SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
“Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back.”
Didn’t these ghouls put massive tariffs on Chinese EV’s and solar panels? How the fuck is that helping?
Oh, okay tankie, I guess you just don’t understand how protectionist measures work, but that’s unsurprising as communists never even understand Economics 101. They boost US industry by encouraging domestic prod–
Will these protectionist measures work? While the previous tariff measures did reduce the number of Chinese solar panels coming to the US (with an 86% drop over the 2012-2020 period), the billions in subsidies, from first Obama and then Biden, did not revitalise the US solar industry. On the contrary, the American global market share of the solar industry has considerably decreased since the original tariffs were placed — from 9% in 2010 to 2% today. Meanwhile, China’s share of the industry rose from 59% to 78%. There’s no reason to believe that the recent tariff increase will reverse this trend. There’s even less hope that they will help spur a domestic EV industry.
…
It is thus no surprise that while the US government tries to block Chinese EV imports with tariffs, US firms are trying to recapture the EV market by licensing the superior technology of lead Chinese firms! Ford (in Michigan) and Tesla (in Nevada) are partnering with China’s CATL to make batteries. CATL says that it has structured its licensing deal with Ford so that it is compliant with “foreign entity of concern” rules. For its part, Tesla already uses Chinese BYD cells in Germany; Ford and GM use BYD batteries. Even Trump doesn’t like the idea of a ‘great wall’ against Chinese FDI in America. Speaking at an Ohio rally in March, he signalled an openness to Chinese firms building plants “in Michigan, in Ohio, in South Carolina”—so long as they were prepared to employ American workers.
…
US manufacturing hasn’t seen productivity growth in 17 years. That makes it increasingly impossible for the US to compete in key areas, and Biden’s ‘industrial policy’ will fail to deliver unless it can end that stagnation. China’s manufacturing sector is now the dominant force in world production and trade. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined.
okay, well, look. it’s actually very unfair to draw upon the history of uh, 14 years ago. what really matters here is that china is 1984 orwell 429,024,902 dead in tinyman square mao killed 1000 billion ughyurs.
watching the (particularly liberal) media manufacturing consent in real time against the sitting US president whom they are ostensibly on the same side of is really fascinating.
definitely feels like the tension between the people who were full pro-Biden and those who were more anxious about him but willing to go along with it so long as he didn’t shit the bed too hard has finally reached the critical point of a visible schism and they’re battling it out using the traditional propaganda techniques usually reserved for America’s enemies. forcing people to make statements by first lying by saying that they’re about to make a statement on a difficult subject and then even when it’s denied, the expectation is still on that person to make a statement and they look weak and cowardly if they don’t, etc.
I honestly have no predictions, to use Christman’s hinge points terminology this all feels fairly underdetermined and either side could win
They’ve learned that Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King got sent to prison and then taken the most baffling lesson from it.
makes a lot of sense; their views of those figures are filtered through the same state propaganda apparatus that they’re protesting. “After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
Nelson Mandela does violent acts in opposition to apartheid -> sent to prison -> case becomes famous around the world because his supporters support him due to his commitment to the cause including his willingness to engage in violence to achieve the end of apartheid -> is eventually released and apartheid ends -> western propaganda purposefully removes the history of violence that got them in prison from public consciousness -> people, now unaware of that violent past, think that merely going to prison is some revolutionary act which will rally the public in support of them -> nothing happens when they go to prison, nobody cares -> either repeat this because they don’t know any better because, again, that violent history is still unknown to them, OR they experience disillusionment from politics and go grill (and probably become conservatives)
the history of western leftism is a long series of people becoming radicalized but still being alienated from their communities, learning that the only effective strategy for creating revolution is the difficult, painstaking, boring work of creating organizations, unions, etc inside their communities and linking up to form national networks which can challenge the capitalist state, then saying “nah, that shit sucks and sounds boring and scary, I don’t wanna do that. can’t I just do an adventurism and/or be sent to prison in a protest and/or become a martyr for the cause? if I’m in prison or dead then I don’t have to do shit and I’m seen as inherently good within the Western Christian paradigm and I like that” the only people who have escaped this process are those who are essentially forced to do this hard and scary work due to their minority status, like the Black Panthers. if they give up, they can’t just go grill like white (cis hetero neurotypical etc) people can, they’ll still be living under acute oppression.
anybody remember all the nonsense in US state propaganda outlets about how Putin or Xi are insulated from bad news due to the fear of punishment of reporting that bad news and so have an extremely biased view of reality? it was all, unsurprisingly, projection, given the recent news about how Biden only listens to his family and a tiny circle of advisors and ignores everybody else
Hillary Clinton was a major proponent in the overthrow of Gaddafi.
Libya was actually one of the best-performing countries in Africa under his socialist leadership (perhaps “socialist” isn’t a totally correct term; he was… unfriendly to communists and didn’t side with the USSR during the Cold War, but in practice there are similarities between his policies and socialist ones), but his anti-imperialist stance and material support for anti-US groups brought sanctions to Libya. This was especially problematic given that the socialist policies that Gaddafi enacted were funded largely by oil, and so sanctions on that oil was a critical weakness. Things deteriorated inside Libya during the 80s/90s but eventually Libya and the West came to an agreement to open things back up. Now in a post-USSR world and concurrent with US wars in the Middle East not far from him, opportunities for supporting anti-imperialist militant groups were rarer, so he focussed more on a grand project of African political and economic unity against American imperialism, such as the creation of an singular African currency which would have been called the “gold dinar”, as well as a single African passport and a singular African army. These efforts towards de-dollarization are, in hindsight, among the first rumblings of the dollar’s downfall in the period after the 2008/9 financial crash (authors such as Radhika Desai were writing about how this crisis portended a coming multipolarity a full 8 years before the Russia-Ukraine war, when serious discussions of it began).
The Arab Spring was quickly used against him by America, with NATO offering their support to anti-Gaddafi rebels as well as bombing factories. When Gaddafi was murdered, Libya plunged into a civil war that rages to this very day, creating widespread poverty in the chaotic aftermath and, indeed, slavery. While Obama and others in the establishment have expressed some regret over how things turned out, it’s clearly not serious enough regret to impact policy, given that the US still loves to spread war and bomb countries that oppose them.
The message here is to adopt a more internationalist stance. Many liberals in the general public are unfamiliar with the atrocious foreign policies that many politicians implicitly or explicitly support. The most monstrous liberals even support those atrocities. If you ignore these policies, one could almost convince themselves that Clinton and others weren’t really that bad; sure, a little old-fashioned, a little too capitalist, but the only reason why you could be filled with utter hatred of her is because of a Russian disinformation campaign funded by Trump or whatever. Knowing her history reveals her to be a heartless ghoul up there with Kissinger. Biden has a similar history, but there’s even less of an excuse for supporting him, because many of his worst policies were and are domestic and the genocide he is supporting is literally ongoing. And lesser evilism is an unviable strategy; we’ve been trying it for decades and things have consistently gotten worse. The implicit argument is that we have to endure the lesser evil for now, but at some point the government/president can be pushed left and things will actually start improving rather than just getting worse slower. This point has never arrived despite many years of trying, and people versed in Marxism and leftist theory more generally are completely unsurprised about this, while (usually white) liberals continue to fall for the trap and derangedly claim that you’re actually racist if you don’t vote for the person who is building walls on the border in a continuation of Trump’s policies, boosting police budgets, and bombing countries that are trying to stop the genocide of 2 million Palestinians.
there are quite a few genuine critiques of him. you do have to be careful to not attribute too much to him - analyses of how financialization interacts with capitalism predate him by decades (Lenin was talking about it in his day, for instance) so he’s not the Modern Marx bringing shining new analyses of capitalism to the fore or anything. I think his near-total rejection of the USSR is a big point against him, and he has other reactionary tendencies (he has shown up on fascist websites IIRC - just doing his regular spiel that he does with leftist and liberal people too, as far as I know, but even so).
he also seems to espouse a very iffy view that industrial capitalism returning would be a big benefit in-and-of-itself (or a view that would be effectively equivalent to that, given his trot views), when we shouldn’t lose sight that we oppose capitalism in general, it’s just that we hate financial capitalism because of the landlords and rentierism that brings as well as industrial capitalism for the traditional reasons that big communist figures hated capitalism for. the theory is that a return to industrial capitalism in the West would mean that workers would be more able to seize the means of production because right now there’s not really a lot of like, weapons factories and steel factories etc to seize and use in a revolution, but there’s also the thirdworldist take that no matter what form of capitalism is happening in the West, it doesn’t matter because there’s an imperialist relationship and that relationship must end before revolution becomes viable in the West (and our job as westerners is to weaken our countries from within in preparation for eventual revolution). I guess I side more with the latter take than the former, especially because western reindustrialization seems essentially impossible anyway, so it’s a useless hypothetical
so there’s a lot to dislike about Hudson, I know that Roderic Day and others really doesn’t like him, but I think it is possible to take what’s good and ditch what’s bad. he has takes I agree with on Russia and China, at least, which can be disappointingly difficult to find in the western left.
