Happy International Workers’ Day! Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
Matrix homeserver at genzedong.xyz. See this thread for information about our Matrix space. Discord here. I’ve been told the Discord server was shut down 😑
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
So what are the odds of US bourgeoisie jumping ship and just slapping a new label on themselves?
in what way?
Well right now, the richest people in the world (AFAIK) are USian. But it doesn’t appear that they have any sort of “patriotism” (for the lack of a better term) towards US as a country specifically. Rather, their loyalty is towards the system that allows their existence. They could move elsewhere, obtain new citizenship, perhaps even make some public statement criticizing the current government to gain some brownie points. After that - it’s back to business as usual, in a new place.
I’m sure they’ll try to hang on however they can for as long as possible, including moving to “emerging markets”, but when they can no longer instigate coups, steal resources, and abuse cheap labour, business as usual won’t be a possibility
These make comprador regimes easier, but there’s plenty of existing compradors to go around
British empire is still stealing, no?
Musk’s father abused labor in South Africa, then moved to USA and now Elon is doing the same there.
That’s basically what I mean. The “as long as possible” phase will only terminate after the worldwide socialist revolution, until then - does it truly matter which flag the bourgeoisie wave?
They need some way to materially support them, though. If they don’t have a foothold in a country, they can’t traffic arms, train terrorists, control the domestic media, etc.
Yes, but it’s barely a threat compared to what it used to be, and it’s becoming less and less influential with time
Yes, but at that time Amerika was the sole superpower, and that isn’t the case anymore. There also hasn’t been a time where a socialist country (China) was “in the lead” before, both in terms of domestic production and foreign policy. Capitalists can try to move to influential non-socialist countries like Russia, but I doubt they’ll be able to take over the government
Of course, capitalists won’t disappear until capitalism ends, but having a capitalist bloc doesn’t mean that imperialism will be able to continue (and that will hopefully speed up the rise of socialism in those countries as living standards fall). The flag they wave doesn’t really matter, but the dwindling possibility of imperialist exploitation does