Clash of Empires and the Logistics Counterrevolution: A conversation with Ho-fung Hung and Charmaine Chua

Edited and organized by Lindsay Choi, Matthew Grumbach, Andy Haas, and Naima Karczmar

On February 29, 2024, the Interdisciplinary Marxist Working Group (IMWG) at UC Berkeley hosted a conversation between Ho-fung Hung (Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University) and Charmaine Chua (Assistant Professor of Global Studies, UCSB), prompted by an interest in the convergence of questions of empire and the rise of logistics. The following is a transcript of the conversation, with thanks to IMWG co-conveners Lindsay Choi, Matthew Grumbach, Andy Haas, and Naima Karczmar for transcribing, editing, and organizing the talk.

Introductory Remarks by IMWG:

Hello everyone, and welcome to “Clash of Empires and the Logistics Counterrevolution: a conversation between Ho-fung Hung and Charmaine Chua.” We (Lindsay Choi, Matthew Grumbach, Andy Haas, and Naima Karczmar) are the co-organizers of UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center-funded Interdisciplinary Marxist Working Group (IMWG), and we’re happy to be hosting this event, with great thanks to our sponsors: the Marxist Institute for Research, the Asian American Research Center, the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, the English Department’s Postcolonial and Global Anglophone Colloquium, and Sociology Department.

In this conversation, our speakers, Ho-fung Hung and Charmaine Chua, will offer brief presentations elaborating the provocations posed by their work to the way in which Marxism and world systems theory have conceptualized the relationship between imperialism and capitalism, engaging the topic of what theoretical and political challenges they see arising from the economic interdependence between China and the US today in the context of capital overaccumulation since the 1970s.

We’re very excited for this conversation, which, in our initial planning stages, grew from a sense of a growing interest within our academic communities in the study of logistics—possibly following the shelter-in-place stages of the ongoing pandemic, and the widespread astonishment, fascination, and humor people around the world experienced in response to the six days of the container ship Ever Given’s accidental blockage of the Suez Canal. Today, this interest in logistics seems pressurized by the continuing tie between logistics and warfare, which we see demonstrated in the continuing port-blockage actions in Oakland. We can also think of the institutional memory of the 2011 Occupy Oakland port blockade as a precedent explaining why logistics resonates here. At the same time, this event follows threads of conversation begun last year, with the roundtable on Capitalism and Anti-Asianism Today, organized by Colleen Lye, and IMWG’s conversation with Prof. Andrew Liu on his book, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, regarding the question of “how to write a history of capitalism in the colonial world as a whole, looking beyond the visible benchmarks of proletarianization and mechanization.” With Prof. Chua’s remarks during that 2023 roundtable discussion, on the need to understand the structure of anti-Asianism through historicizing the rhetoric of Chimerica and the “New Cold War,” we decided to follow these threads and continue the conversation by looking towards Marxism and world systems theory approaches to the problem of circulation, especially as it bears upon the relationship between logistics, Global China, and the ongoing pressures of imperialism today. So it’s with warm appreciation and great enthusiasm that we welcome Charmaine Chua and Ho-fung Hung.

Ho-fung Hung:

To start my remarks, I am going to briefly introduce a few points to facilitate the discussion. One of my recent books, a very condensed little book, is Clash of Empires: From Chimerica to the New Cold War,  with Chimerica and New Cold War in quotations, meaning that I am not buying into this characterization as such, particularly the New Cold War characterization. The inspiration for the book came when I was visiting Zurich. While going to a conference, I visited the apartment where Lenin stayed in Zurich and wrote Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. It is a very powerful and misunderstood book. People just look at the title and do not really read it in detail. At least in development studies and sociology, it is a book that is used to discuss the relation between developed and developing countries, the dynamics of underdevelopment.  No doubt about it, there is a lot of content that is about that. But actually, the key takeaway point and the key purpose of Lenin writing this book was to talk about the relation between imperial powers because he was in debate with Kautsky, who said that the imperial powers are going to join hands to conquer the world together, to form a syndicate of imperialist power. It is what Kautsky called super-imperialism, ultra-imperialism depending on the translation. Kautsky is referring to all these kinds of joint imperialist operations, for example, the Berlin Conference that divided Africa among imperial powers and the joint invasion of China in the first years of the 20th century.

The Kautsky vision is that this imperial power will collaborate with one another to form one bloc of super-imperialist powers to conquer the world while Lenin is saying that any collaboration among these imperialist powers is only temporary because each of these nation-states protect their own national capitalists. When they can cooperate, they cooperate, but sooner or later they run into this overproduction problem so they need to compete with one another to export their spare capacity to the rest of the world. Then they will be unhappy about the division of the world in the previous round of joint operations and then in the end, they will compete with one another and then spill over into war.

So, it is Lenin writing in 1914 that in the end turns out to be right. Germany and the UK were collaborating very closely in all kinds of matters, between Bismarck, the German elite and the British elite, the royal family – they marry one another. There is one integrated elite, but then in the early 20th century the two countries start to compete with one another, first in financing railroad constructions in Latin America and the Middle East. German banks start to outflank British and French banks to finance and control the railway. They try to construct what I call a kind of early 20th century Belt and Road, that is the Berlin-Baghdad railroad that cuts across Germany, across the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Ottoman empire to reach the Middle East.

German banks are very successful in financing it and are trying to build this railroad to cut into the spheres of influence of France, Russia, and the UK. They start to create this conflict among these great powers geopolitically. While in Latin America, German and British Banks also compete to finance railroad construction there, but that inter-capitalist competition of railway construction between Germany and the UK did not spill out and become a geopolitical conflict because the geopolitical situation in Latin America is very different. But in Central Europe and the Middle East, it did develop into a geopolitical competition between these spheres of influence of these great powers. It is why Serbia becomes a powder keg. You look at the map, it is in the middle of that railroad connecting from Berlin all the way to Baghdad. This is the early 20^th century, and Lenin said that this kind of competition is inevitable and will lead to war.

Fast forward to the late 20th century and early 21^st century, we see a similar transition from cooperation to competition between China and the US in the 1990s and the 2000s. That is the Niall Ferguson talk about Chimerica. He wrote that article in the New York Times in 2009 saying that Chimerica became one integrated economy or acts like one integrated country and China becomes west Chimerica and the US becomes east Chimerica, just like the east coast and west coast of the same integrated economy. He is saying that with this division of labor, supply chain – and Apple is a perfect example, research and development of the product in California then using labor in China to manufacture the phone and ship it back to the US market and the rest of the world. It is a perfect example of how China and the US cooperate economically.

But then starting from 2010 onward, you see this intensifying capitalist competition that I document in the book. Many companies did not say out loud, but you look at the lobbying record and all these chamber of commerce and anonymous surveys among American companies in China, you see this intensifying inter-capitalist competition. Then the tide shifted in recent years. In the past, in the 1990s and 2000s, whenever there were geopolitical hawks in Washington DC trying to forward any bill talking about China, human rights, and the South China Sea, American corporations would mobilize themselves to lobby against those bills. Whoever advanced those bills in Congress knew that it would not have a chance to be passed. These bills in the 1990s and 2000s did not even reach the floor for a vote; they just put out a gesture to talk about it.

But nowadays you do not see this kind of thing happening. Despite the polarization and division in Congress, one of the few issues where you can have bipartisan support is talk about China, human rights, the South China Sea and issues related to that. This kind of corporate lobbying on behalf of Beijing disappeared and some of these corporations shifted to lobbying for tariffs and tougher economic sanctions on China because business is hurting due to Chinese corporate competition. You look at many examples such as electric vehicles. China used to be a big frontier for Tesla and this whole market. Now, all of a sudden, BYD appeared on the horizon and competes with European and American electric vehicles. And cell phones, because the US has a lot of restrictions, we do not see a lot of Chinese cell phones here, but you go to developing countries, Africa and Southeast Asia – and also Europe – you see Apple is losing market share, not only to Samsung, but also to Huawei and Xiaomi.

You see this kind of competition everywhere and it is the basic premise of my argument. All this kind of talk about Cold War and ideological confrontation and things like that, there is truth to it, but it is not a driving force. We talk about dissidents dying in prison in China, in Russia, but we also see Saudi Arabia gruesomely killed a journalist that was not tolerated by the authorities and the US did not try to make it a big issue. Also, of course, this allegation and controversy about the Modi government doing this cross-border attempt to assassinate dissidents. You see I am not defending China in this sense, but I am just saying that this kind of thing is not a driving force because if it is the driving force of these issues, then the US should be equally in rivalry with Saudi Arabia and India. But geopolitically, the US is very much in alliance with those countries.

So basically, it is the inter-capitalist competition that is driving the conflict. It is very different from the old Cold War with the Soviet Union because from a perspective of a third country, you choose between the Soviet Union and the US – it is an existential choice. It is a choice between private poverty and nationalization. Even though many countries shift to the Soviet side and they said they would not do  nationalization, like Cuba in the beginning, but very soon they go all the way to the Soviet model and China in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, they go to all the Soviet models. When you are choosing between the Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War, it is really a true choice between a social-economic system and a property system. While today you choose between China and the US, you do not need to change your socio-political economic system whatsoever. You can just shift back and forth a few times without any fundamental change in your own society. It is a very different environment, more like choosing between Germany and the UK back in the early 20th century. It is not an existential choice.

Then it comes to a kind of situation that I call inter-imperial rivalry. In the mainstream, in Foreign Policy magazine and Foreign Affairs magazine, they have another word for it: great power competition. This kind of a term is actually not new. The whole nuclear age, from the Cold War to post-Cold War, people in international relations were talking about great power competitions. The whole Henry Kissinger doctrine was to prevent nuclear war between great powers when we compete. What Henry Kissinger wanted was to prevent nuclear war and to have a stable great power relation and competition, but at the same time he saw all these small states as pawns, and sacrificable and expendable for the sake of stabilization of the competition between the Soviet Union and the US at the time. Also, if you go to the literature, they talk about this balance of power and things like that. It is very important for us to bring in the perspective of small states in this great power competition because in mainstream international relations we talk about US-China relations, we talk about US-Russian relations and then all these smaller states can be sites of proxy wars and proxy conflicts and also at times can be sacrificed and their  interests can be  ignored. In the discussion about Ukraine, you can see it very clearly.

The point I want to emphasize and will end with is that we are desperately in need of a perspective of international relations from the perspective of small states and different social forces and classes in those small states to recover, rediscover, and emphasize their agencies. One example I will talk about that might link up to Charmaine’s discussion about the logistics revolution and counterrevolution because in the logistical sector and trading routes and the space of flow, it is a competition between different classes, the capitalist class, the corporate sector, and the worker. It is also just like the early 20th century Belt and Road and the contemporary Belt and Road. It is a space for competition between these great powers striving for spheres of influence. How smaller powers and groups within these smaller states can take advantage of the situation, not to be destroyed by this great power competition, but at the same time take advantage of this situation to propel their own interests is important.

One example is the rise of East Asia in the sixties through the seventies and eighties. One force behind the rise of these Asian tigers is a side product of the Vietnam War and an example of proxy war between the Soviet bloc and the US. What is interesting is that logistics is about shipping goods, but also there is military logistics. During the Vietnam War, there are a lot of container ships from the US shipping all these military supplies all the way to South Vietnam and stopping over in ports in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. After they unload these military supplies to sustain the war effort over there, they have empty ships going back to California. It creates an opportunity. One trading company in Japan finds this opportunity of these empty ships going back from Asia to the US and because they are empty anyway, they pack these ships going back to the US with cheap manufacturing exports because transportation costs are low. Of course, there are many other factors as well, but it is one reason why in the sixties and seventies the East Asian exports to the US suddenly blossomed. It is one example of these kinds of actors acting in between this great power conflict to benefit themselves and to take advantage of the conflict. From the perspective of Southeast Asian states, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, though it is not that small, but from the perspective of scale of US and China, it is like a middle power, and Australia and Pacific Island states, how they not be crushed by these great powers and how they find their agency and their voice to put forward their interests is very important.

My last point is that another key difference between the early 20th century and now is that we are in a more dismal situation now because in the early 20th century when the great capitalist powers were crashing, socialist alternatives were on the rise. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and also other of his work talks about how the Bolsheviks and socialists and Marxists can take advantage of this clash of great powers to advance the socialist agenda and he did that. Without this kind of an inter-imperialist war, the Russian revolution would not have been possible. It is about how to advance this progressive agenda. But nowadays, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the total capitalist transformation of China, we are in a situation of poverty of alternative imaginations about alternative systems. At best we can talk about advancing democracy, the liberal agenda, or the autonomy of small states, but what about a more egalitarian social system and social democracy? We are even more reluctant and shy to talk about socialism as a definite word, always needing to add a lot of qualifiers in front of it – democratic socialism, liberal socialism, or whatever it is. How can we rebuild this imagination and not only to advance the interests of small states and the autonomy of small states and the people there – it is a great power competition – but also to rebuild and advance this kind of progressive agenda. It is another thing that I do not have an answer to, but I hope that through today’s discussion we can get closer to the answer.

Charmaine Chua:

 I am going to try to do three things really briefly today. One, is talk about my book project, which Ho-fung has set me up really nicely for. Two, is talk about theories of imperialism and where they bring us today. And three, to talk a little bit about what thinking about the question of Asia might allow us to do in thinking about the question of Palestine, which I feel is probably very hard to not think about in this particular moment.

So, Ho-fung ended by saying that we need a theory of small states and it is actually sort of what my book is really grappling with in thinking about the logistics revolution. The logistics revolution has become a kind of term of art to refer to the just-in-time delivery and supply chains that most of you are probably familiar with as the kinds of things that allow Amazon goods to appear at your doorstep in two days.But I think so far in the critical literature on logistics, of which Jasper Bernes (in the audience) has been a really foundational thinker, there are two beginning points at which that literature approaches the question of what logistics is. One historically begins with the 1950s and the falling profit rate and ways in which firms struggling to expand or figure out ways to sidestep the profitability crisis started to move goods to the Global South. And two, geographically it also begins largely with the Global North, but particularly with the US as the beginning point from which corporations drove in different kinds of boardrooms different ways of conceptualizing the form of the corporation in order to allow for a financial consolidation of managerial intellectual property and design in the Global North while dispersing production to the super-exploited Global South. And beginning from both those points, the 1950s and the Global North gives us one picture, but in the book that I am trying to write, I try to look slightly differently, which is to begin with the Global South and to begin with small states and the ways in which small states were stitched into the system of logistics prior to the moment of the 1950s when it rises. And once you look there, once you look to the ways in which trade and commercial and industrial capitalism were deeply stitched at this moment prior to the 1950s, during the colonial period, you get quite a different story.

In Indonesia, which is one of the places that I write about in my book, and in much of the African and Asian continent, most small states were bulk producing countries. The ways that you would farm or produce, those were largely agrarian systems that either through colonial production were sites of palm oil and rubber investment, sites of grain and produce that were then shipped from the south and into the north.One of the ways in which bulk produce traveled was that trading agencies and merchant houses that were based in the state itself. Merchant houses really expanded in the period after the fall of the East India Company and the rise of private enterprise. Merchant houses would take stock of wholesale markets, figure out what was produced, load them onto ships, and then sell them in this kind of push demand model to the Global North.

What I argue in the book is that in the 1950s, as logistics starts to rise and most people identify that with the question of falling profitability, you also have in the Global South a movement that is roiling with anti-colonial unrest. Its peak is the Bandung Conference in 1955 in which Third Worldist states come together to ask: what does it mean for us to decolonize in this moment?One of the ways that they come to that question is to say neither the first world of capitalism nor the second world of the Soviet and Asian blocs, but the third world as a non-aligned concept. The revolutionary nationalisms and sometimes the comprador nationalisms that arose out of these movements were primarily about demanding a kind of political and cultural form of anti-colonialism. But in a very understudied way, they were also arguing for a kind of economic form of self-determination in which part of the struggle was to figure out: how do we build development after national liberation? What does it mean once we have gained independence from imperialism to figure out how to grow our economies? We see in this period, particularly in Indonesia, Ceylon, and Burma, massive nationalizations, particularly around trading infrastructure. Workers start to walk into shipping firms, into plantations and estates and seize what was theirs to expropriate from the expropriators, what they saw as what was rightfully theirs in the period after colonialism.

This is a period in Indonesia that lasts for a good 10 years. 700 Dutch firms first get seized and 50,000 Dutch people get sent back home in ‘64 and ‘65. They then seized British estates. Every single British company is seized and British enterprise basically gets shut out of Indonesia. In response, following the work of the historian Nicholas White, I looked into the archives of British shipping companies who were desperately grappling with the question of what it meant to be expropriated from in this moment of declining empire, and who went back to Britain and in a pretty unprecedented move, four of the biggest shipping companies financially consolidated their investments to invest in the first Atlantic experiments in shipping containerization – the steel boxes that are often said to have “changed the world of trade” through the single innovation of a stackable, modular steel box that vastly reduced the costs of transportation and enabled the expanded accumulation of capital across global space. The common story about where containerization begins often begins with Sealand, a trucking company in the US, and the testing ground of containerization during the Vietnam war. But by focusing on how containerization became adopted in Britain, what gets drawn more sharply into view is the way that inter-capitalist competition across the Atlantic, particularly as the British were in the throes of a declining empire, reveals a story able to more systematically grasp the role that logistics played in capitalist imperialism.

As they reckoned with falling profit rates and the prospect of the loss of formal territorial control over the colonies, What shipping firms did in  British case, is that it requires a form of financial investment in the universal standardization of the container form that is so expensive, so costly to build, that British companies explicitly saw the costs of investment as a counter to what they saw as the problem of incipient anticolonial revolutions. Maritime corporations explicitly noted that “what we are doing is pooling our finances, to pursue a monopoly capitalist form that can take away the possibility of any small competitors— small states— from competing. So, seen in this light, corporate investments in supposedly “objective” technological advancements – such as containerization – were not objective at all. New technological forms were seen as ways to respond to and produce counter-revolutionary responses that could  squash revolutionary nationalisms as they stood in the moment. So I returned to this moment in part because I think something about the third worldist era of the 1960s, which I think people are returning to in all sorts of ways…

Well I’ll say one thing first. I’ll say that the third worldist project was never perfect, right? I won’t pretend that it was genuinely revolutionary or genuinely socialist in a lot of forms, even by the time the Bandung Conference gathered. Many of the states were already sort of beholden either to Western alignment or to the Soviet Bloc, and very few of them were sort of genuinely socialist in their orientation. So what does it mean to say that these are revolutionary nationalisms? I think part of what I’m interested in is to pose a kind of, I suppose, hypothetical question, which is that if we had been able to imagine a form of national liberation or a form of economic sovereignty that would have wrested back from a global capitalist system more control for small states to be able to determine the circumstances in which they could define their own national economies, would we have a different kind of way in which working classes within those states might have a more containable form to which to position demands? And so part of what happens, I think, in the triumph of a kind of informal period of imperialism is that even the question of a demand of a third world in resistance pushing against their own states gets taken out of the picture.

But in telling these histories yet more questions arise about why one should return at all to the decolonial moment. Why return to the revolutionary nationalisms of the sixties and seventies? Should contemporary internationalist projects return to the question of the nation and whether or how it can be transformed? Should we return to a Leninist project of transforming what he calls an imperialist war into a civil war through struggles to rebalance the class forces within one’s geography? And even if you buy my argument that revolutionary nationalisms were not destined necessarily to fail on their own terms, but that northern capitalist states and corporations actively restructured the mechanisms of capital to defang the so-called Third World Project, what does one do with a history of anti-imperial struggle in the current conjuncture where any possibility of revolutionary nationalism seems already destined to be encircled or actively repressed or absorbed into a capitalist world system?

In other words, why think about revolutionary nationalisms today?

I had a whole long section returning to theories of imperialism in order to draw out an answer to this question, but in the interest of time I think I’ll skip that and save for the Q and A, but what I do want to mark briefly is that if you look at the history of Marxist debates about theories of imperialism, these actually approach imperialism differently from the way that it is dominantly understood today, as either an occupation of territory or a kind of extension of the legal mechanisms of empire. Marxist theories of imperialism instead return to Lenin and situate imperialism as having a specific character under the capitalist mode of production, in which the expansion and export of capital takes on a world systemic character. This set of theories give us a very different view of what it means to think about imperialism today, proceeding from think the classical Lenin-Luxembourg debates, to dependency theory in the fifties and sixties and onto the kind of post-9/11 moment where Ellen Wood, David Harvey, Robert Brenner and other political Marxists started to ask how we should think about the Iraq War and its geopolitical dimensions alongside the capitalist world system. Across these traditions, you get one clear picture, which is that all of these theories were not trying to derive a general theory of imperialism at a very high level of abstraction – to sketch a universal theory of imperialism across time, but they were really trying to grapple with what it means to understand imperialism as a form specific to the capitalist mode of accumulation as it unfolds in different geographies and historical conjunctures— in a way, and Salar Mohandesi has helpfully argued this; imperialism is a relation and theory across the tradition, from Lenin to Ellen Woods, sought to understand its unfolding in order to make a kind of political intervention. For Lenin, it was about demanding the nation as a particular site in the moment of Tsarist control. For Luxembourg, it was about actually not trying to grapple with the nation and thinking about an internationalist socialist working class. For the dependency theorists, it was about not blaming imperialism for everything, but actually finding a way to deal with national liberation on its own terms. So I think it brings us to a place where I think what we need to think about today, and why we’re coming back to the question of imperialism today, is that China requires a new theory of imperialism—or, China requires us to ask what it means.

I suppose it requires us to ask: Why ask the question of imperialism now? And I suppose the thing I want to say, which is really what Ho-fung’s work has taught us, is that the difference between a kind of imperial rivalry of the past and the present is that China is not trying to become a new type of hegemon. It is simply trying to become the new hegemon, right? It’s not trying to reshift the terms of order as tankies would like it into some kind of new socialist form. It really is about a sort of reaffirmation of the continuity of the capitalist world system as we know it. So, okay, what does this have to do with the question of Palestine? I think one of the things that I was grappling with as I was writing my book is that I wanted a theory of imperialism that helped us to think, as Søren Mau’s work has advanced, a way to grapple with economic forms of domination and power, and to think about how imperialism as a system doesn’t just inhere in guns and violence and massacres, but also inheres in the kind of mute compulsion of an economic system.

And then the Israeli genocide of Palestinians happened, and I think while watching massacres, the salting of the earth, the brutal killing of Palestinians, to write about imperialism as a kind of economic form and the aftermath of October 7th has felt kind of barbaric, right? What does it mean to say we need to think about the economy in a moment where the kind of brutality of a necropolitics that we see has become sort of made so visible? But I want to suggest a couple of tidbits, and I hope maybe we can talk about this, that actually returning to an economic theory of imperialism helps us in ways that are not immediately visible if we think about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the way that it typically is. So the first is that I think most of the explanations for why Israel is pursuing this have resorted to kind of civilizational arguments or that it’s about the right-wing government of Netanyahu and that it’s a particular kind of racialized form. But I think if we think about theories of imperialism as forms of economic domination, we get a somewhat different picture. One of the people who does really good work on this is Adam Hanieh, who traces how Israel’s insertion into the globalized economy sort of accelerated in the 1980s and how this affected the prospects for class struggle and resistance in Palestine. And although there were some efforts in an initial moment pre-1967 for Palestinian men of capital to build a national economy, which is what Sherene Seikaly’s work has taught us — her book is called Men of Capital that I really recommend—the nakba basically prompted a capital flight from Palestine into Lebanon into other places. And in the decades since ‘67, Israel has kind of stolen control over the west bank and Gaza and in the process knitted together both a heavy dependency on Palestinian superexploited labor and also a kind of way in which the Palestinian production sector in the very small forms that exist largely serve an Israeli economy.

What happens in the post-1987 moment, in the aftermath of the first Intifada, is that the first Intifada was a rebellion that used the opening of the Israeli market to Palestinian labor. And so there were, I think it rose from zero in 1948 to 66,000 in 1967 to 150,000 Palestinian laborers who work, who get visas to work in Israel today. What you got in the first Intifada was basically forms of strikes in which Palestinian labor used the fact of their embeddedness in the Israeli economy as part of its rebellion. And now, since October 7th, Israel has completely revoked all of those visas. In the kind of years in between, Israel has started to, as it’s liberalized its economy, really require the importation of massively superexploited labor from Thailand, Philippines, and from India, and particularly in the post-October 7th moment, as it’s revoked all of these visas, Israel has now turned to India, to Narendra Modi’s right wing government, to basically try to import as much Indian labor as it can. And the Times of India a couple of weeks ago had an article that basically interviewed Indian graduates from universities who said, I think I’m going to take the job in Israel. And when people said, don’t you know there’s a war going on, why would you do that? An Indian worker said this: better to die of war while working in Israel than to die of hunger in India. I’ll say that again: better to die of war in Israel than to die of hunger in India. So I think that there’s something here that we have to grapple with in terms of the ways in which Israel congeals for us a kind of analysis of the ways imperialism bring home to roost these forms in which the Israel economy is really struggling with its own contradictions in a moment in which it sort of requires a kind of superexploitation of Asian labor, largely Asian labor, which itself has become the kind of pool of superexploitation in a kind of global world system at the same time that that has been premised precisely on a kind of racialized segregation of Palestinian life in the first place.

So I think I don’t have neat, beautiful thoughts about how to close this, but part of what I think it raises for us is: what does it mean to build Palestinian solidarity today? Taking really seriously the question of revolutionary nationalisms in the past to ask what it might look like to embolden a kind of socialist solution in the present that might require us to think somewhat differently about the ways in which an internationalist working class stitched across the supply chain might allow us to think a little bit about the ways in which internationalism and anti-Zionist internationalism in the US might produce some new forms. So I’ll stop there.

IMWG: As we know, the word “imperialism” has different definitions and different connotations. For some, imperialism is synonymous with US hegemony and addressing sub-imperialisms or the maneuvering of rival imperialist powers is tantamount to exculpating historical and ongoing forms of violence enacted by the US state. At the same time, in a period marked by both the ideological crisis of left parties and depoliticization, leftists in the US look for signs of hope in anti-systemic uprisings and anti-colonial movements in the Global South, the attacks by the Houthi Rebels on cargo ships bound for Israel inspiring admiration against this backdrop of left melancholia.

In your research, what is your approach to striking a balance between accounting for, on the one hand, the durability of US hegemony and, on the other, rival imperialist and sub-imperialist powers with their own autonomous interests that sometimes diverge from and sometimes converge with US interests? Similarly, what analytic or theoretical tools do you use to assess and sort out forces of resistance? How do you distinguish between anti-systemic movements that seek to rebalance the world system and those with larger aspirations aimed at establishing a socialist world order? Does this distinction matter? How might it help us better assess the balance of forces in our current conjuncture?

HFH: I’ll try to answer part of it, and can leave the rest to Charmaine. I’m glad that you bring up the term Global South here, because when I talk about small states, I’m really thinking about the small states in the Global South, and it is a moment when the Global South is back. Of course during the Cold War, the Global South is about decolonization—the politics of decolonization—but now it is the underdeveloped world or developing world that tries to assert their own agencies and interests. And just a few years ago when people started to talk about the Global South and some of more  conservative intellectuals think of it as an antiquated dirty word from the Left in the 1960s, but then in these past few years you suddenly realize that the former commander of NATO and EU officials and the Japanese Prime Minister, they explicitly talk about the Global South, that we have a “Global South problem,” and they’re openly saying that we need to get the Global South support for the cause of resisting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While the Global South is very lukewarm to that and even despite all this controversy about what the Modi government did, the Modi govenrment actually hosted a Voice of the Global South Summit attended by all these leaders in the Global South. And China also talks about the Global South, definitely. So it seems like the Global South is back. The only country I realized that is the kind of staying away from the use of “Global South” is the US. I try to search and the US is the country that the major official rarely mentioned “Global South,” but now you see Canada and Japan, EU and they’re talking about “Global South.” Now it is a moment of “Global South” coming back and then how we seize this moment to advance the interest of the Global South is really important and definitely there’s opportunist powers also trying to claim to be supportive of Global South, and at the same time, betray them.

For example, in the issue of Israel-Palestine, I would trust South Africa more in denouncing the genocidal activities and also siding with the Palestinian people while China is rhetorically… You see a lot of recent statements by the Chinese foreign ministry talking about being friends with Hamas and all this kind of thing. But at the same time you note that China is no longer part of the Global South, and before the conflict started, actually, China and Israel very much relied on one another and Israel is a very important backdoor for trying to get access to US technology in the high tech sector for China. So it is actually this kind of complicated relation that makes China have a kind of more divided position on this Global South issue. Another example is Brazil. I visited and participated in a conference that actually is a great group of Brazilian political economy scholars of China, with some of the officials from the worker’s party. And so when they talk about China, they are very divided. Geopolitically, they side with China as a kind of counterweight to US hegemony. But at the same time that they worry about this kind of China trade  de-industrializing Brazil while empowering the extractive resources export sectors. And so the kind of organized labor sector is ran up against the China connection, while the right wing in Brazil, the Bolsanaro people, they are reversed. They’re also split on China, but in the reverse way. That is, geopolitically, they side with the US against China. But economically, the base of the right wing are the natural resources exporters and the plantations. People are burning down the Amazon to turn it into a kind of a natural resources production base and for export to China. So they are very much pro-China trade. So in the Global South there’s a conflict of this position toward China and the US. So it’s a very complicated situation.

I’m not trying to claim what is the authentic Global South. There’s never an authentic Global South. Charmaine mentioned a little bit that even in the Bandung conference, they’re already divided—India, China, the conflict is already emerging. So how to navigate this complicated relation to find a kind of progressive politics, not in a very dogmatic essentialist way, but in a kind of strategic and pragmatic way—that is very, very important. We just start to talk about this interimperial rivalry as a kind of the current moment. But we haven’t got to how to advance  peoples  organizing and resisting under this moment. While actually what we’re seeing is the reincarnation of Kautsky’s theory of ultraimperialism. We already have this reincarnation like 10 or 20 years ago by the book Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Many people have already pointed out that this book is already a reincarnation of Kautsky’s theory of ultraimperialism because he’s basically saying that all these imperialist powers, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the US are forming together to become one block of empire. They have the book Empire, but then they have another book, Multitude, where they talk about resistance strategy and things like that in this conjuncture of ultraimperialism. While we are transitioning into this discussion and theory about interimperial rivalry, what is undertheorized right now is that how a revival of resistance and antisystemic movements can be possible and viable in this new understanding of the current conjuncture.

CC: Oh my god, Matt, you just asked an incredibly difficult question. I’ll try to say something brief about it. So I think it might be helpful to return to, as I was mentioning really briefly, the kind of third set of theories of imperialism that I had mentioned to the kind of post-9/11 political Marxists. So Ellen Wood’s The Empire of Capital, then Brenner has a great piece called “What Is and Is Not imperialism” that I find really useful for this question. And one of the things that I think Ellen Wood tries to do is picking up, in opposition to Hardt and Negri, the kind of idea that there is some kind of singular and imperial force, as nation-statists did, for her is bullshit. And so part of what she argues is that what we have today is a kind of capitalist imperialism in which capitalist exploitation is realized through economic rather than extra-economic means. So where is imperial power?

I think it’s useful to think about territorial logics of power, and the capitalist logics of power, and in a kind of previous-moment imperialism, the territorial logic of power subjugated capitalist logics of power to it. And in this moment part of what she claims is that the capitalist logic of power is ascendant. In other words, capitalist exploitation is realized through economic means, right? The mute compulsion of economic forces. But it doesn’t mean that nation-states disappear, it simply means that the form of capitalist exploitation that we have now depends ultimately for its reproduction on the existence of political power within states. The difference is that I think when you think about it in this way, the political power of states compel often forms of capitalist hegemony that may not actually always be good for the state itself. So Panitch and Gindin use an example of the US during the Marshall Plan, actually sort of offering a kind of aid that was not actually very good for the US economy per se, but actually produced and helped to smooth the expansion of capitalist production in general.

I think that we have something pretty similar with us today in thinking about China, particularly in its relationship to Israel and Palestine. So one of the weird things about this moment is that you see a lot of tankies—people know what tankies are, right? Yeah, okay—that you see a lot of tankies basically say that the Chinese president Xi Jinping has been feted for calling for a ceasefire and an end to the collective punishment of the people of Gaza. This means that China is the better imperial force, but really China is doing a couple of things. So China is now Israel’s second largest trading partner. The work of Darren Byler has helped to trace ways in which the forms of surveillance technologies that that were first made in Chinese technology companies that do things like biometrically scan for darker facial features in surveilling Muslims in Xinjiang have now been transported to Israel where over 600,000 of these cameras Chinese-made are kind of being used to monitor the occupied Palestinian Territories.

So China is deeply invested in Israel. Why then is it making this call for a ceasefire? A cynical response to this would be that this is not about a Mao Zedong era of the 1960s in which Beijing viewed the Palestinian liberation question as one part of a global campaign against imperialism. Rather, I think what’s happening is that China is trying to balance peace in a region where it has interests both in Israel and in Israel’s opponents. China buys large quantities of oil from Iran and Qatar, both of whom fund and are patrons and brokers of Hamas. And so not surprisingly, whereas before China appeared to be doing the right thing with Palestine, now we see China starting to try to deescalate the attacks by the Houthis in the Red Sea. The moment in which capitalist trade in general and the flow of the supply chain are threatened is precisely the moment in which China has now started to pull back and say, “Oh guys, maybe you should not rebel—even though we still support Palestine.”

So I think this is for us a useful way of thinking about how it is that sometimes the U.S. and China seem to be rivals, but then at other times their interests converge. I think we have a pretty good theory for it with Ellen Woods’ version of Marxism, in which the U.S. and China are both facilitating a multi-state system in which capitalist hegemony can continue as usual.

Audience Question (AQ): Ho-Fung, could you talk a little bit more about what you see as the alternative to the global dominance of capitalism?

HH: This is a very fundamental and challenging question. Back in the early 20th century there was a clear viable alternative—that is, socialism—while social democracy was still a very moderate thing. And now we talk about social democracy as if it’s already very radical. But I’m hopeful because new forces are bubbling up in this moment of trade war and tariffs. Of course, within that, there’s economic nationalism and some cynical corporate-interest-driven intentions of blocking competition. But in Europe, for example, they’ve already started doing various carbon taxes, carbon tariffs. Industrial policy is not a dirty word anymore. Even the Biden administration is doing a lot of these kinds of policies—Keynesian, hyper-Keynesian, even some people call it post-Keynesian—involving economic regulation and employment boosting. These are not as idealistic as socialism or communism. But 20 years ago, you could not talk about adding environmental and labor clauses in trade deals. It would have been an unforgivable crime. But now the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, no matter how imperfect it is, explicitly takes labor and environmental standards into consideration.

So it is a progressive change, then, that neoliberalism is dead. No matter whether you are from the right or from the left, you hate neoliberalism. So I’m still hopeful, but at the same time the order we are heading into is more difficult. I always half-jokingly say—although actually some International Relations scholars are making this argument seriously—that we live in a kind of a world of neo-medievalism, a kind of a medieval order of organized chaos. The Roman empire is dead, but the Roman coin is still being circulated in a lot of places, the religion is still there, and there are different contenders and transnational networks (legal and illegal).

Within this order, China right now is an imperial power. I don’t refrain from using the words “imperial power” to talk about China. A lot of establishment scholars in China openly talk about how China needs to be an empire, “Empire 2.0.” “Empire” for a lot of establishment scholars in China is not a bad word. In fact, when the German ultra-right party AfD [Alternative for Germany] visited China last summer, one of the AfD leading candidates for the EU parliament said in an interview with the Global Times something like “I trust that the Chinese people have good taste because you are so fond of [Nazi political theorist] Carl Schmitt.”

But China still exhibits a kind of split mind. On the one hand China has been the biggest beneficiary of the U.S.-led multilateral liberal order. It is how the Chinese economy boomed in the last 20, 30 years. But at the same time they feel that they are constrained by the US political order. They don’t want to have their own sphere of influence restricted in Asia at large. So on the one hand, China still tries to cooperate and participate in the U.N., W.T.O., and all these organizations and to compete with the U.S. in those institutions. But at the same time, China is very clearly edging more and more towards what I call “agents of chaos” like Russia, Iran, North Korea. These are cynical powers, trying to bring down the existing hegemonic order of the U.S. without a clear alternative. They just want to create chaos and then in the middle of the chaos to expand their territory and to consolidate their regimes. But China is not totally committed to them. We see that China is still split. So then the question becomes, from the perspective of the U.S. government and other different groups and social forces, how to steer this competition between the U.S. and China to make sure that China doesn’t go all the way over to the agents of chaos. So we need to think more about whether that’s possible and, if so, how to do it.

AQ: I would like to ask you both about the Belt and Road initiative. On the one hand, since 2013 and especially since 2018, the acceleration of the initiative seems impressive: takeovers of the Port of Piraeus in Greece, predatory loans to Sri Lanka and the takeover of the port there, as well as other kinds of big infrastructure projects. On the other hand, the rise of Belt and Road has occurred in the same period in which China’s status as the world factory doesn’t seem self-evident anymore. The industrial dynamism of the WTO period is lagging a little bit. So it seems like from a certain angle these massive infrastructural investments, largely debt financed, are themselves the point and not necessarily a conduit for an increased volume of manufacturing. It seems to be both an impressive thing and also a signal of stagnation or decline. So what is the character of the belt and road initiative? What difference does it make or will it make to competition over hegemony, to supply-chain-based globalization, etc.?

CC: My answer to this is: read Ho-fung’s Clash of Empires. Ho-Fung’s work usefully points out that the time that assets and debt bubbles balloon in China is precisely the moment in which a lot of these Chinese Belt and Road initiatives in other places come with procurement guarantees. These initiatives don’t necessarily come with the same kinds of debt and loan conditionalities as you might have seen with structural adjustment programs, but they come with procurement guarantees that ask you to buy, for example, Chinese tractors instead of John Deere tractors, or Chinese steel instead of American concrete. It’s about finding ways to externalize and create a market, in a classic kind of accumulation of capital argument. It is a classic example of trying to find new external markets for Chinese products. This is all Ho-fung’s work.

HFH: Currently the discourse around the political economy of Belt and Road is really interesting. You’re right that the Chinese are already scaling back because of all these financial and economic problems, and also the socio-political backlash against [Belt and Road]. There’s a recent article about these anti-China protests across the globe, mostly in these Belt and Road countries. Actually China should take pride in it, because 30, 40, 50 years ago, there were all these labor protests and progressive protests against the U.S.—but now China has become a shared target of this protest. It’s kind of a mark of being a Great Power: people start to protest you.  [Audience laughter.] Actually even the Communist Party of the Philippines—a defunct party, I think they have only a few hundred people left—issued a statement a few years ago saying that their main enemy is China. They have been fighting U.S. imperialism for so long, but now China is the main imperialist power.

So with this backlash and these financial problems, China is scaling back. There was an interesting recent conference a few months ago at [The Josef Korbel School of International Studies] about this Chinese “debt trap” narrative, meaning that they’re lending money deliberately to make you unable to pay so that if you default your loan they take over your port or your strategic asset. The Sri Lanka case is much talked about, but it’s only one case and one really couldn’t generalize it. But this kind of “debt trap” theory takes off among officials in the US and then around the world, that China is maliciously and intentionally lending to make you bankrupt.

But the reality is that the debt crisis is created unintentionally. Chinese lending is creating a debt crisis in many countries that borrow heavily from China without benefits to local actors and local laborers because [the Chinese loans] have all these conditions. It is not like I.M.F. or World Bank [loan conditionality] where [debtor countries] need to pursue a certain policy. The conditionality [for Belt and Road loans] is that you need to hire Chinese contractors, use China products, etc. In a number of cases in Africa the Chinese management has had to confront organized labor, and they don’t know how to handle it. So some managers might pull up a gun and shoot a few laborers dead, because militant organized union protest is not something that they are familiar with.

Their remedy is to bring their own Chinese workers to work in those projects in Africa, in Southeast Asia. Those Chinese workers are very much like indentured laborers. The arrangement is that they don’t get paid until the whole project is done. Sometimes they don’t even get paid after they get back home. They confiscate their passports when they’re moving there. So the local labor is very unhappy because you don’t create jobs, and meanwhile the Chinese labor is actually oppressed. This is the situation created in many of these vulnerable countries that cannot bear this debt burden. In the end this debt crisis is the same as the internal debt crisis in China, like [Chinese real estate developer] Evergrande, which develops all this real estate, but just borrows whatever it can to build stuff that is not profitable and then goes bankrupt. It’s a repetition of the same.

We always assume that the Chinese government and the Chinese actor is so competent and so well planned. Either it is very benign, a new benign Hegemon, or it is a malicious Fu Manchu. But in fact they are experiencing internal and external problems. They are chaotic and ad hoc; they create all these problems that they don’t know how to handle. So, in considering Chinese political economy, we need to reckon with the downside, but at the same time we need to be careful to not get into this demonizing narrative [solely] about China

AQ: I have a question for Charmaine about revolutionary nationalisms. What would you diagnose as the problem of revolutionary nationalisms during the global sixties? As in Ghana’s independence, the pan-African movement, or the Vietnam War and the Third Indochina War, we often see these regional blocks collapsing as national interest seems to take priority. I’m a little suspicious about whether there are revolutionary nationalisms or whether it’s just nationalism at the end of the day. How would you contrast those types of nationalisms with what you see as revolutionary nationalisms today?

CC: So, to be clear about my own normative political position: I’m not a nationalist. I don’t think what I’ve been thinking through historically is an effort to revive an argument that what we need now is to strengthen the nation or the small state and to better enable their position within the world system. Even for Luxemburg and Lenin it was clear that a small state would get engulfed by a capitalist world system. So I don’t think that there is any kind of revolutionary or communist nationalism that would be able to survive on its own without some form of a larger socialist bloc.

In the research that I’ve done, part of the story I tell is that the moment of revolutionary nationalisms also allowed for communist parties, surplus populations and the working class within their nations to have a more tractable way to engage in a war of position within the nation that then enabled the nation to then have more power in engaging in a war of maneuver against global capital. For example, the Communist Party of Indonesia, during the period about which I was writing, had about 2 million members. It was only through [the state’s] seizures [of property] that the workers took over most of these trading firms and plantations and estates. It was both a peasant revolution and a working class revolution.

And it was only because the communist party was maneuvering within the state to kind of gain power that it was pushing for that. But it was in that process that Sukarno’s government was able to then say, “okay, we will now do the kinds of things that state capacity [can do] that workers may not [be able to do].” It was only with pressure from below that [Sukarno’s government] took over and engaged in actual decrees that seized capital from foreign merchants and banks. So the argument would not be to say we need to revive revolutionary nationalisms, but that we need to rethink the question of what it might mean to battle on the ground of the state or the nation as a place in which it becomes possible again for different kinds of proletarian struggle to articulate themselves in ways that might make demands more possible.

I think my brief answer to the first question—“what is the alternative”—is a point at which my scholar recedes and the organizer comes out. I think it’s actually really hard to ask the question of what it means to build an alternative form today. What does socialism against a massive global capitalist system look like? I’m not sure that it is possible to imagine a communist horizon without actually just figuring out what it means to organize the conditions for strengthening proletarian struggle in the immediate moment within the contexts over which you have control: to ask where you are a worker or a political participant and what it means to deepen the struggle where you are. And so I think that that’s my answer. My answer is not to return to nationalism – I’m a communist, not an anti-colonial nationalist – to to ask what it would mean to build the conditions of possibility for revolution where one is. Ho-Fung, do you want to respond to this question too?

HFH: One progress at a time. That is my response. I’m old enough to think that whoever promised a big utopian picture is probably not right. One progress at a time.

CC: Can I add one real quick thing? This is my very particular answer because I study the global logistics industry. If you look at how containerization of shipping has transformed supply chains, how the consolidation of capitalist power in these large scale multinational corporations sutures workers across vast spatial geographies together in a way that wasn’t possible before, it produces a real material basis for class solidarity between workers that are not traditionally understood to have convergent interests – for example, between tech workers drafting intellectual property management software in the transnational corporations in the Global North and assembly line workers in the Global South. And the vertical integration of global supply chains thus means that while workers might be spatially distant, they are also materially part of one chain: for example, factory workers in Yue Yuen, the shoe manufacturer in China that produces all of the shoes for Nike, are materially connected to the tech worker in the Nike headquarters. And in a more indirect sense, they also share a class relation with the logistics worker delivering the shoe. All this is mediated through subcontracted relations, but thinking alongside supply chains allows us to see  how contemporary corporate organizational forms may produce deeper antagonisms between the working classes of the world and the financial power of multinational corporations. It allows us to envisage in a real material sense how that shoe maker in China might be connected to the Amazon worker who delivers that shoe in the U.S., and to ask what internationalist solidarity might look like if we organized in a way that understood them as unified in interlocking class positions. To think about a form of proletarian struggle that is located in that site of circulation is a potential way of thinking about anti-capitalist movement.