i wish no harm to american ruling class, my enemy is the american people

op admits it was a joke originally, but says after witnessing the contempt of the american people for gaza, is sad to say his joke was correct (unless i’m misreading this)

the user posting_forever writes “yeah well welcome to what happens when your country bombs and threatens half of the earth. feels pretty shitty, huh?”

barbarism critic continues their thread “If you have posted this as a joke that’s one thing, but there’s wayyyy too much of this sentiment expressed sincerely on here and as a signifier of being the “most radical”. It is not! It is poorly disguised misanthropy and nihilism!”

one person say that barbarism critic is “the brianna wu of 2025. Remember kids I called it”

i guess there is some very real perceived material interests of americans to continue the genocide in palestine, like the christian zionists, or the liberals who want to continue the american dominance via global hegemony, and the labor aristocrats in america who want the treats.

i was listening to rev left radio “The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism” with Torkil Lauesen and, probably gonna butcher it - but my understanding is that as we enter a multipolar world, the americans will not be able to blatantly exploit the over-exploited nations (global south) leading to increasingly deteriorating conditions in the imperial core, which will set the grounds very clearly between socialism and barbarism?

and we are to organize and help alleviate the woes of the people which also serve as a way of building relations that lead to building power via organizations.

(iirc the bolsheviks has above ground orgs and underground orgs for the law breaking stuff)

eh i dunno just over analyzing what do you peeps think.

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    5 hours ago

    Here’s the thing: yes, a worker in the imperial core is exploited. You might be getting paid $14/hr to produce $25/hr of value for a corporation. This is how capitalist production works, we all know it and we all want to abolish it. But there’s a few things that, from the perspective of a periphery worker, are incredibly relevant here:

    • The vast majority of the productive labor in the world economy actually happens in the periphery and semi-periphery nations. The most relevant sector of economic production within the core is capital intensive production of technological goods and weapons. So it’s the periphery that is actually feeding* the world and producing the world’s clothes. (*Of course, there is plenty of agrarian production within the core too, but it often relies on the exploitation of undocumented migrant labor or just explicit slave labor through prison slavery, which I argue is significantly distinct from the capitalist mode of production)
    • The US dollar’s value is tied to the circulation of the natural resources and exploited labor previously discussed, not the United States’ production. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency and as long as a supermajority of critical resources are traded in USD, every country will want to export goods in exchange for dollars, even if the US printed trillions and trillions of dollars. And US private banks have done exactly that, giving US consumers a ridiculous amount of buying power to consume the commodities produced abroad.
    • Due to the hugely inflated value of a US dollar, a worker in the imperial core that gets paid in dollars, British Pounds, or Euro is simply not in anywhere near the same league as a Sri Lankan seamstress that’s earning the equivalent of $270 a year to sew clothes that will sell for 40x that amount when they get shipped to the US.

    Is it in the seamstress’ interest in any way for imperial core workers to become politically organized and overthrow capitalism in their countries? Yes, of course! But with the incentive structure at hand, labor unions in the core aren’t political vanguards attempting to overthrow capital, they’re willing accomplices in imperialism who want a bigger slice of the pie. The question should then be, how can we get imperial core workers to organize against their own best interest to overthrow imperialism, a system that benefits them?

    • inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      29 minutes ago

      (*Of course, there is plenty of agrarian production within the core too, but it often relies on the exploitation of undocumented migrant labor or just explicit slave labor through prison slavery, which I argue is significantly distinct from the capitalist mode of production)

      No it isn’t. Capitalism would of never existed as it does without slavery. The capitalists would enslave the whole world if they could get away with it. And look at how debt is used globally… not all forms of slavery are chattel slavery / trans Atlantic slave trade kind of slavery.

      • The US dollar’s value is tied to the circulation of the natural resources and exploited labor previously discussed, not the United States’ production. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency and as long as a supermajority of critical resources are traded in USD, every country will want to export goods in exchange for dollars, even if the US printed trillions and trillions of dollars. And US private banks have done exactly that, giving US consumers a ridiculous amount of buying power to consume the commodities produced abroad.

      And that is backed by the US military which US taxpayers pay out the ass for instead of getting nice things like healthcare or higher education or high speed rail, etc. and we’re not represented by our politicians, our whole system is totally rigged in favor of a wealthy minority who manipulate the elections, the media, and the politicians themselves.

      I think a real majority actually don’t agree with our imperialism but due to structural issues are powerless to do anything meaningful about it. And class consciousness is minimal. More than half the country is at like a sixth grade reading level thanks to the imperial core being intentionally rotted out so the capitalists can amass even more wealth because somehow their billions are not already enough.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        10 minutes ago

        No it isn’t. Capitalism would of never existed as it does without slavery. The capitalists would enslave the whole world if they could get away with it. And look at how debt is used globally… not all forms of slavery are chattel slavery / trans Atlantic slave trade kind of slavery.

        Capitalism doesn’t just mean capitalists accumulating capital, it also involves a specific social relation between capitalists and workers. The American antebellum South wasn’t capitalist (in fact, it’s often the premiere example of primitive accumulation of capital, a.k.a pre-capitalism), and the shift from the slavery/'modern feudal mode of production to industrial capitalism was a big qualitative change that caused the American civil war. I’d argue that the economic relation of modern day undocumented immigrants also doesn’t fit into the same mode of capitalist production relations. This isn’t really germane to my point though, I think there’s plenty of room to disagree and still end up at more or less the same conclusion as long as we can agree that the workers inside the core who are doing a lot of the “dirty work” in slaughterhouses and farms are not just quantitatively different to the rest of the proletariat due to compensation, but also qualitatively different in their ability (or lack thereof) to organize and wield any kind of political power. They are an underbelly that the rest of the imperial core proletarians don’t perceive as members of the same class.

        And that is backed by the US military which US taxpayers pay out the ass for instead of getting nice things like healthcare or higher education or high speed rail, etc. and we’re not represented by our politicians, our whole system is totally rigged in favor of a wealthy minority who manipulate the elections, the media, and the politicians themselves.

        You’re completely wrong here. The US taxpayer doesn’t pay for crap. This economic model you’re thinking of where US government spending is financed by taxpayers is a myth perpetuated by neoliberal ideologues, and it’s somehow pervasive even in leftist circles. There’s a lot I can say about currency and Modern Monetary Theory, but it’s a very broad topic, the main takeaway is that when you use fiat currency the point of taxes is not to finance government spending, but to limit the political power of different social classes. The US Treasury is totally free to keep bankrolling US military spending and other subsidies to the imperialist class precisely because the US dollar’s value has nothing to do with it being a balanced reserve currency or anything like that, that ship has long since sailed since the Bretton Woods system was abandoned. The US will just keep growing its national debt as a service to the international rentier class who can build enormous amounts of wealth by collecting interest payments on US treasury bonds, but if the US Federal Reserve wasn’t privately controlled they could just as easily eliminate all that debt in one day by minting a coin worth however many trillions of dollars. They could operate their military without taxing the American worker 1 cent.

        I’ll leave you with a couple of links because I recognize it’s a bit of a paradigm shift to see that US government spending is not at all financed by taxes, to the point that it seems illogical.