Economics Explained has a massive neoliberal, pro-western bias which makes his analysis very questionable to say the least.
Their latest video about my country France for example is 18 minutes of him yapping about why akshually it’s a good thing that Macron is taking away our retirement pension, during which he says such absurdities as unironically arguing that France is kinda socialist.
Your reading of the situation is correct. There is a few reasons why this is the case:
Imperialism allows western countries’ capitalists to exploit the cheaper resources and labor of some economically less developed nations and acquire super-profits on top through unequal exchange, since doing this is much more profitable than producing industrial goods in the west directly, western industrial capitalists have a huge incentive to move their factories to the third world. This has the effect of de-industrializing the west itself, and has gotten so bad that some European countries like the UK can barely even produce their own steel anymore, which is very bad given how important steel is to a lot of industries.
This makes the west more and more dependent on supply lines they don’t necessarily control in order to get the resources and goods they need, in this situation the smart thing to do would be to diversify your supplier countries do reduce any ones’ leverage over your country. But…
The US has been hard at work making sure Europe was dependent on them above anyone else for supplies.
They have also have been offering generous advantages to businesses who would de-localize to the US, aggravating the problem for their own profits.
This is part of the reasons why the US has been doing somewhat better than the rest of the west despite de-industrialization and financialization affecting them too, they’ve been sucking on Europe like a parasite to offset the problem ever so slightly.
As you’ve noted, most of the technological progress lately has been happening in the third world who has been catching up while the west seems to have lost it’s drive and is being overtaken. There are a lot of factors at play here but the main issue is the profit motive. A lot of research and a lot of things that are useful for a society aren’t profitable.
Take China’s high speed train network for example, it’s a very good thing for the peoples that there is such a good method of public transportation available, but it’s not profitable, the Chinese state is running it at a loss (offset by other income sources, but still). Because of that, such a good railway network would never be built in the west because the western companies and even governments are only interested in infrastructures if they bring in a profit.
An other example is renewable energy. For many years a lot of peoples have had and propagated this narrative that, since green tech is becoming cheaper, profit driven organizations would have an incentive to switch away from fossil energy, yet this hasn’t happened. Why? Because profit isn’t that simple.
Why can a business buy a pile of woof for 1$ and sell a chair made from the wood for 2$? Where do the added 1$ come from? It comes from work, they can take this chair made from 1$ worth of wood for 2$ because it’s not just a pile of wood anymore, something happened to it, someone used their time and energy to turn the wood into a chair. If it was possible to use some kind of spell to turn wood into chairs without effort, competition would drive the price down to the value of the dead materials that makes it: 1$, and the profit rate in the industry would be 0$ or very close to 0.
This, in a nutshell, is why cheaper green tech hasn’t pushed corporation to transition to clean energy. Sure, it’s cheaper, but it’s also vastly less profitable because green tech like solar panels and wind turbines are much more automatized than fossil fuel which mean less peoples who’s work add value to each unit of energy produced which mean proportionally less profit. This is why the green transition hasn’t happened and won’t anytime soon as long as the west is driven by the profit motive above all else.
The problem is the profit motive and private property. The capitalists shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they want with the industries and infrastructures society needs, taking them to a different country whenever they feel like it, taking jobs away from us to exploit less developed nations, etc…
What needs to be done is to kick out the neoliberals, nationalize a bunch of important industries, restrict what capitalists are allowed to do with their private properties and moving toward abolishing private property altogether.
And the way to move toward this goal is to learn political theory and start organizing. Go to marginalized communities, poor peoples, even to the petty bourgeois not wealthy enough to move their business to the US and get left to die by the wealthier international bourgeoisie who are robbing their country, help them, listen to their problems and their complaints, help them understand where these problems come from and why the right’s analysis of the situation isn’t correct, and build a democratic popular movement able and willing to take power, by force if necessary.
“The peoples who disagree with me aren’t real akshually sweaty, it’s all a conspiracy from [insert whatever person/country lib decided to hate this week].”
Isn’t you radlib’s whole shtick that you’re supposedly better than the MAGA Qanon crowd in every ways? If so you should at least try to pretend to have better arguments than them lol. This is legitimately pathetic.
The fact that you dogged the question with a thought terminating cliché instead of elaborating as was asked of you is a perfect illustration of the fact that the only troll here is you, and that you are nothing but a sad clown with no actual arguments 🤡
Ha, yes. I’m sure that will work out this time.
Washington’s protectionism
More like Washington’s begging daddy bourgeois to please stop exporting all the industry to the third world and exporting back home cheap goods.
Not anymore but it was until the 90s
France become the first country to explicitly include the right to terminate a pregnancy in its constitution.
No, Yugoslavia did it in the 70s.
Y’all are… tiring… I’m just gonna copypaste my answer to an other comment of the same thread:
Y’all keep saying that but I have yet to see any of you point any actual material difference between Trump’s presidency vs during Biden’s presidency.
What changed after the transition from Trump to Biden except rhetoric? As far as I know, oppressed minorities kept having their rights taken away 1 by 1 the same as before, police kept being over funded the same as before, migrants from the southern border kept being detained in literal concentration camps at the border the same as before, things kept getting more financially difficult for the average American every day the same as before, big polluter corporations kept polluting without consequences the same as before, the military budget kept getting ramped up every year the same as before, what is different in the real world outside the clown-show that is your political system? Where the fuck does that “not good but definitely better” goes when you stop going by the words of these known serial liars for to seconds and take a peak at what as changed in the actual lives of the American people?
The only difference I see is that the Republicans is taking an active approach and pass laws directly whereas the Democrats is more passive and like to let the Republicans and other far right parties pass laws while standing there awkwardly and pretending they can do nothing about it.
lemmygrad users: use a standard lemmy features that literally every user has access to
deranged lib user: “this is clearly a conspiracy to take over the world site”
Y’all keep saying that but I have yet to see any of you point any actual material difference between Trump’s presidency vs during Biden’s presidency.
What changed after the transition from Trump to Biden except rhetoric? As far as I know, oppressed minorities kept having their rights taken away 1 by 1 the same as before, police kept being over funded the same as before, migrants from the southern border kept being detained in literal concentration camps at the border the same as before, things kept getting more financially difficult for the average American every day the same as before, big polluter corporations kept polluting without consequences the same as before, the military budget kept getting ramped up every year the same as before, what is different in the real world outside the clown-show that is your political system? Where the fuck does that “not good but definitely better” goes when you stop going by the words of these known serial liars for to seconds and take a peak at what as changed in the actual lives of the American people?
The only difference I see is that the Republicans is taking an active approach and pass laws directly whereas the Democrats is more passive and like to let the Republicans and other far right parties pass laws while standing there awkwardly and pretending they can do nothing about it.
Only after the Nazi’s ally attacked the US first prompting Germany to declare war on the US.
If arming Ukraine does not substantially impact Ukraine’s ability to fight, how does it prolong the war?
This is not exactly what I said. I didn’t say that it didn’t impact Ukraine’s ability to fight, I said it doesn’t change the outcome of the war.
Of course, arming Ukraine adds difficulty for Russia, but it only at most delay Russia getting what they want since because of the way the war is going and the west’s inability to outproduce Russia, Russia has time on their side. Russia can largely afford to just wait until western weapon supply to Ukraine can’t keep up with theirs anymore, which is exactly what they have been doing since their retreat from the siege of Kiev in 2022, that’s why the front line has barely moved since then, Russia know they are in a position where time will do most of the work for them.
A pretty fair point but I still think you are neglecting a few things.
Firstly, while according to this study by the Kiev international institute of sociology most Ukrainians do still support the war it also indicate that the portion that peace at the cost of losing territory is definitely growing since the start of 2023, if I were to try giving admittedly loose and uncertain bound based on those numbers and assuming the rate of change don’t shrink, I would expect this portion to reach 50% of the population 2 months from now at the soonest, 11 months from now at the latest.
An other related thing to consider is how accurately is the state of the war depicted in Ukrainian media? A state at war that don’t plan to surrender has incentives to make their war effort as good as possible and the enemy’s war effort as bad as possible and Ukraine is obviously no exception.
Depending on how distorted the narrative about the war is, these figures could be drastically different from what they would be if the Ukrainian public got a more neutral account of the war.
So do the Ukrainian want to continue fighting? For now yes, but I don’t believe it will last.
Your leverage point is moot in my opinion.
As I said, it is a fact that Russia is winning the war and that Ukraine has decisively failed to push them back before the Russian entrenchment in their position and the dwindling military supply to Ukraine made doing so impossible going forward.
I’m not saying that Russia could just roll over to Kiev any day if they wanted, that would obviously be absurd, but the military situation in Ukraine, the state of western weapon manufacturing compared to Russia’s and the sheer difference in manpower reserve and moral make it such that even if the west threw every last weapon in their stockpile at Ukraine, it would not change significantly what a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev could look like. I repeat therefor once again that the ONLY thing continuing to supply Ukraine with weapons is increasing the death toll on both side and prolonging the was for nothing, it’s literally not doing anything more, let alone helping Ukraine in any tangible way.
You are right, though, that most of the aid to Ukraine is humanitarian and not military, and those absolutely should continue, but that’s one reason more to not prolong the war uselessly, the end of the war would make helping the Ukrainian people way easier and would allow Ukraine to start rebuilding.
Literally the same thought terminating logic fucking flatearthers use.
“I have literally have no counter argument so instead considering what you said I will gaslight myself and others into thinking I don’t have to by declaring out loud, without any evidence, that you are paid by NASA/Russia and imply that therefore everything you say can be dismissed without paying any mind because it is ontologically dishonest.”
This take is both idealistic and ignorant of the situation on the ground.
It’s clear to anyone paying attention that Ukraine has lost any shot they had at driving Russia out in 2023, assuming they even had any shot at it in the first place. As shown by the evolution of the front line in 2023, Russia is now deeply entrenched in it’s current position and Ukraine, even back when Western military support was at it’s maximum, is unable to make them move from them in any significant way. Meanwhile Russia has had the time to adapt to western sanctions and the economy not only stabilized but is even growing quite a lot, especially the arms industry.
You need to come to terms with the fact that Ukraine won’t be getting back the occupied territory. With Russia now largely outproducing the west on military equipment and the west having pretty much depleted their stockpile, Ukraine, who is largely dependent to western military aid as their own military industrial base is far from solid, will unravel sooner rather than later. The ONLY thing sending them weapons is doing right now is prolonging the war and getting more Ukrainian killed for literally nothing.
Getting more thousands of Ukrainian killed because of the delusion that they can somehow still drive Russia out at this point is not worth whatever territory they want to get back.
Continuing to send billions of dollars of weapons to them won’t do any good to the Ukrainian peoples, and you aren’t the saviour of Ukraine you think you are by cheering for this.
What would do good for the Ukrainian people is suing for peace and starting to rebuild whatever territory they have left.
Same peoples who laugth at MAGA peoples for their deep state conspiracy theory. No self awareness.
He just fired him outright without any kind of precautions? Do Zelensky not realize the situation he’s in? Unless Syrsky can quickly win a large enough support in the military that decision has the potential to badly backfire for Zelensky. With more support than Zelensky among both the civilians and the soldiers, Zaluzhny is in an ideal position to pull a coup or at least some kind of mutiny.
In a move that surprise no one, Ukraine blamed Russia for the downing of a Russian plane shot by the Ukrainian military.
Why say I could and not do it? If you have sources, give them. You haven’t linked any source whatsoever in this entire thread to back up your wild claims.