yogthos

yogthos, 6 months ago

Nordic countries have enjoyed a high standard of living built on the brutal colonial exploitation of the global majority.

yogthos, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

The whole western economy runs on cheap labour and resource extraction from the colonized countries. Nordic countries have very little industry and are certainly nowhere close to being self sufficient in any sense.

Scandinavian social democracy only seems to work because of the imperialism they practice on third world countries and the benefits they reaped from European colonialism. It’s just a slightly better distribution of the imperialist plunder from 3rd world nations. They never would have been rich if they didn’t exploit workers and resources in developing nations along with forcing terribly unfair trading terms upon them. Socialism actually seeks to liberate the world from all forms of oppression whereas Scandinavian social democracy merely ships it off to 3rd world countries (which houses 85% of the world’s population). Success of social democracy is not possible without inflicting inhumane suffering and oppression upon people in the global south:

telesurenglish.net/…/Scandinavias-Covert-Role-in-…

scroll.in/…/hitchhiking-imperialism-the-case-of-s…

theguardian.com/…/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countri…

aljazeera.com/…/the-dark-side-of-the-nordic-model

yogthos, 6 months ago

meanwhile in the real world

• telesurenglish.net/…/Scandinavias-Covert-Role-in-…
• scroll.in/…/hitchhiking-imperialism-the-case-of-s…
• theguardian.com/…/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countri…
• aljazeera.com/…/the-dark-side-of-the-nordic-model

yogthos, 6 months ago

explained in more detail here lemmy.ml/comment/6591447

yogthos, 6 months ago

The Nordic model is often thrown out as an alternative to Marxism. The argument is that Nordic countries managed to create a capitalist society without exploitation.

yogthos, 6 months ago

A great deal of western economy runs on exploitation of Latin America and Africa where western companies commit crimes against humanity on the daily basis.

To say the US democratic model or the Middle Eastern monarchy model are predicated on imperialism would be far more accurate.

Scandinavians are part of the US empire, and Scandinavian companies are directly involved in exploitation happening in developing countries. US does provide the military might to back this exploitation to be sure, but the resource and labour extraction is done by all western countries.

The benefit of the Scandinavian model is in how it delivers professional health care and education labor. That’s the primary appeal of the system and it has nothing to do with cheap foreign imports.

Except that it does since Scandinavia is not a closed economy. This the whole point here, much of the labor needed to make Scandinavia run happens in the countries the empire subjugates. You have to look at this in a holistic fashion accounting for all the labor needed to make these economies operate as opposed to just the labor that happens domestically.

Success of social democracy is not predicated on the success of a consumerist market economy. Cuba is an excellent counterexample. It implements a raft of policies that are comparable to Scandinavian social services and reaps enormous economic benefits despite being entirely cut off from imperialist trade and cheap labor.

Sure, the positive aspects of Scandinavian economies aren’t exclusive to Scandinavia, and Cuba is indeed a far more principled example of socialist policies in action.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Undeniably. But the benefit of this exploitation accrues first and foremost to the ownership class.

Of course, but the conditions of the working class are also improved by imperialism and that’s the reason there is sufficient support for ruling class policies from the working majority in the imperial core.

They’re not importing a bunch of Global South doctors and teachers to get the cost of their socialized programs down.

My point was that many of the stable goods consumed by the people in Scandinavia are either partially or entirely sourced in colonized countries. This eliminates a lot of the hard labor jobs in Scandinavia that would otherwise be necessary.

I’m not arguing that the proletariat are the primary beneficiaries of colonialism, I’m just pointing out that people in western countries enjoy a higher standard of living because of it. And this is a necessary part of the social contract that keeps capitalists in power.

Cuba isn’t “principled”, its “embargoed”. Cubans would be more than happy to get the Scandinavian tier of treats if they were on offer.

Cuba would not exploit other countries if it wasn’t embargoed because exploitation isn’t inherent in Cuban economic system as it is under capitalism.

yogthos, 6 months ago

The problem is that exploitation is largely just exported to the countries that the west subjugate. Plenty of exploitation in places like Africa and Latin America is currently happening in order to produce cheap goods people in Europe consume. This is the kind of stuff that props things up theguardian.com/…/mars-nestle-and-hershey-to-face…

yogthos, 6 months ago

I think that’s highly debatable. If nothing else, imperialism undermines domestic labor power, as domestic workers are devalued at the industrial level and shuttled off into police/military industries where they are more easily controlled from the top.

Of course, undermining labor power is the point, but in the short term overall standard of living is raised. Eventually, the empire ends up hollowing out its core because the cost of maintaining the colonies starts to outpace the plunder. This is the point we’re reaching now with standard of living starting to crumble in the west. However, people in the west enjoyed a far higher standard of living than people in the countries the west has been subjugating for many decades on end. This fact can’t be understated.

These consumer goods exist within the private market. Imports undermine domestic labor and retail work is almost entirely privatized. There is no notable distinction between a Swedish democratic socialist shopping at ICA and a British constitutional monarchist shopping at Tesco. They both receive the same capitalist-driven benefits. Neither system is predicated on imperially supplied imports.

If you look at the supply chains for practically any goods, such as cell phones, you’ll see that most of the resources needed to produce these goods are extracted in places like Africa using slave labor. Western countries don’t even have this wealth of natural resources to lean on. They are robbing the rest of the world of these resources while subjugating the people of the colonized countries. The life of a Swedish democratic socialist or a British constitutional monarchist would be wildly different without the plunder the empire is doing.

The benefits of imperialism - particularly in the wake of the 21st century - do not appear to accrue to lay residents of these nations.

The empire is indeed starting to hollow itself out today, but we can’t ignore the history of how we got here. There are stages of development of the empire, and in the early stages most people living in imperial core did enjoy the benefits. As we get into later stages of the empire, the benefits are starting to fizzle for the majority.

If you showed up in Havana with a cargo ship full of H&M clothing and electronics produced in a Samsung sweatshop and cosmetics tested on adorable animals and gold jewelry mined out of a West African slave pit, plenty of Cubans would receive them happily. This is commodity fetishism in action. Nobody understands the blood and toil that made these surplus goods appear and relatively few people are able to reconcile the information with how they live their lives.

I’m not talking about individualistic liberal perspective here. I’m talking about how Cuba behaves as a nation and we can also look at how USSR behaved. USSR did not subjugate other nations the way the west does, and when it collapsed the standard of living in places like Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea also collapsed because they had a mutually beneficial relationship with USSR. When US empire collapses, the standard of living in the subjugated countries will rise. That’s the difference.

The Americans were wrong in the 1960s and again in the late 90s when they predicted the embargo would topple the Castro government. You’re wrong now. Democratic Socialism has nothing to do with Imperialist looting and plundering.

Democratic Socialism is just a the sheep’s clothing of imperialism.

yogthos, 6 months ago

And it’s the root cause vast majority of the time.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Nah, the problems are due to capitalist economic relations and systemic pressures these relations create in society.

yogthos, 6 months ago

People of Gaza are so lucky that it’s the lesser of the two evils facilitating their genocide.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Trump would’ve done the exact same thing. You’re not minimizing any damage your regime is facilitating a literal genocide. The fact that you’re keep trying to minimize this fact because it’s your fascist in office shows how utterly morally bankrupt you are.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Biden has continued all the same policies and has also dragged the world into a proxy war against Russia while continuing to escalate tensions with China. Biden is a lunatic whose actions continue to bring the world closer to a world war.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Even Ukrainians are now saying that it was the west that stopped negotiations last March aaronmate.net/…/ukraines-top-negotiator-confirms

Meanwhile, Stoltenberg finally admitted that the reason the war started was because of NATO expansion www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm#:~…

Meanwhile, people who put this all together are the ones running the empire, and as long as Americans keep voting for the lesser evil nothing’s going to change.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Let’s be real, if capitalists could make you work in your sleep, that’s just going to be added to your existing work. There’s zero chance it replaces 9-5. The reality is that we’ve already made stunning leaps in automation since the industrial revolution, but none of that translated into people working less.

Also, I’m not a neurologist, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that hijacking your sleep cycle that evolved over millions of years to allow your brain to rest in order to do work will likely have some spectacular negative consequences.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Exactly, every time we have a technological advancement that can be used to exploit people further, that’s inevitably how it ends up being used.

yogthos, 6 months ago

I feel personally attacked!

yogthos, 6 months ago

Sure, but it’s still more work than a web UI, and using a web UI is a lot more flexible. For example, say you want to render a chart or some other visualization. It’s trivial to do with a web UI, but can be a tricky problem with native widgets, especially if you want to keep the UX consistent across platforms. I agree that using React Native can work fine in a lot of cases, but I can also understand the appeal of using the web UI stack. Another aspect is likely familiarity, people use the tools they know, and if somebody is already comfortable with a particular ecosystem they’re likely to leverage it.

yogthos, 6 months ago

Youtubers being lazy and retouching content for clicks isn’t exactly a huge discovery. I don’t think that makes the content of the video any less interesting though.

yogthos, 6 months ago

yeah that’s a good point

yogthos, 6 months ago

I can think of one government that definitely surveils data that goes through Google servers.