Journal articles by Adrian M Budd
International Socialism, 2021
In the past two decades, China has emerged as the major challenger to the United States's leading... more In the past two decades, China has emerged as the major challenger to the United States's leading position in the global economy and, to a lesser extent, as the world's foremost military power. Compared to the global reach of the US, China's economic and military power is more concentrated in its immediate neighbourhood. Nevertheless, it inhabits a global system of rivalry that impels the Chinese state to act as an imperialist power to advance the interests of Chinese capital in much the same way as the US does. Previous rivals to US power have now been incorporated into the US-led world system as allies-for instance, Germany and Japan after 1945-and it is conceivable that China might be incorporated in the same way in the very long term. After all, as this article will demonstrate, China broadly accepts the rules of the neoliberal "Washington consensus", and the hyperbole surrounding China's Belt and Road Initiative has been shown to be largely misplaced in recent years. Moreover, China now faces mounting criticism from states in the Global South that were recently touted as its natural allies against the US. However, the path to accommodation is a very rocky one and, as we will see, although the classical state capitalism of the Mao Zedong period has been restructured, China's rulers continue to mobilise state power to promote specifically Chinese interests against those of other major powers. When China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001 and thus signed up to Western rules on the global economy, US geostrategists congratulated themselves on the latest evidence of the West's triumph over "Communism". The deepening of China's post-Mao economic liberalisation promised greater opportunities for Western capitals. These capitals hoped to address the profitability crisis that had afflicted them since the 1970s by accessing the labour of the 200 million rural migrants who have moved into the major industrial cities of China since the early 1990s.1 According to World Bank figures, China's economy was only one eighth of the size of the US's in 2001.2 Writing in Foreign Affairs-the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a cross-party US geostrategic think-tank-international relations writer Gerald Segal could plausibly answer his own question on China's geopolitical significance, "Does China matter?", largely in the negative.3 Segal reflected a widespread, but increasingly mistaken, belief that China was little more than a low-skill, low-wage final assembly platform for higher value-added inputs from more advanced economies. WTO accession came after three decades in which rivalries between the US and China occasionally threatened military conflict-such as when the US bombed China's embassy in Serbia in 1999 and a US spy plane was downed over Hainan province in 2001. However, in two key areas there was a considerable overlap of interests. Both the US and China were rivals of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1989-91 and both were strongly committed to China's economic reform, albeit for separate reasons. This overlap continued through the 2007-8 global financial crisis, when China's vast fiscal stimulus, estimated at 27 percent of national income, was a central component of the weak and debt-driven recovery of the global economy.4 Yet, in recent years, particularly during Donald Trump's presidency, relations between the two powers have become more acrimonious. In the language of US strategists, China has moved from being a strategic partner to a global rival.5 Trump's tariff war after 2018 served as a reminder of the power imbalance between the two states and China's continuing (albeit declining) vulnerability to restrictions on its export markets. Nonetheless, simultaneous tariffs on Canadian and European Union exports indicated that the US is also vulnerable to competition, even from geopolitical allies. Despite a partial resolution (or rather suspension) of the US-China trade war, 2020 witnessed repeated stand-offs as China's increasingly assertive rulers pursued their own interests. Examples of this include China's repression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong in the teeth of criticism from the West. Meanwhile, Trump intensified a simmering conflict over Chinese tech firms, notably Huawei. The rhetoric of rivalry, including Trump's anti-Chinese racism during the Covid-19 pandemic, has prompted talk of a new Cold War. The US's structural problems, the political divisions highlighted by the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, and its wider global interests mean that the general thrust of US policy will be maintained by Biden. Indeed, one of Biden's campaign messages was that Trump was soft on China.6
International Socialism, 2013
Enternasyonal Sosyalizm, 2018
English translation: A Contribution to Marxist theory: The theory of state capitalism in Russia
Contemporary Politics, Jan 1, 1997
International Socialism, 2012
Contemporary Politics, Jan 1, 2000
The articles in this journal are written in English, a language of Indo-European origin with elem... more The articles in this journal are written in English, a language of Indo-European origin with elements from Latin developed by Germanic peoples using an alphabet of Phoenician origin. Page numbers are of Arabic, and earlier Indian, origin and until recently it would have been printed using ...
Contemporary Politics, Jan 1, 2007
International Socialism, Jan 1, 2007
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are not an obvious starting point for the study of internation... more Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are not an obvious starting point for the study of international relations. However, in the past few decades a group of radical scholars has drawn on his work to challenge the dominant Realist perspective in this field. The Realist perspective is ...
Culture, Sport Society, Jan 1, 2001
Sport is not alone in containing paradoxes and contrasts, but they are often starker than in othe... more Sport is not alone in containing paradoxes and contrasts, but they are often starker than in other areas of life. Millions approach participating in or watching sport in a state of excited anticipation, and later experience exhilaration and a powerful sense of belonging to a team, yet revelations of match-fixing, doping and financial chicanery in sport appear regularly in the media. The 2012
This paper explores the argument that the so-called four BRIC or the five BRICS economies can hel... more This paper explores the argument that the so-called four BRIC or the five BRICS economies can help rescue the global economy from its current crisis. It reviews the arguments for the positive role of these developing economies and then urges a series of reasons for caution about their capacity to act as an independent element in global economic recovery. It also draws attention to the differences between these economies and the need to consider the way that economic issues are related to geo-political considerations in the global system.
Review articles by Adrian M Budd
International Socialism, 2022
In 2017 president Xi Jinping spoke of developing China into an "ecological civilisation". China h... more In 2017 president Xi Jinping spoke of developing China into an "ecological civilisation". China has signed all the usual international environment and climate agreements and leads the world in key technology fields, including renewable energy and electric vehicles. In this context, a book by an ecosocialist and member of System Change not Climate Change that mobilises a Marxist mode of production approach to explore the devastation of China's environment is of great importance. Unlike some on the Left, Smith does not see China as an ecologically more sustainable alternative to Western capitalism. Rather, the Chinese model is an ecological disaster, for both China and the rest of the world.
A review of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of... more A review of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2012), £20 As the world commemorates the centenary of the First World War (with limited awareness of its meaning) a book by two leading Marxists that explores contemporary imperialism demands our careful assessment. A century ago there were two broad Marxist approaches to imperialism. Firstly, there was Karl Kautsky's theory of " ultra-imperialism " which suggested the potential for the replacement of rivalry by an alliance of the imperialist countries against subordinate parts of the world. The second approach, the classical Marxist perspective of inter-imperialist rivalry developed by Lenin and Bukharin, argued that competitive capital accumulation produced giant firms that operated increasingly internationally and enlisted their home states in their conflicts with other nations' capitals. The bloodshed and horrors of the war and subsequent decades showed that rivalry provided a superior explanation of international capitalist dynamics. By 1971 Bob Rowthorn noted the emergence of an additional perspective. He argued that a new US super-imperialism had developed in which the US dominated other capitalist powers and had become the " organiser of world capitalism " , able to contain such antagonisms as did appear. 1 Panitch's and Gindin's work sits squarely in this camp, with occasional nods towards ultra-imperialism. Based on earlier collaborative work and an impressive amount of research, The Making of Global Capitalism (henceforth TMGC) provides a comprehensive history of US capitalism and the economic statecraft mobilised to open the global economy to US influence over the last century or so. 2 TMGC's focus is captured in its first two sentences: This book is about globalisation and the state. It shows that the spread of capitalist markets, values and social relationships around the world, far from being an inevitable outcome of inherently expansionist economic tendencies, has depended on the agency of states—and of one state in particular: America. 3 What has emerged from the US state's role in the development of globalised capitalism, including the imposition of US-designed rules for the global economy, is " the American informal empire, which succeeded in integrating all the other capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis ". 4 This is not Michael Hardt's and Toni Negri's Empire, within whose post-national space the idea of rival national imperialisms is outdated. 5 Nor does it neatly correspond to the transnationalist perspective developed by Marxists like William Robinson, because neither a transnational capitalist class nor a global state based on the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) is emerging. In the first place, TMGC notes that capital's national roots and institutional linkages remain important, and that US multinational corporations, however international, remain American rather than transnational. 6 Meanwhile, the IFIs were an expression of US postwar power and remain sites of negotiation and coordination between separate " national systems of regulation among the advanced capitalist states ". 7 Nevertheless, TMGC shares with these perspectives the view that US hegemony has so successfully contained conflicts within the West that the idea of inter-imperialist rivalry is no longer helpful. Appearance and essence
Historical Materialism, Jan 1, 1998
Popular/non-academic articles by Adrian M Budd
Socialist Worker Review, July/August, 1988
Socialist Review, Nov, 1988
Socialist Review, 2006
Ode to Darkness Review of 'Walk the Line', director James Mangold Against the background of mains... more Ode to Darkness Review of 'Walk the Line', director James Mangold Against the background of mainstream country music, synonymous with anodyne formulaic muzak designed to satisfy record company accountants, Johnny Cash stands out as a beacon of integrity and artistic independence. From his early rockabilly records, via blues, folk, gospel and other genres, to the astonishing recordings he made with producer Rick Rubin in the decade before his death in 2003, Cash generally rejected the Carter Family's injunction to 'keep on the sunny side of life'. Rather, his willingness to explore what the Carters called the 'dark and troubled side of life' made his art so compelling.
Socialist Review, 2008
Daniele Luchetti's critically acclaimed film won five prizes in Italy's Donatello film awards in ... more Daniele Luchetti's critically acclaimed film won five prizes in Italy's Donatello film awards in 2007. It is set in the small town of Latina, originally called Littoria, one of the new towns established when the malaria-ridden Pontine Marshes were drained by Mussolini's fascist regime in the 1930s. Latina's close association with Mussolini is central to the film. Accio is a rebellious teenager whose quest for meaning in life leads him to enrol at a seminary and then to leave it in disgust when he recognises its denial of the human spirit. But his rebelliousness is also directed at his older brother, Manrico. Rather than accept Manrico's atheism and socialism, Accio is now drawn towards the illusory community of the nation. Befriended by one of its leading local figures, he joins the fascist MSI party.
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Journal articles by Adrian M Budd
Review articles by Adrian M Budd
Popular/non-academic articles by Adrian M Budd