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Re-reading @IsabellaMWeber's book on China and these tweets does give you a feeling of a certain ‘doux commerce’ thesis that runs through left and liberal writing on global capitalism post-1989, from Thomas Friedman to Antonio Negri. https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1383252843671392257
Story runs like this: under US tutelage the globe was forced into market interdependence, which in turn led to a global commercial society in which classical warfare became impossible. A variety of Smith’s argument about perpetual peace, but now in hollow neoliberal mode.
Sounds eerily reminiscent again of Kautsky’s writings on ‘ultra-imperialism’ from 1912 to 1914: the idea that capitalist integration had become so advanced under the late British empire that states would no longer go to war with each other for fear of their mutual profit margins.
The formation of state cartels now was more attractive. Some months later in 1914 that story was already in the gutter, of course — “Kautsky’s trench warfare died in the actual trenches”, as Trotsky liked to say.
Marxists were right to say that a version of K's ‘ultra-imperialism’ did appear in the Western world with the Cold War. In the 1990s you then get a new vulgar ‘ultra-imperialism' with Thomas Friedman’s World is Flat - McDonald's peace theory basically. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/26/mcdonalds-peace-nagornokarabakh-friedman/
You then get a mirror of this thesis in Hardt and Negri. War is over, terrorism — or fights between state and non-state actors with no real sovereignty — were the future, Jihad vs McWorld etc.
In the 1990s you of course had even more ludicrous versions of convergence theory, or the notion that market integration would lead China to ‘westernise’ and become more like the US (see Friedman). https://www.wired.com/2005/05/friedman-2/
That political convergence theory has been completely debunked, of course, certainly after 2008 and the populist explosion in Europe. But it’s not clear the idea of economic convergence has really disappeared with it.
On both left and right there still is a silent sense that globalisation as presided over by the American hegemon has led to such an irreversible stage of integration that no one will risk decoupling their fragile supply chains.
Bella’s book on China hints at a scarier possibility: China has indeed deeply integrated itself into the global market order but not by neoliberalising itself. It has not collapsed itself into global commercial society, either economically or politically. https://www.routledge.com/How-China-Escaped-Shock-Therapy-The-Market-Reform-Debate/Weber/p/book/9781032008493
Its military budget is of course incomparable to the US. But if you believe that globalisation has actually strengthened the developmental capacity of the Chinese state — unlike, say, Brazil — then we have to hope we don’t end up like Kautsky in 1914.
Anyway I'm just relying on great secondary work here, from @IsabellaMWeber's book to this thread. https://twitter.com/jwdwerner/status/1359149967303131142
For some pushback against both realist and 'international order' accounts, but more optimistic on Kautsky's ultra-imperialist scenario: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09692290.2019.1625427?journalCode=rrip20
