China, the Global South and Progressive Politics: Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey

Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century) writes from Marxist tradition but takes an empirical approach and talks common sense. In this symposium on Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing, David Harvey by contrast looks to be a Marxist who lauds Mao while demonizing present day China as brutally neoliberal. What the views of Arrighi and Harvey point to is a divide in left politics between those who see the lifting out of poverty of hundred of millions in the 'global south' as a progressive trend for the 21st century and those eager to cast the developing world as the problem - for global security, the environment and human rights - in effect giving left cover to the reactionary project of conserving power in the west. Arrighi provisionally sides with the 'global south', saying it's too early to tell how China will develop, while seeing in her history of mostly peaceful interstate relations a potentially different sort of rise than that of western capitalist states, which was inextricably linked to militarism and territorial expansion (see Capitalism's 600 year old playbook).