Would probably be easier to go back to using animals at that point. You can make crude batteries without high tech manufacturing, but they’re going to have low energy density and likely gonna be made out of toxic stuff. So not ideal for vehicles.
Nah, I’m pretty sure people in China are feeling pretty good about their country’s development:
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. www.nber.org/system/files/…/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) semanticscholar.org/…/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b…
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2…
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. www.nytimes.com/…/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Which were rooted in domestic industry and professional services, not extractionary practices targeting populations abroad.
The reality is that it’s both.
Western state control of the Global South has eroded with the outsourcing of US domestic industry abroad - particularly in the wake of the 1980s, when industry transplanted itself to the South Pacific.
That’s just a false narrative.
But even outside of this fact, the Scandinavian states are nearly non-existent in western foreign policy.
Scandinavian states participate in the plunder just like every other western bloc country. My cat can’t doesn’t get much say in how my house is run either, but it does benefit none the less.
The US actively embargoed Soviet States starting with the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1951.
USSR had an entire bloc around it and plenty of non aligned countries to trade with. US embargoes clearly didn’t prevent USSR from being able to trade and to exploit countries if it chose to. The relations USSR developed with its partners were of a profoundly different kind than the ones western imperial powers have with the countries they subjugate today. The whole discussion here is regarding the exploitative nature of the relationship between the west and the global majority.
Social democracy creates public institutions that control the means of production within their fields. But the public institutions tend to be confined to education, health care, transport and other civil services. They don’t extend out to the industrial wing of the economy.
Social democracy can have a slight short term impact in these domains, the benefits however are never permanent and end up being rolled back in times of regular capitalist crises.
So if you want meaningful democracy, you’re going to be doing some social democracy at some point in your transition.
Social democracy isn’t part of any transition, it’s a mechanism that props up current capitalist relations.
Freaking out at people who organize towards publicly financed colleges and hospitals and calling them evil imperialists will do nothing to advance the cause of public ownership in the industrial sector.
But we’re no longer in the short term. Scandinavian social democracy has been ongoing since the 60s.
Right, the standard of living is declining all across the empire, including Scandinavia. The difference is that there were stronger social safety nets erected at the peak, so the decline hasn’t hit as hard as other places, such as US, with more shaky safety nets.
This has been less and less true since the 90s, as the western states become heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports.
Not really, the west has continued to dominate the global south, and has a massive military presence across the globe. Western companies are extracting resources from Africa and other places at record pace today.
Scandinavian social democracy has nothing to do with American / East Asian materials extraction patterns.
Of course it does, all the material good such as appliances, phones, laptops, TVs, and so on are produced using resources and labour done predominantly in the global south.
And the whole reason we’re seeing countries increasingly preferring China to the west is precisely because China offers mutually beneficial relations as opposed to exploitative ones the west imposes.
Cuba’s trade practices are strictly regulated by the American Navy and Coast Guard.
You ignored my point that USSR was not under these restrictions and did not behave in the way you suggest. Given that Cuba being modelled on USSR politically, there is every reason to expect that Cuba would not behave in such a way either even if it was not under a blockade.
At which point they had to reorganize and reestablish new trade ties in order to rebuild their living standards. But this had to do with access to developed industrial capital, not the exploitation of labor through imperial expansion.
Again, the point here was that USSR was able to have positive mutually beneficial relations with their partners as opposed to exploitative ones the west imposes on weaker countries.
Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.
It’s not possible to have any meaningful democracy when the means of production are owned privately. And foreign policy is very obviously influenced by this fact. To give you a concrete example, let’s say you have a factory that’s owned privately by a capitalist. The owner wants to reduce operating costs and increase profits. They have an incentive to move production to a cheaper labour market where they can exploit the workers more than they can at home. This creates a direct incentive for capitalists to colonize other countries and exploit them. On the other hand, let’s say the same factory is cooperatively owned by the workers. They would have no incentive to move the factory to a cheaper labour market because they’d lose their jobs at that point. The incentive for imperialism is directly related to the economic system.
Stopping NATO expansion would be an absurd demand if Russia did not have the power to stop do so by force which is what it’s now doing. Russia gave NATO a choice of either stopping expansion to its borders, or resolving the situation by force. NATO chose to resolve the situation by force. The whole narrative that Putin started the war and nobody else is beyond infantile because it just ignores all the history and geopolitical context pretending as if this was some random event that happened out of the blue and for no logical reason.
NATO has maintained a policy of might makes right since the fall of USSR, it has invaded and razed numerous countries over the past few decades, and now it’s run into a country that will no longer tolerate an aggressive military alliance on its borders.