"One World, One Dream" -- that's the slogan the Chinese Olympic Committee chose for the 2008 Games in Beijing.
But don't let the idealism fool you. This year, beneath the roar of the high-minded sloganeering, you could hear the same twin engines that have powered all modern Olympiads: nationalism and capitalism.
While I was in China last week, I noticed that the media were doing the same dance they do in the U.S.
They paid lip service to the Olympic ideal -- the Games as a moment when humanity puts politics aside to honor youth, talent and noble competition -- but their hook was national pride stirred by relentless images of Houston Rocket Yao Ming and hurdler Liu Xiang. Meanwhile, the hard news was in all the business stories on the wished-for effect on the economy.
The potent combination of capitalism and nationalism is nakedly revealed in the omnipresent Olympic-themed advertising. Eager to tap the Chinese market, Western corporations are not shy about leveraging patriotism to move their product.
McDonald's is airing a "Cheer for China" television ad. Pepsi has turned its blue cans red for its "Go Red for China" campaign, and Nike ads feature Chinese athletes triumphing over the competition. So much for "We are the world."
I see nothing paradoxical or shocking about the Sino-American Olympic love-fest currently being marketed by mass-cultural thought-coordinators on both totalitarian sides of the U.S.-China divide.
The dominant political classes of both state-capitalist Superpowers have more in common with each other than with the subject populations living under their respective domestic regimes.
Their interests and ideals converge along numerous dark and authoritarian lines as the Olympics extravaganza helps the expanding Chinese capitalist elite deepen its power by supplementing hard Orwellian controls with the softer Aldous Huxlean medicine that Western authorities have long pioneered:
Cultural hegemony through hypnotizing and infantilizing mass entertainment.
Welcome to the totalitarian cross-national logic and class alliances of the world capitalist system, wherein "socialist revolutions" assembled proletariats beyond the Western core to be ruthlessly exploited by both domestic masters and global capital.
"Communist" China stands in a long-established relationship of political-economic symbiosis with the corporate-captive United States.
A large number of leading U.S. multinational firms invest directly in coal-fired, smog-choked (around industrial centers) China to exploit its cheap, state-repressed labor and its willingness to subordinate environmental concerns to the holy imperatives of "economic growth" (capitalist throughout).
This investment feeds global warming and China's massive trade surplus with the U.S, which skyrocketed from $83 billion to $252 billion between 2000 and 2007.
CAPITAL WINS, LABOR LOSES
This trade deficit is a critical factor in the ongoing decline of livable-wage employment for working-class Americans. As the Economic Policy Institute recently reported:
The growth of U.S. trade with China since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001 has had a devastating effect on U.S. workers and the domestic economy.
Between 2001 and 2007 2.3 million jobs were lost or displaced, including 366,000 in 2007 alone.
New demographic research shows that, even when re-employed in non-traded industries, the 2.3 million workers displaced by the increase in China trade deficits in this period have lost an average $8,146 per worker/year.
In 2007, these losses totaled $19.4 billion.
At the same time, the internal Chinese market is a source of no small interest to American corporations.
General Motors (GM) made most of its profit out of China sales in 2001-2002. It reports that China is its single biggest market outside the US.
GM (which built a $750 million factory in Shanghai in 1998) invested $3 billion in China between 2004 and 2007 "in hopes," the Associated Press reported last year, "it will drive a revival for the company, which is cutting production and closing factories in its home North American market"
KEEPING UNCLE SAM AFLOAT
Meanwhile, surplus Chinese capital flows into the purchase of U.S. government securities, helping keep the ever more cash-poor American Empire afloat.
Chinese profits wrung from the backs and lungs of the Chinese proletariat subsidize the deficit-generating arch-plutocratic tax cuts and messianic militarism of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush's America, owner of two illegally invaded colonies in Southwest Asia (Afghanistan and Iraq) and more than 720 military bases located in nearly every country on Earth.
This has nothing to do with a Chinese desire to help Bush. It's about China's wish to sustain the exchange value of their currency against the dollar and thus the competitiveness of their goods in the giant U.S. consumer market - a critical lynchpin of China's state-orchestrated capitalist expansion over the last twenty-plus years.
THE OLYMPICS: BROUGHT YOU TO BY GENERAL ELECTRIC
Along with the massive profits multinational corporations plan to make directly off the Olympics, these underlying economic relationships are why U.S. corporate media is helping the Chinese regime use the Olympic Games to sell a softer global image of "Brand China."
It's why Joshua Cooper Ramos - a managing director and partner of the Beijing Office of (Henry) Kissinger Associates (a leading agent of Western investment in China) - is providing "expert" commentary on China's supposedly forward-looking culture of "harmony" for General Electric Television's (NBC's) Olympic coverage.
It's why two leading U.S. war criminals named George Bush have been cavorting gaily with Chinese hosts and touting the glorious wonders of "engagement" (whatever the younger Bush's obligatory rhetoric about Tibet, Taiwan, Darfur, and smog).
It's why Google (Barack Obama's sixth leading campaign contributor at $373,000) helps China keep the Tiananmen Square Massacre "down the memory hole" (George Orwell's term for the erasure of inconvenient history by state totalitarians). And why Yahoo helps China identify and imprison dissenters.
It's why U.S. corporate media is keeping Americans' focus on "the games" and off the terrible conditions experienced by ordinary Chinese working people beneath Chinese Olympic spectacles and "capitalist miracles".
THE COLD WAR RUSE
Some "liberal" Americans are shocked at the extent to which America's "capitalist democracy" goes to uphold "socialist" China's entrance to the so-called "community of nations." I find these liberals' dismay and terminology extremely naïve.
The Cold War was always a great and mutually reinforcing ruse on both sides.
The totalitarian labor-exploiting and elite-dominated Soviet Union and Red China got to call themselves "socialist" even while they abolished and prohibited workers' control and popular democracy - two critical characteristics of any worthwhile and genuinely socialist peoples' project.
Meanwhile, the totalitarian labor-exploiting and elite-dominated U.S. got to claim the mantles of "democracy" and "liberty" even while its homeland politics and society to the plutocratic rule of the wealthy and corporate Few.
Political and cultural authorities in the capitalist West played along with the Soviet and Chinese state's claim to embody "socialism" since it helped them denigrate radical ideals by linking them to Stalinist and Maoist dungeons.
Never mind that their underlying "free enterprise" system was and remains fundamentally opposed to egalitarian and democratic ideals.
"Capitalist democracy" has always been a self-negating oxymoron providing cover for what Karl Marx once aptly termed "the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."
You cannot meaningfully combine the concentration of wealth - an inherent characteristic and tendency of modern capitalism - with true democracy: one person one vote and equal policy making influence for all.
NO PARADOX
I see nothing paradoxical or shocking about the Sino-American Olympic love-fest currently being marketed by mass-cultural thought-coordinators on both totalitarian sides of the U.S.-China divide.
The dominant political classes of both state-capitalist Superpowers have more in common with each other than with the subject populations living under their respective domestic regimes.
Their interests and ideals converge along numerous dark and authoritarian lines as the Olympics extravaganza helps the expanding Chinese capitalist elite deepen its power by supplementing hard Orwellian controls with the softer Aldous Huxlean medicine that Western authorities have long pioneered:
Cultural hegemony through hypnotizing and infantilizing mass entertainment.
Welcome to the totalitarian cross-national logic and class alliances of the world capitalist system, wherein "socialist revolutions" assembled proletariats beyond the Western core to be ruthlessly exploited by both domestic masters and global capital.
The Red Army and Ronald McDonald are not so far apart or inconsistently co-joined.
The merging of the legacy of Mao with the profit calculations of General Electric and General Motors makes perfect sense. There's no paradox, as any serious left-Marxist or left-anarchist knows.