• 35 Posts
  • 132 Comments
Joined 7 years ago
Cake day: April 17th, 2019
  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•How 2025 turned out
    2·
    8 days ago

    Highly disagree with this.

    Even if you ignore the PRC’s primary materialist / world-historic acheivement over the last few decades (lifting more people out of poverty than any country in history), then you still have futuristic / sci-fi things like:

    ELECTRICITY MIX (PERCENTAGE)
============================================================
2010:  [████████████████████████] 61% Coal  |  39% Clean
2025:  [████████████████] 32% Coal           |  68% Clean
2030:  [████████████] ~25% Coal (target)     |  75% Clean (target)
============================================================
    • Rapid development of fusion power.
    • Space missions like a planned moon landing possibly as soon as the 2030s, and planned mars landings for 2040s.

    These are star trek / bucky fuller level ideas.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•a logical question
    7·
    9 days ago

    From Zak Cope - divided world divided class

    The labour aristocracy is that section of the international working class whose privileged position in the lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.

    The labour aristocracy provides the major vehicle for bourgeois ideological and political influence within the working class. For Lenin, “opportunism” in the labour movement is conditioned by the preponderance of two major economic factors, namely, either “vast colonial possessions or a monopolist position in world markets.” These allow for ever-greater sections of the metropolitan working class to be granted super-wages so that it is not merely the haute bourgeoisie which subsists on profits. Thus, according to Lenin, it is not simply capitalists who benefit from imperialism:

    The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.

    For Lenin, superprofits derived from imperialism allow the globally predominant bourgeoisie to pay inflated wages to sections of the (international) proletariat, who thus derive a material stake in preserving the capitalist system:

    In all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting “gain” from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of “their own” country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain super-profits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution.

    There are several pressing reasons why the haute bourgeoisie in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis.

    • Economically, the embourgeoisement of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital’s expanded reproduction.
    • Politically, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government.
    • Militarily, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories.
    • Finally, ideologically, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits imperialism brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve.

    In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read:

    At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies—the yellow, black, and red colonial people—and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist “fatherland.”

    Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform:

    I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread!” “bread!” and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Crazy Idea
    6·
    15 days ago

    I agree that the “principle aspect” as you say, or which class is holding power and ultimately controls both the economy and the political system, is most important. I’d argue though that the primary difference in these sectors is who is in control of the surplus, and whose benefit it goes to. In the PRC and even in Cuba, there are still private capitalists who effectively control the surplus generated within those companies, and use it as they see fit. They’re severely limited of course, but they still function differently from the socialist sector whose surplus is worker-controlled via 5 year plans.

    The only “socialist industry” I can think of in western countries, outside of tiny examples like coops, are things like state-run natural resource and energy companies. The US military is just the enforcement arm of capital, planned and controlled by capital. Even state-run social services shouldn’t really be thought of as socialist, since they produce no surplus value, and are funded via other ways, and are overall capitalist-planned.

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