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Putin Broadens Rules On Russia's Use Of Nuclear Arms
(www.barrons.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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The US is losing geopolitically across the board now. We're seeing huge amounts of trade being redirected outside the dollar now as a direct result of the war. BRICS is growing by leaps and bounds. Middle East, Latin America, and Africa are becoming increasingly assertive. The whole empire is coming apart at the seams. All of this ties back to the war in Ukraine where the US overcommitted and that led to the economic war with Russia that is now turning into a bloc conflict between G7 and BRICS. The war was never about Ukraine itself.
The geopolitical losses that the US is experiencing in the economic and diplomatic sectors are entirely overblown hopium. Yes they're "bad outcomes" for the US, but the scale of these hits relative to the size and strength of the empire is not enough to make the case that the US is falling significantly faster than its overall imperial arc. It has nowhere near exhausted its options for bringing the globe to heel, and we haven't even gotten to a significant tipping point.
If these geopolitical losses were anywhere near significant you'd see a must faster escalation and scrambling to maintain dominance across the globe by the US. The reality is that if this isn't a slow burn it's going to be a precipitous fall and you shouldn't wish that on the globe given that this country has enough firepower stockpiled in the oceans to turn this planet to ash, and it's lead by the kind of people who will do that kind of thing, and spend their lives in bunkers ruling over the ash Enclave style.
It's absolutely not overblown copium. Huge amounts of trade are already happening outside the dollar, and China can obviously see they're the next target so they're redirecting their trade away from the west now as well. This should help you put things in perspective https://youtu.be/RQ3YjZAzqxA
The west has an over inflated view of itself. It's entirely possible that the managers of the empire still don't realize the amount of trouble they're in as well. Once again, you keep trying to treat US as a rational actor here which it demonstrably is not. There is vague realization that things are turning in China's favor, but there's still plenty of chauvnism to go around.
Also, I highly doubt that the oligarchs running the US really want to spend the rest of their days in a nuclear bunker. They'd much rather rule over a diminished empire.
The video you're offering as proof is simply pointing out that US/global north goods are too expensive for markets in the global South so goods provided by China are growing at a rapid rate in comparison. That doesn't actually mean what you're saying. If BYD ships 30x cars to Vietnam but BMW has a 30x price and a higher consumer desire your point is moot.
The video is showing that the Global South has a massive population advantage over the G7, and that vast majority of the economic growth is going to be happening outside the west going forward. That fact that your main take away was that western goods are too expensive for the Global South is frankly hilarious.
Yeah and? This is literally true at any point in the last 200 years, because there's literally more room to grow than in the West. The entire point of neocolonialism as a project is for the West to lease the global South's future and growth to itself.
And the west is now deindustrialized, and it's now entering a bloc conflict with the countries where vast majority of commodities are produces and most of the global manufacturing happens. The entire point of neocolonialism is to extract labor and resources from the countries that are colonized. Those days are now rapidly coming to an end. The empire is crumbling in real time.
Okay lets start simple and define colonization for me.
Colonialism is a tool of capitalist expansion and exploitation, driven by the pursuit of profit and the need to maintain the capitalist system. It results in the domination and underdevelopment of colonized territories, while reinforcing the power and wealth of the colonizers. It is an inherent feature of capitalism, driven by the need for expansion and accumulation of capital, involving the political and economic domination of a nation by a foreign power, leading to the exploitation of resources and labor in the colonized region.
Colonies provide a source of cheap raw materials and labor, as well as new markets for the colonizer's manufactured goods. Crucially, colonialism reinforces global inequalities and uneven development. The colonizers extract wealth from the colonies, hindering their economic growth and development, while the the population of the colonizing countries benefits from the plunder.
Okay so what's neocolonialism then?
Why don't you explain what you think neocolonialism is and its relationship with regular colonialism. This ought to be good.
Sure. Regular colonialism is when you force a capitalist apparatus onto a group of people and force it to extract to the economic benefit of a different group of people who typically through the explicit threat of state violence enforce profitable conditions for this economic activity. Typically what distinguishes it from capitalism is that in capitalism both groups are forced to participate in the capitalist apparatus, where in colonialism the supreme group may choose not to. Lastly the economic form this takes the shape of is typically direct ownership of raw material extraction operations, all the material extracted, and profits from the extracted materials. Colonial relationships are primarily driven by economic engines of raw source extraction to fuel large scale industrial economies. Colonial relationships are limited by the resource mix of the colonized, thus they are inefficient because they tend to make commonly extracted material over available in your economy. Some examples are like you take over a state, and that state becomes your coal extraction venture where you can just ship coal over an ocean to your state. Or how you can take over a state, and you force a capitalist apparatus that exists to provide your state with a stable supply of bananas.
Neocolonialism is the recreation of the colonial relation purely through the paradigm of the market where the same types of unequal economic relationships between colonial states and their patrons occur, but it is not directly due to the paradigms of supremacy, it is only indirectly due to the imbalances of the material history between the two groups and the mediation of the market. In essence it is saying 100 years ago I would come to your country, set up a governate and a factory and force your people to work for me, but today in order for you to build a school you have to agree to the same unequal deal as you did before to get the money to build that school, but it's not meeeee doing it, it' the maaarket. It's the supply and demand! Because neocolonial relationships are based on buyer-seller relations it allows for a more efficient economic extraction because you have more control of the kind of resources the relationship brings so it's easier to protect your domestic industry. So there's also no direct threat of state violence and it transforms the relationship between the two groups from owner and worker (or owner and property) to a more "pure form" of buyer and seller. Like if you have a country where it's an outlier in its the demand for narcotics, and it's kinda weird how its direct neighbor is a narco-state. Or how you have a group of capitalist entities, and they (and their countries) make the majority of the economic profit on the trade of a luxury crop like cocoa rather than the capitalist entities (and their countries) that actually harvest the crop. The important distinction in those two examples being that, for chocolate, Belgium and the Congo created a neocolonial relationship that previously existed as a colonial relationship, where for narcotics, the United States and Mexico created a new neocolonial relationship without a previous colonial form.
To sum up, both traditional colonialism and neocolonialism are acts of exploitation of a nation by another more powerful nation. The difference is in the methods used, but not in the fundamental nature of the act. In both cases, colonialism stems from capitalist relations because it is the capital owning class that seeks to maximize their profits through exploitation of the working majority domestically and abroad.
Now that we've established the definition, hopefully you can see how losing neocolonial influence is a big problem for the western economies that are fundamentally built on the ability to extract labor and resources from the global majority.