• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Living in the imperial core, eating the imperial slop, but claiming we’ve got no interest in the imperial frontier…

    That opium didn’t import itself

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        This isn’t criticism. You’re suggesting “the people did not win” when Americans absolutely enjoy material benefits from our relationship with our satraps.

        Very different to say “I criticize how my electronics and energy are produced” and to say “I just don’t see any benefit in our relationship to cheap silicon chips and fossil fuels”. Again, that opium didn’t import itself.

        • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.netM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          This is criticism. The whatever “material benefits” the American working class “enjoy” comes at the overwhelming expense of the fruits of their surplus labor value that they are not entitled to to be used in exploiting the “free” markets of other nations for their resources at the most minimal costs and in turn taking and transforming those commodities into finished commodities to sell back to the workers in the exploiter countries at artificially inflated prices in order to scrape back the financial losses that are paid out to labor in the form of their paltry wages that barely sustain their existence enough to reproduce the cycle.

          Capital very clearly won the First Gulf War. They won in Kosovo. They flattened Grenada and Panama like pancakes. They won the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan easily, and dominated these countries for decades before the sheer cost of occupying such a remote territory ultimately outweighed the profits. They have occupied South Korea uncontested for 70 years and reduced North Korea to a hermit kingdom.

          Capital pretty unequivocally won the Cold War.

          In the end of this vicious cycle, the only winners are the capitalists in their fetishistic pursuit of wealth.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        the surplus labor of the US worker was funnelled directly into defense contractors and then lit on fir

        I’m a Houstonian and I watched this city’s economy expand significantly during the war’s execution.

        I know people who personally profited from the Pentagon’s spending glut. Haliburton HQ is a short drive from my house and one could argue my mortgage payment on a postage stamp property reflects the enormous real estate price inflation resulting from all that federal money flooding into the region.

        Nevermind what Iraq did for the cost of energy, which directly benefits my city’s native industry.

        Iraq was, in a certain international geopolitical Sense, a labor disciplining war. It guaranteed that energy profits would continue to flow into the West.

        One could argue this fight with Russia is a similar exercise in disciplining a rival energy exporter.