11.16.09
Position paper on the Chinese Wall (work in progress)
I was just looking at: When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (Hardcover)
~ Martin Jacques
with a discussion here:
Discussion at NPR
This is a large book, and I have barely glanced at it, but I see at square one a host of fallacies mixed up with what might be prescient analysis, or not.
Apparently this is a leftist analysis that wishes to sucker punch the ‘American Empire’ and subtly revenge itself by promoting the future of China.
Let me say that as a great admirer of China I don’t wish the fate of world domination on them. It will destroy their reputation for ever, as it seems destined to destroy that of America, originally a charming wonder of world history.
So I don’t recommend being next in line after the procession of imperialistic nationalisms starting with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The challenge is to advance modernity and freedom the way American did (or did not, as you see it). Industrialism is a secondary achievement at best.
I need to read this book at length (maybe), but the opening chapters already look fallacious:
This book suffers from the usual brain-dead historical materialism of Marxists. Economy is all, and economy defines modernity. It is pretty easy to make the case that the economic steam roller defines the modern, but it ain’t so, and the left should know better. The complexity of the modern begins with the Protestant Reformation, the rebirth of science, the rise of a new philosophy, and a host of other things, of which the Industrial Revolution was the last and least, but the most potent.
Marxism got its wires crossed at the start and what should be a liberating thought from the determinism of the economic has become the Marxist one-dimensional determinism of the economic, with a hard-on about ‘the great leap into freedom’.
Look at Archaic Greece: it had most of the first premonitions of the modern, but no Industrial Revolution. That should show the independence of the categories.
Liberal emergent cultures of the early modern transition had a better take on freedom, whatever the insights of Marx’s critique of liberalism (confused with economic capitalism).
The issue of modernity has been lost: the question is more than the Industrial Revolution. Modernity is the result of the modern transition from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, at which point the new economics of capitalism takes over and virtually buries modernity in economic obsession: thus the impulse of Marx to protest the sudden domination of the new market society. Modernity, a global potential beyond the nation state, and beyond the economic, is a genuine global/globalizing category that can challenge its successive exemplars to realize free socities. China was unable to do that, but took a backwards step in that direction with the liberalization of markets. But it must go the full journey and create a liberal (and/or socialist) democracy of the modern type. It is fool’s gold to think that economic Stalinism can lead global society to a higher level.
It is not a venue for successive ambitious nationalisms to play the game of domination for a few generations. In that sense Americans have lost their edge to a species of corruption, and deserve to lose their place in the empire sweepstakes. But what was that? Playing empire was not the question of modernity. So, minus its empire, perhaps the American system can realize once again its place in modernity.
So, it is a question, not of China ruling the world, but of China realizing modernity in the realm of freedom in a new oikoumene of the global non-west.
Unfortunately the deadpan Marxist legacy is likely to forever cripple the future democratic China that alone could allow a great people and a great tradtion to be the successor to the realizers of modernity. I could be wrong.
At some point, as with a rerun of Tienammen Square, the obvious will resurface and we will have the aspiration to something better than the shadowy industrialism of Walmart. They won’t have much to thank Marx for, in the confused analysis of modernity by one of its degenerations.