The Multipolar World Belongs to the People, Not to the Masters
Adam Bark
It is at their dusk that empires demonstrate their most ruthless brutality. This historical law finds the most evident confirmation in today’s crisis of imperialism, which increasingly defends its hegemony to the detriment of the popular classes. The origin of these changes and the conflicts that derive from them lies in the economic structures that regulate human activity and in the consequent division of the world into social classes that are fighting one another. With the vain myths of invisible hands in the best of all possible worlds gone, the intrinsic and terminal contradictions of capitalism seek to slow their inevitable collapse by resorting to expansion through brute force. With ever-increasing war fronts stretching from Ukraine to Gaza, the US-led Western bloc seeks to defend and expand its financial space.
In the context of a general crisis of capitalism afflicted by overproduction, the Western ruling classes see their aims threatened by people fighting for self-determination and by the interest of the new emerging powers of the Multipolar World.
From this it is clear that the clash between the old unipolar world and the new Multipolar World constitutes the main dialectical contradiction, or threat – for the less Marxian – of the current system.
The epochal nature of this contradiction lies in the fact that the West, armed by its own dogmas deriving from the ideological superstructure of liberalism, is by definition the fullest expression of neoliberal tyranny. Acting to all intents and purposes as an aid to capital, liberalism is distinguished from other superstructures by the cult it dedicates to the individual, elevated to the subject of History. According to the principles of this philosophy, the individual must be “freed” from any collective and super-individual identity, such as ethnicity, value system, and family unit, seen as barriers to the expression of one’s will. In its post-ideological evolution today, modern liberalism comes to conceive the liberation of the subject from his own nature, or in other words from himself, giving birth – for example – to the idea that biological sex is a factor relating to individual subjectivity. The consequence of all this is the proliferation of what Nietzsche called The Last Man, a society of consumers left atomized and uprooted to the graces of the anonymous excessive power of capitalist globalism.
If it is true that capitalism today has no flags, it is equally true that only in the West has it achieved, through the help of the liberal superstructure, its most monstrous metamorphosis.
This interpretation allows us to see the emergence of the multipolar dawn as a process intrinsically opposed to the interests of imperialist capitalism. The rebellion of the new emerging powers is a direct reaction to the project of total victory of Western liberal-totalitarianism, which, as described in the famous book by Francis Fukuyama, aspires to its own Washington-centric “End of History”.
And it is here, in the interests of the full implementation of the ideal of multipolarity itself, that we must subject these profound changes to meticulous analysis. Although it represents an improvement, it is undeniable that in the current phase the push for a Multipolar World derives mainly from the interest of the national bourgeoisies of the states in question. In them, we can observe, without almost any exception, a clash in the ranks of their financial elites, between those who propose a rapprochement with the Western sphere and those who instead support greater autonomy from unipolar control.
It is no coincidence that this split is most evident in the state that has most radically decided to break relations with Washington: Putin’s Russia.
The beginning of the Special Operation marked a definitive break between the Russian state and the pro-Western wing of the ruling class. Among the many cases, the example of the oligarch Oleg Tinkov, founder of the Tinkoff Bank with assets of over 4 billion, stands out. Tinkov, convicted in the United States for having evaded over 200 million dollars, rediscovers himself as a champion of democracy by siding against “Putin’s fascist regime” and renouncing his citizenship. Another gem comes from Mikhail Fridman, a billionaire banker who financed the Yeltsin government and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as an opponent of Putin, who at the beginning of the conflict fled, coincidentally, to Israel.
The British state, in fact, thanked him for having changed his coat without hesitation, removing sanctions from both oligarchs.
Putin’s actions represent a change of direction compared to twenty years of Westernisation imposed by the Russian oligarchy itself. The Kremlin’s bold political choices have certainly irritated more than a few oligarchs, but despite the rifts, they find tacit consensus, if not support, even amongst the ruling class. This shows that Russian capitalists, like those of all the BRICS states, see in the new order a prospect of pacification between their respective employers and therefore a reorganization, not an overcoming, of the status quo.
Multipolarity represents a fundamental stage in the fight for a more just world, but it cannot be the final one. If the material conditions that underlie the inhumane modern world remained unchanged, the current problems would manifest themselves in another form.
Capitalism is the enemy of every people; its reorganization will not be enough to free humanity from its yoke.
The idealism of those who, in the area of political antagonism, speak of an imminent multipolar utopia – a few years from now – is to be considered a counter-revolutionary chimera.
The pure self-determination of peoples, free to develop and cooperate in peace and prosperity, is not in the plans of international finance, regardless of the poles in which it is distributed.
Properly understood, multipolarity is not the hope of a new order, but rather that dynamic chaos that crumbles the old. A chaos that conceals within it an irrepressible creative force that allows people to dream of an alternative to the value, social, and economic models imposed by imperialism.
Fidelity to this vision inevitably implies that we hope history reserves the same fate for every oligarch, whether unipolar or multipolar.
(Adam Bark is a political activist fighting for the Free Territory of Trieste. He has participated in several government political forums in Russia and has reported to the UN in Geneva for the Minority Forum 2023, carrying out his struggle both locally and institutionally. Courtesy: https://comedonchisciotte.org. Translated from Italian by Nora Hoppe.)
The Perils and Promise of the Emerging Multipolar World
Jeffery Sachs
The World Bank’s release on May 30 of its latest estimates of national output (up to the year 2022) offers an occasion to reflect on the new geopolitics. The new data underscore the shift from a U.S.-led world economy to a multipolar world economy, a reality that U.S. strategists have so far failed to recognize, accept, or admit.
The World Bank figures make clear that the economic dominance of the West is over. In 1994, the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, U.K., U.S.) constituted 45.3% of world output, compared with 18.9% of world output in the BRICS countries (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates). The tables have turned. The BRICS now produce 35.2% of world output, while the G7 countries produce 29.3%.
As of 2022, the largest five economies in descending order are China, the U.S., India, Russia, and Japan. China’s GDP is around 25% larger than the U.S.’ (roughly 30% of the U.S. GDP per person but with 4.2 times the population). Three of the top five countries are in the BRICS, while two are in the G7. In 1994, the largest five were the U.S., Japan, China, Germany, and India, with three in the G7 and two in the BRICS.
Despite the new global economic realities, the U.S. security state still pursues a grand strategy of “primacy,” that is, the aspiration of the U.S. to be the dominant economic, financial, technological, and military power in every region of the world.
As the shares of world output change, so too does global power. The core U.S.-led alliance, which includes the U.S., Canada, U.K., European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, was 56% of world output in 1994, but now is only 39.5%. As a result, the U.S. global influence is waning. As a recent vivid example, when the U.S.-led group introduced economic sanctions on Russia in 2022, very few countries outside the core alliance joined. As a result, Russia had little trouble shifting its trade to countries outside the U.S.-led alliance.
The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are now making up for lost time. Economic convergence actually began in the 1950s as European imperial rule in Africa and Asia came to an end. It has proceeded in waves, starting first in East Asia, then roughly 20 years later India, and for the coming 20-40 years in Africa.
These and some other regions are growing much faster than the Western economies since they have more “headroom” to boost GDP by rapidly raising education levels, boosting workers’ skills, and installing modern infrastructure, including universal access to electrification and digital platforms. The emerging economies are often able to leapfrog the richer countries with state-of-the-art infrastructure (e.g., fast intercity rail, 5G, modern airports and seaports) while the richer countries remain stuck with aging infrastructure and expensive retrofits. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook projects that the emerging and developing economies will average growth of around 4% per year in the coming five years, while the high-income countries will average less than 2% per year.
It’s not only in skills and infrastructure that convergence is occurring. Many of the emerging economies, including China, Russia, Iran, and others, are advancing rapidly in technological innovations as well, in both civilian and military technologies.
China clearly has a large lead in the manufacturing of cutting-edge technologies needed for the global energy transition, including batteries, electric vehicles, 5G, photovoltaics, wind turbines, fourth generation nuclear power, and others. China’s rapid advances in space technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other technologies is similarly impressive. In response, the U.S. has made the absurd claim that China has an “overcapacity” in these cutting-edge technologies, while the obvious truth is that the U.S. has a significant under-capacity in many sectors. China’s capacity for innovation and low-cost production is underpinned by enormous R&D spending and its vast and growing labor force of scientists and engineers.
Despite the new global economic realities, the U.S. security state still pursues a grand strategy of “primacy,” that is, the aspiration of the U.S. to be the dominant economic, financial, technological, and military power in every region of the world. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Europe by surrounding Russia in the Black Sea region with NATO forces, yet Russia has resisted this militarily in both Georgia and Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Asia by surrounding China in the South China Sea, a folly that can lead the U.S. into a disastrous war over Taiwan. The U.S. is also losing its standing in the Middle East by resisting the united call of the Arab world for recognition of Palestine as the 194th United Nations member state.
Yet primacy is certainly not possible today, and was hubristic even 30 years ago when U.S. relative power was much greater. Today, the U.S. share of world output stands at 14.8%, compared with 18.5% for China, and the U.S. share of world population is a mere 4.1%, compared with 17.8% for China.
The trend toward broad global economic convergence means that U.S. hegemony will not be replaced by Chinese hegemony. Indeed, China’s share of world output is likely to peak at around 20% during the coming decade and thereafter to decline as China’s population declines. Other parts of the world, notably including India and Africa, are likely to show a large rise in their respective shares of global output, and with that, in their geopolitical weight as well.
We are therefore entering a post-hegemonic, multipolar world. It too is fraught with challenges. It could usher in a new “tragedy of great power politics,” in which several nuclear powers compete—in vain—for hegemony. It could lead to a breakdown of fragile global rules, such as open trade under the World Trade Organization. Or, it could lead to a world in which the great powers exercise mutual tolerance, restraint, and even cooperation, in accord with the U.N. Charter, because they recognize that only such statecraft will keep the world safe in the nuclear age.
(Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst, professor at Columbia University, where he was former director of The Earth Institute. He is known for his work on sustainable development, economic development, and the fight to end poverty. Courtesy: The author’s blog at jeffsachs.org.)
