The war between Ukraine and Russia is another item of a catalogue that demonstrates the futility of warfare in this 21st century of cheap drone weaponry. Russia began the war by opening a broad front along the north, east and southern borders of Ukraine. Their subsequent drive on Kyiv and Kharkiv suggests that Russian leadership had banked on a swift military victory and regime change. Obviously that did not happen. Over four years later, Russia has been largely expelled from northern Ukraine, military lines have consolidated in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine and fortified defensive zones have engulfed the field of battle. Although Russia has fought through fierce counteroffensives to capture about 20% of Ukrainian territory, their pace of advance has been achingly slow.
Deep rumination on the causes of this war is beyond the scope of your question but it suffices to say that there are ethnic dimensions to the conflict that trace back centuries. From a materialist point of view, both Ukraine and Russia can be characterized as run-of-the-mill corrupt capitalist kleptocracies: the imperialist NATO alliance backs Ukrainian oligarchs aligned with western capital, while Moscow has sought to shore up its own capital interests in eastern Europe. Working people sent to their doom by capital wrapped in a nationalist disguise is an old and horrible story. Noble causes do not abound here.
There are concrete geopolitical implications worth flagging. Just as the US-Israeli war on Iran has been a cocktail shaker for the regional politics of the Middle East, so too has the Russia-Ukraine war had a similar effect on Europe. The European Union has largely severed key Russian inputs from their economies, creating stagnanteconomic conditions. At the same time, European countries have committed to a large-scale military buildup in order to counter the “Russian threat” that has failed to topple Ukraine. And this is on top of a whopping $400 billion in aid spent by NATO countries to prop up the Ukrainian war effort against Russia. As for the Russian side, the math gets worse: over $1 trillion dollars lost to sanctions and frozen assets plus hundreds of billions more in direct military expenditures.
Karl Marx wrote in the Grundrisse that the economic effect of war “is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop part of its capital into the ocean.”1 By that standard, none of the principal actors in this war can possibly emerge a “winner.” Any victory declared by the principal belligerents could only be considered Pyrrhic at best. As with the Iran war, the primary political benefits have accrued to the one major power smart enough to remain neutral: China.
China has managed to retain a robust trading relationship with the United States, European Union, Ukraine and Russia throughout the war. With Russia politically and economically ostracized from Europe, China has deepened ties with their large northern neighbour and destroyed America’s containment strategy in the process. Ukraine has set fire to western resources across the board and kneecapped any faint hope of Europe achieving economic sovereignty independent of the United States—itself a sinking ship. The relative strength of China increases each day the conflict drags on.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu said that it takes “the acme of skill” to win wars without fighting. China clearly possesses this skill. The imperial world must crumble before it can do the same.
China is one of the most misunderstood countries in the West for all of the predictable reasons: the far-away geography, the curious culture, the unfamiliar politics, the ferocious economy. It is either portrayed as a one-dimensional menace to democracies or, less often, as the last hope to save the biosphere or the Global South. China can be the rigid communist or the wild capitalist—it only depends on the point of view of the observer. Dan Wang is the latest to re-cast China, an engineering state in contrast to the lawyerly society of the United States. He hit the shore of this discovery when it occurred to him that many of America’s founding fathers were lawyers and Deng Xiaoping had promoted a lot of engineers in the 1980s. According to Wang, this is the reason why China builds a lot more stuff than the U.S. today. But he’s wrong.
What Wang discovered is only a basic difference between Marxist-Leninist societies and liberal capitalist ones. The Soviet Union was dominated by engineers, as China and Vietnam are today. Even Cuba has been described as “a society of engineers.” Conversely, western bourgeois revolutions were all dominated by those with legal backgrounds; Thomas Jefferson in the U.S., Oliver Cromwell in Britain, Maximilien Robespierre in France—to name only the most notorious. The first prime ministers of Canada, Australia and India were also lawyers. But if the American “lawyerly society” was able to out-build and outproduce the Soviet engineering state, why can’t it do the same against the Chinese?
The answer has little to do with lawyers or engineers and everything to do with economics and governing ideology. Whereas the American commitment to capitalist class power led it directly into a deindustrialized, cannibalistic financial economy, China’s commitment to building socialism led it to becoming the greatest workshop in human history, in command of entire supply chains and advanced technology. America had built a great industrial power by the early twentieth century and organized labour had won considerable political power throughout the New Deal and Cold War eras. But this unravelled almost the moment the Cold War wound down. The disciplining of the western workforce was inevitable in an economic system pursuing profit for the sake of profit, and it arrived in the form of offshore manufacturing, real estate speculation, vulture capitalism, super-exploited migrant labor and intensified corporate lobbying.
Marxism-Leninism in China
China, meanwhile, was an accident of epic proportions. Whereas other Marxist-Leninist states in the Soviet bloc were successfully marginalized from the global capitalist economy, the U.S. under Nixon and Kissinger embraced China in a successful effort to defeat Moscow by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split. Successive presidential administrations gambled that global capitalism would so thoroughly corrupt Chinese socialist aspirations that the country would abandon Marxist thought altogether. This has turned out to be a bad bet if the words of paramount leader Xi Jinping are any indication: “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our Party would lose its soul and direction. On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”
Statements like this from Chinese leadership mystify western audiences, both left and right. Too many people view socialism through the narrow paradigm of the Soviet system or left wing politics at home and conclude that China has hopelessly deviated from Marxist theory. But what if it is the western left that is aimless and the Soviets who were forced to deviate? Western politics is so saturated with capital that even nominally “progressive” forces don’t understand the corporate interests being served by mass migration crises and obsessional identity politics. And the Soviet Union, facing multiple foreign invasions at the outset, rapidly nationalized most of its economy and placed it under a central command in order to first stave off European aggression and then counter American containment strategies. The Soviet Union was able to achieve incredibly high levels of human development and military superpower status, but balancing these two priorities against western counter-pressure proved unsustainable over the long haul.
China pursued somewhat similar policies to the Soviets until American rapprochement came in 1972, when Nixon visited Mao. Imperial pressure against China was lifted, culminating in large amounts of western commercial investment by 1979 and a U.S. State Department upgrade for China to “friendly, developing nation.” This is where the great misunderstanding of China began: for the left, China was seen as selling out the socialist movement to imperialists and for the right, China was increasingly seen as a nascent capitalist champion. Neither side was completely right or wrong.
China did embrace capitalist investment in a way that was not geopolitically possible for other Marxist-Leninist states. The private sector of China is notoriously wild and cutthroat. At the same time this does not represent a reversal of the Marxist course in China, as originally charted by Mao. Consider the Chinese flag: four small stars representing the national bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, the working class and the peasantry. Mao, while fiercely antagonistic toward rent-extracting landlords, had a different understanding of China’s domestic capitalists:
The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.1
In Marxist theory, capitalism is seen as a major progressive advance over the feudal mode of production. When Mao came to power, China was largely a feudal state. For this reason Mao favoured China’s capitalist elements over the landlords of the feudal order. Mao proposed a five-tiered structure of ownership during China’s transition phase which has been applied throughout the country: state-owned enterprises, cooperative land ownership, individually owned businesses, private corporations and public-private partnerships. The Communist Party of China, while it bristles under imperialism, has always recognized this classical Marxist principle: capitalism is the mother of socialism, not its enemy. Karl Marx:
The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand, the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.2
Having built a mass-party of over 100 million members, the CPC believes that China has already completed its great social revolution and have set themselves the task of mastering “the results of the bourgeois epoch.” In Building Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character, Deng Xiaopingdescribes foreign investment as “a major supplement in the building of socialism,” with the goal of “highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth.” This is a redux of Engels, who said that the forces of production “must be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society” before private property can be abolished.3
Whereas the advanced capitalist countries were able to develop their productive forces through a historical process involving colonial extraction, debt bondage, slavery and corporate-driven markets, China is doing the same with a combination of foreign capital investment, state owned enterprises, domestic start-ups and state-dominated markets operating under the umbrella of five year plans and consultative democracy.
The Limits to Capital
Since the dawn of civilization, Marx noted, the property relations of an economy eventually become barriers to the further advancement of technology and production.4 In feudalism, there was only so much progress that was possible in an economy dominated by illiterate subsistence farmers paying rent to lords. The limits inherent to the feudal order are what eventually provoked daring exploration missions leading to the discovery of the Americas, European mercantilism, the plantation economy and subsequent Industrial Revolution.
As industry has progressed, it has gradually given way to rent-seeking financial monopolies and Big Tech companies which are posing enormous barriers to production in western economies. Even our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data can no longer be trusted, as the economist Michael Hudson explains: “Bank penalties and fees are now counted toward GDP rather than as an economic cost. GDP accounting is now a travesty that credits finance as producing a product rather than zero-sum transfer payments.”5 Our system cannot solve this problem because our system is the problem—and no quantity of Trumpian neofascist rebellions will change the fundamental contours of the western economy. Only a revolution can do that.
Post-revolutionary China, on the other hand, has seen enough to avoid these pitfalls. Financial capital currently plays an important role allocating resources toward innovation and productivity but, left to its own devices, it will devolve into debt predation, real estate speculation and inflating unproductive assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies. According to Marxian economics, money has a price but only production can create objective value. Banks in China are state owned and directed to fulfill the five year plans that build their country. Salaries and compensation for financial service managers have been reigned in and regulatory frameworks ensure that Chinese hedge funds invest in domestic products like DeepSeek rather than asset prices. It’s been said that the West can never produce like China and this is why.
Projects from state owned enterprises, clockwise from left: Raffles City, Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, China Energy Engineering Corporation. The public sector can build according to use rather than profit.
Marx and Engels supported free trade and industrial competition as a means of provoking technological revolution and working class development.6 China has used both instruments to build out world-leading high speed rail, renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles, high tech skyscrapers and record-setting bridges. Unlike capitalist countries that over-promise and under-deliver on almosteverything, China’s public sector consistently beats its own targets. They have a working class of 772 million people, of which 500 million are considered middle class. But the contradictions created by technological change, fluctuations in value and financially ruinous competition often spur crises, and these crises promote changes to economic relations and political orientation.
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
For China, crises precede expansion of the public sector. Banking, land and resources are already under socialized ownership. Further, there are 362,000 state owned enterprises in the country comprising 60% of total market capitalization. With many people forecasting future economic turbulence, economists Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei see a China that is well-positioned to:
Either take over the remaining capitalist enterprises or invest in new socially owned enterprises to replace the bankrupt capitalist enterprises. Eventually, this could pave the way for social control over economic surplus, to be used for the free development of all individuals in manners to be determined by democratic decisions.7
Throughout their work, Marx and Engels stressed the need to not simply oppose capitalism but to go beyond it.8 Neither the workers’ state of the Soviet Union nor the welfare states of western nations have actualized this concept.9 By prioritizing production over distribution, China is doing exactly what Marx outlined in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Engels in his Principles of Communism: driving the forces of capitalist production to their technological limit before crossing the barricade that capitalist relations inevitably impose.
The colossal solar plants, hydro dams and wind farms that China is constructing are not just for show. They are the building blocks of a fully-automated robotic economy powered by the Sun. Under social ownership, an advanced economy of this type makes class distinctions extinct. It makes economic democracy viable, free development of individuals possible and the Communist Party unnecessary—as Mao envisioned.10
In America, plantation slavery funded industrial capitalism and industrial capitalism, in turn, made slavery obsolete. In China, capitalism is funding a high-tech socialist economy and socialism, in turn, will make capitalism obsolete. Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”11 China finishes the thought: “And the socially-owned robot gives you society without class.”
Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.” ↩︎
Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover,” in Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 53, No. 4: 12. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Capital Volume II (Penguin, 1992): 250. ↩︎
Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei, “Surplus Absorption, Secular Stagnation & the Transition to Socialism in China,” in Monthly Review Vol. 76, No. 5: 25. ↩︎
Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man: “Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad “welfare” or “workers’” state. ↩︎
Mao Zedong, On Contradiction and On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 47. “To build the Communist Party is in fact to prepare the conditions to eliminate the party and all parties.” ↩︎
Just when so much of our politics had spilled over into plain sight, James Bond came along right on time. Dramatic imperial courts, palace intrigue and backrooms redolent of cigarette smoke belong to a bygone era. But espionage has never been so important as when the first Bond novel debuted in 1953 and it is this kernel of reality that gives the spy thriller a cover of plausibility. Common sense dictates that espionage must be tedious, precarious and thankless work. But since it operates out of view, fiction can occupy our imagination and dazzle us with bottomless martinis, adrenaline-pumping capers, lustrous sports cars and foxy women playing not-so-hard-to-get.
The lineup of Bond movies starring Daniel Craig were released over a 15 year period between 2006 and 2021. This was a stretch when terrorism, digital surveillance, the rise of China and deadly viruses all took turns at the forefront of our collective attention. And these things are represented in the Bond films. In Casino Royale, there is terrorist financier Le Chiffre, who makes stock bets based on anticipated attacks. In Skyfall, there is Raoul Silva, an ex-MI6 agent who was detained by China and tortured over his espionage activities in Hong Kong. In Spectre, the “Nine Eyes” program—inspired by the actually existing Five Eyes intelligence alliance—becomes the target of a vast criminal enterprise. And No Time to Die revolves around a synthetic viral bioweapon made with nanotechnology.
The Geopolitics of James Bond
The pressing geopolitical issues of the day tend toward the background in Bond stories, including each Craig film. The flagpoles of global politics are no place for the criminal geniuses, the sharpshooters or duplicitous women who inhabit the world of James Bond. Bond himself can commandeer a bulldozer or cargo plane, shoot down helicopters with a pistol, swift-kick through drywall and implode stone buildings before cocktail hour. It’s difficult to imagine a man of his talents tasked with something so pedestrian as fetching China’s naval papers in the event of war over Taiwan. Besides, that issue would be of more concern to the Americans with all their Asian military bases.
When the CIA does show up they are often more of a nuisance than anything else. While CIA agent Felix Leiter is deferential to Bond, agent Logan Ash is an outright villain who betrays Bond and kills Felix. In Quantum of Solace the CIA side with the villain, Dominic Greene. With a promise of oil, they are easily duped into backing Greene’s plan to overthrow Bolivia’s democratic government. This part of the film is very believable, by the way, given the American government’s pernicious record of violent government overthrows around the world. Bond’s ministerial superior sides with Greene as well, suggesting that a villain with oil would be a preferable trading partner to “another Marxist giving national resources to the people.”
Of course, Bond does not end up in direct contact with the bloody and sordid politics of oil. His pursuit of Greene was personal, related to his ex-lover, Vesper Lynd. Greene’s character avoids real-world geopolitical complexity because oil was a ruse all along—it was actually water that he intended to hoard away from the Bolivian people. So Bond leaves him to to die of thirst in the desert, exacting his personal revenge in the process.
Bond as Übermensch
Daniel Craig’s Bond cannot tread at the level governmental affairs because he is not merely a man. He is an Overman of the Nietzschean variety; the highest human being with “the greatest multiplicity of drives, and in the greatest strength that can be endured.”1 His ability to operate any weapon, vehicle or device is astonishing. But his resoluteness under torture and savoir-faire in every interaction demonstrate an Overman who has mastered his drives, able to restrain or unleash them at will.
For a perfect construction like Bond, the most difficult part must be finding adversaries resistant to the onslaught he brings. The Craig films have Bond tangling with a shadowy organization known as Spectre, each film revealing another level to the organization that was previously unseen. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson’s description of conspiracy theories, Spectre is a criminal organization “so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves.”2
It must be no surprise when Bond runs into his own shadow once reaching the top boss of Spectre, as it is revealed that Ernst Stavro Blofeld is his foster brother from when both were children. Blofeld grew so jealous of his father’s relationship with Bond that he decided to kill his dad, fake his own death and found a criminal organization out of spite for James. In other words, it is only James Bond who is capable of creating an adversary to go against himself. Even in the labyrinthine underbelly of global commerce, corrupt dictators and criminal intrigue, there is no organic match for the indomitable 007.
The Fetish
Given the circuitousness of Bond’s storyline, it is a good question what the meaning of this British cultural icon actually is, as the face of one of cinema’s longest running film series. Writing for The Guardian, Dan Sabbagh bluntly states, “James Bond’s mission stays the same: letting Britain think it’s still a superpower.” Consider the context in which James Bond was thought up by his creator, Ian Fleming. Britain faced a massive debt at the conclusion of World War II, it had lost the bulk its empire and MI6 had just suffered a brace of defections to the Soviet Union. The United States would be taking up the Western imperial mantle and James Bond becomes the fetish to the British disavowal of this new reality.
Applying Slavoj Žižek’s conception of fetishistic disavowal to James Bond, the British public “knew very well” that their country would slide into irrelevance “but nevertheless cannot bring [themselves] to really believe it will.”3 The Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese—let them jockey for global supremacy. In James Bond, there is an agent whose abilities are actually too overwhelming for the humdrum of high stakes geopoliticking; it’s beneath him.
Daniel Craig’s character filled the interstices beneath the world stages, which is exactly the same space carved out for Bond by his 20th century creators. Given the truth of Britain’s diminished standing in the world, there is a heightened pleasure derived from the fetish object of Bond, and a disproportionate cultural significance attached to him. With the headwinds facing Britain at the moment, the next Bond film can’t come soon enough.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Friedrich Nietzsche quoted in John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford University Press, 1996), 69. ↩︎
Fredric Jameson quoted in Robert Tally Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (Pluto Press, 2014), 111. ↩︎
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010), x-xi. ↩︎
