October 20, 2024 
An old theme
within social theory holds that societies with very unequal distributions of
wealth can sustain their social cohesion so long as total wealth is growing.
Such total growth enables all who get a distributed share of that wealth—even
those with the smallest shares—to experience at least some increase. The rich
with the biggest shares can grab most of the growth so long as some is provided
to those with small shares. The pie analogy works well: so long as the pie is
growing all distributed shares of it can also grow. Some will grow more, others
less, but all can grow. If all do grow, social stability is facilitated
(assuming the society’s population accepts unequal shares). Modern capitalism’s
prioritization of economic growth as urgently necessary reflects such social
theory (much as economic growth has reinforced it).
Of course, if
instead, a society’s population prioritizes movement toward less unequal
shares, economic growth becomes relatively less important. If a society’s
population seriously accommodates climate change, economic growth can become
still less important. Were social movements endorsing such priorities to grow
and ally, they could well alter societies’ attitudes toward and commitments to
economic growth.
U.S. capitalism
from 1820 to 1980 favored and fostered rising total wealth. The share going to
wages grew while the share going to capital grew more. Notwithstanding many
bitter capital/labor struggles, the United States as a whole exhibited
considerable social cohesion. This was because, in part, a growing pie allowed
nearly all to experience some growth in their real income. “Nearly all” could
be rewritten as “whites.”
In contrast, the
last 40 years, 1980–2020, represent an inflection point inside the United
States. The growth of total wealth slowed while corporations and the rich took
greater relative shares. Therefore, middle-income people and the poor found
their wealth either not growing much or not at all.
The reasons for
slowing U.S. wealth growth include chiefly the profit-driven relocations of
capitalism’s dynamic centers. Industrial production moved from Western Europe,
North America, and Japan to China, India, Brazil, and others. Financialization
prevailed in the capitalism left behind. China and its BRICS allies
increasingly match or exceed the United States and its G7 allies in levels of
production, technical innovation, and foreign trade. The U.S. response to their
competition—growing protectionism expressed by imposing tariffs, trade wars,
and sanctions—mobilizes increasing retaliation that worsens the U.S. situation.
This process is continuing with no end now visible. The U.S. dollar’s role in
the world economy declines. Geopolitically, the United States sees former
allies such as Brazil, India, and Egypt shift loyalties toward China or else
toward a more neutral position relative to the United States and China.
The combination
of slowing total wealth growth with a larger share going to corporations and
those they enrich undercuts the United States’ internal social cohesion.
Political and cultural divisions inside the United States, exposed sharply in
the Trump-Harris contest, have become social hostilities that further undermine
the global position of the United States. Empires’ declines and their internal
social divisions often accelerate each other. For example, consider the
scapegoating of immigrants in the United States that now includes charging
Haitians with eating pets and ignoring data showing the greater criminality of
citizens relative to immigrants. White
supremacy resurged to become more public and fuel increasingly divisive
regionalism and racism. Struggles over the issues of patriarchy, sexuality, and
gender are sharper than they have perhaps ever been. Long deferred protests
over social conditions proliferate when empires decline, growth slows, and
social cohesion unravels.
Via a parallel
logic, matters in China differ very significantly. For the last several
decades, China’s GDP growth has been two to three times faster than that of the
United States. The growth of average real wages in China has been faster than
that in the United States by much larger multiples. These differences are stark
and have been sustained for a generation. The Chinese leadership—its Communist
Party and government—was thereby enabled to distribute the fruits of its rapid
economic growth—its rising wealth—to support internal social cohesion. It did
so by its policies of raising real wages and moving hundreds of millions from
rural and agricultural to urban and industrial positions. For those Chinese
people, this was a historic transition from poverty to middle-income status.
China’s growth
plus that of its BRICS allies produced a major competitor for the United States
and the G7 by 2010. Both blocs now scour the globe looking for secure, cheap
sources of food, raw materials, and energy. Both likewise seek access to
markets, secure transport routes and supply chains, and friendly governments.
Both subsidize cutting-edge technological advances such that the United States
and China now virtually monopolize their achievement (relative to what Europe
or Japan once did).
U.S.
policy-makers portray China’s global efforts as aggressive, threatening the
U.S. empire and thereby potentially U.S. capitalism itself. Chinese
policymakers see U.S. efforts (protectionist tariffs and trade restrictions,
South China Sea maneuvers, foreign military bases and wars) as aimed to slow or
stop China’s economic development. For them, the United States is blocking
China’s growth opportunities and dynamism, possibly foreshadowing a resumption
of years of China’s humiliation that it finds totally unacceptable. National
security anxieties haunt both sides’ rhetoric. Predictions spread of imminent
military conflicts and even another world war.
At a time when
the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East lead many to call for immediate
ceasefires and negotiated settlements, might history suggest something similar
for the United States and China now? Britain tried twice (1776 and 1812) to use
war to slow or stop the independence and growth of its North American colony.
After failing twice, Britain changed its policies. Negotiations enabled the new
United States and Britain increasingly to trade with and economically develop
one another. Britain focused on retaining, profiting from, and building up the
rest of its empire. The United States declared that its imperial focus would
henceforth be South America (the “Monroe Doctrine”). This remained the deal
until World War II ended Britain’s empire and allowed the United States to
extend its own.
Why not a
comparable deal between the United States and China, bringing in the G7, BRICS,
and the Global South? With genuine global participation, might such a deal
finally end empires? The very real dangers—ecological as well as
geopolitical—that the world now faces encourage finding some kind of negotiated
agreement on a multipolar world. After World War I, such goals inspired the
League of Nations. After World War II, they inspired the United Nations. The
realism of those goals was challenged then. It cannot suffer that indignity
again now. Might we manage to achieve those goals now without World War III?
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