Covid Protectionism

The US is imposing further protectionist restrictions on China, by demanding that, as China ends its idiotic lockdowns, Chinese visitors to the US provide negative COVID tests.  Why?  Chinese people, including those infected with COVID pose no greater threat to the US and its citizens than do Europeans, Africans, or anyone else.  As with the sanctions placed on trade in technology products, it is just part of the growing Mercantilism and economic protectionism of a reactionary, populist US government, as it sets about trying to carve up the globe into monopolised and protected spheres of influence.

For 60 years after WWII, the world was characterised by an imperialism based upon the dominance of industrial capitalism, which needed free trade, and the dismantling of old monopolies and colonial empires, so that the vanguard of that industrial capital, the multinational company could settle anywhere, and exploit labour where it could best employ it.  It was a period in which the theory of ultra imperialism, put forward by Kautsky, best explained the world, as against Lenin's "Imperialism", which was based on the period of colonialism that preceded it.  But, a declining and challenged US imperialism, now increasingly resembles its predecessors amongst those old colonial powers, as it tries to mobilise its military alongside its economic power, via sanctions and other measures to carve up the world into spheres of economic as well as political/military influence, though on a grander scale than the pre-WWI, colonial empires.

The period after WWII, was marked by a general rise in bourgeois-democracy and liberal freedoms, consistent with a breakdown of remaining monopolistic and protectionist behaviour.  Its most obvious manifestation was probably the flowering of youth culture in the 1950's and 60's, the break down of old sexual taboos, as well as the wiping away of all of the state imposed censorship and control.  More recently, many of those things have begun to re-establish themselves, and there has been a general rise in authoritarianism and Bonapartism, of a general resort to protectionism, censorship and so on, as an alternative to open debate and competition.

Imperialism always shaped the stage on which such events played out.  It was a rules based system, but one in which the dominant states determined the rules.  The framework within each economy, and also, thereby, globally, naturally favoured the largest industrial capitals, and so the largest industrial states.  But, just as changing material conditions see once dominant capitals eclipsed by new ones that rise from small beginnings, so too former dominant states get eclipsed by new ones, as happened to Britain in the 19th century, and as is happening to the US, today.  To try to hold on to their position, such states, always revert to the attempt to use whatever power they have to impose restrictions on the newcomers, becoming themselves, therefore, the fetters on further development, and the antithesis of what they started out as.

As China, India and other developing economies have risen, at the same time that the US and UK, in particular, have declined, but also as have many of the older economies of the EU, so the latter have used many methods familiar from the past.  Britain, France, Germany and the US developed industrially by exploiting labour brutally, whether in terms of almost limitless working-days, lack of any safety or health protection for workers, and of course, the use of child labour.  Only after these economies had industrialised were they able to dismantle the worst of these practices that became unnecessary and even counterproductive - though, for example, firms continued to knowingly expose workers to asbestos, until quite recently, where they had no economic alternatives.  

Yet, under cover of being civilised exploiters of labour, these same states insist that today's industrialising economies must live up to all of the same standards that those of the already developed economies are able to meet!  This is just an application on a global scale of the idea set out by Engels.

"And in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother... The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites."

(Preface to the English Edition of The Condition of The Working Class)

developing economies are required, despite their much smaller capitals, and difficulties to pay wages, and have working and environmental laws equal to those of already developed economies, and that necessarily discriminates against them, and in favour of the existing imperialist states.  The imposition of these tests is just another example of the way US imperialism is seeking to use the old monopolistic, protectionist and bureaucratic means to protect its position in the world, as is its general economic war against China, and use of its power to force other subordinate imperialist states to comply.  Another example, is the use by the US of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is another protectionist measure that also affects the EU.

It is still industrial capital that dominates, and we will yet see whether it is that which means that the period ahead is characterised by ultra-imperialism, and yet the contradictions that exist within imperialism itself, with existing states continuing to protect their own interests, with sizeable petty-bourgeois forces controlling governmental parties, with the long-term interest of large-scale socialised capital conflicting with the short-term interests of fictitious-capital, leads to the behaviour currently seen.  The existing dominant imperialist powers, particularly the US, in order to hold on to their dominance, resort to the old practices of colonialism and mercantilism, which they once abhorred and helped to sweep away.