China Represents the Existential Threat of our Time—and the Democratic Party is a Chief Enabler

Social media memes attempt to paint China as a victim of Western capitalism, as if China played no role in the appearance of the vast industrial plantations, known to economists as export processing zones (EPZs), that enslave millions who produce the gadgets and widgets upon which consumers in the West depend and desire. Economists call the practice of shipping production overseas or across borders “outsourcing.” Along with mass immigration, it is one of the two main methods used to undermine the working classes of the West.

One might suspect Chinese propagandists plant those memes. Perhaps they are behind some of them. But the woke left is eager to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t have to be told what to do. They know what to do. Maoist influence on the New Left from the sixties onward has built sympathy for the CCP and a loathing for Western values of liberty and human rights into woke leftism.

Outsourcing is very much driven by Chinese imperialism and its running dogs among the US corporate class, e.g., Silicon Valley. China’s long-range plan is to control global supply chains and produce debt-encumbered nations that are easily bullied by the People’s Republic of China. The CCP has no love for the Chinese people, either. The ruthlessness of China’s external behavior is surpassed by the ruthlessness of its internal behavior. The Communist Party enslaves tens of millions of Chinese and herd China’s ethnic minorities, for example the Uighur people, into concentration camps. How could China’s rulers have any love for the Chinese masses? Without the love of liberty, there is no real love at all. One does not love those whom he enslaves.

The CCP is directing Chinese corporations globally, stealing intellectual property across the First Word, luring Western investment to its EPZs, leveraging the pension funds of Western workers, assuming control of the periphery and semi-periphery by indebting those countries via its Belt and Road initiative, buying up property throughout the world.

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing what military strategists Qiao Jiang and Wang Xiangsui, colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, identify as “unrestricted warfare.” Jiang and Xiangsui are very clear about what unrestricted warfare is meant to accomplish: it’s a master plan to destroy American and rule the world.

Traditional thinking about war is that offensive action is reducible to military action. Liang and Xiangsui identify alternatives to direct military confrontation: its Confucius Institutes, economic warfare, such a theft of intellectual property, international policy, sabotage, such as attacks on digital infrastructure and networks, and terrorism. Indeed, traditional approaches to military preparedness, such as focus on the development of new weapons systems, crowds out consideration of the tactics of unrestricted warfare.

The PRC pursues unrestricted warfare because it is presently not powerful enough militarily to use kinetic warfare. But why would the PRC need to when the corporations of the West are working with the CCP to build a global neo-feudalist system of industrial plantations—even turning the United States into one?

Transnational corporations (TNCs) have no country. TNCs globe trot to amass wealth and they see China’s authoritarian model as optimal. This is why we see the shift in rhetoric from class to race among leftwing intellectuals in the West and the switch from free speech to speech codes among the rank-and-file of the progressive countermovement.

The woke left is decidedly illiberal in consciousness and practice. Whereas Marx believed in free speech and sought to inspire the proletariat to rise up and seize the means of communication to maximize free transmission of working class expressions, the woke leftist works with global corporations to restrict the free flow of ideas, even taking over free market rhetoric of private power to justify censorious desire.

As the corporate form is a manifestation of bureaucratic collectivism, it differs little in terms of its social logic from the bureaucratic collectivism of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Both are forms of state monopoly capitalism, with globalization having replaced imperialist motion in the West.

There is no real national interest held by the respective political establishments in the West because corporatists are the ruling class of the trans-Atlantic realm and their interests in the context of late capitalism lie in importing to the West the surveillance apparatus of the state capitalist model of China. We know this as the managed decline of America and the West, which involves giving up national sovereignty and turning Western countries into Third World countries.

China’s action express an imperialist intention to spread the PRC’s brand of state capitalism across the planet. The CCP uses globalism as a means to an end. There are plenty of elites in the West eager to betray their countrymen for the privileges that come with tightening authoritarian control over the population. We don’t have to infer this. It’s the long-standing goal of Chinese Communist Party to spread the PRC model globally. It’s open about it. 

Chinese imperialism and Western integration with the global system is an existential threat to West. The CCP is totalitarian. The Chinese people are slaves the CCP sells to the West. Transnational corporations are China’s customers. The CCP is exploiting transnationalist aspirations to take over the world. As midwives to the birth of a new order, the First World globalists, defended by the progressives of North America and social democrats of Europe, are moving to fuse the world economy and its legal structure with the logic of Chinese corporatism.

This is why the effort to stop the trans-Atlantic populist-nationalist movement has been so aggressive. It’s why popular democratic movements organized around economics and glass are smeared as “xenophobic,” “racist,” “nativist,” and “fascist.” But these popular democratic movements have arisen to confront the destruction of the West. 

I don’t want any readers to be confused about which movements I’m talking about. I’m not talking about such “movements” as Black Lives Matter. BLM is a corporate-backed anti-working class movement designed to stand in place of a genuine working class movement. BLM is a barely concealed ruse. That these movements reflect Maoist sensibilities straightaway reveals their purpose. The Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialist of America are also faux-working class movements. That these organizations work hand-in-hand with progressives in the Democratic Party tells you everything you need to know about where their sympathies lie.

Capitalism as it operated under internationalism is in trouble. Depletion of resources, overshoot and collapse, a chronic realization crisis, a legitimation crisis, mass economic migration, rising populism and nationalism—the world elite are moving to a different model to preserve their wealth, one that is already seeing global inequality worsening as more and more wealth is accumulated in the upper echelon. (To know what they are up to, see the World Economic Forum.)

In this context, the memes progressives share on social media represent pro-CCP propaganda or the thoughts of persons clueless about the geopolitical and international political economic situation. China is the most serious threat to humanity since Nazi Germany. As I have said, Biden is the Chamberlain of our time.

The PRC is particularly dangerous at this time because China is ascendant in the moment of managed decline of the American republic and the trans-Atlantic system. This is the model the transnational corporations are embracing—and the TNCs are calling the shots—and the Democratic Party is their party. The inverted totalitarianism Sheldon Wolin describes in Democracy, Inc. (despite misidentifying the midwife) is a new mode of totalitarianism, no less evil just more sophisticated.

Observers are estimating that China’s one-child policy, a program of forced abortion, has resulted in the termination of 400 million pregnancies. Female fetuses were overrepresented among those aborted, and now there are some 20 million young Chinese men who are bachelors. In other words, cannon fodder. Two of the three pillars of unrestricted warfare are in play—economic and information warfare. All that remains is kinetic warfare. China has the men to wage it. They await the opportunity.

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Having mentioned the Communist Party USA, I feel it is necessary to write about my own history with this group. In the mid-1990s, as a graduate student at Middle Tennessee State University, a colleague and I established a small leftwing organization, the Committee for Social Justice, which published a short-lived journal Theory and Praxis: A Journal of Free Thought and Revolutionary Action. This and work on public interests shows for cable access at VIACOM drew the attention of the Communist Party USA who sent an organizer to Tennessee to organize a communist club (the name the CPUSA uses for its cells). We got a nice write up in what was then called the People’s World Weekly (formerly the Daily Worker). I still have a signed copy of Gus Hall’s Working Class USA which the organizer had brought with him to give me.

In order to be a member of the CPUSA, one must organize a club and actively recruit others to the CPUSA. It was this cult-like practice that kept me from becoming a CPUSA member. However, the CPUSA tapped me for some articles for its paper, which had been renamed the People’s World, the most notable of these, “The Victims of Capitalism,” published on June 23, 2007.

Another reason I disassociated myself from the group was its shift from working class socialism to woke leftism and its increasing ties to the Democratic Party. In the 1990s, the CPUSA still advocated, at least rhetorically, what Hall called “bill of rights socialism.” This is not the case anymore.

Today, the CPUSA and the DSA are effective fronts for the Chinese Communist Party and it is through these fronts that the CCP manipulates the policies of the Democratic Party when the Party is not directly serving the interests of the PRC. If you are curious to know how this happens, just look at who in the Democratic Party openly declares membership in the Democratic Socialist of America.

Long ago I repudiated the CPUSA. If I could deny any past association with this group I would. I find my flirtation with this group mildly embarrassing. But the Committee for Social Justice, the journal Theory and Praxis, my meetings with the CPUSA organizers, and my articles in the People’s World are all matters of pubic record and part of my biography, so I will have to own them. At least I can say that I am not and have never been a member of the Communist Party.