The Western left experienced this 40 years ago when they fully bought into the post-war class collaboration with Capital under the Fordist-Keynesian social democratic model and believed this to the superior model to evil totalitarian Stalinism. Surely Capital would never betray them.

Seems like Western minorities are having to learn the same lessons all over again.

But will they ever learn?

Nah it’s fine the point is to have a discussion.

I do think that if Trump couldn’t get China on board his presidency is pretty much screwed. Maybe that’s how it’s paving the way for the Dems to make a come back in 2026 and in 2028.

I don’t quite understand the SC ruling on Tiktok ban.

The projected loss of revenues for vendors is about $1 billion, with another $300 million loss for content creators. Granted I’m not a fan of Tiktok/Douyin and never used it, but this is undeniably yet another class warfare waged by Biden and probably won’t even be the last before he leaves office.

Is Biden seriously doing this to take away Trump’s bargaining chip with China? Does he really want to stoke a war as his final act as the president?

I think Trump will still fight the court decision but the grounds for divestiture is thin.

Getting away with the charge of genocide under the guise of dementia is going to be his defense at the Nuremberg trial. Biden’s gonna be the first in history to get away with it and set a new precedence for all the presidents that came after him.

No way this is going to pass. Comrade Trump has made it clear that he’s not going to let it happen.

They also learned. No more direct US involvement in major military conflicts apart from auxiliary support role. Importantly, the US stopped Europe from attaining energy sovereignty through buying oil in euro.

It would take another decade before a major energy infrastructure was built to supply Europe with cheap natural gas. The geopolitical vector then turned to the European periphery, but this time, the US would mobilize ultranationalists in Ukraine to do the dirty work.

In the meantime, a full blown hybrid warfare was initiated to destroy the economies of the oil producing countries during the 2010s. Maidan, sanctions from Crimea and MH-17, the shale revolution, Syrian Civil War were all unleashed simultaneously to destroy the oil producing economies of Russia, Iran and Venezuela and permanently put them on the back foot. The strategic goal being to cut Europe off potential energy suppliers and obliterate its status (and the euro currency) as a major challenger to the dollar regime - a thorny problem to the US since the collapse of the USSR.

Even today, the US is no longer directly involved. It is the Ukrainians and Israelis and ISIS/HTS who are dying on the front, while the US slowly drips its military equipments to the frontline to ensure that it will not run out of munitions beyond its capacity to replenish.

Without sacrificing the lives of a single soldier, the US has sunk the European economy. Russian pipeline is dead. Nigeria pipeline is dead. Qatar pipeline is dead. The US remains the sole supplier of natural gas to Europe, and it will have total control over European politics and economy for the foreseeable future.

Yes, but it is very important to note that for many years this connection was not known/deliberately obscured even in academic spaces until the author of the paper I linked in the other comment published his findings on it in the 2000s. The wikipedia article cites publications from the same guy.

From the opening paragraphs of Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany:

Privatization of large parts of the public sector was one of the defining policies of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The privatizations in Chile and the United Kingdom, implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, are usually considered the first privatization policies in modern history (e.g. Yergin and Stanislaw, 1998, p.115). A few researchers find earlier instances: Some economic analyses of privatization (e.g. Megginson, 2005, p. 15) identify partial sales of state-owned firms in Adenauer’s Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the first large- scale privatization program, and others argue that, though confined to just one sector, the denationalization of steel and coal in the United Kingdom during the early 1950s should be considered the first privatization (e.g. Burk, 1988; Megginson and Netter, 2003, p. 31).

None of the contemporary economic analyses of privatization takes into account an important, earlier case: the privatization policy implemented by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany. The modern literature on privatization, the recent literature on the twentieth- century German economy (e.g. Braun, 2003) and the history of Germany’s publicly owned enterprises (e.g. Wengenroth, 2000) all ignore this early privatization experience. Some authors occasionally mention the re-privatization of banks but make no further comment or analysis (e.g. Barkai, 1990, p. 216; James, 1995, p. 291). Other works, like Hardach (1980, p. 66) and Buchheim and Scherner (2005, p. 17), mention the sale of State-owned firms in Nazi Germany only to support the idea that the Nazi government opposed widespread state ownership of firms and do not carry out any analysis of these privatizations.

And it’s all the same. Neoliberals (British marginalists/neoclassicals) derived much of their economic theorems from studying contemporary fascist regimes, and became its successor in a more perfected form.

they nationalized industries like crazy

lol. The Nazis were the first to re-privatize the economy during the Great Depression after European powers nationalized their economies during WWI, which led to unprecedented socialist movements all over Europe and especially that revolution in Russia.

The mass privatization that begin in the late 1960s-1970s was based on the re-privatization effort of Nazi Germany, where that part of history has been conveniently scrubbed when academics talk about the history of neoliberalism and where the roots of marginalist/neoclassical economics were concerned.

From the Economy of Evil:

In February 1933, as Chancellor, Hitler met with the leading German industrialists at the home of Hermann Goring. There were representatives from IG Farben, AG Siemens, BMW, coal mining magnates, Theissen Corp, AG Krupp, as well as a locust of Bankers, investors, and other Germans belonging to the top 1%. During this meeting, Hitler said, "Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy."

In 1934, Nazis outlined their plan to revitalize the German economy. It involved reprivatization of significant industries: railways, public works project, construction, steel, and banking. On top of that, Hitler guaranteed profits for the private sector, and so, many American industrialists and bankers gleefully flocked to Germany to invest.

The Nazis had a thorough plan for deregulation. The Nazi's economist, stated," The first thing German business needs is peace and quiet. It must have a feeling of absolute legal security and must know that work and its return are guaranteed. The interferences in a business which occurred at first, perhaps as a result of too much zeal, have become intolerable."

Germany had the most robust social-democratic movement, and consequently, the best worker protections in Europe codified by law. This was a significant impediment to businesses "operating freely without interference."

…

On January 20, 1934, the Nazis passed the Law Regulating National Labor. The act explicitly took power away from the government to set minimum wages and working conditions. The act stated, "The leader of the enterprise makes the decisions for the employees and laborers in all matters concerning the enterprise, as far as they are regulated by this law." Employers lowered wages and benefits. Workers were banned from striking or engaging in other collective bargaining rights. Worker conditions were so deteriorated that with the head of the AFL visited Nazi Germany in 1938, he compared the life of an average worker to that of a slave. Workers in Nazi Germany worked longer hours for lower wages.

“Adolf Hitler was a socialist” lmao

This. Imagine Americans being told that they’re only allowed to watch Netflix and browse the internet for 4-6 hours per day. They’d rather burn the whole planet down than to have their treats taken away.

Just last month, there was an outrage on Chinese social media when Yi Gang, the former head of China’s central bank, remarked in an interview during the Beijing-Tokyo Forum that “economically, China should not retaliate against the US economic warfare” and it sparked an outrage so bad that media reports on it have since been removed and we only got fragments of it remained on English outlet like SCMP that doesn’t quite capture the controversy:

“We all understand that, from an economics perspective, [retaliatory actions are] never a good choice,” Yi said at the annual Beijing-Tokyo Forum in Tokyo. “But there’s not much policymakers can do about that” in the face of mounting domestic pressure and rising concerns among international industry players.

…

Against such a backdrop, “as policy advisers, we should speak up for the benefits of free trade”, Yi said, calling it the easiest way to boost the world’s economic growth.

lol

These are the people who have been running the country lol. Our University of Illinois PhD alumnus certainly knows not to bite the hand that once fed him, and I’m sure he’s proud of the fact that he’s learned from the very best.

Why can’t the government just print the money and give it to the people to spend?

Consumption has been subdued since Covid because people have become increasingly worried about the uncertainty of the future (it is a trait in the Chinese society to save for the rainy day especially during uncertain times).

And you know what is going to assuage them of this fear? Just give people, especially poor people, the money to spend so they can stimulate the demand and drive the local economy.

But…. but…. this would violate sound market principles! We are not being a “good country” if we spend more deficit than 3% of the GDP - we could lose our trustworthiness and our reputation of spending responsibly, that will scare away investors! Meanwhile, the US deficit spent 7% of its GDP in 2023 alone and blatantly violating the “rule” it set for other countries lol.

The irony is that the recent wave of anti-corruption actions, while undeniably good and long overdue, is more likely to be driven by the fact that the government needs to recoup the money stolen by corrupt officials to replenish the coffers. They still haven’t figured out that you can simply print the cash out of thin air.

We don’t have free healthcare in China, although state-owned enterprise employees usually get decent benefits.

Incidentally, there was a netizen debate about free healthcare just a few months ago sparked by a Beijing University professor (Li Ling) who proposed the implementation of free healthcare to all of China. The online reaction was sort of bifurcated, with detractors going with the usual arguments about how it’s inefficient, China has too many people, healthcare quality will fall, queues will be too long, and “if the government cannot even subsidize the 400 yuan needed to finance the healthcare coverage of each rural farmer, where is the government going to find the money to finance healthcare for the whole country?”

On the other hand, there used to be a very comprehensive healthcare system under Mao. Between the 1950s-70s, there was something called the rural cooperative medical system that provided healthcare coverage to >90% of rural villages, apparently highly praised by WHO and the World Bank for its innovation to provide maximum healthcare benefit at very low cost.

However, following the reform and opening up era in the 1980s, the marketization of the economy also meant that the income growth of rural farmers could not keep up with healthcare cost. Between 1990 and 1999, the income of rural farmers had increased by 2.2 times, but the average clinic visit fee and hospitalization cost had increased by 6.2 and 5.1 times, respectively. This eventually led to the disintegration of the rural cooperative healthcare system and I believe the coverage has already fell to <10% since, and had been replaced by a newer version that supposedly is more compatible with the liberalized economy but apparently has nowhere near the comprehensive coverage as it used to have (I need to study more about this in detail).

In general, the more I dive deep into China’s economic system (especially with an MMT lens), the weirder it gets. The purchasing power parity (PPP) of China has already exceeded the US, its industrial capacity is far beyond any country has built, and yet its per capita GDP is only a fraction of the US. That means the average Chinese labor have been producing output with value that is worth far higher than what they have been receiving with their depressed wages. It is not controversial at all to say that Chinese labor has simultaneously sustained the high income consumer lifestyles of Western countries and the economic development of their own country all these years.

Why would a country ever do that except for the true believer who has complete faith in the neoclassical economic theories.

You learn something new everyday. I was reading a China doomerism article on Naked Capitalism today which I have some issues with and won’t be commenting on, but I came across this quote supposedly from Xi Jinping:

To promote common prosperity, we cannot engage in ‘welfarism.’ In the past, high welfare in some populist Latin American countries fostered a group of ‘lazy people’ who got something for nothing. As a result, their national finances were overwhelmed, and these countries fell into the ‘middle income trap’ for a long time. Once welfare benefits go up, they cannot come down. It is unsustainable to engage in ‘welfarism’ that exceeds our capabilities. It will inevitably bring about serious economic and political problems.

At first, I thought this must be some Western propaganda smear and maybe mistranslation. Then I looked it up, turns out it’s real… It was actually published in Qiushi (CPC’s theory website) back in 2022 on an article titled “To correctly identify and grasp the major theoretical and practical issues of our country’s development” based on Xi’s speech to the Central Economic Work Committee in December 2021:

—-

This actually explains why China has been so reluctant to just give people money directly to boost consumption. Turns out this neoliberal brainrot is deeper than I thought (I have been defending Xi all this while and now I am getting disappointed) - they really believe that giving people money is bad and you can only create the money after earning the revenues from selling stuff first.

It makes total sense now why China has been struggling to boost domestic consumption since Covid and why the central bank doesn’t simply inject the money.

Because handout is bad! People will turn lazy if they get free money without work! What the fuck, China! How is this different from your typical GOP rhetoric?

Just give people the fucking money and at least half of the problems will be solved.

The illusion of Western liberal rules-based order was already shattered when the US confiscated $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves in 2022.

Everyone back then said “the trust of the dollar has been broken”, nobody’s going to trust the US again. That’s completely correct, and what has been unveiled instead is that US imperialism is never run on “trust” or “rules”, but on coercion.

So, guess what, nearly three years later, the foreign treasury holdings in the US has reached an all-time peak in 2024 at $8.5 trillion! Despite the blatant “stealing” of Russia’s foreign reserves, foreign countries still continue to buy US treasuries like it is the most precious asset in the world.

The dollar hegemony remains unbroken because there is no alternative to the dollar system, and as long as there is no alternative and challenge to it (to be fair, the Europeans tried, and look how the US properly disciplined the EU), everyone will have to play by the rules set by the US. There is no Soviet Union to save us this time.

Trump literally said that he will not use military force, but economic force, to annex Canada, and there is nothing Canada can do about it if the US really wants to.

What you’ll see is Canada folding under sanctions just like the Europeans did.

It’s always been about austerity lol. The finance capitalists can finally celebrate on the graves of European industrialists, who remarkably fell hook, line and sinker to the US propaganda that Russia will collapse under sanctions in 6 weeks, just be patient lol. After all, it’s the world’s greatest sanction combining the economic power of the US and the EU - what can go wrong?? How can Russia possibly survive this?

Yes lol, the real and difficult question is how? It requires a complete overhaul the global financial system and resolves the external debt burden of the Global South countries that subjected them to Western financial imperialism.

Even the Russian proposal at the BRICS Kazan Summit acknowledges just how difficult it is to de-dollarize and they are proposing to do it realistically and slowly at a limited scale. Thankfully Russia didn’t say things like gold or crypto, which means at least the Russians aren’t stupid and actually understand where the difficulties lie.

US’ industrialization is impossible

Another reason, and perhaps most important of all, is that reindustrialization is incompatible with Wall Street finance capitalism because raising the wages of labor will reinvigorate the trade unions and workers movement, as the working class in the Imperial Core becomes re-proletarianized again instead of being a neofeudal debt slaves as they have been driven into after 50 years of neoliberalization.

If you’re interested in the theory I recommend reading up 贾根良‘s work (Marxist/MMT/Listian economics professor at the People’s University). After reading so much material, I found his stuff to make the most sense, and is a major source where much of my theory is derived from.

I kind of dismissed his “warning” back in 2018 Trump’s trade war when he said that the real goal of Trump’s tariffs were to eventually force China into opening up its financial market, because I thought the trade war didn’t really go anywhere, so I thought it was rubbish.

The thesis was that the contradictions built up by the hyperfinancialization of the US i.e. the growing of MAGA movement (or the disgruntled working class of Bernie Sanders’s movement) due to the persistent trade deficit over the years that led to a huge loss of domestic jobs needs to be resolved somehow. By transitioning the export of dollar from running trade deficit gradually into entering China’s financial market as investment, the US gets to retain its dollar hegemony while allowing trade deficit to be partially reduced (limited scale reindustrialization), thus preventing the lid to be blown off.

Honestly I wasn’t paying much attention until it started to make sense after the Ukraine war and Europe’s economy is now blown into pieces, as the US has reshaped a new geopolitical situation where Europe in austerity can no longer absorb the rest of the world’s exports, and that means the US becomes the world’s only and biggest consumer market that carries the export economies of the world (doesn’t even matter what currencies the trades are settled in).

This is why China is scared of US’s tariffs because they haven’t built up their consumer market enough to absorb the loss of trade with the US, and Europe/Japan are already out of the game to pick up that role.

in the events that the USD stays hegemonic in the near and mid future. Is there a way to transform the USD into a Bancor like currency?

I don’t think so. Bancor is a clearing currency that is used only by central banks to settle balance of payments, so the US dollar cannot become that.

However, in constructing an alternative financial system, bancor is ideal to prevent the situation we have today where the US can run a huge trade deficit without contributing anything, and China can accumulate huge trade surplus. The concentration of the world’s productive capacity into China was a pre-requisite for the US to deprive the rest of the world of their industrial capacity and rendering them vulnerable to US imperialism. A bancor system will punish both the US and China for running such huge trade imbalances.

So we now end up in a situation where the world’s two largest economies are reluctant to give up the status quo, and the sheer size of their economies completely eclipse the rest of the world’s. This is why the way out is for China to transition into a domestic consumption economy, as it will ease their ability to give up this advantage since it no longer has to accumulate so much trade surplus, and hence can allow industrial capacity to be distributed more equally to the rest of the world while China focuses on giving free healthcare, education and various utilities to its people and pioneering high tech sector.