70
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
70 points (98.6% liked)
news
24776 readers
545 users here now
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Well what they do is manufacture the underlying conditions which make crises more likely - Hurricane Katrina was used as a crisis to expel Black people from their properties and privatize the school system, but the only reason Katrina became a crisis is because of decades of steady neglect of the roads and bridges and levees. So when you dig into the cause of the crisis, yeah, you do find that it was porky all along.
I guess what they're doing right now might be intended to soften the US up to make H5N1 into a proper crisis when it goes pandemic, but they're just moving so fast. Softening up New Orleans took 25-30 years. Where's their patience?
... also I guess maybe they expect a crisis to happen really soon and they don't have 25 years to whittle away at the State.
Back in the day they had an American Left and the USSR to deal with. Both those are gone and even the remaining "Left" in America is largely sinophobic and ignorant as hell.
Personally, I just don't see that much of a risk for them. There's been a pretty steady downward spiral my whole life and I think we're just reaching that point where everything is lining up in their favor. We're heading for some depression era shit and there's nothing really standing in their way.
Which is not to say I've given up. I still think there's possibilities going forward, but it's probably going to get much worse before it gets better. People have to acknowledge the class war before they're ever going to fight it.
But now they have BRICS and multipolarity to deal with, it's like their plan is to give up on ruling the rest of the world to rule over their own little kingdom of shit.
Well keep in mind, I'm separating Global Capital from US government. Imo, Global Capital, as a whole, doesn't really have any true allegiance to anything more than profit. They're making money from our suffering, they're making money from neoliberal micro financing scams in Africa, they're making money from China growing other nations, they're making money from the US doing genocide; They've got their thumb in every pie.
As for the US gov? Slaves (in all but name) and soldiers is my guess for their ideal future. They'll continue poking every weakness they can, shoving resources into every right wing death squad waiting to be born. They're not giving up, they're just trimming the fat and taking the mask off. Is it a good idea? Hopefully not. Hopefully, it blows up in their face.
Multipolarity is not in global capital's interests; they do have an allegiance to the imperial core, even if they aren't loyal to any one country. Unless we're moving to some new stage of superimperialism where they ascend above the imperial core and move to live in Elysium on Mars where all of their needs are taken care of by robots or some shit, they still have to live somewhere. They need higher production/finance separated from primary production/resource extraction, so they need a core and a periphery.
... although I did think that they were working to make New Zealand into their bunker nation during the first COVID waves. For a few months it actually did look like they were going to uproot themselves from the rest of the imperial core to hide away on a fortress nation, so maybe we'll see something like that again when H5N1 inevitably mutates.
Maybe? But I think we all are maybe being a bit optimistic about what a multipolar world will look like. I think some of them are seeing it as an opportunity for more conflict. Making the US's fall in status not a loss, but like a shift in the tides.
During the Bush years we suspected that was happening with Dubai.
https://www.gainesville.com/story/news/2007/03/15/halliburton-moves-headquarters-to-dubai/31516752007/
I think it might be worth it to read Geopolitical Economy by Radhika Desai. I think she foresaw with this book what is happening here and now. I haven't finished it yet, and I'm not sure its a revolutionary text in the same way State and Revolution was. However, the argument she makes is that capital is still very much a nationalist project, and it has not transitioned beyond national interests and ties. I think the reality is, there hasn't truly been an alignment of global capital, in the sense that, there are many equally powerful capitalist entities that have transcended the influence of the state through collaborative means. "Global Capital" as we understand it is by and large American Financial Capital, and most of their assets are tied to the success and failings of America. The reason for this is there hasn't been a transition away from the dollar as the dominate global currency. Maybe if they keep pushing hard on crypto and bitcoin, and most of the corporate entities performed their transactions through that system instead of a state-owned system, then we might see a true "Global Capital". However, as it stands, a national currency as the backbone of "global capital" naturally ties its value to the state, and the state has all the cards when it comes to that currencies value. To maintain its value, it has to maintain its usefulness on the world stage, and to maintain its usefulness it has to squash competition, which Desai argues creates uneven and combined development of those states, pushing them through rapid and compressed development and eventually becoming contenders to the leading state. This eventually will bring about a multipolar world, as states are more or less on equal footing. The emergence of BRICS also signals a lack of true "global capital", in the sense that it is an effort to bolster national development, something Global Capital would see as irrelevant, since they should exist above any one state's influence.