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.
lmao, that is a wild distortion of reality. the US exports feedstocks as a diplomatic mission to support or undermine regimes around the world. brazil exports more feedstock than the US from amazonian megafarms. ireland and india were both "net exporters" during their capitalist induced famines. hardly examples of stability.
actual food, that humans eat? like fruits and vegetables? the US heavily dependent on import of products and labor. even in the large horticulture producing states like california, which have a lot of mechanization... they have even more labor demand, and those aren't citizens with great legal protections receiving a livable wage.
but sure, let's just pretend that the ideal human diet can be a 100% mixed ration of ground corn and soybean meal. these monoculture production systems are extremely energy intensive (7-8 calories of fossil fuel energy to 1 calorie of food energy) and only "work" with access to a global supply of cheap fossil fuels for mechanization, transport, fertilizers and a constant stream of subsidies to growers like price supports, direct payments, and federally subsidized disaster and crop insurance. [and let's not even discuss the uneven technology transfer / licensing of plant biotechnology and seed hybridization or their role in making commodity grain growers completely dependent on growing from seed that can no longer be held back and saved for planting next year.]
even with all that assistance and risk management from the central government, farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing and have been since the 1980s. our commodity agricultural system simply does not work, but it has a lot of corporations making money off of its dysfunction, the US government can dump excess production onto countries as "aid" to undermine agrarian reform movements, and hasn't yet killed off the entire domestic labor force.
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