So i have been thinking more and more about how stupid it was for the west to willingly deindustrialize. And ive had a realization about why they did it.
If you go back to when capitalism began to really take off a lot of the time different companies and capitalists acted very violently towards eachother. We can see how things like stocks and financial markets were used as a way to reduce inter-ruling class violence by providing an outlet for them to compete inside a legal framework they controlled. The gamification of it.
This seems to have worked for them for awhile. Allowing them to accumulate wealth at an insane rate without much risk of just being assassinated by some rival industrialist.
I think though this has ultimately poisoned their world views and will be what destroys them. In the current era rather than capitalists wealth being based on actual capital, factories, industrial output of their companies, etc. Its more and more based on market speculation. Even the ones who do own factories their wealth comes from stocks whose value is highly speculative.
They have forgotten that it is a game. They have lost touch with the material reality of power. So they willingly hand the means of production over to a communist nation in pursuit of more speculative value without realizing theyve handed the keys to the castle over to the people.
China basically joined their game, and let them feel like they were winning. Allowing them to become rich in the market while China accumulated actual wealth and power via industrial capacity. China seized the means of production without firing a single shot. Or technically, China tricked the west into handing over the means of production willingly.
I think there is now a small faction of them that realize theyre screwed. And its why your seeing so much insane behavior from empire. Its flailing about in a panic.
Because China has already won. The fight between capitalism and communism is already in its final stages, and the communists control most of global production while capitalists are incapable of catching back up.
China played them for fools. The hubris of western capitalists made them think they could simply use financial markets to control the world. They can’t.
So whats going to happen now? Well the camp in the west who realize that they lost sight of reality will try to force reindustrialization. As they are now. But the majority of western liberals still dont get it. So theyll fight back to keep doing their financialized games. Sabotaging their own efforts to reindustrialize in the process. You can see this in how Trump and his goons are using tariffs to play the market or how the CHIPs act failed since the companies used the money on stock buy backs.
They are like addicts. They cant stop sabotaging their own system.
China knows this. Its why you saw Xi courting international investors recently. He was basically saying hey keep up the financial games we will make you rich. Like waving a beer in an alcoholics face when theyre trying to quit.
All this is to say, rejoice comrades, for our causes victory is all but assured. China has the west in checkmate. No matter what move they make, they will still lose. They may do lots of damage before their defeat comes, but i think that defeat itself is now a certainty.
Do not allow your own circumstances to blind you if you are in the west, or a nation controlled by it. For even if circumstances seem dire right now i think everything is going exactly to the Communist Party of Chinas plan, and their plans do not stop at Chinas borders. They will not be finished until every human being is free from capitalist oppression.
~ In 1922 a bear discovered fire. A flaming torch the bear carried for a generation. From the skies an eagle attacked, and when the bear died to its claws the world thought that flame lost. But a young dragon ate it and fled to the heavens. Today that flame is a raging inferno. Held within the mouth of that dragon. The eagle thinks it owns the skies, and all the earth below them. Soon though the dragon will descend from the heavens and the eagle will burn. ~
万岁中国!
So whats going to happen now? Well the camp in the west who realize that they lost sight of reality will try to force reindustrialization.
At this point reindustrialization is just trying to wind the clock back to 50s America and bring back low paid factory work. It’s not a promising plan when most Americans can’t survive on 50s wages.
The scary issue in the background that the world faces is climate change. The planet doesn’t have the time and resources to waste reindustrializing the US.
I’m not advocating for doing it. I’m just saying what i think theyre gonna do. I want America to cease existing not reindustrialize.
Understood but I think trying to reindustrialize may accelerate America’s downfall because the world has globalised supply chains.
The 50s were good for America because WW2 left it without an industrial competitor.
I find that thinking through the lens of natural selection is a good way to understand this shift. A society’s foundational rules create selection pressures that shape behavior of people living within it. People adapt to whatever the system rewards. Under capitalism, the dominant “fitness function” is capital accumulation where success means minimizing risk while maximizing profit.
Globalization and the rise of financial capitalism intensified this logic as the highest rewards went to businesses avoiding material production. For a venture capitalist, why gamble on high-cost, high-risk ventures such as factories, supply chains, and worker training when you could fund software startups instead? Software shops require little upfront investment, scale easily, and offer portfolio diversification. Just a few unicorns can offset countless failures for the investor.
As a result, industry fled to China where public investment filled the void left by profit-obsessed private finance. Both systems evolved exactly as their respective incentives dictated that they should.
Factories and the like also require high skilled labor and good infrastucture to support them. Which capitalists constantly want to cut funding for.
Very much so, Michael Hudson never tires of pointing out how having more social support structures lowers the cost of labor. In China, people have effectively free healthcare and education, efficient public transit, they own their housing, and their food is cheap. This translates into lower labor costs because they have low out of pocket expenses. Meanwhile, in the US where there are practically no social services available, the worker has to pay for everything out of pocket and that translates into need for higher salaries from the employer.
literally. Just existing in the US is so fucking expensive. A person who is totally destitute and on the verge of being on the streets probably spends more money than someone in china living a very comfortable life.
A person who is totally destitute and on the verge of being on the streets probably spends more money than someone in china living a very comfortable life.
I am painfully and personally aware of this fact.
It’s absolutely nuts, and the fact that getting sick is the main cause of bankruptcy is so wild me.
“万岁中国” looks weird, I see “中国万岁” more often (“long live” is usually after the subject)
Sorry im still learning
I have limited knowledge of Mandarin, but that tracks with what I remember because there’s something about order of importance in how the language is formatted. I don’t know when all it applies and when it doesn’t, but I remember like with day for example, it wouldn’t be “I go to the park at 9:00am on Sunday.” It would be ordered more like (rough literal translation from memory) “Sunday early morning 9:00 I go to park” or “I Sunday early morning 9:00 go to park”. So 中国万岁 is probably one of those cases where the country name would go first because it’s considered the important part and then “long live” comes after.
I don’t know Chinese, but Chinese shows usually have 皇上万岁!万万岁! (“Emperor” first, “long live” later). Note that 万岁 is reserved for the Emperor only, Emperor’s relative will have lesser number (千岁, i.e. 1000 years as opposed to the Emperor’s 10,000 years).
basically China has actual production while the West has inflated stocks.
I was already thinking something like that, that China had tricked the west into thinking that China had gone down the path of the late Soviet Union under Gorbachev and convinced them that the CPC realy did become revisionist and they just had to wait and slightly nudge things along and the CPC would come crashing down sooner rather than later, and forced western capitalists to hand over productive forces and tech be exploiting the fact that because of the way capitalism work, capitalists can’t afford to pass up on a new market opening.
But it’s very validating to see someone else come to the same conclusion.
It is not even that China tricked anyone. The CPC was always honest and explained why they did what they did, it was the west who either didn’t listen or didn’t believe them.
Yeah, I think the idea that the West was “tricked” is Western post hoc ergo propter hoc framing.
The even simpler mechanism that Deng successfully exploited is market competition. Imagine you’re a Western company and China just opened, you have two choices : be patriotic and keep your workers home, or delocalise to China.
Except there is no choice, if you don’t delocalise you’re gonna go under because everyone else is slashing their prices and flooding the markets thanks to cheap labor.
Giving the opportunity to gain market advantage to capitalists is enough to force them into anything, including collective self destruction. That’s cartoonishly stupid. Truly the most efficient and rational system lol
It also brings to mind Russia a bit in a lesser way. Like how all those western companies pulled out of Russia and closed up shop a couple years ago acting like it would stop Russians from operating those businesses and then the Russian government just slapped a new logo on em and started them back up again. Liberals were like “B-but this piece of paper says thats mine! You can’t do that!”
It’s like they have no idea what value actually is. They think money, and private property are some sort of fundamental law of the universe people have to acknowledge.
What I also find funny, besides China pulling the wool on the West like this, is that Vietnam seems to be doing the exact same thing (they now seem to be where China was maybe 20 years ago), and the West is falling for it again
Yeah seems like they saw what China was doing and were like “Damn great idea can you teach me how to do that?”
Deng after signing the biggest rope deal in history:
It turns out the capitalists really will sell us the rope we use to hang them, and in fact they’ll compete with each other to sell the most and best rope (or lie and claim to sell more and better rope) to increase their stock value.
They gave us the whole rope factory haha
