Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world.The moral of the Cold War, which has seen both "socialist" countries, Soviet Union and China, evolving into capitalist countries, is that class structured societies regardless of what names they call themselves will always result in a ruling class that exploits the other classes. The bureaucracies in both countries realized beginning in the 1970s that they could extract much more wealth and power under capitalist policies than they could under bureaucratic based rule. As we have seen, the conversion to capitalism was easy and painless--for the ruling classes of both China and Russia.
...At the heart of the deal was a rejection of the basic moral claim of both egalitarian socialism and free market capitalism, the rival ideologies of the Cold War, to empower the individual as the center of decision-making. Instead, the fate of the citizen would come to be determined by an alliance between huge multinational corporations and government elites with scant reference to the needs of ordinary working folk.
In the 1990s capitalist apostles celebrated these conversions by exclaiming "the end of history" by which they meant that humanity had achieved its final perfect organization of society. Today capitalist apologists are now more on the defensive about their glorious system, but profits are just too good to really make any real changes. Under neo-liberal policies they have eliminated borders for their ruling classes and joined together to exploit workers even more efficiently to enrich all capitalists everywhere. The most celebrated success nowadays is Apple corporation which has married the tightly controlled cheap labor in China with American technology (created by mostly American workers) to create fabulous profits for all Apple investors.
As a result we now hear talk about corporations bringing back some overseas manufacturing to the US, but under what conditions of employment? With so much current unemployment in the US, corporate employers may be thinking that US workers will accept much lower wages and benefits. After all, they are directly competing with the most vulnerable workers in the world. Ain't neo-liberalism wonderful?
