Neither Washington nor Beijing – nor geopolitics at all

The loudest left-wing critique of postmodern or cultural leftism comes, unfortunately, in the form of neo-Stalinism. We've discussed this plenty on Bunga. The corrective to Foucauldian understandings of power – as located everywhere, and to which the only response is resistance – has been to refocus on the *seizure of state power.* Any 'politics’ which does not have this as its north star is lost.

But this neo-Stalinism represents, at best, an over-correction. And more likely a profound error: 1) it rests on a worshiping of established fact (such and such a left party are in power, therefore they are right); 2) it elevates “anti-imperialism” at the expense of emancipation and so politics becomes a matter of backing one capitalist camp against another (usually, whatever is anti-US) – politics is substituted for geopolitics; and 3) if one understands intersectionality as a major expression of the postmodern/cultural left, then the neo-Stalinists miss that the Stalinist popular front is at the root of it (as Mike McNair has argued in his genealogy, “Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism?” – see here for discussion).

I see this tendency primarily but not exclusively in the global South, incl. in Brazil. A recent discussion between Daniel Tutt and Chris Cutrone, though, filled in a blank for me in some of this reasoning. The intellectual resource for this neo-Stalinism and its recasting of defeat as success is Domenico Losurdo. This is a name one hears a lot here.

I'm reminded of this tendency today by Elias Jabbour, a Brazilian geographer and former adviser to the president of the New Development Bank (the so-called BRICS Bank), one Dilma Rousseff. He’s also the author of China: 21st Century Socialism. He posted today that discussions about China being capitalist are “debased and intellectually dishonest”, equivalent to idly debating “Soviet bureaucracy” during the siege of Stalingrad.

What prompts this post of mine here is that I read Jabbour’s just after finishing an interview with Walden Bello on the Philippines (episode out next week). One of the points of discussion was the legacy of Maoism, and the way that US-China rivalry may present countries like the Philippines with more political opportunities and room for manoeuvre, by starting from the national interest, rather than default alignment with the US. Indeed, this is one of, if not the, key political question for the next decades and emerging “multipolarity”. And no longer just for the global South, but also for core countries. Which way Western man?

Without commenting on the Philippines directly, it seems that one challenge will be combatting the political tendency identified above. That doesn’t mean siding with the defeated and dead left-wing tradition that runs from 68ers through to “French Theory” and down to “wokeness”. That post-political left was in part premised on US unipolarity and unchallenged neoliberalism; it played in a cultural sandbox while much more powerful forces reordered the world. That order is now in advanced decay and it is the radical right which is making hay, not the cultural left. (There’s an irony here: May 68 and the counter-culture can find its bastard child in the radical right too, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out.)

Particularly in what was called the global South (the term was a bit inadequate during the End of History, now it’s gravely so), China’s success has its appeal. Insofar as it can stand as an avatar of modernisation, if not quite civilisation in a normative sense, it looks better than what the West has to offer. This opens up strategic possibilities for popular, democratic, developmentalist forces. What it does not do is stand as proof of the victory of some fantasy “21st century socialism”, nor as justification for the worship of state power and the abandoment of other goals (such as individual and collective autonomy – of which the PRC offers its citizens little).