Preamble
This contribution does not mention the many positive advances and achievements accomplished through contemporary Chinese Modernization Theories and the CCP, on both the theoretical and practical level.
It rather concentrates on supplementary aspects and subsystems which, from the point of view of a revolutionary Marxist scientist who supports the Chinese process, would enrich the existing theories. It is meant to be an enhancement of the existing paradigms and not a substitute for them. In this sense, it should be considered a practical contribution to comrade Xi´s thoughts and praxis in the New Global Era.
Due to time constraints this is a basic outline.
1. The Power Vectors of Socio-political Human Behavior in 21st Century Global Society, in Hierarchical Systemic Interaction Order (macro, meso, micro, situational level).
1. Planetary Universal Sphere
2. Biosphere
3. Anthropocene
4. Class Societies
5. Modern Capitalist Class Societies
6. Economy, Politics, Military, Culture, Environment
7. Imperialism Theory
8. Profit Rate & Domination
9. Subjects
2. Subsystems/Building Blocks of the New Multidisciplinary Scientific Theory of Imperialism and Geopolitics.
To contribute to the scientific understanding of the alleged policy of "containment" of China and Russia, by Washington and its neocolonial allies in Europe, Asia, and Australia, I have advanced a model of multidisciplinary analysis that goes beyond the monodisciplinary economic-political explanation of imperialism.
This model combines several established scientific paradigms:
1) Ecological sustainability, in the light of Darwin's evolutionary dynamics crystallized in the concept "survival of the fittest".
2) The behavioral ecology of living organisms in complex predator-prey dynamic systems.
3) The social systems of kinship, ethnicity, political economy, and the principle of the excluding territoriality that gave rise to the concept of Homeland Nation.
4) The political economy of capitalism in its current imperialist phase, under the control of unproductive finance capital and high-tech capital hegemonized by artificial intelligence (AI).
5) The ethical-cultural weakness of homo sapiens in lieu of its animal genetics.
6) The military sciences, with the four new dimensions of 21st century warfare and the evolutionary race between weapons of aggression and weapons of defense, which evolve between predators and prey.
7) Deterministic chaos theory and the Lorenz attractor.
8) Systems theory and, of course,
9) The classical paradigms of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao Zedong, among others. (See my oeuvre, with Prof. Hu Angang: “The Chinese Miracle and the Future of Humanity: Explanatory Introductory Essay”).
3. Planetary Universal Sphere (Subsystems of the New Multidisciplinary Scientific Theory of Imperialism and Geopolitics.)
There are four fundamental interactions (“basic forces”) at work in the universe, about human beings have practically zero influence on a macro scale: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force.
Together with concrete spatial and time-conditions on the blue planet they have a determining impact on earth conditions and human societies. Increasing problems of climate change, water stress and massive flooding, sea level rise, geological tectonic movements, seasonal changes, and global political-military competition for scarce resources, are some of the consequences, with increasing risks of confrontation and instability.
A major UN report recently warned that water supplies around the world are at increasing risk from “vampiric overconsumption”. 2.2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water worldwide, and more than half of the global population does not have access to safe sanitation. And 80% of the world's wastewater is discharged untreated directly into the environment!
Europe, one of the most important economic regions of the global economy has been in drought since 2018. Researchers say the water situation is now “very precarious”. In northern Italy, France and Spain, the situation “raises concerns for water supply for human use, agriculture and energy production”, according to the EU Joint Research Centre’s (JRC) latest report on droughts in Europe.
4. The Laws of the Biosphere
Following the universal planetary and biosphere, the third subsystem in descending hierarchical order is the contemporary global society.
For every living organism in the thin biosphere of the Earth, its survival and reproduction is presented in terms of biodiversity and ecological sustainability, within the evolutionary dynamics of “survival of the fittest” (Darwin). This law establishes that the adaptability of organisms against adverse conditions is the key to their survival within the sum of biotic factors and food chains in predatory systems, many of them operating in zero-sum logic.
These predatory systems are characterized by patterns of antagonistic interaction between the individuals of the ecological community, with asymmetric interrelationships that benefit some to the detriment of others. Three Specific Types of Predatory Systems can be distinguished in the biotopes of the earth: predation, parasitism, and herbivory.
By predation is meant an interaction in which the predatory organism kills and eats another organism, its prey. To live harming, stealing, or hunting others is the definition of the predator. It is obvious, that US imperialism fully meets the criteria of this definition.
In the second type of antagonistic relationship, an individual or collective organism, the parasite, consumes nutrients from another organism, its host, which reduces the survival ability of the host-victim. Parasites often do not kill their hosts. but they prolong their asymmetric use, except for the so-called parasitoids. Again, the parasitism of US-Western imperialism and the collective West in the global system, coincides fully with this criterion of predatory systems. There is no better illustration for this imperialist parasitism than the unpayable foreign debt of weak countries.
Finally, by herbivory the predator-prey relationship between plants and animals adapted to eat them is inferred. Destruction of natural forests in Africa, Asia and Latin America, by the corporations of first world capital, is a clear example of this global predatory system.
5. Win-Lose Relations: The general operative logic of the Biosphere.
Those are the predominant antagonistic interactions in the kingdom of biological systems. And being homo sapiens an integral part of this realm, it is not surprising that the current capitalist system --like those of all previous class societies, feudal, slave, “Asian mode of production” and so on— operates fully as a predatory system, under the aegis of advanced global imperialism, with more violence than ever.
6. A new Realism about Khrushchev’s Dream of Peaceful coexistence with Capitalism is needed in the light of the Fundamental laws of the Biosphere (survival of the fittest).
A scientific basis for a realistic interaction-policy with other Great Powers in the world system is needed. Khrushchev’s main foreign policy doctrine of possible peaceful coexistence between the systemically antagonistic superpowers --a capitalist-imperialist United States and a socialist Soviet Union(1956)-- has no foundation whatsoever in fact or in science.
There is no historical empirical evidence for that thesis and there is neither any scientific evidence within the patterns of behavioral ecology of the biosphere, of which human societies and Anthropos are integral subsystems. In fact, there is no evidence at all to be found in any major scientific paradigm of modern history (Marx, Darwin, von Clausewitz, Lenin, Mao, Lorenz etc.). And if there are any doubts left about that reality, a brief review of the U.S. proxy war of aggression against Russia in Ukraine and the threats (Trump, Taiwan, semiconductors etc.) against China´s Communist Party and president Xi´s Marxist development project would be helpful. And the same is true for the six major historical attempts of U.S. imperialism to destroy the CPC.
Chinese research and policy institutions would be well advised to take note of an elite Stanford University project, called: “The U.S.-China Great Power Competition. How China builds power and what the United States can do to protect its interests at home and around the world”, with the following Research Focus: The most crucial challenge facing U.S. policymakers today is how to prevail in great power competition with China. The first step to devising an effective U.S. strategy for great power competition is to understand and correctly characterize how China builds power and influence in the international system. Yet serious analysis to answer this question is scant.
The U.S.-China Great Power Competition project aims to fill in this gap. Drawing heavily on Chinese sources and engaging with experts from the diplomatic, economic, technology, and military sectors, it pieces together the logic behind Chinese actions and behavior in foreign policy, military strategy, and the economics and technology realms. The project uses the crucial case of China’s rise over the past 25 years to explore what shapes the strategic approach of rising powers as they accumulate influence, where they imitate, and where they innovate. It reveals that China builds power largely by differentiating itself from the United States. The findings will make significant contributions to key theoretical and policy debates about China’s intentions and goals and, more broadly, how states compete.” 7. Contemporary Global Society: A third degree Complex Adaptive Subsystem of Objective Reality (planetary, biosphere).
7.1. The civilization of bourgeois modernity evolves, grosso modo, according to the operational logic of Complex Adaptive systems (CAS), which operate between an established order and indeterminacy (chaos) with a certain capacity for adaptation and self-organization. The main contradiction that governs the behavior and development of these non-linear systems —reminiscent of Mao Zedong's reflections on Dialectics (“On Contradiction”, August 1937)— is reflected in the transcendental dialectical concept of deterministic chaos, that “apprehends” the movement between the predetermined order and the emerging order of the system.
7.2. The fate of nations, from the most powerful such as China and the United States to the weakest such as Africa and Latin American ones, as well as the transformative possibilities of its social and political actors in the contemporary global order, depends, consequently, on the concrete dialectical unity of the relations between the tendencies of the systemic order (negative feedbacks) and the tendencies of systemic chaos (positive feedbacks) that characterize the current global macrosystem and the subsystems of advanced capitalism.
In essence, it is the laws of deterministic chaos that establish the systemic degrees of freedom for its objective and subjective components, in this brilliant and, at the same time, frightening farewell with which the advanced sciences of the 21st century “dispatch” the idealistic illusions of free will and judgment of philosophers of the past.
8. The Future of Humanity: three capitalist dystopian scenarios and the path of 21st Century Socialism.
The two centuries of evolution of the modern capitalist mode of production and its corresponding bourgeois superstructure are generating a growing imbalance between the homeostatic regulatory tendencies of the system and its chaotic tendencies, to such a degree, that the current transition phase of the American era towards the post American age of the world system –of its post-hegemony imperialist stage and dynamic towards indeterminacy-- is often seen as a pre-configuration of the future with only four possible paths of evolution: three capitalist dystopian scenarios and the path of socialism of the 21st century.
Not surprisingly, such complexity of the phase change in the world system is politically perceived by citizens as uncertainty, chaos, or confusion.
9. War against Russia and China: The end of Bourgeois Civilization and liberal democratic Ideology?
The imperialist war to destroy Russia may be the final nail in the coffin of Bourgeoise Civilization because it is demonstrating in a very real, prolonged, and bloody way, that the Western discourse of liberal democracy and a rules based global system is nothing more than an instrument of global-scale ideological domination. A perception management and brainwashing system that the dominant North-Atlantic part of the ecumene has used for five hundred years to ideologically enslave the rest of the world. Now, the brutal unprovoked aggression against Russia in the heart of Europe, which in one year has claimed the lives of over 300,000 people and the displacement of millions more, is rapidly destroying the cherished fable of the Collective West´s dominant classes about their progressive democratic bourgeois states.
Nowhere is that more visible than in the demise of the legend of the Scandinavian welfare states, which have been the global attractor par excellence for most of all past transition leaders of the Third World, as our respective CTS-model has shown. But with Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands etc., falling in line in a slave like manner with the criminal aggression of Atlantic Imperialism against Russia, they have become forensic evidence that –due to their capitalist nature-- they are first and foremost imperialist instruments of global class struggle. Reactionary tools of global and national class struggle, because their chrematistic market economies and grand bourgeoisie dependence leave no room for the democratic illusions of the founding fathers, to become reality in the global capitalist system.
That is, in fact, no surprise for any serious scientist, because all human class societies for the last 5,000 years have been prototypical bio spheric predator-prey systems. And the bourgeois civilization is, of course, no exception to that general law of phylogenetic civilizatory evolution of homo sapiens.
But now, that the imperialist war against Russia and China has shattered the essential software substratum of the bourgeois order, a phase change in the global organizational structures of mankind may become possible, overcoming the chrematistic institutional cancer of the species, that befall it about five millenniums ago.
10. Systemic propensity (evolution) of the new Penta-Centric Ecumene during the next Decade.The evolving penta-centric world system is characterized by dynamic balances of strategic power that vary according to fluctuating alliances, which, in turn, are determined by three fundamental attractors of contemporary global society.
1. The production, appropriation, and distribution of the world surplus product (Globaler Mehrwert).
2. The accumulation of geostrategic power in its six basic forms -economic, cultural, political, military, territorial and demographic- as a decisive means to prevail in that archetypal race of the biosphere between predators, competitors and prey.
3. The war propensity of the capitalist systemic structure in its upper phase of Imperialism and Fascism of the 21st Century. In other words, the relationship between the “system structure and war propensity” of nations with a market economic economy.
During the next decade, the new system will have a strong antagonistic-binary propensity with high danger of nuclear confrontation between the Imperialist Block of the Collective West (BIOC), led by Washington, and the Block of National Strategic Sovereignties (BSEN), led by China and Russia, with India in an opportunist-attentive attitude and position and the European Union as a vassal state of Anglo-American imperialism.
11. The historic role of China in the Global Emancipation Struggle between 21st Century Socialism and 21st Century Capitalism-Fascism for the Liberation of Humanity.
11.1. It is evident, that the construction of a viable global basin of attraction for the 21st Century civilization can only be achieved with conscious scientific-political avant-garde organizations, that act in consonance with decisive social classes and collective subjects.
The paradigmatic lessons of Darwin, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Deng and Xi, as well as contemporary advanced sciences, provide the fundamental software for the gigantic transitions and progressive phase changes that are required to modify the entropic course of humanity.
11.2. In this perspective, the only discernible structural emancipatory alternative in the contemporary global system is China's algorithm of development: the zhōngguó Middle kingdom's model of evolution towards a socialist future under the hegemony of the CCP and the interpretation of the “new global era” by President Xi Jinping.
In the current complex reality of the planet there is no guarantee that this demiurgic perspective will prevail in the future or that the species does not self-destruct via ecological implosion or nuclear holocaust. However, it is the only discernible rational perspective on a global scale, whose “DNA” allows us to be moderately optimistic about the future of humanity.
12. Will Capitalism or Socialism of the 21st Century prevail?
We don’t know, if the current phase change will be transient or effectively take hold and lead to a new consolidated systemic order. In political terms, whether the future of mankind will be 21st Century Socialism, 21st Century capitalist Imperialism and Fascism, or the nuclear holocaust.
But the currently emerging polycentric world system at least presents an objective possibility, to transcend all class societies and leave the brutal laws of conduct of the biosphere behind. Whether that historic opportunity will be taken advantage of by homo sapiens or not, depends on the capabilities of individual and collective critical social subjects, to organize the majority of people in the ecumene and convince them, that the bourgeois experiment in democracy has miserably failed.
13. Additional indispensable science-based theoretical Subsystems for a successful Transition to 21st Century Socialism and Communism.
13.1 Socialist Culture.
The development of a socialist post-capitalist culture is probably the most intrinsically difficult part of the process because Culture is the most sophisticated Complex Adaptive System (CAS) that exists in 21st Century societies.
The importance of culture lies in its macro-social function: it guarantees the integration and cohesion of a gigantic diverse social universe through an ample variety of languages: judicial, historical, political, logical, linguistical, ethical languages, which convert billions of heterogenous people with potentially antagonistic interests (class struggle for surplus product, contradictory ideologies and socializations, etc.) into functionally efficient integrated macro systems.
The center of gravity or, to be more precise, the principal attractor of that complex system is the concept of identity, which serves, to use an analogy, as the GPS (Global and National Positioning System) of individual practices of these billions of people.
Culture and Power (in its six basic forms), are the decisive algorithms of politics. Therefore, the transition struggle for a socialist or capitalist future will be decided in this theater of operation. As in Mathematics: the development of the forces of production is a necessary condition for the triumph of Socialism, but it is not a sufficient condition. That´s one of the reasons, why the global debate about the communist future would be better served by not framing it as a “Modernization Theory”, but a Theory of Transition.
Any political, ideological, educational, media and public policy praxis in China should therefore be guided by a clear understanding of the identity needed and desired by the Party under Xi´s core leadership. This identity must be capable of overcoming the 24 hours a day and 365 days a year toxic formative de facto influence of a mercantile chrematistic market economy in production, commerce, and consumption. Of an ecosystem, which is antagonistic to the anthropological configuration that a new trans-capitalist society requires.
13.2. Economic and Labor Justice through a labor-value based Equivalence Economy and its Implementation through Input Output-Tables and the Magic Triangle.
Besides productivity and efficiency, any socialist economic system must strive for a just retribution of rewards for all economic subjects involved in the process. In fact, economic justice is the main criterium that differentiates socialist political economy from capitalist political economy.
2,000 years of chrematistic market economy and respective economic sciences have shown, that it is impossible to determine the adequate/just retribution for the effort of all workers in an objective scientific way.
The metrological problem of objectively determining the value of all and any labor contributions to the final product, the iustum pretium (just price), can not be resolved within the framework of a chrematistically determined market economy. Among other problems, because the determining factor in the market price building mechanism is power. Power in its four elementary social forms: economic, political, military and cultural.
The only scientific solution to this problem of justice and just retribution –which is of cardinal importance for any socialist and communist economy— is the so-called Labor Value based Equivalence Economy, developed by two outstanding German scientists: Prof. Arno Peters and Prof. Carsten Stahmer.
Parallel advancements were developed by renown British scientists Prof. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, University of Glasgow, also linked to the approach of Econo-Physics.
Ground breaking achievements are due to the Magic Triangle Input Output-Table calculations by Prof. Stahmer.
13.3. The objective problem of developing a functional Non-Bourgeoise Participatory Democracy and Political Superstructure for current Socialist Transition Societies.
The principal problem for the development of a functional Socialist Superstructure of a new Type, adequate to the conditions of 21st Century digital societies, is the objective contradiction between the horizontal organization of power and the fractal characteristics of the universe.
Democracy is a culturally evolved horizontal organization-system which, ideally confers equal power to all citizens. However, the laws of scale and the functional need of hierarchical organization in social non-micro systems --like corporations, armies, trade unions, political parties, Nation States, as well as in biological systems etc.-- according to the logic of fractal geometry, with self-similarity at all levels of the empirical organization (institution), generates an objective contradiction, which has not been overcome in current socialist transition processes.
Any realistic appeal to Western audiences for a change from bourgeois civilization to 21st Century Socialist civilization must urgently resolve this contradiction, to have a mass impact.
13.4 The New Socialist Normal and the New Anthropos vs. the power of the capitalist civilization and chrematistic market economy.
Any new social order, the New Normal, imposes new forces and relations of production and a new superstructure on the submerging ancien régime. It also configures the type of human being, that its new social order and economy requires: the homo novo, as the Romans baptized this necessary reconfiguration project of pre-existing identities.
Any transition society is, by definition, a hybrid society, in which the success or failure of transformation depends on this main contradiction. In the case of China, on the solution of the contradiction between market-driven development and its corresponding ideologies --(possessive individualism, consumer oriented pervasive penetrating marketing exposure in tv, internet, etc.; stock market speculation, optimization of personal benefits, etc.)-- which profoundly determine, through everyday life-experiences and conditioning, the New Anthropological Normal, on the one hand, and the declared objective of the Party, to build a socialist, post-capitalist society, on the other.
Coordinator, World Advanced Research Project, WARP, Global
Coordinator, The Center for Transition Sciences, CTS-UAM, Mexico City
Vice Chair, World Association for Political Economy, WAPE, Beijing-Paris
Editor: ciencialibertad.org, New scientific Breakthroughs in 21st Century Socialism.
Mexico City, 22.4.2023
