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Waiting For the Fall
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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The standard of living erodes in the West because resources are starting to be shared globally. A communist revolution would have even less resources unless there is a willingness to continue exploitation.
Even if the revolution comes and currently big cooperatives are bound to be destroyed, why not start a small cooperative restaurant now?
US is a huge country with a ton of natural resources. This isn't an actual problem. The reason there is a problem is because the capital owning class would rather do production outside of US in cheaper markets, and the mechanics of that are explained here in great detail. A communist revolution would result in people in US using their own resources for the benefit of the workers. No exploitation is necessary here.
Nobody is stopping you from starting a coop restaurant now, it's just not going to address the fundamental problems in the capitalist system that are continuously pushing the entire system towards the inevitable collapse. The very mechanics of capitalism are unsustainable. The only possible paths are either a revolution or descent into full on fascism.
The text is interesting but the author doesn't seem to know that Smith's invisible hand was invented to explain away the risk of outsourcing that was already known back then.
But outsourcing is not bad. It spreads wealth globally. It's interesting that you argue for isolation when communism usually is a global approach. That's the exploitation I was hinting at. You want to keep 'your' resources instead of sharing them with the world. But even if you do, look at China's history to know the problems that will come with that strategy.
Do you remember the end of the text? That virtualization will make any revolution unnecessary. If you want communist relations, you better come up with something new if you don't want to find a new way to have working cooperatives.
No, outsourcing does not spread wealth globally. In fact, the very opposite of that is happening in practice.
I'm not arguing for isolationism at all. I'm arguing for the country to leverage its own resources and labour to meet its needs without relying on exploitation of other countries. In fact, this has to be the foundation for any sort of public ownership where the workers own the means of production.
That's not what exploitation is.
The problems of having constant and consistent improvement of standard of living for its population without suffering economic crashes every decade as seen under capitalism?
The text simply explains the mechanics of financial capitalism which led to deindustrialization of the west. I do not have to agree with every single conclusion it makes. I don't have t come up with anything new because I'm perfectly happy with the kinds of relations USSR, Cuba, or China managed to achieve. I see these as a real and tangible improvement on relations in western societies under capitalism.
Nobody is stopping you from implementing your cooperativist utopia, but I'm simply explaining to you that it's an unlikely outcome in practice. You can do what you want with that.
If native Americans claim every land taken by capitalists, how much is left for communism?
For China, you have to know that they burned their blue water navy before European traders arrived. Their choice of isolation is the origin of their past losses. That was the context of my argument about the problems of isolation.
You cannot expect to have a communist revolution in America with the world just watching.
I don't get your argument about communist relations in China. If China hasn't increased extreme poverty headcount, how is that good enough?
I have no idea what that's supposed to mean to be honest. Why would Native Americans taking back the land be somehow at odds with communism. have you ever talked to a Native American person, their ideas are very much aligned with what communists want.
Nobody is talking about any isolation here except you.
Again, nowhere did I say anything of the sort. However, it's up to the people of each country to figure out how to make their system work for the majority. Nobody is going to solve America's problems for it.
I don't understand what this sentence means. China is the only place in the world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening and they have lifted over 800 million people out of poverty.
There is implicit isolation when resources should remain the same for American workers. When you have global communism, resources would be shared which means there is significantly less available.
But when capitalism collapses, will there be communism or will there be wars redistributing resources? That's what I meant with the expectation that the world will not just watch.
The Chinese reduction of poverty, I got that wrong. I thought China kept their number of people in extreme poverty. But since they reduced that number, how is that article an argument against the spread of wealth by outsourcing? China receives most of the outsourcing and thus received most of the wealth. Other countries just increased their population which keeps the number of people in powerty the same.
From my point of view you are stuck in a desire to keep capitalism as bad as possible so that the communist revolution happens as soon as possible. But capitalism isn't the single source of evil and actually has positive outcomes.
Take that outsourcing text. It tells you that capitalists don't want to invest into capital intensive businesses, which is funny by itself. We started with cooperatives that should issue bonds. Don't you see the opportunity that capitalist could support cooperatives to run those businesses?
I know, I should do it myself. But I am more the capital relations kind of person which makes it very difficult for me to run a cooperative. All I can do is tell you that there is an opportunity.
No, there's no implicit isolation here. What's being said is that local industry should be preferred. You don't seem to understand even the very basic concept of what communism is or how it works. Communism is when people living on the land share their labour and resources for common benefit. Global communism simply means that majority of the world follows the same model.
The reason production should be local is because people doing the work are working in their own interest and for their own benefit by virtue of owning the means of production.
As, I've repeatedly explained above, communism isn't a necessary outcome of capitalism collapsing. The other obvious alternative is fascism as it happened when there was a capitalist collapse in Germany in 1930s.
China increased its wealth by focusing on productive activity in China. This has little to do with outsourcing. If outsourcing was the main reason standard of living in China is improving then we'd see that happening in every other country the west outsources to, yet the opposite is happening.
I've repeatedly explained to you above that the very mechanics of capitalist relations are what leads to poor conditions under capitalism. You can read this book from Ray Dalio, who is a very successful capitalist discussing this if you don't trust the communist perspective.
The mechanic is not complex, and it's well illustrated by the game of monopoly. Everybody starts with equal opportunity, and as the game progresses through capitalist competition a single player ends up with all the resources. This is precisely what we see happening in the real world. Successful capitalist enterprises grow by outcompeting the rest, and this results in capital concentration.
On top of that, capitalism produces crashes roughly once a decade as we saw with Y2K crash, then 2008 crash, and now the current crash. During each of these crashes there's a rapid wealth transfer to the top as well. People lose savings, homes, and property because they can't make ends meet, and those people who own significant capital end up buying up the assets people are forced to forfeit. So, when a crash happens majority becomes more poor and in a worse position to weather the next crash. Eventually things get to the point where people simply don't have much to lose and violence starts.
I don't think you understood what the article was actually saying which is that financial capitalists want to minimize their risk and maximize their profits. Investing in real productive industry is both risky and expensive. You have to build factories, buy machinery, hire workers to operate it, and so on. This is a big initial investment, and if it doesn't work out you're stuck with a big loss. On the other hand, investing in ephemeral industries like software development is a very low initial cost, you just hire a few guys with laptops. You can invest in a whole bunch of these startups, and if one of them makes it big then you get a huge return. This is the silicon valley model. Not only that, but the company doesn't even have to have a viable business model. It's a pyramid scheme in practice because you just need the company to have a high valuation when the IPO happens and cash out. This is how we end up with companies like Uber that aren't actually profitable and have no path towards being profitable, but are valuated at billions of dollars.
So that you're saying is that you don't actually believe in what you're saying enough to put your money where your mouth is.