WHEN I was a student I was a voracious reader of Marxist literature, which was hard to come by at that time. Because the world wide web was nonexistent, we relied solely on printed materials that were considered subversive and thus difficult to get. School libraries don’t display these on their shelves. This only increased my appetite for them.
My friendship with former activists made me hungrier. After they talked among themselves about dialectical materialism, I soon found myself in libraries looking for materials to enlighten me about it. The hunt was futile and I never got to understand Marxist philosophy on my own. I only did when my activism deepened.
President Rodrigo Duterte is in Beijing for China’s Belt and Road forum, an activity that analysts say is an attempt by that country to strengthen its position as a world power and further weaken that of the United States. China’s Belt and Road Initiative offers infrastructure project funding to countries in need of money such as the Philippines. Its underlying motive is to advance Chinese interests in the world.
Funny how this sounds like some of the passages in Vladimir Lenin’s pamphlets about the actions of what he termed as “monopoly capitalists” in an earlier world. Karl Marx lived in a period when capitalism was in its nascent stage. He did not live to see capitalism reach its monopolistic stage and some capitalists in industrialized countries becoming monopoly capitalists and gaining control of the states they are in and transforming them into imperialist nations. It was Lenin who lived during those times.
Lenin it was who noted that behind the wars that the world experienced were the efforts of monopoly capitalists to establish their spheres of influence in the world. China itself was a victim of those wars when it fell under British and later Japanese rule. The revolution that the Communist Party of China won under the leadership of Mao Zedong was both anti-feudal and anti-imperialist. Who would have thought that China would be able to transform itself into a new power demanding from old imperialist powers a sphere of influence of its own in the world?
When the communists took power in China, they sought to embark on what it termed as socialist construction preparatory to the full flowering of communism. But to do so, it had to transform a large and backward country into a progressive one. It could only do that by embracing capitalism itself. What differentiates it from the older imperialist powers is that the state itself is the monopoly capitalist.
China’s global designs are obvious. It is not only about the Spratlys or the territories within its so-called nine-dash line that unfortunately for us includes the West Philippine Sea. It is also about the Belt and Road Initiative that have reaped dividends in terms of widening the scope of its sphere of influence. Countries that are too poor to pay the money they borrowed from China have ceded some of its territories to the wannabe superpower.
The fate of those countries could soon be ours.