Two Holocaust Monuments

[Music] Hello for Steve's heads and welcome to American Proceeds. I'm Danny Bessner. Here as always with my friend in Comrade Derek Davison. And we're very excited to welcome back to the podcast today, Jake Warner. Jake is the director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a historian by trading. So I always enjoy having Jake on. Thanks for joining us again. Yeah, great to be back. So Jake, you sent me a piece that's in draft, but I really want to talk about it, which is basically tracing one of the largest transformations in the history of American thinking about the world in the last 10 or so years, which is the transformation of China from a country that the United States was trying to embed in the neoliberal capitalist world order, a country through which that the United States understood to be competing with and maybe didn't like everything that it did, particularly cyber espionage. I sound like a 90s movie person cyber. I feel like that's a an old term, but people still use it in this in this particular sphere. But into something that both parties have embraced as effectively an existential enemy of the United States akin to how American policymakers are both side to the aisle viewed the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War between roughly the late 1940s and the Cuban Missile Crisis are signing of the test band treaty, whichever period you want to choose, whichever date you want to choose, in the early 1960s, 1962, 1963. So China viewed as really an ideological enemy. And this to be is really interesting, and then I'll start submissalulically, because I recently published a piece on the new multi polarity, and one of the major arguments I made in this piece that came out the ideas, letter called Power Without Ideology, welcome to the multi polar world, was that one of the key features of international relations or the new international order that is emerging in the 21st century, is that it's not going to be defined by the great powers or the superpowers trying to explore a universalist political, economic, ideological project that they think that other countries would adopt. This being a departure, I argue from basically the last two centuries of history. So I think these pieces complement each other nicely. So why don't we start with yours and talking about what happened? How did the United States view China in the post-Cold War period and how did this transform in the last decade or so? Yeah, so already from the 90s, the post-Cold War period begins with 1989, of course, and China was part of 1989 was the sort of the period 1989 to 1991, is a period of popular uprising against state power around the world. The place that China shows up in this is the June 4th, 10M square massacre. So that threw a wrench into the already strong collaboration between the US and China, which had been focused up to that point on containing the power of the Soviet Union. George Bush, George H. W. Bush, who was president of the time, he immediately tried to restore that relationship. He sent his advisors secretly at first and then openly to try to paper over the problem of this mass murder by Dong Xiao Peng and the Chinese regime. But fairly quickly, then, because the business community saw lots of opportunities in reforming and opening up China, the both parties came on board the idea that we're going to engage with China diplomatically, we're going to deepen ties economically. When Bill Clinton came in at first, he ran on a human rights by a former China, but he repudiated that shortly afterwards. The consensus starting from the mid 90s until China was brought into the WTO was we want to integrate China into this system. We don't want to contain it or confront it. We want to integrate it into the neoliberal globalization system. The Jake, one question that I have about this is to what degree do you think that this was part of an effort to discipline labor? I know that's not what we focus on professionally, but I know it's something that you're interested in because the so-called China shock. There's part of this effort to embed China in this neoliberal capitalist order will involve the offshoring of jobs, not in every sector, and it's not solely responsible for deindustrialization, automation, is a huge factor there. But what do you say to the populist argument? Now, what do you say? Is this inaccurate understanding of what happens? That's something that capital wants to discipline labor partially by having China embedded in the world capitalist order as a means to offshore labor from an already deindustrialized United, deindustrializing United States. Yeah, I think the answer is yes, but maybe not at that level of intentionality, because the pattern of offshoring manufacturing jobs in the United States was already well established by this point, it started in the already in the 70s and was really major deindustrialization from the 80s to the 90s. It really wasn't until. In the Pacific Northwest, this very interesting, it starts in the 60s. The timber industry starts to be assured like 10 years before like what becomes the rust belt. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, and well, you have some, you have the same internal dynamic, like the the core industrial areas of the industrial Midwest, the northern states, were already moving production to the south to get away from the power of labor in the 60s. But then obviously it became international in scale. Once it became possible, once the global production networks became possible, really starting in the 70s. I think a lot of the populist backlash against this, people still think about NAFTA as the ultimate betrayal. I think a lot of people in DC focused on the China shock, which was this period after China entered the WTO in 2001. So the sort of the decade of the odds up to or at least up to the financial crisis of 2008, that's kind of the core period of the China shock and that's when thousands upon thousands of jobs were moved to China. And this is true. And I encourage people to read like the Clinton speech about China's accession to the WTO. It's like the height of neoliberal ideology. Like I usually don't get that far in my classes. But like that is to me the best just one single document on like neoliberal brainworms. It is wild. I'm sure Jake, Jake, you have read it a million times. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it took me no great primary tax. If you're teaching this stuff, like look for that as primary tax for your students, definitely. But I think the interesting thing is that there was there was all these American jobs were lost to to Chinese production. But people don't remember that quite as strongly as NAFTA because many of those jobs were already pretty shitty jobs. Like that internal movement from the unionized north to the non-union south had already happened. And a lot of the job loss was in the non-union south. And there weren't that many people lamenting those jobs. Now they did devastate many communities. And that had really important political effects. But the sense that we have lost the golden age of union labor and you know an income that can support a family. That was already gone by the time China came into the picture. So there's I think there's a conflation in Washington like we want to confront China geopolitically and wouldn't it be great if we could get working class support for that. So then there's a lot of focus on China shock and very little focus on how an earlier rounds of off-shoring to Mexico, Central America, to Turkey or Southeast Asia, those earlier rounds kind of disappear from the picture then. How does this become dogma before we move on from this 20-year-ish period, 19-year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the financial crisis of '07-08? How does this become dogma in both parties? And I'm sure this story, I mean maybe it won't be because I don't think there's going to be many future historians, but if there were future historians, they would complicate this. But how does this become dogma in both political parties? The goal of the United States is to essentially create a neoliberal capitalist world order with the United States standing at the head of a pyramidal structure in which it basically is the ultimate consumer in other parts of the world produce. Right. It is complicated because it doesn't take over the entire democratic party. If you look at free trade votes, for example, throughout this period, most Democrats in Congress are voting against free trade agreements. And that's because they're responsive to UNI's labor, to the states that that are threatened by offshoring. But at the level of the president, leadership and and often at the level of congressional leadership particularly as we get to the end of this period Yes, it's just like the common sense like this is just what we do like this you know there these people are reading Thomas Friedman and they're like yes an open world Where everyone can succeed as long as they have talent and Everyone can get access to the tools they need to succeed like cell phones or whatever I don't know I don't know where capital comes in to their conceptualization here But like everyone has a cell phone now so anyone can be an entrepreneur like you get these kinds of You know fantasies of Of perfect entrepreneurialism that encompass everyone in the world everyone from You know a rich man in San Francisco to poor man in Nigeria or something And and that is obviously that's in service to economic interests Corporations want to expand their footprint. They want to be able to sell into global markets They want to be able to exploit a global labor pool But you know, I think it's all I think it's worth saying. It's also more than that. They're there there were attractive ideals about neoliberalism Like we could have an open world That was cosmopolitan we could Have access to other cultures we could talk with other people you didn't have to have great power wars We didn't have to fear geopolitical strife We could have like the commercial peace like that ideal was very attractive to a lot of people and not just at the elite love Now it could never make good on its promises and that ultimately became a problem for the system as a lost legitimacy But I think we should recognize that that those ideals were very attractive and they continue even to this day They continue to to wield a lot of attraction In like every time Trump comes into office right Democrats are like no actually we love immigration. We love Free trade and some of that's just in reaction to Trump But some of that is there is a desire for an open world that is at peace and where different countries can can get along and Exchange with each other exchange at the level of commerce would also exchange with level of ideas and culture I just wanted to jump in here and and Remind everybody or maybe you're not aware of this that two kind of no two countries with them acknowledge it ever You know gone to war with each other And until 2008 right was it was in Georgia? That was the first It was definitely Russia and somebody whether it was Georgia or you created depending on how you like Like in a part but yeah, yeah, I think it was Russia in Georgia is that the first McDonald's war as I call it in my And of course Russia doesn't have McDonald's now they have like the Russian version of McDowell's which is The McDonald's faces that's a coming to America reference kids If you haven't seen it check it out the kids love Arsenio Hall a very funny guy and obviously Eddie Murphy. He was very good in that movie. He was great in that movie So what I mean what happens like what what happens to change this this outlook that we're gonna have this perfect neoliberal world And everybody's gonna get along But and also I just want to underline before we get into the next stage like Jake You make a really interesting point in your essay about this notion of abstract equality And I think that's really really key and probably one of the reasons that identity politics exploded like It did in the 2010s is a sort of response. I just want to underline this and then we can get the Derek's thing Because of this notion that we are now existing on a playing field where race and gender and nationality and capital Don't matter anymore because you've got your cell phone and I think that that's actually a really key point that I haven't seen like many people Make and I think it's only a minor point in your essay, but that might be Worth drawing out like neoliberalism is abstract by definition and in that sense It really represents on my mind the apotheosis of a type of liberal thinking that took off in the 20th century of like this Equal playing field negative liberty freedom from things. So I just want to underline that because I thought that was quite a good point Yeah, and I think this is also really important for understanding the nature of the crisis that we're living right now Because people have at least on the reactionary side have turned against that idea of abstraction and are attacking it directly and then and what I'm talking about here is just The the sense of abstract equality I think people on the left I think can very easily see that Free market society is driven at every level by concrete inequalities and that people's life chances and They're and even their thinking is shaped by where they are they're at on the class hierarchy and what kinds of actual experience of domination they have what what kinds of racial inequalities there are the different ways the gender are treated But the there's another side to that which is that markets and principle treat everyone the same They're not based on a caste system They're not based on the idea that people have to see stay in their place. What the opposite? They're based on the idea that people can move that they must must be able to move because that's the only way that we can have markets that work properly And that means move socially it means move geographically It means move across the course of their lives and it also means the ability to reshape who they are So there is in the sense of fixed identity like fixed racial or civilizational or national identity These things are fluid and they're open to reinvention and they're cited by the individual right these are the sort of orienting ideological Assumptions behind neoliberalism, but they come from somewhere there's a reason they become plausible And that's because when you live in a market dominated society That that is how people appear you know until you look at their concrete conditions And I think we have to hold those this is a contradiction It's not that one is true and the other is false It said this is a contradiction people actually are constituted as abstract actually equal And they are constituted as concretely unequal And that basically sets up the debate between leftists and liberals both on the you know The liberal liberals and the right wing liberals That the democratic and republican parties used used to be before The Republicans became reactionaries rather than liberals And that's a really crucial point and that gets into really interesting historical questions of why certain minority groups have tended to Really be supportive of capitalism because it's a way to basically get beyond placed identity Um, I think identity racial identity religious identity and and that is a I think a Process coming back a very very long time and this is also kind of the grounds on which people who criticize Actually existing neoliberalism Often stand on as they say look you're it's not realizing its ideal It's it claims just it claims that everyone's going to be abstractly equal And we can see that that's not the case So what we need to do is this this and this and that will make everyone abstractly equal And it's not it's not possible you can't have everyone abstractly equal So that ideal is not realizable in practice But Because that ideal is systematically generated people are like this is something I can stand on and I can criticize the outcomes of the system if not the system itself Right then that's folks what we call imminent critique criticizing the system for not realizing its own Ideals if you ever come across that term when you're reading Marxist theory that is the that is the criticism But Jake I do think it's important to return to Derek's question, which is what happens? How does 2008 Re-shape all of this at least in the long term because there's some interesting initial reactions to the global financial crisis Yeah, so the first thing to say is that the tensions are there and building up And ultimately the crisis is a result of these tensions within the system of global neoliberalism being unmanageable The core the core driver of the financial crisis was there weren't enough consumers to purchase the output of the system And those consumers had to be created then through unsustainable growth in consumer debt and And also government debt more in Europe than in the United States And through unsustainable speculative bubbles So it was the creation of those speculative bubbles that drove Wall Street it was the creation of those debt bubbles the sustained consumer demand in the system and that all fell off a cliff in 2008 So that's one of these tensions, but there's many more a wider much wider range of sort of social tensions that are building up in this period And you see this but this particularly acutely in China actually China which I would argue is completely neoliberal is completely internal to the system of global neoliberalism You see in in the years Immediately preceding 2008 including 2008 there's all these scandals about companies like selling poisoned milk basically it's not poison, but it's they're using It cheaper inputs that Matt the mimic the properties of infant formula and then selling it to infants and then the infants die So there were there were dozens of of babies died and many others were made terribly sick by this infant formula And it's those kinds of like fraudulent or degraded products those kinds of scandals are all over the place. There's all kinds of scandals about local officials who are abusing their position who are ripping people off who are taking their land and selling it to developers There's scandals about Like the developers themselves Evicting like hiring sucks to evict people from their homes. There's there's scandals about Like construction contractors who are not paying their wages So you see you see this in a really extreme form in China, but but you see these kinds of tensions building up people are increasingly resentful of the inequalities And the forms of everyday insecurity they experience in neoliberal society all around the world But it really took the 2008 crisis to bring that into the open and for people to start questioning the system itself rather than just being like, well, you know It's like this corrupt local official. That's the problem. Get rid of this guy and then things will be okay It became much harder after 2008 when the global economy was no longer growing quickly because the driver of demand in increasingly indebted rich countries had been removed now There was there were other new speculative bubbles to make up for that gigantic speculative bubble in property in China The the big would eventually prove to be a bubble in the fracking industry and yet states So you got and then just like I don't know if you can remember the like Uber but for dog walking they made that like Got a billion dollar fundraising round like