this mostly applies to the U.S. but also most of the western world:

As Marxists we know that most policy is driven by what capital allows or within the increasingly narrow range of acceptable discourse it allows within bourgeois dictatorship

Obviously it's not a conspiracy of ten guys in a secret room but a general consensus that develops from a chaotic web-like oligarchy of money peddlers, influencers, lackeys, billionaire puppetmasters, etc

But this really, really hurts Capital. they need the influx of cheap labor or face the real threat of forced degrowth. and we know every international-community-1 international-community-2 including russia-cool is trying to make it harder for people to be childless but short of forcing people to procreate at gunpoint..

  • so why allow this to become a bipartisan consensus (U.S.) instead of say throwing some scraps of social democratic programs?

  • or in Europe's case allowing these parties to come to power instead of reversing some neoliberal austerity?

Is this a case of anti-immigration just being easier to do vs. building resiliency into the system? i mean it's always easier to write laws crimializing stuff and throwing cops at a problem i suppose

Or something else?

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Labor efficiency is up, all The Powers That Be are drinking the Kool aid on automation and AI, it's still easy to outsource low-skill labor (with the possible exception of agriculture), and climate change is going to make it harder to support large, resource hungry populations.

    Thus, I assume the plan (to the extent there's a plan) is to continue to automate or proletarianize white collar jobs while using immigration as a distraction and an excuse to build up the police state further. When there aren't enough immigrant workers to fill jobs, start pushing the whites back into lower skilled populations while they enjoy their robot utopia in the cities.

    Given that the rich are idiots and automation is definitely not going to proceed as hoped, I'd imagine this plan is going to clash with reality and things are going to get messy.