THE DRUMS are beating ever louder for an all-out war against China as world capitalism plunges into recession while the economy of the deformed workers state powers ahead from the coronavirus pandemic.
The call to arms to save Western capitalism was expressed by ex-Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith in an article last Friday in the Daily Telegraph with the headline ‘China’s evil regime is successfully using Covid to accelerate its bid for global dominance.’
Smith is raging that while the UK economy collapsed by 20%, China has recorded an economic growth just under 5% in the third quarter of 2020 and in 2021 it is expected to grow by a further 7.6%.
The reason for China’s ability to recover from the pandemic and defeat it with virtually no new outbreaks in the country, is that from the outset they followed total lockdown and the most rigorous testing, treating those infected in specially built state hospitals.
In contrast, the Tory government in Britain, along with the Trump administration in the US, opted for herd immunity and the continued drive to reopen capitalism at all costs.
Multi-billion pound contracts were handed out to private companies to run test and trace systems that didn’t work as these companies saw in the pandemic not a health crisis but an opportunity to make vast profits.
But for Smith, China is the ‘evil’ enemy that must be dealt with.
This theme was taken up in yesterday’s Telegraph editorial which carried the headline ‘While the Western world slides into depression, China powers on.’
According to this editorial it doesn’t matter who wins the US presidential election, the Democratic candidate Joe Biden or Donald Trump, they will have to either ‘sue for peace or intensify this new cold war’.
It states: ‘Whoever wins the White House next week will do so in the knowledge that America is no longer the sole superpower.’
In fact, as the Telegraph acknowledges, there is no difference between Trump and Biden who, it notes, ‘has been almost as critical of China (as Trump), if not quite so strident. His tone might be more emollient but his policies might be little different.’
The policies that Trump has followed ever since his election has been all-out trade war with China and that he would ‘return’ millions of jobs to the US.
In fact his trade war was spectacularly unsuccessful and in August this year he was forced to step up his trade war onslaught under conditions where the US economy was sliding into a depression with over 56 million workers filling in unemployment claims.
Trump’s trade war against China has already devastated US farmers, whose crops have been locked out of their biggest overseas market as China retaliated against Trump’s massive tariff increases on their exports, while the increases on import duties have fallen on the backs of the US working class in the form of increases on basic commodities.
At the same time, the offshoring of American jobs has continued to grow as US bosses scoured the world for alternative cheap labour sources.
A recent report by consulting firm Kearney found that the US trade war against China hasn’t reversed America’s manufacturing collapse.
According to the Telegraph, ‘China is hoping the election will allow for a reset in relations’ but the fact remains that whoever wins the presidency will carry on and increase the drive to war with China.
There will be no ‘reset’, the absolute imperative for US imperialism is to wage trade war against its rivals, especially China, a trade war that will rapidly escalate into a shooting war regardless of who is elected president next week.
Capitalism, in its final and most degenerate imperialist stage, is driven to try and solve its crisis through re-conquering the world for capitalist exploitation; there is no other way it can survive.
With workers and youth across the world rising up against a capitalist system that is crashing into bankruptcy and war, the only solution to this crisis is for the working class internationally to unite and put an end to capitalism through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
