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IMPERIALISM AND TRANSITIONS TO SOCIALISM

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RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

Series Editor: Paul Zarembka

State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

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Paul Zarembka – State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

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RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY - VOLUME 36

IMPERIALISM AND TRANSITIONS TO SOCIALISM

EDITED BY

RÉMY HERRERA

National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2021

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ISBN: 978-1-80043-705-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-704-3 (Online)

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ISSN: 0161-7230 (Series)

Contents

About the Editor

Rémy Herrera (France) is an Economist and a Researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS). Graduated from a Business School (École supérieure de Commerce, 1988), the Institute of Political Studies (Institut d’Études politiques, 1990) and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Master of Philosophy, 1994; Ph.D. in Economics, 1996), he supervises students in Ph.D. at the Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne. He started working in the financial audit (1988), at the OECD (1992–1997) and for the World Bank (1999–2000). He was a member of the CNRS National Committee (2000–2005) and of the Scientific Council of Paris 1 (2001–2006). He taught at various universities in France (especially at Paris 1 [1993–2013]) and abroad, including at the Universities of Aleppo (1998), Cairo (1999–2000), Vitoria in Brasil (2006), Complutense in Madrid (2009–2013) and Lingnan in Hong Kong (2018). He was an Adviser to research programs at the Chubu University (Nagoya). He is or has been associated with the Third World Forum (Dakar), the Union of Radical Political Economics (New York), the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economics (London), the Sociedad de Economía Política Latinoamericana (São Paulo) and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas de Cuba (Havana). He was the Executive Secretary of World Forum of Alternatives. He is also a member of the Global University for Sustainability and of the International Crisis Observatory. He organizes the “Marx in the Twenty-First Century” seminar at La Sorbonne. He regularly works with the Centre Europe-Tiers Monde (Geneva), supporting it in its advisory role to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.

About the Contributors

Al Campbell (USA) is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and Co-Editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies. The three pillars of his research interests are the functioning of contemporary capitalism, all human-centered theoretical alternatives to it, and all historical experiments in trying to build an alternative, with much of the latter work being on Cuba. His latest book is an edited collection by Cuban authors (Cuban Economists on the Cuban Economy), and he is presently co-editing a collection of contributions by Cuban authors on Cuban cooperatives.

Hemmi Croes (Venezuela) is an Economist, graduated from the Central University of Venezuela. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, after having obtained a Master’s in Macroeconomics and Quantitative Analysis from the University of Paris 10 Nanterre. Since 2014, he is a Professor of Political Economy at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Wim Dierckxsens (Netherlands) has a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (Netherlands). He was former Administrator for the United Nations. He is currently a Senior Researcher on globalization and post-capitalist alternatives, and the Coordinator of the International Crisis Observatory. He is a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability, and the Co-Founder of the Latin American Society of Political Economy.

Walter Formento (Argentina) is a Professor of Geopolitics, Hegemony and Communication at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. He is the Director of the Center for Policy Research and Economy. He also coordinates the research branch on geopolitics, globalization, new forms of capital and international conflict. He is a member of the International Crisis Observatory.

Andy Higginbottom (United Kingdom) is an Associate Professor at Kingston University, London, and teaches modules on International Political Economy, Slavery and Emancipation and Crimes of the Powerful. His current research project is an extended dialogue with Marx’s Capital concerning Marini’s concept of labor super-exploitation, as well as the transformation problem. He has recently published papers on corporate responsibility for climate change.

Kin Chi Lau (China) is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Research Coordinator of the Programme on Cultures of Sustainability of the Centre for Cultural Research and Development at the Lingnan University in Hong Kong, China. She is a member of the International Board of Peace Women across the Globe, and a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability.

Tran Dac Loi (Vietnam) is currently Vice-President of the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation. He was formerly Vice Chairman of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee’s Commission for External Relations, with a rank of vice minister.

Zhiming Long (China), Economist, is an Associate Professor at the Moral Education Research Center at the Tsinghua University in Beijing. He supervises researches since 2017 in this same institution. Since 2018, he has been granted Tang Scholar. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris 1, as well as two Master’s degrees in Economics from the Universities of Paris 1 and 10. He is a specialist in growth theory, statistics and (timeseries analysis) econometrics.

Constantin Lopez (France) is a Ph.D. student in Economics (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) with a Master’s in Political Sciences (Sciences Po Toulouse). His works are mainly about the strategy of economic development implemented in Ecuador under Rafael Corea’s presidency. In 2014, he completed a 4-month internship as an Associate Researcher at the Andean University Simon Bolivar in Quito. He is a High-school Teacher of Economic and Social Sciences.

Leonardo Loureiro Nunes (Brazil) has a degree in Business Administration from the University of São Paulo (USP), a Master’s degree in Economics from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and a scholarship from the Institute of Applied Economic Research. Currently, he is a doctorate student in Economics at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Federal Public Employee from the Brazilian government.

Kinhide Mushakoji (Japan) is former Vice-Rector of the Regional and Global Studies Division of the United Nations University, Vice-President of the International Political Science Association, Director of the Institute of International Relations (Tokyo Sophia University) and of the Institute of Advanced Studies (Chubu University), President of the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Centre (Osaka), Secretary-General of the International Movement Against all forms of Discriminations and Racism and a member of the boards (among others) of the Peace Studies Association of Japan and of Radical Ecological Democracy.

Andrés Piqueras (Spain) did his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Anthropology. Currently, he is a Titular Professor in Sociology at the University of Castellón, Jaume I, Spain. There, he is the Founder of the Permanent Observatory on Immigration, and also Coordinator of the research branch on globalization, new identities and collective subjects. He is a member of the International Crisis Observatory.

Andrea Ricci (Italy) is a tenured Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Urbino, Italia. He has a Master’s in International Economics from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies of Geneva and a Ph.D. in Political Economy from the University of Ancona. His research interest focuses on international and development economics and Marx’s theory of value. His book Value and Unequal Exchange is to be published by Routledge.

Tsui Sit (China) is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Rural Reconstruction of China at the Southwest University in Chongqing, China. She is a board member of Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives and a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability.

John Smith (United Kingdom) is an independent researcher and activist based in Sheffield. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Sheffield. His specialities are development economics and international economics, in particular international trade and monetary relations. He is currently working on projects related to his book Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century published by the Monthly Review Press, New York, in 2016.

Fabien Trémeau (France) is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He graduated in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Paris 4 Sorbonne and from the Institute of European Studies in Paris. His research focuses on the value and the commodity fetishism in Marx’s work. As a publisher, he is also the Founder and Director of the Éditions Critiques.

Tiejun Wen (China) is a Professor and Director of the Centre of Rural Revitalization, Peking University, China. He is the Executive Dean of the Institute of Rural Reconstruction of China, Southwest University, China; the Executive Dean of the Institute of Rural Reconstruction of the Straits, Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University, China. He is a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability.

Erebus Wong (China) is a Senior Researcher for the Centre for Cultural Research and Development at the Lingnan University in Hong Kong, China. He is a fellow of the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives and a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability.

List of Contributors

Preface

In this volume, we provide the reader with a set of texts designed to shed light on the issues of imperialism and the transitions to socialism. Written by 18 contributors – in addition to the author of these lines – from 12 countries and 3 continents, these texts are organized in two main parts. One part is devoted to certain theoretical aspects whose analysis seems to us to be decisive for understanding the subject under consideration. The other part is focused on the examination of practical experiences of socialist transitions, more or less advanced and with varying degrees of success.

In the theoretical part, the reader will not find a homogeneous definition of imperialism nor a unified characterization of the transitions to socialism. Rather, we propose multidimensional, polyvalent and multidisciplinary approaches to highlight both the complexity and the topicality of these phenomena. Thus imperialism, which combines and articulates relations of domination between nations with relations of exploitation of labor by capital, is linked here to several of the most fundamental concepts of Marxism, such as value, abstract labor, the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and class struggle, but also to the contradictory dynamics of the transformations of present-day capitalism, in connection with the new contemporary forms of fictitious capital, the behavior of transnational firms in the concentration and centralization of globalized capital or the delocalization of production, as well as with the configurations of unequal exchange in the international division of labor and global value chains or the evolution of economic structures. These analyses do not claim to be exhaustive and would certainly be enriched with in-depth studies of wars and military expenditures, new technologies or the destruction caused by capitalism on the environment – points that are present in this book but not extensively developed in the form of specific chapters. In addition, even if the calculations and estimates in Chapter 6 are performed on a particular country (China), we ultimately thought that it was recommendable and preferable to place this text in the theoretical part of the volume, given the methodology used. The latter, as a matter of facts, is centered around a conceptual and theoretical reflection on the rate of profit and mobilizes technical tools (such as econometric modeling, impulse response functions, matrix calculation, Bayesian analysis, among others).

The countries studied as case studies in the applied part can, beyond the singularity of their respective historical trajectories, be classified into several quite distinct categories. Here, two criteria will be used, depending on whether or not these countries are anti-capitalist – that is to say, for questioning the structures of capitalism – and/or anti-imperialist or not – in other words, for or against the implementation of policies aimed at opening up margins of maneuver for national sovereignty. China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba all fall into a first category, that of countries that are both anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, where the revolutionary processes are the most radical, where the struggles for socialist emancipation and national liberation have merged into a conceptual and political unity, and through which the generalized social gains and the concrete improvement of living and working conditions of the vast majority of the people are the most solid. Venezuela (since 1999 and the setting in motion of the Bolivarian revolution) but also Ecuador (for the period of the citizens’ revolution between 2005 and 2017 only) belong to a second group, bringing together countries where significant revolutionary advances have been performed, or are still in the process of being consolidated, whose anti-imperialist and pro-socialist orientation is explicit, but which have so far only managed to tackle the neoliberal form of the capitalist system, rather than its deep structures. Other governments, with a popular base and progressive leaders, have made progress in the fight against poverty, but limited and without affecting its causes, because the neoliberal line of capitalism has not really been inflected there: this is the third category in which we find Brazil of the mandates of Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff. Finally, other countries, the fourth and last group, are seeing popular resistance, whose heroism is no less important than that of previous struggles, against regimes that, for the time being, remain right-wing or even extreme right-wing. Brazil after the parliamentary coup of 2016 and Ecuador since 2017 have slipped into this category. However, movement in the opposite direction is also possible, as Bolivia has recently shown, whose people succeeded in overturning the military coup orchestrated by proimperialist and racist forces in 2019 and, thanks to the victory of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS, or Movimiento al Socialismo) in the Bolivian presidential elections of October 2020, in reviving the momentum of the indigenous revolution begun in 2005. Bolivia, like other countries in Asia (especially Nepal) and Africa (Burkina Faso, for example), could have been studied here to show how important the revolutionary advances of modern times are for the strengthening of national independence and social justice, but also how vulnerable they remain as long as they do not succeed in radicalizing themselves by breaking with capitalism and socializing the productive forces.

Capitalism is in crisis. This crisis, old, structural, serious, is systemic, in the sense that the system will not find a solution by itself. The capitalist system is declining, degenerating, becoming more destructive and dangerous, and if it is not collapsing faster, it is because its state is supporting it, at arm’s length, as was the case in 2008 when the monetary authorities of the US hegemony injected astronomical amounts of liquidity into the economy and granted the Central Banks of the countries of the North and some key countries of the South unlimited access to the dollar; or as is the case at the present time in the so-called “health crisis” following the COVID-19 pandemic, with the main capitalist economies that only remain in a functioning state because they are placed under an infusion of public money. There will be no way out of the “health problem” with neoliberal managers who weaken public hospital services; nor will there be a way out of the financial problem with rapacious private bank managers who continue to speculate frantically, shamelessly. There will be no way out of the environmental problems with procapitalist environmentalists; nor will there be a way out of the social problems with the social–liberal reformists; any more than there will be no way out of religious terrorism with capitalist leaders who stir up hatred and communitarianism and behave like temple merchants by weakening national education (and secularism where it exists, as in France) by selling it to the private sector (confessional, moreover) and promoting market mechanisms in education.

Capital will not find a solution through its internal logic of profit maximization that locks the world system into a spiral of destruction and wars that ends up threatening us all with death. This is where we are. And this is why wanting to embark on a socialist transition is not only a response to a spirit of justice but also an answer to the call of reason: it is a question of survival for humanity and for life. Socialism is not just a word, it is a struggle. It is not an end, but a transition process, long and difficult that can take many paths toward the liberation of labor from the domination of capital. It is socialism, a society of solidarity, which walks with history.

Rémy Herrera

December 29, 2020