P
that to the deafening media and geopolitical noise that accumulates in these turbulent times, some issues seem certain: the decline of the United States and the rise of China are long-term, structural trends that may take more or less time to materialize but are, shall we say, inevitable .
The second issue that is becoming crystal clear is that war between nuclear powers is more than likely, with all the terrible consequences it will have for humanity and life on Earth. There was never a hegemonic transition without war.
I cannot elaborate on these trends, but I would like to highlight that China’s dominance of the technologies of the ongoing industrial revolution (such as artificial intelligence, 5G networks and quantum computing, among others), represents something similar to the dominance by USA, a century ago, of the scientific organization of work, the adoption of the technological advances of the time and its application to the art of war.
There are some differences with respect to the previous transitions, that is, the decline and rise of great powers.
The first is that the declining power depends on the rising one, because their economies are intertwined. An example of this is the enormous frustration of the American Boeing, when China has just bought 292 commercial aircraft from its competitor Airbus, which reacted by asking the Biden government for a productive dialogue
with China, because it cannot do without that market (https://bit.ly/3uGSnUg).
Boeing’s statement says it all: Boeing aircraft sales to China historically support tens of thousands of American jobs, and we expect orders and deliveries to resume soon
. But the US government has imposed sanctions that include the maintenance and repair of Boeing aircraft, hurting one of its main companies.
The second difference is that we are facing a transition that involves regions and nations whose population has different skin colors, that involves a history of colonialism and racism of the West against the East, of the North against the South. Something like this had not happened in previous transitions.
The third is that there will not be a world hegemonized by China, or by the US, or by any other power. We are heading towards a world divided into two large blocks, with various regions and even continents oscillating between one and the other.
Since the transition will be resolved through wars, it is important to keep in mind that China’s defense sector is developing new weapons more efficiently and five to six times faster than those in the US
according to a senior air force commander (https://bit.ly/3bWn1CA). China’s advantage lies in its industrial base and the scale of its research, while the main US exports are commodities agriculture and weapons.
Although the geopolitical issue is important, and it will be necessary to continue studying it in order to better understand a complex world that is constantly changing, I am interested in opening the debate on the repercussions of a possible Chinese hegemony on social conflicts and on the type of movements that will take place in the future, from a perspective focused on Latin America.
A first aspect to take into account is that under the English hegemony trade unions predominated and under the US hegemony mass unions. To a large extent, as a consequence of the type of company and production that existed in both periods. The large Taylorist and Fordist company replaced the manufacturing family business, where the workers still controlled their times and ways of working.
The second is that since the world revolution of 1968, the traditional workers’ movement ceased to be the central subject in the anti-capitalist struggle, being replaced by the original people, the women who fight and the black peoples, peasants and the urban peripheries. Accumulation by dispossession and the fourth world war lead peoples, women and youth to fight to survive, because they are condemned to disappear under this model.
The third is that the kidnapping of the Nation-States by the large multinational companies and the richest one percent means that the movements cannot refer to that institution, neither to demand it nor to occupy it, opening the paths of autonomies as necessary and possible.
Finally, it is hard for me to imagine that there will be a single type of movement and a single way of walking, because the trends say that there will be different forms of organization and action. What we do know is that the unified movements and unitary
they will not be emancipatory, because they cannot be in tune with a profoundly anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial era.
It will be the times of those who risk creating by putting their bodies first; and they will be bad times, for those who look for manuals.
