Why China Cannot Win a Trade War Against the USA
Worth reading -- not 100% accurate, but has many critical insights.
"The essential difference between Chinese capital and that of the US or other rich countries can be characterised as that between non-monopoly and monopoly capital. As seen above, the profitability of companies such as ZTE and Huawei is mediated by their degree of technological capacity. Before looking at how the concept of monopoly versus non-monopoly applies to the international division of labour (below) it is useful to look at how it corresponds to both the profitability of First and Third World corporations and to the income in First and Third World societies.
The characteristic feature of monopoly capital – which is based principally in the rich countries – is higher rates of profit. Non-monopoly, Third World corporations, even very large ones, tend to have far lower rates of profit. These high and low profit rates of the largest corporations also correspond to high and low national per capita income levels in the countries where these companies originate and are based.
The reality of Chinese giant companies – and those of other Third World countries – is that, overwhelmingly, these are domestic monopolies with few if any international operations. While the sheer size of China’s economy means it can sustain a high number of very large companies, the degree of their profitability (at least on average) is mediated by the weak competitive position of Chinese capital within the international division of labour.
What could conceivably happen is that more areas of the labour process that are presently dominated by the imperialist societies and hence subject to monopoly pricing, could be wrested from them and become the domain of Third World production – the same thing that has already happened, for example, in low grade steel production and other industrial processes. The same may be true several years from now for the production of basic automobiles. If the proportion of necessary world labour coming under the control of non-monopoly capitalists increases, or the degree of imperialist technical superiority in high-end labour is reduced (and thereby the degree of imperialist monopoly in these is reduced), then the gap between Third World and First World income could conceivably narrow relatively – even as the overall polarisation remains robust.
However, a narrowing gap between the two camps is the opposite result to the overall outcome of neoliberal period (1980–2015) and far from inevitable.
The gap cannot close entirely because it manifests the basic structure of the world market – the development of both monopoly and non-monopoly capital. The social and market polarisation between monopoly and non-monopoly capital, its reflection in the technical polarisation of labour, is the reason income inequalities manifest not as random variations, or on a spectrum, but mostly as two principal poles – rich and poor capitals, rich and poor states, rich and poor societies.
There is no ladder from ordinary to advanced labour accessible to Third World societies – except with the cooperation of imperialist core states.
Every Third World society is continuously pulled back into the mundane routine of ordinary labour for the simple reason that this is where their capitalists can make money. There has been no change in that basic social structure of imperialism over the last several decades. Only the technical composition of what constitutes high and low-end labour has evolved in tandem with the general development of the human labour process itself."
