Image is of legal adviser to Israel's foreign ministry Tal Becker and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the ICJ hearing.
The ICJ case against Israel might not achieve much for the Palestinian cause directly, given that Israeli politicians have explicitly stated that the Hague will not stop them - and I believe them. The Resistance will be what stops them, and they are doing quite well for themselves. Hezbollah has hit highly sensitive and important Israeli military sites over the last couple weeks, and in general persist in several border attacks every day. The battles in Iraq and Syria also continue. Hamas remains largely intact, and is successfully forcing Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip to retreat, and other parts of the Gazan Resistance are continuing to battle down in Khan Yunis. And, last but not least, Yemen is firmly dedicated to the blockade, warding off another ship literally minutes before I started writing this paragraph.
What the ICJ is battling over isn't Palestine and Israel - not really - but the legitimacy of international law itself, and to what degree victimized countries can rely on it to solve problems, versus needing to take more militant routes for justice. In a weird sense, it might be an L for Israel either way. If international law sides with Palestine, then when Israel refuses to stop, it will invalidate international law. If international law sides with Israel, then it will invalidate international law. There is no conceivable way for the West to come out of this looking good.
The South African portion detailing Israeli atrocities against Gaza was largely ignored by the western media. They have instead, obviously, decided to focus on the Israeli portion. Their defense appears to amount to "We didn't do it, Hamas did it. And if we did do it, it doesn't matter, because that's just urban warfare for you. Please get this whole thing thrown out on a very dubious technicality so we don't have to advance to the next stage."
From Craig Murray, who has been physically going to the Hague:
It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.
...I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…
What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.
I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.
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The Country of the Week is South Africa! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
There’s been a lot of talk about the production capacity gap between Russia and NATO as it relates to artillery rounds specifically. Russia has retooled its economy and invested heavily in wartime production and is currently seeing it pay dividends both on the battlefield but also in the overall health of their economy. Meanwhile the NATO nations have refused to make the investment in restarting mass production of rounds, a capability liquidated and sold off under the guiding principles of neoliberalism, and instead has solely relied on draining existing stockpiles bits at a time. The result has been catastrophic for the Ukrainians tasked with dying on NATO’s behalf ever since the initial blitz push from the RusFed was repelled and the war has settled into a WWI style trench and artillery game of attrition.
I think though that we shouldn’t confuse an unwillingness with an inability. There’s no reason to believe that the US or Germany are incapable of making the investment to restart the mass production of artillery shells (or any mass produced weapon of war rather than the big ticket, hyper specialized war toys they prefer now). There’s an entire point to be made that in this moment of profitability crisis the only industries that are succeeding are the ones hand chosen by the state to be made so with direct subsidies and funding (re: Brenner & Riley’s Seven Theses in which they attempt to coin “political capitalism” as the new economic model post-neoliberalism). The general consensus seems to be that there’s so far been an unwillingness to commit to the production process because it’s been thought that the Russo-Ukrainian war will end before the investment will be worthwhile and then the general style of combat will return to anti-insurgency missions relying on drones and laser guided munitions rather than mass produced dumb bombs and shells. My fear is that if this calculation changes and there is heavy investment in restarting the NATO war machine it puts us on the path towards another world war. The European nations may see the success of the Russian economy under wartime policies and see the return of a military Keynesianism as an appealing out to their financial woes but, as we know from the start of the previous century, you can only build up your stock of weapons for so long before the imperative to use them arises. I’m worried that the long duree trends of the 21st century see the return of both multipolarity as well as great powers conflicts, but this time we have nukes. Guess there’s nothing to really do about it tho but enjoy the view
A big question really is whether Biden represents the beginning of an industrialization trend, or instead a high water mark that will be reversed by the Republicans, whether they come into power in 2024 or 2028. I genuinely don't know.
While I think there's a ton of inertia in the imperial core that prevents much industrialization and production of actually effective mass-produceable military gear occurring, it's also a tremendous mistake to believe that countries are forever locked into their current path and that fundamentally nothing will change; basically hardcore capitalist realism. I think Kaplya is correct in saying that it would require a revolution (of the industrialists overthrowing the financialists; essentially a different form of fascism) for this to actually occur. The US can do bits and pieces of industrialization here and there, but as soon as the green shoots start to grow above a certain height, the lawnmower of financialism cuts them down for immediate profit. I also agree that therefore the US will try as long as physically possible to fight China and friends via financial methods; maintaining staggering levels of debt, cutting off countries from financial institutions, etc etc. I'm much more optimistic than Kaplya is about it, but even I admit that the ultimate victor is far from certain. It's like saying to somebody in early 1914: "Alright, there's gonna be a massive war soon that engulfs Europe. Give me your predictions for the next 40 years." How many people would predict the state of the world in 1950, even moderately correctly, even with the superpower of historical materialism and Marxist analysis? An entire fucking communist superpower rises up out of a feudal backwater and is the primary rival of the United States, the major capitalist power on Earth, unseating the British Empire! For all we fucking know, the current war in Palestine leads to the fall of Israel and then the propagation of communist revolutions across the Middle East, leading to a federated superpower that goes to war with Europe or something, and virtually nobody is predicting that that's going to happen.
Will the US be the Russian Empire of WW1 and just collapse under the weight of a system that cannot adapt and develop its productive capacities fast enough before internal forces rip it apart, or will it be the British Empire of WW1, and break economic orthodoxies like the gold standard to become an industrial juggernaut and extend its reign for another few decades longer?
as a side note, It's been pretty interesting to see how journalists and analysts have largely gotten behind government subsidies and nearshoring/friendshoring given that the last three decades (as in, virtually entire adult lives of even your typical middle-aged analysts) has been dominated by "free markets" and globalization. it's not surprising, western media exists in total subservience to the US government as it's all state propaganda, but even given that, it seemed to me a rather painless shift from "the free market will solve everything and if you think governments should have any economic role then you're a commie" to "yeah actually the government investing hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and factories is cool and good"
It is quite obvious that whoever is president, Biden or Trump, will never going to be able to re-industrialize. Biden’s infrastructure bill and the CHIPS act are a drop in the bucket compared to what is actually required to drive an industrialization trend.
90% of US corporate earnings are spent in share buybacks, not capital expenditure (investing in means of production). 88% of S&P 500 companies (2017 data) have one of the big three institutional investors (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) as their top shareholders. That figure was 25% in 2000. Good luck defeating Wall Street in there. There is no president, not even Bernie, that can do anything against them. A disproportionate amount of GDP in US is spent on rent, healthcare, mortgage, and for the rich, stocks and bonds. How are they ever going to drive the real sector in the local economy and reindustrialize?
I do think that China and BRICS doing mass debt cancellation in the Global South will have a palpable effect on the position of the US financial capitalists though. But how that’s going to play out, I have no idea, but the most important thing for the Global South is to dedollarize, because you cannot defeat the US financial empire, you can only make sure that you’re not the ones being crushed by its collapsing weight when the inevitable happens.
A lot of Chinese contracts include ways to circumvent USD payback with collateral. Would not be surprised to see negotiated terms on collateral in exchange for debt cancellation as a policy rather than as a last resort.
Why not just cancel them?
Wouldn't that be advantageous to Bretton Woods & Co? They get their debts repaid and China doesn't
No, it would be disastrous for the dollar hegemony.
Let’s break this down. First, the consequences of dollar loans to the debtor countries:
The point of external debt denominated in dollar is to keep the countries subjugated to the American monetary imperialism. If you’re a developing country that has high amount of dollar debt, there is no way that you can ever repay them. Argentina is never going to be able to repay its dollar debt, only debt cancellation and/or a jubilee can wipe out that debt.
When you’re indebted in dollar, you will have to earn dollars to repay them. That means exporting your goods and services (produced by the hard workers of your country) to buyers willing to accept the dollar. Now, because the net US dollar asset can only be “printed” by the US government (through the Federal Reserve), that means the US is the only country that can reap the net benefit of the dollar. Every other country can only store up their dollar reserves by earning them. When you go far up the chain (or trace the history further back enough), their dollars (including the ones that they lend out) had to have come from the US (most likely by exporting goods/services to the US).
So, instead of prioritizing a national economy that benefits your own citizens, you now instead have an economic policy that prioritizes export. More than that, you now have to compete with every other country selling the same goods/services as the ones you are producing, and that means a pressure on lowering the costs (pay your workers less, force overtime etc.) and depreciating your own currency to make the price attractive enough for US consumers (you get less in return, which makes import more expensive).
Next, such broad economic policy changes often result in the loss of economic sovereignty of the debtor country, especially in energy and food. In addition to importing fuel in dollar at a depreciated exchange rate, other conditions such as loans from World Bank explicitly dictate that your national agricultural plan to produce export crops, instead of building food self-sustainability, and so you have to end up importing food to feed your own people as well. A loss of ability to import fuel and food would be disastrous for the country, as we saw in Sri Lanka and Egypt not too long ago.
Going further, taking loans denominated in a foreign currency means that you have now placed certain public assets/utilities as collaterals. If you fail to repay, you have to privatize and sell these public utilities to foreign creditors, which allow their further encroachment on the national economy. Before long, you’ll find those foreign holders looting national industries and stripping them bare, while you are left saddled in more debt as productivity plunges.
Even more, failure of repayment means you have effectively defaulted, and the consequence is a loss of “trustworthiness” (e.g. downgrade of credit rating). You’ll find less foreign investors, currency exchange rate devaluation, more expensive/worse terms when taking out loans/trade deals, all of which which make the economy suffers even worse and the further the inability to obtain dollars to import fuel and food.
That’s how dollar hegemony works. It’s not so much about “petrodollar” that some people like to think is the only way the dollar gains its dominance. No, the weaponized dollar is far more pervasive and sinister than it appears on the surface. If you have to do anything that deals with global financial institutions (even something as ubiquitous as SWIFT), you can’t escape the dollar. It is an endless spiral that perpetually subjugates your economy to the global hegemon.
The US doesn’t care about being repaid in a currency they can print at any moment. The US cares about exerting its dominance over debtor countries whose only ability to earn this currency is at the complete mercy of the US. As long as the Global South needs the dollar to survive, America will continue to get free lunch.
A mass debt cancellation is the only way to escape this fate for most debtor countries.
——
Now, let’s discuss the consequences to China:
As mentioned before, the only reason China is able to give out dollar loan is because they have amassed a huge reserve by exporting goods/services to the US (through the hard work of cheap Chinese labor) for decades.
First, China is a net exporter country, which means that its economy is structured in such a way that heavily relies on export revenues, and as a net exporter (running a trade surplus with the US), you always end up with more dollars than you can spend.
The question is what are you going to do with those surplus dollars? They can’t purchase important/critical industries in the US, the dollar itself is meaningless for their domestic economy (Chinese citizens use yuan in their everyday transaction). It really is just a pile of junk papers and the only place left to store them is the US treasuries, which gives out like 1-2% of interest every year.
This is where the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI) came from. If you can lend out the dollar to other developing countries to build infrastructures, it can be a net gain for the Chinese economy. You can keep Chinese labor employed, Chinese companies get new contracts from overseas, the massive concrete production that was ramped up in the wake of the 2009 recession will now find new uses as domestic demand dampens. It’s one way of keeping China’s economy going.
Most importantly, China, while looking to internationalize yuan, is very reluctant to do so because they want to remain as a net exporter country. They want people to use the yuan to import Chinese products, they don’t want you to store yuan as a savings/reserves. They want you to use them so Chinese manufacturers can expand and keeping their workers employed.
However, that comes at a significant price. Because those BRI countries have taken loans in dollar, they will now have to repay their debt by earning dollar. This goes back to what I have wrote in the first part, with all the negative consequences to the debtor countries.
(I will not go into details but I should point out that BRI loans can be separated into two types: infrastructure loans (mostly in dollar) and rescue loans (mostly in yuan). There has been a shift towards yuan in recent years because countries found themselves unable to repay so instead of cancelling them, China simply shifts the burden by lending out rescue loans (in yuan) to keep those economies afloat. This doesn’t lessen their debt in dollar, it simply provides a temporary relief to the countries in crisis. To keep it short, debt cancellation is the only way out for most of the debtor countries).
The riskiest part is that China has effectively dollarized those countries when lending out the BRI loans in dollar. This allows the US to have a disproportionate amount of power over those countries, and, if the US plays its cards correctly, will be able to “exploit” the development of these BRI countries as a replacement of China as a manufacturing base, the country it ultimately seeks to decouple. So, cancelling dollar debt might seem like a loss for Chinese creditors, but it is actually a blessing in disguise for China if you look at the long term.
——
Finally, we talk about the US and the dollar hegemony itself:
If you have followed the arguments this far, then it becomes abundantly clear that the dollar hegemony derives its control over the Global South largely through debt. If there is a mass debt cancellation and/or global debt jubilee program that frees up much of the Global South from their dollar debt, and in conjunction with an alternative financial system (such as a BRICS-led financial system) coming into place that fundamentally rewrites the global rules of international finance, then those countries, now free of their debt, will be able to jump on to the new system with relative ease. This will free them ultimately from the collapsing weight of the US empire, like what is bound to happen to Europe, the first to sacrifice itself for the empire.
This is interesting. How did you come to learn this stuff?
It's actually a remarkable shift from European rhetoric, which is trying to block Chinese EV imports for those exact subsidies.
There is no way that the US and the EU can reindustrialize, even if it’s just the military armament complex. We’re talking about entire supply chains that need to be built here, and that requires a lot of adjacent and secondary industries to be rebuilt as well.
But that’s not because they are incapable or incompetent, but because reindustrialization will improve wages and working conditions for the American working class, which is fundamentally detrimental to the financial capitalist class. The banks earn record profits because they are able to keep the working class as debt slaves, forcing them to take on more and more debt to sustain their livelihood. Reindustrialization means higher aggregate wages for the working class, and people not having to rely on taking out loans - this is bad business for the rentier economy as a whole.
Besides, industrialization also means workers gaining leverage, which formed the basis of labor unions and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The capitalist class is going to have to deal with more and more labor actions and the proletarianization of the working class itself. This was why they exported their manufacturing base to the developing world like China in the first place - to crush domestic working class movements in the 1970s.
That’s why you need to understand this as a conflict between two competing ideologies: finance capitalism vs industrial capitalism. Reindustrialization can really only happen if somehow all the neoliberal finance capitalists are defeated in the imperial core, and that requires a revolution, and based on what we’re seeing, we are still very far from that happening.
This is all well and good in peacetime, but do you really believe the US government won't flex it's muscles if a wider war erupts in Europe or the Middle East?
I'm not optimistic enough to believe the US has collapsed that far.
The US is not collapsing. There is a steady decline over the long term (like the fall of the Roman Empire) but it’s not going to collapse like what some people are believing.
The true dominance of the US comes from its financial weapons, not its military. War in Europe is destroying their economic and financial competitor, while bringing over a whole bunch of cheap skilled labor from Europe, and wars are benefiting the military industrial complex. The tons of equipments and munitions lost in Ukraine have meant record profits and contracts given out to the MIC.
I am already sounding like a broken record at this point, but without true dedollarization (and that means mass debt cancellation and China/BRICS stop issuing new loans in dollar), the US is going to be able to maintain its hegemony simply because the world cannot run without dollar.
Socioeconomic orders aren't only just overturned by domestic revolutions. They are also overturned through cataclysmic warfare. The US political class is cooked and its military is nowhere near as good as people think it is although it's still a military superpower. This means that in times of war, the US lacks the leadership to navigate through hardships wrought by war nor the general capacity to effectively wage war in a sustained fashion. Can you imagine a population who mald over wearing masks be living off of year-old rations for two years? The scary part is there will eventually be a country or group of countries that recognize these two weaknesses and be daring enough to militarily challenge the US, even at the risk of the US nuking the entire world. If dollar hegemony won't be overturned by socialist revolution in the US or debt cancellation by BRICS+, then it will be overturned by war. But dollar hegemony will not last forever. Hegemonies never do.
As Mao said, "dare to struggle, dare to win." Dollar hegemony will be intolerable enough that countries would rather risk the world being nuked than continue to live under it, especially since climate change is going to fuck over the world anyways. What's a little nuclear fallout in a world ravaged by climate change?
US hegemony is definitely collapsing. The financial stuff is fake, what matters is global industrial systems, and the US and its closest allies are not catching up. They can pull all the levers of their diplomatic-military-financial empire to try to isolate China and protect their markets, but the best it can do is force a war they can't win. China will just build a conventional military force three times the size of the US alongside literally billions of drones and crush us in 3-4 years, with a huge risk it goes nuclear. The alternative is we just go along with a relatively gradual decline punctuated by crises, and give up the empire with a whimper. At some point in 3-10 years the decline will be undeniable and reshape domestic politics in the US profoundly.
You don’t need full revolution to bring the capitalist class to heel. There are plenty of corporatist strategies that could reset and refocus the economy without fully transforming it. America is significantly more likely to solve this crisis by finding a fash solution than anything else imo
You are misreading the situation. All the military equipments and munitions spent in Ukraine and Europe have meant record profits and contracts given out to the military industrial complex.
Why would America need to refocus its economy when the wars have benefited the financial class? The military contractors are making huge profits from losing equipments in Ukraine. The oil and gas industries are profiting from the European energy crisis and blowbacks from sanctioning Russia. The institutional investors are grabbing up cheap assets from Europe and Ukraine and stripping them bare for profit. The Fed rate hikes have pumped out over $1 trillion free money to the bond holders just in 2023 alone, mostly rich people. S&P500 is at record height, 50% over Trump’s highest point!
Why would the US need to refocus its economy? The capitalist class is not in crisis, the people are.
Why industrialize when you make so much more from not industrializing? That’s the whole point of transitioning into a financial oligarchy!
Because as we both know there will be a bullwhip effect where these financialized highs will break into depression level economic lows. You could’ve said the same thing about the 1920’s. You can’t turn an entire nation’s citizen base into surplus population and liquidate them (at least not from the inside, outside imperial projects have no issue with attempting this). The deaths-of-despair attritional class war model will result in an eventual backlash. Trump rode that anger into the presidency once already, someone else will pick it up in the future. I’m of the mind we might get another Huey Long type within the next two decades but we’ll have to see where that generalized restlessness and anger goes. Finance capital is sowing but it will have to reap eventually. You already saw it fomenting in 2016 era altright memes that would list heads of financial and media industry and then draw little stars of david next to their head
Neither Trump nor Biden was a threat to finance capital. Trump bragged about how good the stock market was under his watch (only to be eclipsed by Biden a couple years later). The real threat (within the electoral system) was Bernie Sanders (or rather, what he campaigned on) and he was promptly taken care of.
Right but none of those three present a truly transformative vision because we haven’t reached that point of crisis yet. Bernie’s negotiated social imperialism was dismissed out of hand, Biden represents the decrepit institutions of liberalism that are currently displaying how woefully not up for the challenge of the modern moment they are, and Trump represents the best augur of the future as his policies have presented the greatest shift in policy orthodoxy since, what, probably Reagan right? We’ve already seen glimmers of right wing heterodoxy in the house with Gaetz’s attempt to detonate the debt bubble during the speaker votes knowing full well that might destroy American financial hegemony. Trump’s campaigning on open hostility to the American administrative state that’s built up and since calcified from the new deal/WWII onwards. I could see a Trump win in 2024 genuinely discrediting the Dem party project to the point it destroys it and a new formation is able to take its place over the coming decade or so. Knowing Amerikkka it will be an unholy fusion of left and right populism built out of good paying weapons manufacturing jobs used to enslave the global south while economic decoupling between great power blocs fuel tariff based trade wars and protectionist policies. Go back and look at the Klan’s economic policy in the 20’s and this suddenly looks way more realistic. Especially knowing that our current monocropping agricultural practices plus climate crisis are setting us up for a dust bowl-esque crisis.
We’re not there yet but tell me you can’t feel that polycrisis cooking
The political angle might have been decisive in winning support for neoliberal development politics in the West, but it's not the only factor at play here. The whole exchange-rate manipulation-financialization scheme is poison to an industrial economy. Building any kind of domestic industry is like marching against a river. The Asians just do everything cheaper, bigger, and now most of the time better. They're doing it all in a concentrated region connected by the newest and best infrastructure in the world. The body of knowledge and experience in so many of these fields is dwindling or non-existant in the US today. We're definitely rich enough to solve these problems of weapons production, but the MIC is mind-fuckingly corrupt and inefficient and completely insulated from military and congressional scrutiny. Any money you throw at the problem will get stolen with little to show for it. We would need a coup for the problem to get fixed and there would be a coup if anyone seriously tried.
Unwillingness under capitalism is inability. I don't think there's a situation where the American government actually has the motivation to reindustrialize and keep corporations from just pocketing subsidies. Maybe if they went full fash
Yeah, the government in the US is entirely captured by business interests, and they'll never put up with being forced to produce large volumes of munitions at a low profit margin. The stuff the US did during WW2 to take over and manage industry just doesn't seem at all possible in this century.
I'm confused as to why you say there is no reason to believe we can't reindustrialize at will?
We’re not talking about the full scale reindustrialization of the imperial core, just the restarting of the war machine specifically. Germany and the US currently rank in as the 4th and 5th largest manufacturing economies respectively (China, India, Japan are 1-3). Just because less profitable industries got shipped overseas and factories that used to employ hundreds now just need 50 dudes and a ton of automation doesn’t mean the imperial powers lack heavy production abilities. Additionally factors of profitability concerns are moot in instances of direct government funding like defense contracting (tho inflation risks being an issue, Russia is currently undergoing a minor inflation crisis due to their commitment to military production tho this is minor compared to the economic benefits from the overall economic growth). The only thing lacking is a political will to commit to a war economy in the core.
Dark thought but I see a return to the US abusing Latin and South America in the face of a shrinking empire as the justification to revamp the imperial death machine. The current crop of GOP primary candidates has already openly discussed invading Mexico. A wounded US empire forced to withdrawal from the fringes may concentrate its violence more heavily within its own sphere of influence to secure what territory it can still control
There are very concrete obstacles other than just willingness to invest regardless of profitability for instance we would have to upgrade the electrical grid.
Less concrete but no less real than suddenly having good planning there is the bizarre political opposition to some stuff required to do this like anti-nuclear power brainworms.
Our broken ass raii system, crumbling bridges and roads, too. Moving a lot of materials around will expose more weaknesses here in the US.
At the end of the day, the US still has the Mississippi. If the US wanted to, it could move pretty much infinite resources down the Mississippi and it's tributaries. It won't, but it could.
There wee issues in '22 where barges backed up in the Mississippi because the water levels were too low and they were running at half capacity to avoid bottoming out for a while.
Yeah y'know what fair enough lol
How has this worked out for semiconductors
Great point. The bourgeoisie simply pocketing the cash and refusing to actually produce anything is a major issue for the US’s ability to actually accomplish anything. They would need to bring their capitalist class to heel lest they collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, though I’m of the mind that historically empires rarely just collapse suddenly and instead erode over the course of centuries.
Imo the US is primed for a bonapartist figure and the instatement of a new social compact as we deal with the death of neoliberalism and a new profit crisis. Though I don’t agree with all their conclusions, I think Brenner & Riley are pulling at the edges of something real in their piece I cited, specifically the idea of state dictated capitalism or political capitalism as they call it. I think the mode of state capitalism outlined by China and to a lesser extent Russia wherein a state apparatus utilizes the capitalist class as a patronage network to produce the commodities necessary for state projects could become the dominant economic model of the coming century (tho of course everyone will have their own versions. Europe had social democracy when we had fordism and China will have socialism with Chinese characteristics while we get the megacorp imperium). America’s tendency towards monopoly capital makes me think we might just see a fusion between the private and public sectors where the regulatory administrative state is overtaken by private firms operating on a pRiVaTe-PuBlIc PaRtNeRsHiP basis.
Historically wars have been a great place to build new social compacts from and from which bonapartist figures can emerge out of. Maybe the current regional conflict in the mid east expands and the US gets smoked by a Houthi/Hezbollah/Iran coalition and we have our own Russo-Japanese war that inspires a retooling of the American economy and plenty of “stabbed in the back” narratives about the ruling elite that failed us. Or maybe we instead experience a political defeat as China’s efforts to link Iran and Saudi Arabia sees the US’s influence pushed out of the region. MBS has already made indications of a desire to go his own way more separate from US hegemony rather than remaining a junior partner. I’m this instance again I could see the US turning its sights south to secure access to oil reserves there if our relationship with the Saudis becomes fraught. A situation like Venezuela-Essequibo could provide the justification to put troops into SA. Either way I think the American brain pan has a unique craving for global violence. We saw that the number one thing that’s tanked Biden’s approval was his withdrawal from Afghanistan and both parties seem intent on jumping in feet first to any conflict that presents itself. The only disagreement is about which wars to be fighting
Neoliberalism has also left US infrastructure in a sorry state. Underinvestment in roads, rails, grid. You name it, it has been left to crumble
The CHIPS act hasn't even sent out money to TSMC/Samsung yet. It was all smoke and mirrors and unsecured IOUs.
The only money granted so far has been to BAE Systems to expand a New Hampshire plant manufacturing military chips.
https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2023/12/biden-harris-administration-and-bae-systems-inc-announce-chips
Skilling up workers for this is also an issue while we're focusing on financially milking our universities etc etc
Universities are already dying. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the humanities fully gutted (halfway there!) and a full switch towards a STEM focus as a means of outsourcing the technical jobs training needed to work these production jobs. Just imagine the new engineering building of your university sponsored by Raytheon. Feels like it’s just around the corner
I find it hard to imagine the difference between this and the Steve Ballmer center for whatever here at UW
Thought on this too. I don't know about EU post nord stream but the US could certainly begin this or even outsource it to a close allie. The old arsenal of democracy troupe. Certainly seems doable with enough state subsidies in the US anyways.
I agree, in a drawn out hot war without nukes I don't think the NATO core will be a weak as they've shown themselves in recent conflicts.