Afaik, no one's ever done an actual quantitative analysis, but if the US was barred from exploiting the global south tomorrow the standard of living for all US Americans (other than the rich) would plummet. It wouldn't even be a recession, more like all of capitalism just seizing up. iPhones now cost like $5k and no one could afford them anyway. I think it would be orders of magnitude worse than what the Russians had to deal with in the 90s with their "shock therapy". It's truly astounding how dependent we are on exploiting labor and resources in the global south. Like... damn near everything we own was made by people making shit wages and living in conditions that would make US Americans cry after living in them for a few hours.

It pisses me off so much that 99% of US Americans think their lifestyle of cheap, plentiful treats is the ultimate evidence that capitalism works. They say "look how much stuff we have" and compare it to what folks in AES states had. They never think about there are like 100+ countries out there that are every bit as capitalistic as the USA. And yet they are living in crushing poverty. Why is the US a symbol of the success of capitalism but poor countries don't reflect it's weaknesses?

The standard of living that most people in the US enjoy is more thanks to the exploitation of the workers and resources of the global south than it is to some inherent positive quality of capitalism. Take that away and US Americans would have a very different life from what they have come to expect. For the working class in the US, without all that exploitation I don't see how our lives would be materially different from workers in the global south.

And I haven't even gotten into how much of our lifestyle is driven by environmental exploitation! US Americans consume resources at something like 5X what is considered a sustainable rate. Force us to live sustainably and that would be another huge blow to treatflow and the "success" of capitalis.

  • seitanicRights [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Who the hell is getting treats these days besides the rich? Everyone around me is living in abject poverty, a single hardship away from Hooverville.

    I'd wager the floor is much, much lower than you think it is, and the worst off among us here are not faring much better than the folks in the global south, even with the magnitude of hyperexploitation. We aren't getting our basic needs met, plain and simple.

    This isn't even to mention the nearly invisible, at least to the average American, slave economy that comprises the largest prison system in human history, mostly exploiting black Americans.

    I realize that in some ways my experience is marginal, and there are yuppie fucks who actually are hoarding grain while I get sick from eating only noodles and beans and bean-noodles, or if I'm really lucky paying taco bell for, you guessed it, beans, and that other ways I'm privileged, such as not being in prison, but it really does seem like my experience is more normal than it should be, looking around.

    All of this isn't to minimize the hyperexploitation of the global South by American capital, but rather to say that for the average working class American, things wouldn't change all that much if that stopped since nearly all of that surplus labor is going to the rich. It isn't trickling down. and never has, and it surely doesn't provide an excuse to continue the exploitation of the global south.