The global hegemony of consumer-communism

Capitalism is over, but did anyone notice?

The Beijing Television Cultural Center fire, 2009. Photo by ‘WiNG’, public domain.

My elderly neighbour Terry, who died during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, once told a story from his life as a salesman in 1960's Britain. Terry was selling confectionery wholesale, and he had somehow managed to get into the outer office of the formidable Jack Cohen, founder of the Tesco retail empire. After lengthy persuasion, he was called in to see Jack, clutching his briefcase of samples. The deal was done, and Terry got his bonus.

Terry was a Londoner, but his boss was a diplomat at the Czech embassy; these were communist confections. The Czech government of that era couldn't be seen making a direct approach to a capitalist like Jack Cohen, but it needed hard currency. So, Terry acted as a middleman between the two systems. Jack no doubt made a healthy profit, and the biscuit-eaters of Britain never knew their sugary snacks were baked behind the Iron Curtain.

Learned helplessness

It's a given that almost everything is made in China these days, from textiles to high tech. Some in the West assume that Chinese people aren't smart or creative enough to figure out what to make, but perhaps because they are a little dull or too poor to say 'no', they are willing to do factory work for very little money. This is of course a racist stereotype, but also the standard explanation for the state of globalised trade today. It's the trope of Western brains supposedly directing Chinese hands, implied in the smug slogan 'Designed in California' emblazoned on an iThing.

This tired trope is apparently paradoxical; how did Western billionaire capitalists come to be co-dependent with a communist state which has reiterated its commitment to Marxism in the contemporary doctrine of Xi Jinping Thought?

Several pundits have attempted to give a fitting name to the political system that the West has today. In his 1980 book, Bertram Gross called it 'friendly fascism'. More recently, short-term Greek finance minister 'Yanis' Varoufakis has been telling everyone it is 'techno-feudalism', while Joel Kotkin's variation is 'neo-feudalism'.

In case you've been seduced by the idea that the world is run by a handful of white male billionaires who pull all the strings of puppet governments, which would be called a conspiracy theory if it were not so mainstream a concept on the political Left, I'd like you to try a thought experiment with me.

Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a gigantic Amazon warehouse, built with the support of tax money because it has brought employment to a low-income neighbourhood. Tall racks of palletised consumer goods spread in all directions, as far as you can see in the dim light. Now imagine that every box in that warehouse containing goods produced under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party regime suddenly vanished. What do you see after that? In my mind, I see a lot of empty shelves.

If your thought experiment had the same result as mine, this implies our 'feudal' rulers including Jeff Bezos are only middle-men for the CCP. They have been richly rewarded for raising the standard of living of the Chinese people, by accelerating the diversion of Western capital and consumer spending into communist-controlled factories. This is a reversal of the post World War II period ending with the 1980's, in which only Westerners had a wide choice of consumer goods, and communist citizens queued for scarce bread or rice. Should Bezos seriously fall out with the CCP for any reason, the source of his great wealth would be switched off overnight, and he's not the only billionaire bro in that position.

All companies of significant size depend on tacit CCP approval if they wish to ship physical products, including anything with a chip or a battery in it. Despite their discoveries of electricity, general-purpose computing and semiconductors, the days when the Western countries which had given birth to Volta, Ohm and Hertz could boast pioneering hardware manufacturers such as Ferranti or Olivetti are long gone.

The trans-ideological corporation

At least since the now-discredited President Nixon made his visit to China in 1972, many other politicians have followed his attempt to form commercial and political alliances between East and West. As I write, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, second in command to the Prime Minister, is in China for talks which will enable more imports from the CCP regime, while the UK's domestic economy is hardly flourishing.

More than fifty years ago, Samuel Pisar, Holocaust survivor and youthful communist positively appraised the 'trans-ideological corporation', which has no allegiance to any particular political system. Having previously served in the Kennedy administration, Pisar's 1970 book 'Coexistence and Commerce' would inspire Nixon's approach to China.

British readers may remember Pisar as Robert Maxwell's lawyer, while Americans might know he was Steve Jobs' legal representative and Anthony Blinken's stepfather.

The trans-ideological corporation is the perfect partner for an authoritarian communist regime which can use its absolute power to deliver goods for export on time, at any level of quality required, and at a price which no Western capitalist can match, let alone beat.

The left-right continuum of conventional politics offers no enlightenment when examining the trans-ideological corporation. Neither does a classical Marxist analysis which pits capital against labour. Instead, the transnational consumer-communist regime aims to provide the greatest happiness for the proletariat by providing it with all of the consumer goods that capitalism offered, with none of the inefficiencies of bourgeois multi-party liberal democracies.

The Dengism of the 1970's and 80's has gone global, and it is delivering its promise of an improved standard of living for billions, moving far more people out of poverty than capitalism ever managed to. (Please note the improvements in living standards ascribed to free markets over the last fifty years or so also coincide with the post-Nixon era).

The losers are the free-thinking dissidents, the principled, the religious observers with their contradictory belief systems, and the reactionaries who refuse to accept the new hegemony. Even they will benefit from plentiful consumer goods at low, low prices.

The ecological impact of this rampant consumer-communism, with Chinese coal plants burning around the clock to power 'green' technology production, is externalised, so that it doesn't figure in the ticket price of those goods. We can take bets on whether the ability of the planet to support human life will end before everyone on this planet gets the keys to a Chinese-made electric car.

In case you think this is just hyperbolic Sinophobia, I am not anti-Chinese. The chaos of the Great Leap Forward, while deadly for millions, was a short-lived speed wobble in the context of a 6,000 year old Chinese culture, a human-made disaster which the CCP has learned from and overcome. I commend Chinese ingenuity in its dialectical synthesis of capitalism and socialism to deliver the benefits of both systems worldwide, with the assistance of Western fellow travellers in business, media and the academy.

It should be obvious by now that the West has had its own Cultural Revolution over the last ten years or more, with denouncing, shaming and ostracisation all the rage, and British police checking your thinking in preference to addressing bourgeois concerns such as property crime.

It's just a pity that the drawbacks of both systems have also been synthesised - the loss of the natural world, and inherent authoritarianism - but it seems most people don't care about freedom or environmental downsides as long as they get what they want from the online store.

There may be trouble ahead

Peter Zeihan's theory that China faces imminent collapse, which has received millions of views due to his appearances on well-known podcasts, is, as politely as I can put it, counter-factual. If China collapsed, so would the West, given its dependent relationship. The CCP's ruthless authority means it will ensure China and its favoured people survive, by any means necessary. It has all the capital, resources and the production capacity to do so, and it isn't short of labour either.

Consumer-communism faces two political challenges, and neither will emerge from the trans-ideological corporation or within the CCP itself. The first is from fundamentalist religion. For example, an Islamic caliphate provides an alternative political structure, non-Marxist in origin, to the CCP. However, if we accept James Lindsay's proposition that Marxism is a theology and communism is its religious practice, there is potential for an Islamic caliphate or other religious bloc to co-exist peacefully with a consumer-communist world, including trade in goods and raw materials.

If we believe the goal of Dengism and now Xi Jinping Thought is to provide the best possible outcome for China's Han majority, then Islamic, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist regions can flourish indefinitely as long as they do not impinge on China's unity, power and prosperity. China's religious minorities may continue to suffer, lest they have any ideas about secession or joining with their counterparts across borders.

The second significant challenge to consumer-communism comes from national anarchism, which is both anti-globalisation and anti-authoritarian, and therefore completely incompatible with the hegemony of an alliance between the CCP and trans-ideological Western corporations. Given that anarchists are anti-government, they are necessarily anti-global-government, and the nation offers a potential organising unit of resistance. A relatively small community is ineffectual against a superpower, as China's eleven million Uyghurs have found out to their cost.

Indeed, when Varoufakis was attacked and beaten in Athens in 2023 he denied that anarchists were responsible, despite the evidence that this was exactly who had targeted him for assault. The former Greek finance minister cannot ascribe a political motive to this attack because the facts don't fit his 'techno-feudalism' theory. I have written previously about how the British political and media class ignored evidence of national anarchist involvement in the UK's summer 2024 riots, even though evidence of this was published by the media itself.

Costs and benefits

On a purely pragmatic level, Westerners don't like air pollution and toxic waste; they have successfully exported the problem for others to deal with. Consider the electric car, which delivers the clean air Californians have demanded since emissions regulations of the 1960's and 1970's, while relocating its environmental impacts elsewhere, and doing precisely nothing to address the failed city planning of the Golden State. The wildfires this year which have yet again destroyed large areas of Los Angeles are just another symptom of that failure, which has more than outweighed any local air pollution benefit from electric vehicles.

Of course, every regime has its elite, and the most powerful men in the world can see eye-to-eye regardless of the colour of their flag. They live much the same lifestyle, flying from meeting to meeting by private jet, or where landing strips are not available, helicopter. State security is private security when you own a country. In June 2021, a small corner of Britain was turned into a police state for the G7 meeting in Cornwall, with a super-lockdown for local residents enforced by a reported 6,000 peace officers.

The apparent convergence between East and West is not happening at the level of public politics. We can point to embarrassments like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey donating ten million US dollars to academic Ibram X. Kendi as examples of corporate virtue signalling, rather than a serious attempt to synthesise capitalism with revolutionary action. Kendi, formerly Henry Rogers, could have chosen any middle name beginning with any letter of the alphabet. It seems revolutionaries with an X in their name are like Ghostbusters: you thought the original was worth watching, but you have doubts about the reboots.

Instead, the convergence is taking place at the level of personally identifiable data. Have you ever wondered why identity politics is dominating discourse, given that we all know humans are far more complex and subtle than can be described in a series of boxes for ticking? While advertising has been manipulating Western culture at least since the invention of the newspaper and magazine, ads have now reached their zenith. The most powerful tech companies in the world, and by extension the most powerful individuals, essentially run advertising delivery platforms.

This is not about meeting human needs. In the Western world of financial abundance, the only limit to economic growth is that most people don't need any more stuff. Governments have to pay you to scrap your perfectly good car, just to incentivise you to buy another. It is not the Earth's dwindling raw materials, the availability of labour or even capital itself which are the fuel for the economic engine today; it is personally targetted advertising.

Yet the data science of ads isn't really interested in getting to know us personally; for the time being, it needs a level of abstraction so that we can be categorised into marketing niches. This is way beyond the simple ABC1 categories of yore; these are multiple intersecting identities of race, class, gender, age and location. If this sounds familiar, it is because contemporary politics reflect the lived experience of the data-driven app, whether that is social media, dating or the daily news.

Personal data holds value better than Bitcoin. Britain's citizens were recently surprised to find out that they now need to opt-out of having their medical records sold to third parties. Not their generalised health statistics for population-level modelling, but their personally identifiable records from National Health Service databases, collected by their local family doctor.

If only the East German regime had something like Facebook, it wouldn't have needed the Stasi. Instead of waiting for your children to denounce you, your own messages to family and friends will now do the job. Marxist governments had an insatiable need for data, but the cost of acquisition and processing was too high for the system to cope with. Recruiting half of the population to spy on the other half generates a ridiculous amount of paperwork, as Berliners discovered in 1989 when they broke into Stasi headquarters to read their own files. That's what we now call a big data problem.

Fortunately, Western capitalism and Chinese communism have united to provide the high-tech answer. A Chinese facial recognition system is unironically named Skynet, after the tyrannical computer system in Hollywood movie 'The Terminator'. One guy's dystopia is another's utopia, it seems.

We've sat back and watched as the Chinese middle class and its overseas investment grew dramatically as a result of Western spending on Chinese goods, kidding ourselves this meant that China was being Westernised - as if the significant aspect of our culture was the cars, the refrigerators and the gadgets.

Big data is needed as much to drive sales as it is for surveillance, and that's why convergence is happening at the data level. China is achieving the materialist goals of communism by outcompeting the West on production and investment, essentially beating capitalism at its own game. This is an iterative improvement of communism which has learned from the deadly mistakes of the Mao era, but retains a Marxist analysis at its core. That's why the old labels don't seem to make much sense; this isn't your grandad's communism, or your grandad's state capitalism for that matter.

Don’t expect freedom

There has been a cross-pollination whereby Chinese students have been attending Western universities for decades, and (some) Western academics are teaching critical theories derived from Marxist analysis. The seeds are sown for a political convergence in the generation to come. However, it would be a mistake to assume this means China will liberalise on issues such as personal freedom. The centre of gravity cannot be assumed to be in the West, drawing China closer to it.

Our politicians have been preoccupied with class interest, seeking to maximise the advantages of their particular supporters over the other lot. Rentier capitalism delivers return on investment, but does not appear to set strategic goals for the success of capitalism itself. Perhaps Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' turned out to be a phantom limb.

It is our setting up of bosses against workers and landlords against tenants which gives consumer-communism its competitive edge. For example, Britain has a housing crisis despite there being enough houses for almost everyone, because market manipulation has strangled affordability.

Unlike the Chinese electronic manufacturing city of Shenzhen, much of the housing in Britain is more than a hundred years old and has already been paid for several times over, yet many people on average wages can't afford to buy or even rent a basic British house. Job creation in the West is a risky investment when your competitor is streets ahead in efficiency and has no objection to using forced labour, so it seems the West's surplus capital has accumulated in real estate.

After adjusting for inflation, the average house price in Britain has more than doubled since former chancellor Gordon Brown granted political independence to the Bank of England in 1997. Yet in many cases it is the exact same house as it was when the previous mortgage was taken out 25 years ago. The practical implication is that British workers can't afford to move to where the work is, creating a sclerotic economy in which half the country is living on state support and the other half can't recruit to keep businesses running.

Western politicians need to acknowledge that consumer-communism is a strategic threat from within, not from China as a state or ethnic Chinese people. The blatant Sinophobia of our representatives who rail against Huawei is rooted in obsolete Cold War notions of competing geopolitical forces. Companies like Huawei wouldn't have a toe-hold in the West if it wasn't for capitalists forcing down the wholesale price of consumer electronics in the pursuit of margin. As they say in Shenzhen, every Western inventor that arrives with a new product idea wants high labour and environmental standards in Chinese manufacturing. It's that inventor's Western financial backers that insist on the lowest possible prices, and that is how exploitation happens.

Regardless of the marketing materials tailored for regional buyers in their own languages and idioms, consumer-communism is transnational. It makes no difference whatsoever if your smartphone or router is branded as American; it is likely to be made in the exact same Chinese factory. In fact, the only reason that people can tell the difference between a Huawei product and their more familiar devices is the increased confidence in Asia which has put a Chinese brand name on the casing.

Although Shenzhen is just across the bay from Hong Kong, these two manufacturing cities remain worlds apart. As a new settlement filled with immigrants from all over China, the lingua franca in Shenzhen is Mandarin, rather than Cantonese as generally spoken on the other side of the Deep Bay bridge. Those young people still fighting against the odds for democracy in the 'semi-autonomous region' of Hong Kong are fighting for us, not just themselves.

Our politicians have been seduced by the power of big data, but the days when they could take charge of it are over. Western governments are just one more segment of customers for transnational goods and services. This has led to the absurd situation where the British state pays more for cloud hosting to Amazon than that company pays in taxes on all of its activities in Britain. Along with paying for infrastructure for e-commerce, such as the highways leading to huge warehouses built on greenfield sites, the Western state is subsidising its own descent into irrelevance. It could be an indicator of these states' subordination to consumer-communism that the tax reforms for transnational data giants announced by the G7 could actually result in decreased tax revenue.

War is not the answer

At the height of the Cold War, Eisenhower warned us of the danger presented by the military-industrial complex. Consumer-communism is a different but no less drastic threat to the values which we assumed were entrenched in our culture, and just like that complex is as much a threat from within as it is from without. Our long-established human rights organisations are asleep at the wheel. They have abandoned their stated missions and stoked division in the West through the promotion of identity politics, and lobbying for highly selective causes.

Consumer-communism might not be an external military threat to the West, except in local territorial disputes; why invade a country, when you can simply buy it? When former British prime minister David Cameron invited Xi Jinping to the pub near official residence Chequers for a pint of beer in 2015, he might not have anticipated that the pub would be sold to a Chinese investment group a year later. China has advanced the evolution of international socialism because it has adapted to reality in the harshest terms possible, maintaining social control throughout the years of famine, disaster and beyond.

In case you've bought into the idea that China has embraced a form of capitalism, you might like to reflect on the cases of Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping. They were executed in 2009 by the Chinese state for supplying powdered milk contaminated with melamine, which had killed six babies. By comparison, there were around 1000 additional suicides in the United Kingdom alone following the 2008 financial crisis, according to research published in the British Medical Journal, and it seems there is yet to be a reckoning for those individual tragedies.

Perhaps it was the 2008 crash which convinced Western elites that free markets and democracy were over-rated. The behaviour of European and American governments during the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated both their willingness to adopt authoritarian rule on the flimsiest of pretexts, and their total dependence on CCP-authorised supply chains for even basic items such as medical-grade face masks.

The West can fully embrace the emerging global consensus on the subordinate status of the individual in the pursuit of state ambitions, which is to say the ambitions of the technocratic elite which controls the state. Or, it can reaffirm the Enlightenment values of humanity, enquiry and scepticism in the face of ideology. No half-measures are possible if the free people of the world are to have a sustainable alternative.