The collapse of the American empire would benefit almost every other country. I am starting to feel that since I live in America I should want to accelerate the collapse (or make sure one happens if things start to go back to business as usual). Can someone tell me why this is a bad idea so that I don’t make a mistake here.
Is that it? “Higher number on paper” is not a very strong argument for when we are talking about tangible benefits (this being a materialist forum, I assume we are only talking tangibles).
You listed factors of quality of life, I asked if they were achievable outside the framework of domination, you seem to have answered yes. But instead of the basics, the “things we are offered in the west” are specified as “some goods just straight up not available [in underdeveloped countries]”.
Which goods that a typical worker in the US can buy are either unavailable or marked up to be prohibitively expensive in other countries? And how does someone in the US, with yearly wages of $28,000 PPP (hi, it’s me) exploit a worker in a producer country in the global South with yearly wages of $20,000 PPP [1]? What is the mechanism and extent of exploitation that the worker in the core (as opposed to the business owner in the core) exerts on the worker in the periphery?
I’m using pre-tax income and leaving out the consideration of healthcare and transportation because while these are relevant, they could especially make the reckoning a lot murkier.
roughly averaging a selection of the most frequent producer countries I encounter on tags: China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia, Honduras ↩︎
These questions deserve a separate post in c/askLemmygrad dedicated to this to help more comrades join in. However, for the first question, a typical US worker, even though it is expensive, can easily find a way to get a great medical service such as Kidney transplant compared to what a Burkinabe just now achieved recently. In the medical service, there are just too many examples and it gets uglier if the country is currently sanctioned by the US.
As for your yearly wage, we can make more comparisons but I prefer if we take this to a different post. Tag me if you have it!
This is true. I’m not denying any of this.
My point entirely was that even though we have people in critical poverty in America; there is a genuine framework of “higher opportunity” (as shitty and liberal as it sounds) in America due to the fact that the plunders of the imperial system exist around them. It’s a really shitty and tough topic to talk about, but even where I grew up I had running water (wasn’t warm ever) and irregular electricity. Some places don’t even have that in the periphery like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Brazil, etc.
China isn’t a “periphery” or part of “global south”. It is a developed nation. You could argue it is from a geopolitical perspective, but I’m using economics and development in terms of classifying them in a “vibey” sense.
What exactly was your point?
I was hoping you’d say something like “this T-shirt has its final sale value realized in a country where it is taxed more and contributes more to social services in the US than it does in Bangladesh” or "gas prices, largely guided by the petrodollar, are more affordable in the US and this makes everything in the supply chain cheaper by a small proportion. It was a softball that I hoped you’d be able to knock out of the park.
There’s an ambiguity of who is doing the exploiting of workers in the periphery, whether it is capitalists in the periphery, capitalists in the core, or workers in the core. Saying simply that workers in the core exploit workers in the periphery, without explaining the means and extent to which this is true, just encourages conflict between nations instead of international proletarian solidarity.
Because you are purposefully being vague and assuming (you seem to have answered yes) I am answering questions when I have no idea what you were originally talking about or proposing.
I thought you were saying that there are other methods of imperial exploitation other than simply the benefits that are offered at home to other proles that encourage their division, to which I did say yes. I didn’t realize I’m in a college class and this was an open-ended question. Do you typically do this with people and get surprised when some have no idea what you’re talking about? Hate this shit because smug lib redditors would do it constantly and I always get confused by it because I heavily rely on context.
Because of our domination of the ME and Saudi puppet-states (who gladly work with us). Part of the reason we have so much presence in the Middle-East is to enforce our will and doctrine of capital there as colluding with the vassal states of the gulf can keep the dollar linked to petro. To me, it’s more related to the fact that since it is linked to petro and the U.S dominates the main source of petro globally it has more power in being the de-facto established currency most of the world uses. Anyone who tries breaking away from that is bludgeoned economically by the IMF or just straight up invaded.
Should add in an edit it’s more than just “petrodollar” too. We have entire “schools” of colonizer thought in multiple countries encouraging rampant neoliberalism that shapes the economies of the nations to be more willing to be exploited. Argentina is an example.
I’d imagine when most of the world trades in the dollar. That part I’m not as aware of, though.
“Group A can afford X goods, while Group B cannot” does not self-evidently equate to “Group A is exploiting Group B”. I was asking you to trace the logic of this. If you’re so confident of it, it shouldn’t be hard.
You gave a response that ambiguously could have referenced multiple things, then said I was being vague.
A proletarian making minimum wage in the US is not the same as “the stochastic quality of life options for any given American”. From the beginning I was talking about the working class, the lifetime net debtors, the precarious class. How does it figure that the exploitation of the proletariat of the global South is being done by the American precarious class, instead of the American owning class?
That’s because you’re assuming (multiple times now) and I wasn’t saying that proles from the West are directly exploiting those in the periphery. I said, in my original post, that despite growing up in some of the shittiest conditions that I still don’t recognize my struggles over people in the periphery because of the wide variety of options a prole can have in America compared to those in the periphery. Even the poorest one. That was my original point.
Petrodollar was something I’m already aware of, I gave an example of how colonizer schools influence economics and local-regional politics in these nations to adopt neoliberal economics. The flow of goods and deals the exploited in those nations make for the Imperial Core has plenty of collaborators from those schools of thought, hence why I cited Argentina.
I never directly said “Western proles exploit those on the periphery”. Benefit from the exploitation of the periphery by the ruling class of the core? Yes. All though, I suppose if you want an example; there are plenty of local agri-businesses in many parts of the country that literally rely on ripping people’s Visas from them by advertising good jobs and benefits and then turning on them when they get here. That’s a global thing, however and even other colonized countries do it to less developed countries (Saudi Arabia, Philippines for example.). But that’s not the “working class”, kulaks, petty-bougie, etc…What the core working class benefits from is the cheap fruit, labor and vegetables while they are free to pursue the class ladder as a U.S citizen. Entire stratified sections of the economy filled by lumpenprole along the lines of class and race. I think that’s a pretty solid example.
You could also read J. Sakai, where they talk about it a bit. Do I spam quotes now to prove I read it or more mental olympics? My tolerance for nonsense has been low lately, so I encourage saying something absurd so I can block you and be done with it.
That’s a deeply valid point and I must have just misunderstood the wording the first time.