Comrade Quan Le, a member of the China Writers Group has brought this indispensable material to our attention, Michael Hudson’s 3-part analysis of the clash between China and the US, an empire in economic, social and political free fall due to its embrace of inherently predatory financialization.
ANDREI MARTYANOV—Talk about being ignorant and suffering from the acute case of folie de grandeur while being British. Putin is not going to “ask anything” from BoJo and the UK. Least of all legitimacy? LOL. Blain should stick to what he knows best, which is a financial voodoo which turned the UK into a pipsqueak of a country and continues to run the US into the ground with acceleration. Russia doesn’t need any favors from the UK nor any permissions on dealing with anything domestically, let alone about Ukraine and here is the point: what is the definition of “free hand” in Ukraine? Can Blain give a definition of what this “free hand” in Ukraine means? He can’t for a simple reason, as I already pointed out above–he will deflate within the first minute when trying to talk about real geopolitics and real economy because he has zero background in those matters and does not operate with the conceptual apparatus and epistemology of modern geopolitics because it is very difficult and requires serious STEM and natural science background.
MICHAEL HUDSON—On September 7, 2021, in his second mainstream editorial in a week, George Soros expressed his horror at the recommendation by Black Rock, the world’s largest asset manager, that financial managers should triple their investment in China. Claiming that such investment would imperil U.S. national security by helping China, Mr. Soros stepped up his advocacy of U.S. financial and trade sanctions.
China’s policy of shaping markets to promote overall prosperity, instead of letting the economic surplus be concentrated in the hands of corporate and foreign investors, is an existential threat to America’s neoliberal priorities, he spells out. President Xi’s “Common Prosperity” program “seeks to reduce inequality by distributing the wealth of the rich to the general population. That does not augur well for foreign investors.”[1] To neoliberals, that is heresy.
Criticizing China’s “abrupt cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant group in November 2020,” and “banishment of U.S.-financed tutoring companies from China,” Mr. Soros singles out Blackstone’s co-founder Stephen Schwarzman and former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton for seeking to make financial returns for their investors instead of treating China as an enemy state and looming Cold War adversary.
BRUCE LERRO—If you received an undergraduate college degree you probably never had a class in political economy. What you probably had is at least one class in political science and another class in economics. If you are like most people, you found these classes either boring or incomprehensible. Why? The answer is because both fields are riddled with capitalist propaganda that has little basis in most people’s experience. Sure, there are some people who are convinced that political science and neoclassical economics make sense but which social class is this? Chances are it is members of the upper middle class for whom political and neoclassical economics make sense from their class position. But upper middle-class people are 10% of the Yankee population.
For Marx, the narrow pursuit of value-based accumulation, through the “robbery” of the earth itself, at the expense of “eternal natural necessity,” generated a metabolic rift in the relation between human society and the larger natural world of which it was an emergent part.8Coupled with the related class contradictions of capitalism, these conditions pointed to the need for the expropriation of the expropriators.