Wait so you're telling me you can continue to be a manufacturing superpower even when you pay your workers well and give them a good standard of living? But neoliberalism told me that was impossible!
the US did it for a couple decades. neoliberalism probably can't do it.
Dialectics teaches us that real systems are never static, that they change over time. The western post-war model of industrial capitalism by the late 1970s had already ceased to be viable and entered into crisis. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time, which Marx correctly analyzed, had made it impossible to continue to maintain the high wage industrial economies and welfare states established in the wake of WWII as a means of placating the masses and staving off socialist revolution. There were only two ways out of this predicament: socialism or neoliberalism.
Of course capital picked the latter. And now things have deteriorated even further and even the illusory boom provided by the financialization glut of the 80s and the cannibalization of the industrial base which occured in the 90s has long since evaporated, at least since the great recession of '08 which in many ways is still ongoing. It is impossible to turn back the clock on capitalism and return to the pre-neoliberal model short of a global black swan event like a world war which would destroy much of the existing base of production.
It is very likely that the capitalist ruling class understands this otherwise unsolvable dilemma they are facing and the fact that on the current trajectory their situation will only get worse, and this is precisely why they are so frantically trying to accelerate the timeline for war with Russia, China, Iran, etc. whoever really just so long as they can get a sufficiently big and destructive war before it is too late and even this would no longer save them but only bring about their demise faster.
Unfortunately for them i think that we have already passed that inflection point and they just don't see it yet. Russia is probably the country that understood this first, hence why it dared to launch its SMO. Following that the Axis of Resistance in the Middle East seems to have caught on as well. Now it only remains to see what China does.
“we have already passed that inflection point and they just don’t see it yet.” Inshallah 🙏🙏🙏
Sure, but neoliberalism is just a natural progression of the system, it's the negation of the negation :)
Neoliberalism was the natural evolution of the previous system so that it could keep satisfying the need of the ruling class.
Industrial capitalism was at it's end and we now that because the way a society is organized is decided by the social and economic condition of that society.
Labour was getting weaker and growth was stopping, so the system naturally changed to allow the bourgeoise to keep enriching itself as much as possible. I believe it's not good for Marxists to talk positively about past capitalist systems that lead us to our current situation, the road that history took was not random.i don't think I was talking positively about postwar liberal capitalism. I believe it's not good for Marxists to overstate their case
I think the right side chart being of manufacuring value added rather than raw volume is the reason why this has been possible. Expanding the volume of low value added goods has limited results and also leads to the market quickly saturating. Chinese government has adopted a conscious strategy of moving up the value chain. For example, businesses which have strategies for this get easier access to credit.
I am just surprised that western bourgeoisie agreed to the technology transfer agreements that helped in this. I guess the race to the bottom that the competition among them fosters is maybe why.
China used its large market to play the capitalists against themselves. First to new market wins, so Western capitalists were begging to get in no matter what.
I do think that as China moves up the value chain, they should still improve and automate their low-value manufacturing. That way, they can never get cut off from needed goods. I don't know whether this is exactly what they are planning. If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, that would be great!
OP has posted in the past about how China uses robots for automation more than any country in the world (even the so called developed ones). I think the rate of adopting automation will keep on increasing.
China also makes it legally hard to move capital out of the country even if capitalists want to chase lower wages elsewhere. Good strategy. Money can still flow somewhat, but that factory isn't going anywhere.
From the ILO 2022 Global Wage Report:
real wage growth among all G20 countries between 2008 and 2022 was highest in China, where real monthly wages in 2022 were equivalent to about 2.6 times their real value in 2008. In four countries – Italy, Japan, Mexico and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – it appears that real wages were lower in 2022 than in 2008.
They literally has to create a with China and without China datasets because China alters results so much. Without China the growth of real wages would be absolutely dismal.
