Chinese Militarism and Global Capitalism’s Need for the State

Plus, one should mention the Chinese mega-hit movie Battle at the Lake of Changjin, which celebrates the Chinese intervention outside China’s territory (in the Korean War) in 1950. Maybe even today’s global capitalism needs nation-states. China is now paying the price for embracing a capitalist economy—one needs a strong nation-state to control the economy and keep society together. What further complicates things is that tensions are also rising between Russia and Ukraine. Russia is signaling that it plans to invade Ukraine, and the two attacks (on Taiwan and Ukraine) seem coordinated. Russia is hoping that the West will not be able to sustain a double war. However, we are not taking a simple anti-Chinese and anti-Russian stance—Biden is prolonging Trump’s trade war against China in the hopes of maintaining America’s near-monopoly over new digital media, and the West also broke the agreement that former Soviet Union sovereign states could not join NATO. Both sides are playing an extremely dangerous game. In today’s conditions, what winning a war means is best described by the title of a CNN report on Syria: “President Assad won the war but lost his country.”81 Alain Badiou wrote that the contours of the future war are already drawn: The United States and their Western-Japanese clique on the one side, China and Russia on the other side, atomic arms everywhere. We cannot but recall Lenin’s statement: “Either revolution will prevent the war or the war will trigger revolution.” This is how we can define the maximal ambition of the political work to come: For the first time in History, the first hypothesis—revolution will prevent the war—should realize itself, and not the second one—a war will trigger revolution. It is effectively the second hypothesis which materialized itself in Russia in the context of the First World War, and in China in the context of the second. But at what price! And with what long-term consequences!82 But how can we even imagine a revolution that will prevent the war to come? Let’s stay with Badiou and his motto mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre (better a disaster—the catastrophic outcome of an event—than a non-eventful survival in a hedonist-utilitarian universe). The origin of this motto is Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore (original title: Le Rivage des Syrtes), a novel about Orsenna, a fictional stand-in for Italy, a country ruled by the ancient and decadent city of the same name, which for the last three hundred years has been in a state of suspended war with Farghestan, the barbarian desert country across the sea to the south. The leadership of Orsenna decides to provoke an open war with Farghestan in order to break the spell of the decadent apathy and bring authentic life back to Orsenna, even though they are aware that the war will result in Orsenna’s destruction. The underlying existential dilemma is: What is more desirable, an inert life of small satisfactions (not a true life at all) or taking a risk which may end in a catastrophe? But is Gracq’s example not misleading? Orsenna’s hedonist non-being society is a false state that obfuscates underlying social antagonisms, and the pseudo-event of the war with Farghestan exacerbates this obfuscation. So there are three terms and not two: the event (which may end up in disaster), the pseudo-event (Fascism, or in this case, war), and the hedonist-utilitarian bio-politics of non-being, of regulating animal-human life. The difficulty today is how to distinguish the first from the second since they often share many features. Even if we agree with the formula “mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre,” what about “mieux vaut un pseudo-événement qu’un désêtre”? Is a Fascist “event” also better than a non-eventful capitalist survival? Here Badiou is walking on a dangerous edge, sometimes confusing the two. Back in the early 1990s, in a Gracq-like mode, Badiou wrote that a victory of Milošević in the post–Yugoslav War would be more interesting politically than the victory of the forces opposed to him, which was a clear preference for a nationalist pseudo-event over a non-eventful life. It is crucial for us to discern between fundamentalist pseudo-events (mobilization for a national cause) and authentic events (struggle for social justice, against global warming, etc.). To do this is pretty easy: A pseudo-event is by definition exclusionary, a passionate defense of one’s own state or ethnic or religious identity, while an authentic event is by definition universal. When there was a brief war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, I remember a report from the Armenian side in which one of their soldiers said, “We have the pandemic, but now we fight for our country, so we should forget the pandemic and focus on the war!” This comment made me very sad.