The China “Shock,” Militarism, and Capital Accumulation

Thinking about great-power rivalry means thinking about capital’s relationship to militarism

Photo by David Beale on Unsplash

How should we understand political economy in relation to geopolitics? Does capital accumulation fundamentally drive geopolitics, or vice versa?

Some good books have kept this question in the back of my mind for years. A chapter of my forthcoming book, The Rivalry Peril (w/ Mike Brenes), also addresses this question in one of its chapters. Recent decisions to securitize EV production and implicitly poison-pill the green energy transition have put this issue front of mind too.

Also, a while back, two of the smarter people in my mental universe, Ted Fertik and Jamie Merchant, each had long but generous threads on twitter responding to the other (Merchant, Fertik). Part of what was at issue was the best way to make sense of progressives’ selective alliance with Biden on the CHIPS & Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as Biden’s whole pivot away from the rhetoric of neoliberalism.

So if you’re trying to wrap your mind around how political economy fits in a world of Sino-US rivalry and growing militarism, there’s no simple answer but you’re in the right place.