We're seeing increased pressure in the imperial core to reinvest in public funding for industry and social programs due to competition from a large socialist project.
This happened throughout the first cold war, so it's telling to see the same patterns re-emerging.
Something I missed a couple months ago - The Senate Overwhelmingly Passed a Bill to Bolster Competitiveness With China
Passed back in June, the "Innovation and Competition Act" only really picked up support when it was renamed from the "Endless Frontier Act" and positioned as being an anti-China bill.
The more than 2,400-page bill greenlit almost $250 billion in funding for U.S. manufacturing and technology. It passed with a 68-32 vote in a Senate that has otherwise been mostly gridlocked by electoralist excuses (parliamentarian, manchin, fillibuster, etc).
Really telling quote from a Republican senator at the end of the linked article:
“Frankly, I think China has left us no option but to make these investments,”
Another quote with Schumer saying the quiet part out loud again:
“They [China] believe that squabbling democracies like ours can’t come together and invest in national priorities the way a top-down, centralized and authoritarian government can. They are rooting for us to fail so they can grab the mantle of global economic leadership and own the innovations.” - source.
A spokesperson from China's foreign ministry said that bill was “full of cold war zero-sum thinking” that “distorts the facts [and] smears China’s development path and domestic and foreign policies". - Source
In a strange way, this could result in some benefits for those workers trapped in the Imperial Core as it could potentially lead to renewed spending on social programs, especially as China's standard of living continues to improve.
I unfortunately don't view that as a net positive since we're already experiencing a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes, but it is interesting to see Capitalism's ongoing response to its global power being challenged for the first time in decades.
What other examples of this have you noticed? Were benefits like the (still underwhelming) stimulus payments also caused by this pressure?
Would it though? Better technology in the hands of capitalist oligarchs and borderline fascists doesn't make for a better world.
Chinese intelligence machine go BRRRRR
You could maybe make the argument that much like the first cold war, having a socialist rival actually forces capitalist states to innovate and try and confront some of their more glaring contradictions, and therefore maybe China doing better dealing with global warming will force the US's hand and they'll do something about it, along with confronting all the other issues in American society.
I don't agree with this argument but it's one someone could make.
Yeah if we (being the workers of the world) are lucky we'll see the US make some concessions to its workers to stop revolutionary thought from bubbling over while investing in technologies to avert the worst of the ecological catastrophe to come.
In other words, the best case scenario is more decades of milquetoast social democracy which is still built off of the exploitation of the third world.