My god, even the best chance for socialism is hopeless because of the dollar. “it’s not doomer because the party could do something different” idgaf day after day it’s more dollars and less long term hope. Nothing China does can matter because all the green energy, all the bnr, all the poverty elimination, all of it is paid for with imperial currency and little to no interest in changing this arrangement from within. The party will talk about win-win arrangements and mutually-beneficial cooperation until the fucking nukes are flying.
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You’re not helping the doomer, comrade. Everyone is a lib, and there’s not a Stalin in sight. So imperial core residents just wait until the planet cooks us alive, maybe doing some charity work for migrants and people on the streets with a red flag in the mean time. Fantastic
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Ok man. I understand it’s about being correct, but there’s a reason I made a separate post to vent rather than replying to you directly like I actually think good things can happen
And even then they started to seep back into the Soviet bureaucracy as soon as Stalin died.
They existed in there semi-covertly from well before his death, as Khrushchev’s coup itself demonstrated.
Nothing China does can matter because all the green energy, all the bnr, all the poverty elimination, all of it is paid for with imperial currency
The physical capital improves domestic livelihood whether its paid for with dollars, gold bullion, or bottle caps.
Don’t get all doomer because the glut of petrodollars in the market has made it a preferred form of liquidity. That’s a transitory condition.
The party will talk about win-win arrangements and mutually-beneficial cooperation until the fucking nukes are flying.
A big reason why the nukes never launched stems from the globalism that made life too good to throw away on ideology.
sorry for using the word nukes, they’ll keep talking about cooperation with the imperialists while the oceans rise. They can’t beat climate change on their own and per some replies I got, it’s impossible for capital to plan for the future, so we’re cooked
China could drop USD and all trade with the US tomorrow and not lose anything of value. That was their entire point in selling bonds in USD in Saudi Arabia recently. China can issue bonds at Treasury levels… Without US permission. Meaning they could, if they needed to, pay off all USD based loans regardless of the creditor… Which ends the US dollar and removes all incentives of the petrodollar.
To China, USD is now play money, worth no more or less than the euro or timber or any other base renewable trade good. It’s no more a currency than fish.
Also check this out and see what you think? It seems to be the polar opposite of your take
If you’re correct, that’s even worse, it means they could drop the dollar, but choose not to because ???
Because they don’t deal in the short term. Short term thinking without fully planning situations caused the loss of life during the great leap forward. China doesn’t care about tomorrow, just ten, twenty, a hundred years from now… And the US isnt going to make all of those milestones regardless of China’s involvement.
Now let’s say brics lead by a strong China does push to dedollar the world; what’s the US response? Probably nukes. The US is a dangerous dying empire who may just convince its military members and financial backers that a world without US hegemony is equal to nuclear annihilation, and we all know anyone stupid enough to join the US military is dumb enough to believe that. If a highly visible threat to power happens before China et al are sure the US doesn’t have the internal political will to lash out in its dying breath, then you’ve just given the empire a target, and China would very much not like to be that target.
So what’s China doing? Reassuring the world. They built up a navy not to attack the US, or even defend against a US attack, but to replace the US when it’s time – piracy is a legitimate issue after all and someone needs to be patrolling the waves. They issue bonds at the same interest rate as the US Treasury in USD, which assails any fear of defaulting on imf or US debt by the global south – China can take care of you if they act up and pull some dumb shit. This climate change thing? China builds more solar panels alone than any other country builds any kind of power generation, combined with their turbine factories they’re poised to coat the world in cheap renewable energy that lasts.
China is setting up to help the world recover from the fall of the West, to do that they need to survive the fall of the West, which means not directly fucking with the US until it is too weak and disjointed to go full nuclear Holocaust.
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How does the west fall without nuclear holocaust? Or would it be a partial nuclear holocaust rather than a full one?
How does China building solar panels solve climate change? No matter how many renewables they invest in, it’s a group project with a group grade
For the first point; by simple collapse. We know from the ussr that nuclear powers can collapse without it ending the world (even if some of us think it maybe should’ve and we’d be better off). The government fails to stop a revolution, some rich guys get a little too self assured and back some legal separation, some banks simply collapse without anyone bailing them out, there’s a hundred scenarios, and most of them would happen if any single one happens… But the easiest thing would simply be if the global south stopped being exploited and instead was openly armed with just 13 nuclear icbms each.
To your second point, if you shrink fossil fuels customers, you reduce emissions fucking up the cycle. Moving all but the West away from fossil fuels, essentially making some countries leapfrog the technology tree, shrinks overall demand while reducing emissions enough that we might keep under 2c. We reduce demand, the producers can’t export while maintaining their economies, meaning the West must produce and consume, and use government resources to prop up both sides of that industry. The economics behind such a move from the West don’t favor longevity, and if the West becomes more poor, then renewables look even better as a survival tactic.
I gotta be honest, the example of the ussr does not make me more secure that the US would go equally as quietly into that dark night. And the only country making progress is China, not the rest of the global south and especially not India.
it means they could drop the dollar, but choose not to because
they probably don’t want wwiii to start today
If you agree with Putin, it started earlier this week
I mean central axis is exploitation, not nerd dollars. And that chinese won’t liberate nobody been obvious since 70s, same with ussr. People control their destiny. not magical hand from god. Would be nice if they did it, but it’s not expected.
And ip laws fucked more people over than dollar dominance
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I’m critical ideologically (and was), but uncritical structurally (world-systems wise) of china. (USSR i mentioned since 70s specifically, they did lots of cool stuff before that, but after that were mainly in holding pattern, not developing further.). And cheerleading is nice, i don’t mind it, i just don’t place hopes on it changing things in the way or at speed people think. (and hope might be praxis killer in some scenarios)
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Oh, i meant structurally, as in weight in global economy. Assuming all else equal, getting 2.5 billion people good life ™, will shift the productive forces in the global south into higher gear, china either consciously (if commies) or unconsciously (if porkies) will have to build out productive capacity in the rest of the world, simultaneously reducing western pie (no sense in being coffee harvester for 0.50 cents an hour if chinese funko pop factory pays 2). While it is not, strictly speaking, good from climate perspective, the alternative from the west is getting murdered on the border, so, let them do their stuff with cheap solar and shit working conditions (or good working conditions), its good in either case, because the alternative is getting shit working conditions and getting killed.
Higher order thinking says capital is not, exactly, sound, profit-wise, but that includes lots of fat they can shed in consulting/advertising/lawyering/lobbying to recover, so ai might give some time there
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Respectfully, this feels like unsupported pablum. The dollar is a mechanism of control and exploitation from which the only socialist project with a modicum of global influence refuses to separate. People control their destiny, but they don’t control it in a vacuum
Bigger vibe-check problem is them owning mines in congo rather than dollarization.
Magical thinking (“someone powerful will do something nice”) is not productive for any movement. The usa intransigence might force them to stop using dollars, it might not
They’ll still tilt the world economy even if they were (fully) capitalists. its like observing tide: would be nice if it brought me some fish, but probably still have to work for it, even it becomes slightly easier with the tide.
Personally, global financial transformation is a bigger vibe check issue than selling some mines to other capitalists
Is it bigger vibe check issue to congolese?
Chinese business and SOEs have a shit ton of exploitation in their supply chains. that would not change if Canadians or Brit’s owned the mines. You know this. I’m talking about the dollar
And the dollar what? If dollar disappeared, it wouldn’t change capitalism, or ownership. Maybe make american consumers 5% poorer. Capitalists made them 20% poorer for a time, and they’ve dealt with it without riots.
Dollar might implode by overextension of usa or it won’t if they don’t, it’s very irrelevant
I don’t think you believe this
It’s ok comrade. This state of affairs doesn’t have to be permanent, and China may in the future find it beneficial to promote de-dollarisation due to a change in material circumstances. Hegemonies always fall. We are seeing the US empire crack and crumble around us right now.
The cracking and crumbling you note feels like it would be the change in material circumstances necessary. And yet, nothing
These things play out over years, decades even. I am not an expert either but looking to the long term, it seems to me that green energy has to overtake fossil fuels at some point, and China is the global leader in green tech. So eventually countries will switch to cheaper green tech coming out of China and the petrodollar will decline in relevance.
Yeah to put things in perspective, just a decade ago the concept of dedollarizing the global economy wasn’t even discussed. The fact that it’s now presented as a, albeit extremely unlikely, possibility is itself a dig of a shift in global economic power.
I admire the optimism, but the dollar isn’t just the petrodollar. Thank you for the hopium tho
Agreed, I was more using that as an example of the kind of shift that might weaken attachment to the dollar over time. Love & solidarity
China is playing the long game very well.
If I wanted to just have religious faith in the PRC ultimately saving the world, I could.
I agree but the game needs to end before the world does
Remember China and western leftists spaces had to deal with massive anti-China racism seemingly out of nowhere in 2019. Do you even remember the stressful and tiresome years of having to constantly read some shitty Xinjiang conspiracy theory.
It was through careful study and examination of the available facts that we understood it was BS, you know its not like Muslims themselves would approve of their own genocide right? Even writing this today feels silly but that was the climate.
So their stance to support Russia against the neoliberal consensus was a historical big deal. Likewise the sanctions blowback was something nobody expected, including China and Russia themselves.
Not to go on a historical tour but its not possible to very hopeful when a few months of “wolf warrior” and Yellen/Blinken’s vacation home in Beijing followed by Financial times “finexplaning” to the CPC how they’re stupid, their country is in a crisis and they must become like a western consumer economy because their overcapacity is unfair was enough to cause the CPC to act so deeply and swiftly to change course.
The future now is on whether China realy believes embracing neoliberalism is a solution. The outlook is bad.
The retirement age reform, even defended by some as “common sense” is a huge red flag(the bad kind). The fact some people even in left spaces defended is reminiscent of the same “we can do no wrong” attitude found in right wing spaces. The left struggle is written with exactly this sort of incremental defeatism. TINA except the obvious one we can’t actualy pick.
Likewise, the recent incentives, particularly liberalization of foreign investments is concerning.
We’re all thinking the Taiwan is the key but from the beginning there was never an indication of that being a long term issue. Taiwan is irrelevant if not now then soon enough. US is coping with CHIPS and CN already on a path to their own e.g Huawei’s advances.
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Thank you for this, responding to the last bit. I don’t know a ton, but I’ve read a lot of young Chinese people are disillusioned with the current state of things. Whether that makes them fervent Marxist party members who will fight the good fight or libs who blame the party for their problems, I can’t say. But that’s through western media so I could be way wrong
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I def wouldn’t say it’s cooked, xi is proof that progress can be made, but it depends on the ideological perspectives of the youth
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Is this in responce to the recent news article that china started issuing their own USD and people like theirs better than America’s?
In response to XHS-posting mostly, but specifically their extraordinary effortpost in the news mega about this event
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When you put that much effort, repeatedly, over the course of months, to make this particular financial point, I’m going to take it seriously. The future is affected by the restrictions of the present, but thanks for the hopium
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Ironically, i put some of my retirement savings into a gold fund a couple years ago, and it did way better than the various US industry positions I had
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Oh I know, I always feel conflicted between keeping money invested to overcome inflation, vs taking it out because there’s no way everything’s not about to crash, right?
In the end, I just constantly resent the fact that the neoliberals have forced our retirements to be tied up in stock market bullshit.
I’m so far thinking of this as like the launch of the financial Prius. A hybrid dollar essentially, which is a transitional step towards a future without the dollar. It still relies on the dollar to function, but it starts to prove out the potential for alternatives that are not hegemonic tools of the US.
Not a ton of Prius sold at first except to institutional fleets that could make a case for saving money on fuel for their fleets, but it wasn’t quite a entry-level vehicle comparitively. If the calculation was over a long enough time frame, it made sense for a lot of institutions to transition. This is partly why Saudi is where this is being done as far as I can tell.
Once the concept of dollar alternative has been normalized via this, then it starts to give credence to a lot of what BRICS+ is working towards. If this can work in Saudi, it can work almost anywhere that wants it. So I think it could snowball eventually, but there has to be a stepwise process of transitioning away from US dollar hegemony first to open the way.
Maybe this bloomer cope, but that’s where I’m at so far from reading the different takes that have been posted.
I hope you’re correct
America will never be felled by financial war, it will be felled by war war
That’s even worse lol, because if America falls militarily, we all go down in nuclear fire
theres many ways for this not to be the case, chiefly i can imagine american civil war due to climate disaster
You don’t think nukes would be used in a civil conflict?
they could be used, but nuclear civil war would not be the end of the world
As a resident of a major metropolitan area, it would be the end of mine
