Bitter Rice to Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 Novecento, represent that attempt made available to international audiences.

Nothing like this conscious collective attempt to nourish and promote working-class cultural life has been attempted on any scale in the US since the demise of the pre-neutered Congress of Industrial Organizations. Even the days of an independent radio station (WCFL, in Chicago) are past.

As Hobsbawm explains, “The basic problem of hegemony, considered strategically, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though that question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guide and rulers.” Two examples from Hobsbawm are telling: “The Polish communists in 1945 were probably not accepted as a hegemonic force, though they were ready to be one… The German social-democrats in 1918 would probably have been accepted as a hegemonic force, but they did not act as one.”

Marxist-Leninists in many, but not all, capitalist countries are cut off today from working-class life-- they are led by intellectuals, but not organic intellectuals, paraphrasing Gramsci-- with no vital connection to working-class life. 

Apart from the Communist Parties, leftists have willfully or from ignorance failed to acknowledge that Gramsci wrote as a Leninist, accepting the critical importance of a vanguard party (The Prince), though he had ideas about party organization that reflected conditions peculiar to Italy in his time (e.g., the Turin movement). Without a party, no sense can be made of an “organic” connection to the working class. 

John Womack reminds us that Gramsci’s “original” thoughts are often elaborations on ongoing debates in the Marxist movement. For example, the military-sounding contrast between wars of position and wars of maneuver predate Gramsci’s argument, with the Kautsky-Luxemburg dispute over the strategy of attrition versus the strategy of overthrow. These debates were carried forward into the early Comintern and played an important role in shaping Communist strategy.

It is commonplace on the left to view Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” as a passive interregnum between the “wars of maneuver” where the working class and its allies can directly challenge the capitalist class from a position of relative strength. Too often this idea of positional warfare has been interpreted to be a period of defensive treading water. In the US, Gramsci’s war of position has often been used as a justification for supporting the Democratic Party in its turf war with the other bourgeois party or as grounds for taking a back seat to other organizations in an unnegotiated united front.

Hobsbawm addresses this misreading of Gramsci:

[T]he failure of revolution in the West might produce a much more dangerous long-term weakening of the forces of progress by means of what he called “passive revolution.” On the one hand, the ruling class might grant certain demands to forestall and ward off revolution, on the other, the revolutionary movement might find itself in practice (though not necessarily in theory) accepting its impotence and might be eroded and politically integrated into the system… In short, the “war of position” had to be systematically thought out as a fighting strategy rather than something to do for revolutionaries when there is no prospect of building barricades. (my emphasis)

Today’s left often neglects the essential questions of place and time in evaluating Gramsci’s thinking. Hobsbawm is careful to point out that Gramsci was writing about specifically Italian conditions and lessons for the Italian left: “Italy in Gramsci’s day had a number of historical peculiarities which encouraged original departures in Marxist thinking.” Hobsbawm discusses six “peculiarities” in great detail.

In addition, it is necessary to note when Gramsci was writing, as well as when Hobsbawm was commenting on Gramsci.

Writing from prison with Italian fascism securing its hold over Italy, Gramsci was understandably motivated to take a critical eye toward the tactics and strategy of the PCI, as much forward looking as retrospectively. Hence, his revisiting the Southern question. It would be ill-advised to generalize his conclusions to every revolutionary project under different conditions.

Further, Hobsbawm writes at a time (1977) when the PCI’s electoral share was growing (34%, up 7%, 1976), when the PCI committed to a Gramsci-inspired historical compromise, and Eurocommunism was on the rise. At the same time, the Portuguese revolution-- met with great expectations by the socialist left-- appeared to be dashing those expectations and heading toward conciliation with the mainstream European community. Hobsbawm, like others favoring the Eurocommunist road, turned to Gramsci for an explanation: “...we see in countries in which there has been a revolutionary overthrow of the old rulers, such as Portugal, in the absence of hegemonic force even revolutions can run into sand.” History was not kind to Eurocommunism and the PCI project.

Perhaps the most cited Gramsci quote is: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The great blacklisted, expatriate director, Joseph Losey, used the Gramsci quote, to good effect, as the preamble to his film version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Others have used it to introduce the many crises that have afflicted the capitalist system.

One could argue that we are in just such an interregnum today, with the capitalist system struggling to continue ruling in the “old way.”

Therefore, there may be much that we can learn from Gramsci. But we must remember that he remained a Leninist. If he were alive today, he would be searching for the party capable of giving birth to the new.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

What’s Next?

There is a growing sense among many that we may be on the verge of a new world order or-- to be more accurate-- at the end of an old one. Opinion polls show very low confidence in the familiar institutions of governance and high uncertainty about the economy. Voters are rejecting traditional centrists parties, with new alternative parties and movements growing in popularity. There is little or no popular consensus on the path forward and an abiding sense that matters are, in general, going badly.

The global economy is variously afflicted with inflation, stagnation, or both, and growing insecurity. Political leaders are rigidly defending the old consensus or unsuccessfully advancing “new” wrinkles on the old that go nowhere. Inequality of wealth, income, power, and outcomes grow dramatically.

Few are satisfied that we can continue in the old way, but even fewer know of a way forward.

So, it should come with little surprise that intellectuals have taken on the daunting task of describing where we are and where we might be going.

Within the broad left, two characterizations of the current “international order” have been popularized: a policy, “neoliberalism” and a process, “globalization.” Much nonsense has been written and spoken about both. As the terms grew in popularity and usage, their meaning became fuzzier and fuzzier.

There have been useful accounts of neoliberalism that place it both in an historical context and within the evolution of modern capitalism (see my discussion of Gary Gerstle’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order). Gerstle, notably, gives a credible account of neoliberalism’s origins in the late 1970s and strong reasons for its fragility today.

Similarly, Branko Milanović has offered a credible account of globalization in an article that I recently reviewed. However, he dates it from 1989, when, in fact, the expansion of trade has been consistent from the establishment of the post-war global trade architecture, with qualitative leaps coming from the 1978 “opening” to China, the 1991 demise of the European socialist states, and again with China’s entry into the WTO, but followed more recently by globalization’s wane after the Great Recession of 2007-09. 

It is important not to confuse the two: neoliberalism is a political initiative that gained traction from the failings of New Deal Keynesian policy and became policy with the establishment of centrist consensus and its subscription by mainstream political parties, spreading throughout the world as dogma; globalization is an expansive process accelerated with new technologies and the migration of capital to new and expanded labor markets. While they overlap in many ways, they are different phenomena.

An even more recent participant in this discussion is Perry Anderson, writing in The London Review of Books. Contra Gerstle, Anderson sees a still-resilient neoliberalism locked in a political struggle with populism-- “The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.” 

Within the various fora of left-wing intellectuals, Anderson is a well-known, important, but controversial figure. His writing, his editorship of New Left Review, and his hand in Verso books placed him in the center of UK left intellectual life-- independent of Communist and socialist parties-- in a role similar to that played by Monthly Review in the US. Wherever Marxism rose in fashion in student and professorial circles, Anderson’s influence could be found.

The publication of Domenico Losurdo’s book, Western Marxism, in 2017 (2024 in English) placed Perry Anderson at the center of Losurdo’s critique of Euro-American trends, a critique generating much attention with the anti-imperialist left. There was certainly some merit to Losurdo’s charge that some of the “Marxism” exercised in Europe and the US was stained by Eurocentrism. Certainly, Losurdo was on to something. 

Anderson’s leftism was decidedly hostile to, real-existing-socialism-- both East and West-- and the various Communist Parties. He opted, instead, for some pure vision of socialism, a version that Marx would have scoffed at as utopian. Moreover, Anderson encouraged a left scholasticism that took young activists further and further from changing the world and more and more toward an academic career.

But the failings of the Western left lie less in any “geographical” disposition, but more centrally in the virus of anti-Communism and the disillusionment after the demise of the USSR. Gary Gerstle-- no friend of Communism-- captures it:

The collapse of communism… shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.

Ironically, Anderson concedes as much:

[Behind] neoliberalism’s apparent immunity to disgrace-- lay the disappearance of any significant political movement calling robustly either for the abolition or the radical transformation of capitalism. By the turn of the century, socialism in both of its historical variants, revolutionary and reformist, had been swept clear of the stage in the Atlantic zone.

But notice the difference. Gerstle-- the liberal-- identifies the socialist left as in retreat from socialism, with not a little suggestion that the “redefinition” was based on opportunism. There really was an alternative, despite what elites wanted us to believe.

Anderson-- the Western Marxist intellectual-- describes the retreat in the passive voice, as though there was no agency in the retreat, merely a “disappearance.” Who or what caused the “disappearance”? Who or what swept socialism clear from the stage? Did it fall from the sky?

There are no regrets of the setbacks to the socialist world. There is no remorse over the sponsorship of student rebellion over worker actions. There is no reflection on the dalliance with the renegades, malcontents, and dreamers on the margins of the left. 

Anderson writes of “the widely differing set of revolts… united in their rejection of the international regime in place in the West since the 1980s.” “What they oppose,” he asserts “is not capitalism as such, but the current socio-economic version of it, neoliberalism.” And what was the role of New Left Review in taking socialism off the table? 

Like so much of the academic left, Anderson and his colleagues were fully compliant with the post-war Western intellectual catechism: ABC – “Anything But Communism.” 

Not surprisingly, Anderson sees a bleak future: either a continuing neoliberal nightmare or an ineffective populism, possibly offering worse outcomes.

In the last few weeks, the discussion of the next international order further develops with an intervention by Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, an establishment figure who has taken the rare enlightened position on Ukraine and Palestine. In Giving Birth to the New International Order, Sachs argues that:

The multipolar world will be born when the geopolitical weight of Asia, Africa, and Latin America matches their rising economic weight.  This needed shift in geopolitics has been delayed as the US and Europe cling to outdated prerogatives built into international institutions and to their outdated mindsets. 

Sachs endorses a view widespread on the left, a utopian view that a diverse and multi-interested group of states organized around diverse and often contradictory grievances against the reigning US-centered international order-- the BRICS alliance-- can produce “a new multilateral order that can keep the peace and the path to sustainable development.”

Almost instantly, Sachs article was met with a critical response from Dr. Asoka Bandarage, who challenges the BRICS commitment to social justice for the smaller, weaker, less powerful nations:

Unfortunately, BRICS appears to be replicating the same patterns of domination and subordination in its relations with smaller nations that characterize traditional imperial powers. Whether the world is unipolar or multipolar, the continuation of a dominant global economic and financial system based on competitive technological and capitalist growth and environmental, social and cultural destruction will fundamentally not change the world and the disastrous trajectory we are on.

Through her intimate knowledge of Indian-Sri Lankan relations, Bandarage shows how decidedly unequal power relations function even with the BRICS founders, questioning: “...would this truly represent a move towards a ‘New International Order,’ or would it simply be a mutation of the existing paradigm of domination and subordination and geopolitical weight being equated with economic weight, i.e., ‘might is right’?”

A welcome voice joins the conversation with the April 16 issue of the Morning Star. Andrew Murray-- Marxist trade union and anti-war leader-- affirms that “[t]his is a moment of transition, so we should hold firmly in our heads that the destination is not foreordained.”

Indeed.

Murray, like the others, sees neoliberalism as the current order: “a prolonged assault on working-class institutions, on the social wage and on the sovereignty of the countries of the global South, with the state receding from some of the obligations it had assumed after 1945-- the maintenance of full employment for example.” 

Unlike the others, he sees 2008 as the apogee of neoliberalism’s ascendance: 

Neoliberalism met its own Waterloo in the crash of 2008. The stagnation in living standards since has been paralleled by an intellectual stagnation of the ruling classes, unable to easily preserve the old systemic assumptions yet equally incapable of transitioning to new ones.

Murray reminds us that the previous transitions always included the socialist options, noting a fascinating quote from former French socialist president François Mitterrand-- frustrated by difficulties around the Programme commun of the Communists and Socialists-- reportedly saying “in economics there are two solutions-- either you are a Leninist or you won’t change anything.”

Until Murray’s contribution, no one even hints at a Leninist solution.

The leading oppositional candidate for a “solution” today is right populism. And we must take note of Murray’s warning: “Previous transitions have been accompanied by war, or at least violent social convulsions.”

If elites continue to cling to neoliberal dogma, “that hands the initiative to the Trumps, Le Pens and Weidels who embrace a lot of Hayek and a little of Hitler, a rhetorical dash of Roosevelt and nothing of Lenin,” concludes Murray.

Conclusion 

The growing sense that neoliberalism is a spent force, both popularly and in practice, leads to the question: “What comes next?”

Ruling circles offer only two choices:

1. Clinging to a nearly 50-year consensus of deregulation, privatization, public/private partnership (socialism for the capitalists), dismantling of social safety nets, austerity, growing inequality, and money-democracy.

2. A right-populism that postures as anti-establishment, but maintains existing unequal relations of power and wealth, employs bully-democracy, while dismantling the institutions and organizations of their opposition, and scattering their forces.

Neither choice challenges the socio-economic system that spawned both options: capitalism. Neither option serves the interest of the people.

The liberal Gerstle, the social democrat Milanović, the academic Marxist Anderson, and the multipolarista Sachs offer us a return to a disastrous neoliberalism or blind faith and hope in a yet-to-be-discovered solution. 

Only Murray offers an approach with historical antecedents and the prospect of a sharp break with capitalist malignancy.

We must remember that those who have been swayed toward right-wing populism were despairing for better alternatives. Blaming their votes when they are offered no real choice is arrogant foolishness. Better we find a real alternative.

Without another alternative emerging, the neo-nationalism of right populism-- expressed today as tariffs, sanctions, barriers (protectionism)-- will inevitably lead to war.

The only answer to an obscenely inhuman capitalism hell bent on a catastrophic path is the “Lenin” answer: socialism.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Globalization, its Demise, and its Consequences

There is very, very much to like about the recent (3-24-2025) article in Jacobin by Branko Milanović entitled What Comes After Globalization?

First, Milanović explores historical comparisons between the late-nineteenth-century expansion of global markets and trade (what he calls Globalization I and dates from 1870 to 1914) and the globalization of our time (what he calls Globalization II and dates from 1989 to 2020). The search for and exposure of historical patterns are the first steps in scientific inquiry, what Marxists mean by historical materialist analysis. 

Unfortunately, many writers-- including on the left-- take the more recent participation of new and newly engaged producers and global traders, a revolution in logistics, the success of free-trade politics, and the subsequent explosion of international exchange as signaling the arrival of a new, unique capitalist era, even a new stage in its evolution. 

Recognizing a growing share of trade in global output, but burdened with a limited historical horizon (the end of the Second World War), left theorists drew unwarranted, speculative conclusions about a new stage of capitalism featuring a decline in the power of the nation state, the irreversible domination of “transnational capital,” and even the coming of a borderless “empire” contested by an amorphous “multitude.”

Countering these views, writers like Linda Weiss (The Myth of the Powerless State, 1998) and Charles Emmerson (1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War, 2013) bring some sobriety to the question and remind us that we have seen the explosive growth of world trade before, generated by many of the same or similar historic forces. Weiss tells us that “the ratios of export trade to GDP were consistently higher in 1913 than they were in 1973.” Noting the same historical facts, Emmerson wryly concludes “Plus ça change”.

Milanović’s recognition of this parallel between two historic moments gives his analysis a gravitas missing from many leftists, many self-styled Marxist interpretations of the globalization phenomenon.

Secondly, Milanović-- an acknowledged expert in comparative economic inequality-- makes an important observation regarding the asymmetry between Globalization I and II. While they are alike in many ways, they differ in one important, significant way: while Globalization I benefited the Great Powers at the expense of the colonial world, the workers in the former colonies were actually benefited by Globalization II. In Milanović’s words: 

Replacing domestic labor with cheap foreign labor made the owners of capital and the entrepreneurs of the Global North much richer. It also made it possible for the workers of the Global South to get higher-paying jobs and escape chronic underemployment…  It is therefore not a surprise that the Global North became deindustrialized, not solely as the result of automation and the increasing importance in services in national output overall, but also due to the fact that lots of industrial activity went to places where it could be done more cheaply. It’s no wonder that East Asia became the new workshop of the world.

While he misleadingly uses the expression “coalition of interests,” Milanović elaborates:

This particular coalition of interests was overlooked in the original thinking regarding globalization. In fact, it was believed that globalization would be bad for the large laboring masses of the Global South — that they would be exploited even more than before. Many people perhaps made this mistake based on the developments of Globalization I, which indeed led to the deindustrialization of India and the impoverishment of the populations of China and Africa. During this era, China was all but ruled by foreign merchants, and in Africa farmers lost control over land — toiled in common since time immemorial. Landlessness made them even poorer. So the first globalization indeed had a very negative effect on most of the Global South. But that was not the case in Globalization II, when wages and employment for large parts of the Global South improved.

Milanović makes an important point, though it risks exaggeration by his insistence that because Globalization II brought a higher GDP per worker, the workers are better off and exploited less. 

They may well be better off in many ways, but they are likely exploited more.

Because he forgoes a rigorous class analysis, he assumes that gain in GDP per worker goes automatically to the worker. Most of it surely does not; if it did, capital would not have shifted to the Global South. Instead, most of the GDP per capita goes to the capitalist-- foreign or domestic. Capital would not migrate to the former colonies if it garnered a lower rate of exploitation.

But engagement with manufacturing in Globalization II, rather than resource extraction or handicraft, certainly provides workers in the former colonies with greater employment, better wages, and more opportunity to parlay their labor power into a more advantageous position-- a fact that nearly all development theorists from right to left should concede.

Structural changes in capitalism-- the rapid mobility and ease of mobility of capital, the opening of new lower wage markets, a revolution in the means and costs of transportation-- have shifted manufacturing and its potential benefits for workers from its location in richer countries to a new location in poorer countries, creating a new leveling between workers in the North and South. 

Denying or neglecting this reality has led many leftists-- like John Bellamy Foster-- to support the “labor aristocracy” thesis as a reason to ignore or demean the potentially militant role of workers in the advanced capitalist countries. As one of the strongest voices in support of the revolutionary potential of the colonial workers and peasants, Lenin was scathingly critical of elements of the working class who were indirectly privileged by the wealth accumulated from the exploitation of the colonies. Those “labor aristocrats” constituted an ideological damper on the class politics of Lenin’s time (and even today), but by no means gave a reason to deny the class’s revolutionary potential. Certainly, the ruling classes of the Great Powers employed that relative privilege and many other ploys to further exploit their domestic workers to the fullest extent and discourage their rebellion.

Bellamy and others want to deny the revolutionary potential of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries in order to support the proposition that the principal contradiction today is between the US, Europe, and Japan and the countries of the Global South. Bellamy endorses the Monthly Review position taken as far back as the early 1960s: “Some Marxist theorists in the West took the position, most clearly enunciated by Sweezy, that revolution, and with it, the revolutionary proletariat and the proper focus of Marxist theory, had shifted to the third world or the Global South.” 

While frustration with the lack of working-class militancy (worldwide) is understandable and widespread, it does not change the dynamics of revolutionary change-- the decisive role of workers in replacing the existing socio-economic system. Nor does it dismiss the obligation to stand with the workers, the peasants, the unemployed, and the déclassé wherever they may be-- within either the Great Powers or the former colonies.

Just as revolutionary-pessimism fostered the romance of third-world revolution among Western left-wing intellectuals in the 1960s, today it is the foundation for another romantic notion-- multipolarity as the rebellion of the Global South. Like its Cold War version, it sees a contradiction between former colonies and the Great Powers of our time as superseding the contradiction between powerful monopoly corporations and the people. 

Of course, richer capitalist states and their ruling classes do all they can to protect or expand any advantages they may enjoy over other states-- rich or poor-- including economic advantages. But for the workers of rich or poor states, the decisive question is not a question of sovereignty, not a question of defending their national bourgeoisie, or their elites, but of ending exploitation, of combatting capital. 

The outcome of the global competition between Asian or South American countries and their richer Western counterparts over market share or the division of surplus value has no necessary connection with the well-being of workers in the sweatshops of the various rivals. This is a fact that many Western academics seem to miss.  

Thirdly, Milanović clearly sees the demise of Globalization II-- the globalization of our time:

The international wave of globalization that began over thirty years ago is at its close. Recent years have seen increased tariffs from the United States and the European Union; the creation of trade blocs; strong limits on the transfer of technology to China, Russia, Iran, and other “unfriendly” countries; the use of economic coercion, including import bans and financial sanctions; severe restrictions on immigration; and, finally, industrial policies with the implied subsidization of domestic producers.

Again, he is right, though he fails to acknowledge the economic logic behind the origins of Globalization II, the conditions leading to its demise, and the forces shaping the post-globalization era. For Milanović, globalization's end comes from policy decisions-- not policy decisions forced on political actors-- but simply policy preferences: “Trump fits that mold almost perfectly. He loves mercantilism and sees foreign economic policy as a tool to extract all kinds of concessions…” Thus, Trump’s disposition “explains” the new economic regimen; we need to look no deeper.

But Trump did not end globalization. The 2007-2009 economic crisis did. 

Globalization was propelled by neoliberal restructuring combined with the flood of cheap labor entering the global market from the “opening” of the People’s Republic of China and the collapse of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Cheaper labor power means higher profits, everything else being the same.

With the subsequent orgy of overaccumulation and capital running wildly looking for even the most outlandish investment opportunities, it was almost inevitable that the economy would crash and burn from unfettered speculation.

And when it did in 2007-2009, it took trade growth with it and marked “paid” on globalization.

As I wrote in 2008:

 As with the Great Depression, the economic crisis strikes different economies in different ways. Despite efforts to integrate the world economies, the international division of labor and the differing levels of development foreclose a unified solution to economic distress. The weak efforts at joint action, the conferences, the summits, etc. cannot succeed simply because every nation has different interests and problems, a condition that will only become more acute as the crisis mounts…

“Centrifugal forces” generated by self-preservation were operant, pulling apart existing alliances, blocs, joint institutions, and common solutions. Trade agreements, international organizations, regulatory systems, and trust greased the wheels of global trade; distrust, competition, and a determination to push economic problems on others threw sand on those wheels. 

Anticipating the period after the demise of globalization, I wrote in April of 2009:

To simplify greatly, a healthy, expanding capitalist order tends to promote intervals of global cooperation enforced by a hegemonic power and trade expansion, while a wounded, shrinking capitalist order tends towards autarky and economic nationalism. The Great Depression was a clear example of heightened nationalism and economic self-absorption. 

The aftermath of the 2007-2009 Great Recession was one such example of “a wounded, shrinking capitalist order.”  And predictably, autarky and economic nationalism followed.

The tendency was exacerbated by the European debt crisis that drove a wedge between the European Union’s wealthier North and the poorer South. Similarly, Brexit was an example of the tendency to go it alone, substituting competition for cooperation. Ruling classes replaced “win-win” with zero-sum thinking.

The pace and intensity of international trade has never recovered. 

While Milanović does not attend to it, this cycle of capitalist expansion, economic crisis, followed by economic nationalism (and often, war) recurs periodically. 

In the late-nineteenth century, the global economy saw a vast restructuring of capitalism, with new technologies and rising productivity (and concomitant rises in rates of exploitation).The era also saw what economists cite as “a world-wide price and economic recession” from 1873 to 1879 (the Long Depression). In its wake, protectionism and trade wars broke out as everyone tried to dispose of their cheaper goods in other countries, only to be met with tariff barriers. 

The imperialist “scramble for Africa” -- so powerfully described by John Hobson and V. I. Lenin-- raised the intensity of international competition and rivalry, while generating the foundation for economic growth and global trade with newly acquired colonies. This is the period that Milanović characterizes as Globalization I. A further aspect and stimulus of the rebirth of growth and trade was the massive armament programs mounted by the Great Powers. The unprecedented armament race-- the “Dreadnought race” -- served as an engine of growth, while exponentially increasing the danger of war (from 1880 to 1914 armament spending in Germany increased six-fold, in Russia three-fold, in Britain three-fold, in France double, source: The Bloody Trail of Imperialism, Eddie Glackin, 2015).

One could argue, similarly, that the 1930s were a period of depression and economic nationalism, following a broad, exuberant economic expansion. And as with the pre-World War I Globalization I, the contradictions were resolved with World War.

Is War our Destiny after the Demise of Globalization II? 

Certainly, the historical parallels cited above suggest that wars often follow pronounced economic disruptions and the consequent rise of economic nationalism, though we must remember that events do not follow a mechanical pattern.

Yet if history is a great teacher, it certainly looks like the mounting contradictions of today’s capitalism point to intensifying rivalry and conflict. A March 24 Wall Street Journal headline screams: Trade War Explodes Across World at a Pace Not Seen in Decades!  

The article notes that the infamous Smoot-Hawley (tariff) Act of 1930-- a response to the Great Depression-- was only rescinded after the war.

It also notes-- correctly-- that tariffs are not simply a Trump initiative. As of March 1, the Group of 20 have imposed 4500 import restrictions-- up 75% since 2016 and increased 10-fold since 2008.

The World Trade Organization, responsible for organizing Globalization II has failed its calling. As the WSJ reports:

In February, South Korea and Vietnam imposed stiff new penalties on imports of Chinese steel following complaints from local producers about a surge of cut-price competition. Similarly, Mexico has begun an antidumping probe into Chinese chemicals and plastic sheets, while Indonesia is readying new duties on nylon used in packaging imported from China and other countries. 

Even sanctions-hit Russia is seeking to stem an influx of Chinese cars, despite warm relations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Russia in recent weeks increased a tax on disposing of imported vehicles, effectively jacking up their cost. More than half of newly sold vehicles in Russia are Chinese-made, compared with less than 10% before its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

As tensions mount on the trade front, rearmament and political tensions are growing. War talk mounts and the means of destruction become more effective and greater in number. The US alone accounts for 43% of military exports worldwide, up from 35% in 2020. France is now the number two arms exporter, surpassing Russia. And, in over a decade, NATO has more than doubled the value of weapons imported. 

European defense spending is expanding at rates unseen since the Cold War, in some cases since World War II. According to the BBC, “On 4 March European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced plans for an €800bn defence fund called The ReArm Europe Fund.”  Germany has eliminated all restraints on military spending in its budget. Likewise, the UK plans to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP in the next two years, while Denmark is aiming for 3% of GDP in the same period (growth rates consistent with those of the Great Powers before World War I, except for Germany).

Dangerously, centrist politicians in the EU are beginning to see rising military spending as a boost to a stuttering economy. As military Keynesianism takes hold, the possibility of global war increases, especially in light of the shifting alliances in the proxy war in Ukraine.

Even more ominously, Europe’s two nuclear powers-- France and the UK-- are seriously discussing the development of a European nuclear force independent of the US-controlled NATO nuclear capability.

At the same time, the incoming chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced readiness to supply more NATO powers with a nuclear capacity.

As war cries intensify, the EU Commission has issued a guidance that EU citizens should maintain 72 hours of emergency supplies to meet looming war dangers.

Of course, the continually escalating wave of tariffs, sanctions, and hostile words directed at The People's Republic of China by the US and its allies threatens to break into open conflict and wider war, a war for which the PRC is quite understandably actively preparing. 

As with previous World Wars, it is not so much-- at this moment-- who is right or wrong, but when the momentum toward war will become irreversible. Another imperialist war-- for, in essence, that is what it would be-- will be an unimaginable disaster. No issue is more vital to our survival than stopping this momentum toward global war.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com