A comment on Michael Karadjis' answer..

 

 

Following the:

Questions to Michael Karadjis.

Some general remarks, in relation to your kind reply,

Michael Karadjis 

1.

When we refer to territorial-centric capitalism-imperialism, perhaps we should not limit ourselves to "territorial visions" of annexations, etc., but to a plan to return to the Westphalian or pseudo-Westphalian nation-state whose main characteristic is the homogenous and hard-line dominance over a territorial space.

Newer Western capitalism played with the scenario of a complete de-territorialization of it, while the emerging nation-statist state-centric Eastern capitalism of the emerging great or would-be great new Eastern imperialisms play with the scenario of a new territorialization.

There are of course great contradictions between them, there is no strictly demarcated and unified block of these forces, but they have strong common elements that do not only concern ideological or imaginary identifications.

They are converging on a new and hybrid model of state-centric capitalism (with a strong but controlled private sector), which is authoritarian in a structural rather than a circumstantial way.

The west has all the bourgeois possibilities "within" it (bourgeois democracy, dictatorship-junta, hybrid combinations thereof, etc.), but the east, I think, is developing a structural and now stabilized neo-despotism.

The territorial-centric model therefore means a tendency to remove what Deleuze defined as de-territorialization (as it exists in capitalism but also in Deleuze's desire to appropriate "nomadism", and to constitute a radical anarcho-Marxism -and others, it's not time to analyze them). The extreme reinstatement of territorial-centrism through the bloody campaign of the Russians apart from all else wich it means in practice perhaps also symbolizes a re-emergence of the ''self-enclosed territoriality'' of the nation-state. China still has no territorial claims beyond Formosa (although I think Vietnam should start to worry) (don't forget it swallowed Tibet) but the whole essence of its state policy is incomprehensible without seeing how it views its territory. I think China is now a well-polished and domesticated open concentration camp promoting a new type of techno-totalitarianism/capitalism (extreme surveillance of citizens, etc.).

2.

There is certainly no ontologically or even worse culturally understood "eastern pole", but an idiosyncratic and original revival of the first stages of the emergence of the "western pole", when together with the emergence of the Westphalian nation-states emerged the non-national context of their emergence.

In the first phase the non-Western capitalist world (as yet another new capitalist world) tried to emerge mainly as nation-state, the original modern-capitalist "unit" of sovereignty, without the wider special context (as happens in the West, where through horrific intra-capitalist and transnational antagonisms this wider framework was constituted: "west"), and in the phase we are in today, the non-western capitalist world (mainly the "east": China-Russia-Turkey-Iran perhaps) has conceives and has begun to implement the plan to make this strong broader special framework which it could not implement in the original first phase (despite the Soviet state capitalist "nudges" and the Soviet plan to create an alternative non-Western capitalism in the new countries etc.).

This second phase of the new capitalism of the non-Western world, as it is "interwoven" with the strong statist tendencies of its first phase, presents us with the possibility that there is, historically necessary, an extreme violence from the perspective of the "new east'', as if we could speak of a process of primary accumulation of power in two phases.

In the West, or rather, the West was something that emerged as a broader context of the emergence of a new mode of production but also a new mode of structuring of power (in nation states that exist as "units of sovereignty" and in the broader and more fluid "unit of sovereignty'' which is the west as such as a world-imperial system), while the east is something that emerges similarly to the west, but with a need to accelerate, and in two phases.

3.

The idiosyncratic new authoritarianism of the emerging new east does not arise from any inherent "cultural" characteristics of it, but from the historical necessity that means the emergence of the non-west nation-states and a wider authoritarian form of their capitalism, under the special condition of a ''late realization'', which mandates the structural existence-and-coexistence of two phases in a state of acceleration of this process:

First phase-acceleration: nation-state without a wider "familiar" cosmo-imperial non-national framework.

Second phase-acceleration: emergence of the wider "familiar" cosmo-imperial non-national framework with a simultaneous defense-attack against the already formed ("west"), given the idiosyncratic crystallizations of the first phase (strong existence of a strict version of the nation-state determination).

 

 

Ιωάννης Τζανάκος