The new multipolar world, or, becoming China's giant farm is cooler than becoming the United States' giant farm.

The excellent Márcio Pochmann made a post pointing out a shift towards the East in international relations. He observed that a Ford factory in Bahia will become a factory for Chinese electric cars, so our bilateral relations with the US are gradually turning into multilateral relations with the BRICS. I've seen other posts on the same topic, including one that suggests the international currency will cease to be the dollar due to a Russia/China agreement (actually just one article, repeated ad nauseam by different "experts"), and that this would allow us to escape the SWIFT payment system and the hegemony of the dollar. Therefore, we should hope for victory in Russia's war against Ukraine, as it's all part of a new global package for a multilateral world.

I am suspicious of this consensus for several reasons. Firstly, the Chinese strategy for hegemony relies precisely on a commercial and financial symbiosis with the United States. On one hand, there is a trade war and a struggle for hegemony in global capitalism; on the other hand, China's main consumer market for its exports is the United States. The Chinese competitiveness strategy involves devaluing its own currency and generating trade surpluses through a favorable balance of trade, with products that become competitive in all markets compared to products sold in euros and dollars. China is the largest creditor of the United States and profits from a strong dollar and the hegemony of the American currency. It is not in China's interest for the American currency to fall, or for it to cease being a currency of account, since its main assets are valued in dollars.

So, when I see articles that explicitly state that China is inaugurating a new era of bilateral transactions without the use of the dollar, this is more fantasy than reality. Even if there are agreements in which the Yuan is used instead of the dollar to trade with Brazil (used here as an example), exchanged for reais, or with Russia (exchanged for rubles), ultimately, when accounting for the trade balance, the balances will be reconverted into dollars, the international currency, and this is the aggressive Chinese trade policy: favorable trade, both because its products are cheaper compared to products made in the financial center of capitalism (including and also by American and European companies based in China), and because they are products with higher added value (more incorporated technology). This is far from being the end of SWIFT or the dollar. Even when Chinese giants threaten to leave or do leave the New York Stock Exchange for Hong Kong, their performance is evaluated and assessed in dollars, not Yuan.

Secondly, because China is not proposing a new international division of labor in which both the technological and financial gaps between central and dependent capitalist countries are reduced. A colonial or neocolonial country is one whose capital accumulation occurs elsewhere. I see many people changing the classic concept of Imperialism, created by Lenin, so that this concept is not used to analyze the Chinese or Russian economy. But yes, Alibaba is as imperialist as Amazon, Chinese high-tech companies are as imperialist as US or Japanese technology companies. China's bilateral relations with Latin American or African countries can be classified as anything but socialist, egalitarian, or harmonious. Selling raw iron ore and receiving airplanes or cell phones in exchange is unequal and disadvantageous trade, whether it is done with the US, Germany, or China.

Thus, a shift from purely capitalist relations from the US/Eurozone/Japan axis to China does not encompass any process of economic, political, or colonial emancipation. China does not have a project similar to that of the former Soviet Union, despite all the criticisms of the actually existing socialism, in which unequal capitalist trade was replaced by a relationship of co-dependency, where trade surpluses did not result in an unpayable external debt or a relationship of financial exploitation. Even with the defeat of the socialist bloc and the dissolution of the USSR and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union did not execute billions of dollars of Third World debt and did not become the owner of companies in its former allied countries. 

Can the same be said of the new Chinese capitalism? In fact, we have to call a spade a spade: China's relationship with any other nation is a purely capitalist one, which passes either through Chinese state-owned enterprises operating as simple capitalist companies outside of China, or through companies controlled by major Chinese billionaires. Today, China is the second country with the most billionaires in the world, with 73 among the 500 richest people in the world. No, being a billionaire is not a socialist process; the expanded reproduction of private ownership of the means of production is not a socialist process. The hybrid Chinese system, which combines state and private ownership internally, is merely capitalist in its international commercial and financial relations. This does not mean that China is not important in counterbalancing US hegemony in the world and that the BRICS should not negotiate with China. This simply means that we must call a spade a spade; this way of trading high-tech and high-value-added products as commodities does not change the international division of labor in any way and is pure and simple savage and unequal capitalism, in the most naked and raw sense of the international division of labor.

It's worth remembering that China's aggressive global strategy includes buying state-owned companies in countries with which it trades and profiting by directly exploiting concessions in peripheral states. China has made major acquisitions in Brazil in both the energy and mining sectors. Yes, this is strategic for China, but it is far from changing the unequal and neocolonialist relationship that Brazil has with the countries of central capitalism, regardless of whether the company is Spanish, Japanese, or Chinese. 

There is a theoretical reductionism that avoids analyzing these unequal economic relations and only celebrates the fact that they are conducted with China. Today, the largest external partner and financier of Brazilian agribusiness is China. This does not change the semi-feudal relations in the Brazilian countryside in any way, nor does it make any project of national emancipation and development viable. The historical reductionism, which long ago stopped analyzing the contradictions of the Chinese system to celebrate the "success of socialism," also failed to analyze that the Chinese state acts as a capitalist state in its commercial relations, only deepening technological dependence, in a permanently unequal trade that reaches the point of buying strategic companies in the countries with which it has commercial relations.

Thirdly, because a shift of the economic axis from the West to the East is not a process of human emancipation or a socialist alternative for development. The international left has exchanged the central objective of human emancipation/socialist revolution for this reductionist, camp-based discourse of global hegemony. In the relations that China establishes with its trading partners, it matters little to China whether the new partner is a democracy, a misogynistic sultanate, a semi-feudal tyranny, or a socialist country. The Chinese objective is purely commercial. If this has been praised as pragmatism, it does not change the balance of power in the world for those who fight for emancipation, against fascism, against neocolonialism. The stark demonstration of this occurred when the Taliban retook Kabul and we saw part of the national left celebrate the victory of a misogynistic and anti-communist tyranny, simply because it would no longer be in the "sphere of influence of the United States".

The shift from fighting for hearts and minds for a new socialist humanity to this "socialism by halves," measured only by areas of influence, is an absurd intellectual and conceptual poverty. First of all, because all contradictions must be swept under the rug so that the international left can become a cheering section for a victory for China or Russia (clumsily confused with the former Soviet Union), in a kind of game of Risk. Dialectical analysis disappears because all real contradictions must disappear. Just look at the theoretical simplification being used to analyze the war in Ukraine, reduced to a dispute between NATO versus Russia/China. The people, or peoples, residing in Ukrainian territory disappear, the civilian victims of the war disappear, and the only perspective from which the war can be viewed is whether we cheer for the success of NATO or the success of Russia. The 43 million lives involved in this war are a mere detail. Unlike the socialist solidarity movements related to the Vietnam and Korean wars, the Russell Tribunal (which even condemned the war crimes of socialist powers), and the movement for peace and the emancipation of peoples, our role would be merely to hope that one of the powers wins the conflict and thus, in a mechanistic way, the new multipolar world will emerge.

The problem is that this new multipolar world will not emerge, because none of the problems of the international division of capitalist labor are present in this imperialist war for new spheres of influence. The international division of labor in 21st-century capitalism is based on two divides:

1. The ever-growing technological gap. The new capitalism is divided between countries possessing cutting-edge technology and countries that import this technology. It matters little whether the new car factory in Bahia will be Chinese; the know-how, the technology, will not be exported. What comes to peripheral countries are factories that depend on very high technology; this technology will continue to be produced elsewhere, and its capitalist accumulation will occur abroad. One thing the left in Campos has stopped doing is criticizing the fact that, when a foreign industry is established in Brazil, the bulk of its profit goes to its headquarters, whether in Beijing or Washington. The discourse of employment and increased GDP has buried the old criticism of dependence on imperialist companies (which remain imperialist whether they are from Japan, Korea, or China). Becoming a giant farm of the United States or China is neocolonialism all the same; it doesn't look any better just because it's painted red.

2. The financial divide as well. Unequal trade between core and peripheral countries hasn't diminished simply because China has entered the game. No, China doesn't create a "new type of trade," advantageous to all parties, as the propaganda of certain communists (or ex-communists?) would have us believe. It's merely a new player in the struggle for world hegemony. For peripheral countries, it makes no difference whether capitalist accumulation takes place on the New York Stock Exchange or the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This isn't a passport to a "new multipolar world," because the two main features of exclusionary 2st-century capitalism—the technological divide and the financial divide—are only deepening. And no, neither China nor Russia plays any role against this or proposes a new international division of labor. Capitalism remains the same; core countries produce cutting-edge technology and profit from unequal trade and from being the world's financial center. Peripheral countries sell commodities and remain peripheral, suffering from a new form of colonialism.

To replace the idea of ​​socialist emancipation, and of a world free from an unequal international division of labor, with an oriental capitalism, tinged with red, is far from being a revolutionary or socialist idea.