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AntiCapitalist MeetUp - if there's a capitalist peace, is there a really a socialist peace [1]
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Date: 2023-09-24
Being “one of the most peaceful eras” does not obviate violence.
Expanding free markets as a global growth hypothesis could be a far more important factor in establishing a peace, according to Columbia University’s Erik Gartzke calls a “capitalist peace.” Can one conclude that “ If it is true that democratic states don’t go to war, then it also is true that “states with advanced free market economies never go to war with each other, either.”
Is it a reason for even the left to support free markets without endorsing neoliberal capitalism because socialism remains possible with an increase in so-called free market ideologies.
Is this neoliberal excuse really an ideological construction meant to discredit socialist alternatives especially given threats like the climate crisis that socialism might be better equipped to address.
Technically there have never been free markets especially under capitalism and a capitalist peace is only trivially superior to a socialist peace under globalization. It may be spurious even under some hypothesized post-imperialist world system to connect democracy with the absence of military conflict.
Similarly, we would be hard pressed to prove whether imperialism has “withered away” as the BRICS countries function as a de facto “Second World” and the “second best” economy vies for the spot as hegemon.
Considering the dominance of actually existing socialism, like the “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in China, market size may not be as important as supply chains and the relative wealth of the actors in a trade network. The prospect of economic ruin does still not prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets. The current crisis in Ukraine exemplifies that sorry state where combatants and their allies continue to trade during military engagements with only marginal effects on currency and energy flows.
The reality is that a socialist peace would be a democratic peace no different than a capitalist peace but sans the negative externalities of which Marx has made us aware.
Like the “low” terrorist threat level scale, the history of peace is fraught with unpeaceful conflicts, like the higher US COVID death toll caused during the time when a proper quarantine and contact tracing program in 2020 might have saved lives rather than promoting Sinophobia for partisan political purposes. Peace can function like a commodity and its manipulation by corrupt politicians obscures the need for differentiating peace from pacificism in the first instance.
While violence is unacceptable, it may be that symbolic, traumatizing violence is the biggest threat to world peace.
Socialism is a system of peace, justice and equality. The road to socialism begins with revolution in the United States. The prospect of economic ruin does still not prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets.
Various perspectives on whether the US was or continues to be a hegemon have been presented since the end of the Cold War. Most notably, American political scientists John Mearsheimer and Joseph Nye have argued that the US is not a genuine global hegemon because it has neither the financial nor the military resources to impose a proper, formal, global hegemony.[53][54] This theory is heavily contested in academic discussions of IR, with Anna Beyer being a notable critic of Nye and Mearsheimer.[55] According to Nuno Monteiro, hegemony is distinct from unipolarity.[68] The latter refers to a preponderance of power within an anarchic system, whereas the former refers to a hierarchical system where the most powerful state has the ability to "control the external behavior of all other states."[68 en.wikipedia.org/...]
While there have been vast differences in the experiences of those socialist revolutions, they share one common feature: The socialist revolutions of the 20th century took place in countries where the level of productive forces was very low compared to the imperialist countries. Every successful revolution faced the primary task of developing their economies—while under constant military threat by world imperialism. For that reason, Lenin described the challenges of building communism in 1920 in very practical terms: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” There was no hope in building socialism if the economy remained underdeveloped. Because of the combined challenges of developing the productive forces under the gun of world imperialism, no socialist revolution has yet reached a stage where the “withering away of the state” could be imagined. Imperialism has seized on any weakness in the revolutionary states in order to foment counterrevolution. www.liberationschool.org/...
But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of economic ruin did not prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets. An even greater conflict followed a generation later. Thankfully, World War II left war essentially unthinkable among leading industrialized — and democratic — states. Support grew for the argument, going back to Immanuel Kant, that republics are less warlike than other systems. Today’s corollary is that creating democracies out of dictatorships will reduce conflict. This contention animated some support outside as well as inside the United States for the invasion of Iraq. But Gartzke argues that “the ‘democratic peace’ is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom.” That is, democracies typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states. Thus, while “democracy is desirable for many reasons,” he notes in a chapter in the latest volume of Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, “representative governments are unlikely to contribute directly to international peace.” Capitalism is by far the more important factor. The shift from statist mercantilism to high‐tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war. Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable. Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches. Free‐flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict. Moreover, sanctions, which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends. Positive economic trends are not enough to prevent war, but then, neither is democracy. It long has been obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not each other. Contends Gartzke, “liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states fight.” In particular, poorer democracies perform like non‐democracies. He explains: “Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels.” pages.ucsd.edu/...
The failure of one theorist’s explanation of capitalist peace theory is their omission of almost every Latin American intervention between 1816 and 1992, a fact that allows the author to conclude that "joint highly democratic dyads are about 3 times more likely … to resolve their militarized conflicts with mutual concessions’ (Mousseau, 1998, p. 210; see also Bremer, 1993)."[37] en.wikipedia.org/…
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