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Mike Pompeo's speech just kicked off a new Cold War with China. But amid all the tough talk, just like with the USSR, there's an unnamed spectre: the Chinese working class. The West has to imagine democratic reform without a workers' revolution... but that's impossible... 1/
2/ Xi's "Marxism" is a mixture of rote-learned bullshit from Engels' Dialectics of Nature plus accountancy principles... and profoundly anti-humanist. Hence the title chapter in Clear Bright Future...
3/ But to understand Xi's project you have to understand it as an explicit deal with the urban working class...
4/ Pompeo is right about one thing: the real Chinese people love freedom. Given one ounce of it they would mobilise in the workplace around real trade unions and secure the same rights as Western workers... so Xi is ultimately the policeman on behalf of Apple, GE etc
5/ In the original Cold War, corporate America had little directly at stake inside Russia (but a lot to gain from escalating the arms race)... today US corporations rely heavily on the anti-union thugs employed by CCP at local level to stop strikes and organising...
6/ So here's how to tell if Trump/Pompeo are serious. They could, tomorrow, order all US companies operating in the PRC to negotiate with freely elected factory councils. But the whole of US capitalism is reliant on Xi's regime of surveillance and exploitation...
7/ Meanwhile the left has to get serious. I predicted in CBF that Xi would start to export his "Marxism" to the West... that's happening now. "Western Marxism" with its commitment to humanism, workerism and democracy is under attack...
8/ But in this new Cold War, maintaining an internationalist position should be easier: the Chinese workers have strong traditions and networks of struggle; they are globally engaged, despite the Great Firewall; and the prestige of the USA is at an all-time low...
9/ As Trump and Xi vie with each other to recreate Great Power competition and disorder, they're united in the project of disempowering the Chinese working class.
