/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Define "productivity"

Ok, quick question: what do you think triggers automation and mechanization?

>>2828647
Desire for higher profits triggers it. But high I.Qs and capable institutions actually enable it.(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>2828646
Physical material wealth produced per real labour hour of work.

>>2828652
False, it's actually high wages. And now you understand why certain countries have high automation rates while others don't.

>>2828641
Manufacturing is automated in first world countries but a lot of third world industry is extractive. It’s known as the resource curse where western/increasingly-far-eastern countries exploit the global south for all of its precious minerals and tropical agricultural land.

>>2828641
countries don't do anything because countries aren't people. The bourgeoisie exploit the proles. The idea that "countries" exploit people is just collectivizing the guilt of the bourgeoisie onto proles and turning class struggle into national/racial struggle. The idea being that if you buy a computer or something you exploited the prole who made it just as much as the bourgeoisie who bought the labor power did.

>>2828654
so are you saying rich country wages should be lower or poor country wages should be higher?

>>2828665
Why do you believe wages in countries outside of the imperial core are stagnating? You tell me.

>>2828653
For whom?

Person a plants seeds, person b harvests fruit, person c transports fruit, person d sells fruit. Which one has "produced the most wealth"?

>>2828666
stagnating in the sense that they stay at a low level.

>>2828666
You didn't answer my question but expect me to answer yours.

9.2.2 - Manufacturing employment as a proportion of total employment - 13th ICLS (%) - SL_TLF_MANF
US in 89th place
China in 1st place

>>2828680
You jumped the gun by asking two normative questions before we have even established the mechanism of exploitation. There are two more steps left, buddy.

You also have to explain to me how you think productivity is determined by neoliberal economists, how you think high wages came about in the imperial core and the aforementioned questions why wages in third world countries are currently stagnating. Here are the spoilers: productivity is just another misnomer, it's wages all the way down. How did wages increase in the first world? Mostly due to the Labor movement. What happens in third world countries whenever workers there try to raise the wage floor? 2004 coup in Haiti. In the end it all comes down to how much surplus workers get to keep.

>>2828654
Lmao ok Cockshitt. All capitalists have an interest in automation as long as it can save them in wage costs. This is a universal phenomenon. Companies in low-wage countries still employ a huge amount of labor. The low-wages are cancelled out by high number of employees per unit of physical material produced.

If this was not true, then the gigantic increase in automation across the third-world over the past decades, not just in China but everywhere except some African and Middle-Eastern countries, would not have happened.

>>2828655
Maybe 50 years ago. Today many third world countries produce manufactured finished goods. And automation in the third world is rapidly increasing.

>>2828666
>>2828668
They are not stagnating? Most third world countries have seen a massive rise in wages. As well as a massive improvement in virtually all metrics of development - electricity access, life-expectancy, infant mortality, calorie consumption, education years, road access, transportation access, drinking water, quality of housing etc.

>>2828687
> How did wages increase in the first world? Mostly due to the Labor movement. What happens in third world countries whenever workers there try to raise the wage floor? 2004 coup in Haiti. In the end it all comes down to how much surplus workers get to keep.
This is the point what I was trying to lead you to not realizing you already agreed. So thanks!

>>2828688
Did you just criticize the other poster by saying "lmao" followed by restating his argument that you agree with??

>>2828697
No I didn't agree with him. He stated that only high-wages *per-capita* resulted in automation. I stated that low-wages has also resulted in automation.

>>2828667
You sum up the labor hours involved in that production and divide the number of fruits with it. You ignore the different nature of the different kinds of labors and treat it all as the same single unit "labor hour".

>>2828652
>IQ
kek

OP is entirely correct. the popularity of third worldism today is probably due to Parenti and Hickel. few "communists" actually bother to read Marx, who says the exact opposite of what Parenti, Hickel and their ilk say about superprofit
communists, even MLs, get up in arms about imperialism, forgetting that imperialism is historically progressive. it is imperialism that will rip the land from third world peasantoids, proletarianizing them and raising the value of third world labour power

yes, they do. they exploit the poor people living under authoritarian regimes as a source of cheap slave labor and they support the authoritarian regimes and block all attempts at independent/democratic/pro-labor reform by any means necessary including military intervention if need be. and the exploitation doesn't stop there either, the rich countries also leverage the cheap slave labor in the poor countries they are exploiting to drive down wages and prevent strikes in their own country and thereby exploit their own workforce as well.

>>2828667
you're comparing things at the wrong scale. the productivity of the whole process is interlinked!
Person a plants seeds by hand, person b harvests fruit by hand, person c transports fruit by bicycle, person d sells fruit in an open-air marketplace.

Person a plants seeds with a tractor and seed drill, person b harvests fruit with the aid of a harvesting machine, person c transports fruit using a truck, person d sells fruit a year in advance because the outputs of this process are highly predictable.

which process is more productive?

>>2828693
This is completely wrong, whiggish nonsense the overwhelming majority of global poverty reduction comes down to what happened in a single country, China and to the reclassification of the poverty line by the world bank.

https://aeon.co/essays/china-the-world-bank-and-the-truth-about-global-poverty

>>2828641
>higher productivity of workers in rich countries is the reason for greater material wealth
nah, greater material wealth is the reason for higher productivity. higher productivity comes from more developed means of production and a more skilled labour force, which are achieved through the primitive accumulation of capital i.e. "conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force" and on a global scale primitive accumulation was carried out by "rich countries" against the rest of the world via colonialism

>"do rich countries have high productivity due to exploitation of poor ones"? And the answer is no.
)
>In fact, rich countries even outsource production to poor ones

arent these claims contradictory?

>"do poor countries have low automation because of rich countries"? The answer is no.
the answer is kinda. the rise of manufacturing and automation in poor countries directly correlates with the deindustrialisation of rich countries and their transition to a service-based economy and driven by deliberate global restructuring of manufacturing, where rich countries relocated labour-hour intensive stages of manufacturing due to costs but keeped high-value stages at home (designing iphones or smth)

>and help them increase their productivity via tech transfer, capital for building factories etc.
which only decreases relative price of primary commodities cos structure of global markets and stuff.
also technology transfer by design does not create an independent technological base.
as a result poor countries are forced to pay royalties for these technologies and to purchase spare parts to maintain those factories.

>Now you can indeed blame colonialism, but I'm talking about existing processes
like colonial economic structure? e.g. infrastructure built for resource extraction and reliance of cash crops in agriculture
also something something neocolonialism

>it was colonialism that enabled the development of capitalist relations in the first place
ye. colonialism created global economic structure which nowadays "rich countries" still use to exploit poor ones, automation or no automation

also kinda this >>2828766
comprador and/or corrupt rantier elites

>>2828688
>If this was not true, then the gigantic increase in automation across the third-world over the past decades,

[citation needed]

>>2828641
> I find it hard to believe that rich countries "exploit" poorer ones
Good thing you don't have to "believe", you just have to accept reality.

>>2828803
disingenuous. Of course the "overwhelming majority" of poverty reduction happened in China, 1/6 of all people on earth live there!
the actual development picture is mixed by region, rather than "It's all china and doesn't demand we update our theories at all" cope. Asia in general has seen pretty good growth (compare Indonesia in 2000 to now! Or Malaysia! Or Vietnam! Or fucking Cambodia!!), as have Latin America and Eastern Europe. The middle east has been more mixed, and Africa's done pretty badly as a whole.

the choice of a random dollar figure to measure poverty is stupid and arbitrary, but as the article itself notes most data in the world's poorest countries is stupid and arbitrary. but of course it is: getting accurate data is basically impossible because a poor government can't afford a good national statistics agency. a chunk of African countries get their GDP figures by having a handful of guys basically guess how each sector is doing over a few beers because it's not like hard numbers are available, it's not like anyone's going to pay to collect them. (and it's not like raising the global poverty line to $7/day is going to unlock vast swathes of development aid.)

using India as an anti-free trade example seems like cope. "a slowdown in poverty reduction" is an inherently suspicious measure: if there was no poverty reduction whatsoever in the areas that weren't exposed to trade, and massive poverty reduction in those exposed to trade, then a trade downturn would give the effect described yet the effect of trade would clearly be positive. it's also, more broadly, clear that india's pre-neoliberal trajectory was basically unsustainable and doomed, so if liberalization increases poverty over (say) 20 years, then begins reducing poverty, it's a bullet you've just got to bite.

cards on the table: i think to fix the poorest countries you'd need a combination of massive economic aid and economic liberalization. no economic liberalization and you'll just be propping up stupid inefficient ways of doing things, no economic aid and you can't build the basic institutions required for a functioning market economy that foreigners actually want to invest in. china's probably the most likely to deliver this since the west is too given to thinking of aid as either charity or grift rather than setting up a win-win scenario in the future.

>>2828806
>doesn't mention that zimbabwe was running budget deficits of 10% of GDP by the late 1980s
>doesn't mention that zimbabwe's economic growth had already flatlined before they went to the IMF
>doesn't mention that unemployment was already rising before they went to the IMF
>doesn't really seem to dwell on why the government might've gone to the IMF at all
>doesn't mention there were massive droughts in 1992 and 1995 which crippled the country's agricultural sector
>doesn't mention that the government failed to keep to the terms of the deal and the IMF regularly suspended credit
come on man.
fwiw: again i think the IMF made errors. they should've supported a social safety net while pushing liberalization. this is the biggest mistake "neoliberals" made the world over. they underrated the importance of eliminating regulatory barriers and trade barriers, and overrated the importance of reducing tax burdens and fiscal consolidation. if neoliberals were smart they'd have left taxes high and used the money to buy off the losers from deregulation. unfortunately, the lobby for people who're taxed now is big while the lobby for businesses that would hypothetically exist in a more competitive environment is not…

>>2828823
You're correct to refute the usual leftoid conspiracy theories about 'exploiting the third world,' but there are structural economic reasons why the global south can't develop like Europe or America. There is a global industrial overcapacity that prevents it, and the overdevelopment of productive forces means factories no longer require mass industrial workforces anyways. Industrialization is happening, but it only benefits a small sliver of the workforce, and most of the population just gets shunted into informal employment in the new urban slums.

what the fuck did we have a sudden influx of liberals or smth

If the first world doesn't depend on exploitation of the third, then why do powerful first world states so often violently interfere to prevent those of the third world from nationalitzing their resources, carrying out land reform, implementing social safety nets, and improving productive forces and securing capital on their own terms?

No. Class struggle is more fundamental that differences between states.

>>2828857
The capitalists of the first world depend of the exploitation of workers in the third world. Some capitalists in the third world also benefit from that arrangement. Others don't, and that's why there are nationalist movements there.

>>2828861
So then you agree with Lenin's theory of imperialism.

/thread

>>2828832
users coming from twitter and redit

>>2828641
It's just thirdie cope. China is proof of what is possible if you stop coping and focus on improving your shit.

>>2828652
It's so funny that anon got banned for this.

>>2828862
Saying only "first world" or "third world" or "global south" is nationalism that ignores class struggle.

>>2828872
Class is not the primary contradiction and never has been

>>2828872
Not necessarily. It's just a description of the net direction of profit extraction. Marxist theories of imperialism have always taken account of internal class divisions in both third world and first world countries. If it takes no such account and flattens these distinctions into a first and third world binary, then it isn't Marxism but Third Worldism.

>>2828875
First world countries don’t have internal class dynamics at all

>>2828876
Embarrassing post.

>>2828878
The US and the broader NATO sphere are communist societies, they achieved it by raping the rest of the world. It’s like how Athenian democracy works because you have time to debate all day when slaves do all the work.

>>2828857
Mostly geopolitical considerations + some domestic politicking. The US advocated and encouraged land reform in many of the countries that it wanted to shore up as anti-communist allies and resisted it in more marginal countries. Of course, the US is also regularly incompetent on top of that.

>>2828832
Personally I got tired of cope explanations and just-so stories. I remain a communist, but a communist who recognises that the task is much more difficult than mere slander. "China got rich because the CPC is magic, so that's a win for communism, there is no need for other communists to engage with difficult trade offs or truths" is the mindset of a child. "Everything was great before those gosh darn neoliberals showed up" is the mindset of a socdem child.
Neoliberals failed neoliberalism and that's a bad thing that fuelled the current reactionary turn which rubes will briefly believe portends a return to Keynesianism.

>>2828890
>Mostly geopolitical considerations
That's an extremely vague handwave. What geopolitical considerations? Why did their interventions almost always involve opposition to the domestic policies I described? If they have no interest in the expoitation of these countries, why care whether they were communist at all?

nice bait OP

>>2828894
Huh?

>>2828890
And why is half of that map not red? Why were nations like Botswana able to gain independence and develop peacefully without being overthrown? Why are modern day Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, etc. experiencing record economic growth without US or NATO interference?

Obviously the US was meddling in foreign politics during the Cold War. But the strange folk-leftist belief that 'all development is impossible in the global south because America will kill you' is just ignorant, and wouldn't be taken seriously in the real world.

>>2828890
All true Keynesians eventually became Communists anyways. Keynesians are based when they realize that capitalism will never let them do reforms and then they get really really mad and go full stalinist/maoist.

>>2828909
so they want to be reformists with party state and undisturbed dirigisme rather than communists

>>2828915
Uyghur can you read? She ended up supporting the Cultural Revolution and Juche. She radicalized so hard that she made Stalin look like Bernie Sanders.

>>2828907
>Why are modern day Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, etc. experiencing record economic growth without US or NATO interference?
Likely because this growth is in very particular areas that the US finds non-threatening, and is combined with an acceptance of Western investment and policy prescriptions on Western terms. Additionally, we should consider that the emergence of China as an alternative source of investment and geopolitical support has complicated matters, since states can now access capital on far more equitable terms and without nearly as much policy meddling. Finally, I say that it's not accurate as such to say that imperialism renders all development in the global south impossible. Rather imperialism is designed to preserve the position of the Western monopoly on the highest tier in the value chain. Previously this meant relegating the Global South to the production of raw materials, however since the advent of neoliberalism it has expanded to include low tech, low efficiency manufacturing. This serves a similar function because it still maintains a disparity between productivity that allows for wages to remain depressed, competition to be limited, and (possibly) for unequal exchange to occur according to the Micheal Roberts model.

>>2828907
Rwanda got rich by exporting its civil war to the Eastern Congo and raping its mineral wealth, Paul Kagame is Africa’s Netanyahu

>>2828909
Joan Robinson is the only notable Keynesian who became a communist. Keynes himself was fiercely anti-communist.

>>2828941
>Keynes himself was fiercly anti communist.
Is that why he visited the USSR for his honeymoon, received a medal from the Bolsheviks, and married a Russian? I am well aware of his reputation in socialist circles as a "conservative" or "liberal" who criticized Marx, but I find that narrative unconvincing due to his actions. He went way out of his way during his life to defend the USSR, and his students followed in his footsteps by helping the Soviets spy on Britain.

>>2828918
I'd consider both the soviet union after lenin's death and nk to be extremely revisionist (the 1917-1924 bolsheviks also engaged in revisionism and socdem cope but y'all aren't ready for that conversation)

>>2828948
They should have stepped down after the failure of the German revolution so they could come back later, it worked for the FSLN

>>2828948
>It wasn't real socialism
Ok Raya Dunayevskaya let's get you to bed grandma.

>>2828950
I don't think they could have just waited it out
>>2828953
It's true though. The fact that none of the core capitalist countries had a successful revolution around the same time meant that the Bolsheviks were pretty much unable to implement lower-stage communism as described by Marx in the critique of the Gotha program

>>2828869
>rich countries are smart, poor countries are just low autism score subhuman apes
>wow, heh, banned, really? i guess you monkeys cant handle my white truth
we see what you are doing, and we are going to disembowel you

>>2828909
keynesians literally think you fix the reserve army of labor by hiring people to dig holes and fill them back up for no reason

>>2828959
Your ignorance is amusing. Keynes' actual argument about digging holes is that this is effectively what the private sector already does, such as in the gold mining industry, which while having "business" sense, contradicts common sense, such as building houses. Read:
<It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly “wasteful” forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict “business” principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions. If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch10.htm
>>2828947
I've reviewed that article before and it scarcely provides a primary source from Keynes himself. Keynes' self-styled politics was "New Liberalism", as a conscious departure from both free market capitalism and state socialism, as he speaks of here:
<The abuses of this epoch in the realms of Government are Fascism on the one side and Bolshevism on the other. Socialism offers no middle course, because it also is sprung from the presuppositions of the Era of Abundance, just as much as laissez-faire individualism and the free play of economic forces, before which latter, almost alone amongst men, the City Editors, all bloody and blindfolded, still piteously bow down. The transition from economic anarchy to a régime which deliberately aims at controlling and directing economic forces in the interests of social justice and social stability, will present enormous difficulties both technical and political. I suggest, nevertheless, that the true destiny of New Liberalism is to seek their solution.
https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Am_I_a_Liberal.htm
He also writes directly of the USSR in the same period:
<Like other new religions, Leninism derives its power not from the multitude but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one the equal in strength of a hundred indifferentists […] Like other new religions, it persecutes without justice or pity those who actively resist it. Like other new religions, it is unscrupulous. Like other new religions, it is filled with missionary ardour and occumenical ambitions. But to say that Leninism is the faith of a persecuting and propagating minority of fanatics led by hypocrites is, after all, to say no more nor less than that it is a religion and not merely a party, and Lenin a Mahomet, not a Bismarck […] I think that it is partly reasonable to be afraid of Russia […] For how much rather, even after allowing for everything, if I were a Russian, would I contribute my quota of activity to Soviet Russia than to Tsarist Russia! I could not subscribe to the new official faith any more than to the old. I should detest the actions of the new tyrants not less than those of the old. 
In the same text, he critcises Marx directly as "obsolete":
<How can I accept a doctrine which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world? 
https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/A_Short_View_of_Russia.htm
And here, Keynes gives his class loyalties to the bourgeoisie:
<I can be influenced by what seems to me to be Justice and good sense; but the Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Am_I_a_Liberal.htm
So, there is no argument that Keynes was sympathetic to communism, except from libertarian cranks, such as you cite.

>>2828966
You are reddit brained you place endless importance on what people say rather than what they do. By your logic Trump is a president of peace and deserves a Nobel Prize simply because he said so. Keynes visited the USSR in its formative years while it was under blockade and received a medal from the Bolshevik government. Clearly the Bolsheviks themselves did not view him as some arch reactionary or belligerent anti Communist, and thought that they could work with him.

>>2828990
>You are reddit brained you place endless importance on what people say rather than what they do.
I am a person who knows what he's talking about, and you're someone who doesn't. That's the biggest difference between us. I provide primary sources; you delude yourself into believing fantasies.
>Keynes visited the USSR in its formative years while it was under blockade and received a medal from the Bolshevik government.
There is no actual evidence that Keynes received a medal from the USSR. The only cited source of the claim is from that Mises article. Keynes visited the USSR, spoke poorly of it, then left. Later he saw both Communism and Fascism as his political enemies. There is no mystery here.

>>2828892

1. They "almost always" involved opposition to such policies because you are ignoring the countries where the US supported those policies. It's not like they were subtle about it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Progress
   
2. Because it doesn't matter if you have no interest in exploiting a country, you don't want it supporting your enemies against you. You don't want to exploit me, but you'd be worried if I joined a club based on the premise that you were a malignant influence on the world and needed your wings clipped.
   
3. Because some countries (which really should be red) aren't. e.g. the US meddled in Japan long after WW2, first being the ones to legalized trade unions, socialists, communists, etc (odd thing for them to do in your model!), then famously reversing course after getting spooked that Japan might go red. (Including funding the right wing LDP, reactionary trade unionist DSP, literal cult komeito, etc.)
   
4. Because the US isn't some all powerful puppet master. See for example https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v07p2/d304 where the US strongly advocate south Korean land reform, but south Korea's own government drag their feet because they're in hock to landlords.
   
   

>>2828907
You are mistaken if you think my line is that such development is impossible because of the US. I take almost the opposite line.
Ethiopia for example is a good case in point for how the cold war fucked things up, then once it ended things ultimately improved.

productive is a pretty loaded term when you think about it. people are always productive, they are always working on something and don't really need any outside motivation to make them be productive. whenever we talk about people being unproductive what we really mean is that they are not producing the kinds of things that we want them to be producing. for instance, we consider a bunch of poor farmers in a poor country to be unproductive because they are spending all their time farming to feed their families instead of producing things that we can use like nike shoes and iphones.

it's quite a significant statistical anomaly that humans just happen to be the only species of organism in the entire world whom we ever think of as being problematically unproductive. even a very slow-moving sedentary animal like a sloth that we commonly associate with laziness in our culture, their apparent laziness is accepted as part of their nature, there's nobody out there who is talking about how we need to motivate the sloths and figure out how to make the sloths be more productive. it's only humans that apparently need motivating, that need to be steered away from doing whatever they are doing right now and made to do something else that we consider to be a more productive use of their time and effort.

>>2829099
>people are always productive, they are always working on something and don't really need any outside motivation to make them be productive
Ideally but there's loads of wastrels and lay-abouts.
>humans just happen to be the only species of organism in the entire world whom we ever think of as being problematically unproductive
Take it up with Locke and Marx.

>>2829077
>because you are ignoring the countries where the US supported those policies
Such countries were few and far between, and usually because they had other strategic considerations for them. You mention Japan, but this was because Japan was intended to be built up as a robust satellite under the same logic as the Marshall Plan. Japan had been an industrialized, imperialist country before the war, and so the US applied the same strategy that they did to Europe, which was to rebuild it and establish themselves at the head of a united imperialist bloc. This guaranteed the cooperation of Japan's ruling class as well as a robust buffer to contain the USSR and later China in Asia. In short, what you're identifying here is the difference between how the US related to a defeated imperialist country vs how they related to a colonial one. It's worth noting that the land reform program initiated by the Americans in Japan after the war was copied in Cuba, and yet when the Cubans did it, it was evil socialism and justification to attack that country. The Alliance for Progress is also interesting to bring up, since it was the brainchild of Kennedy, whose brains were splattered all over the streets of Dallas by an assassin with CIA connections, which I'm sure was just a coincidence. It atrophied and withered away after his death and is regarded today as a failure.
>Because it doesn't matter if you have no interest in exploiting a country, you don't want it supporting your enemies against you
That begs two questions. First, why should the US view the USSR as an enemy to begin with? They had been allies in the war, the Soviets had already adopted the policy of Socialism in One Country, they had displayed a willingness to establish and respect spheres of influence with the percentages agreement with Britain, they had offered to withdraw from Germany and reunite the country under a neutral government, they had dissolved the Comintern and pushed increasingly reformist lines on Western communists, Khruschev offered to join NATO and even called his foreign policy "peaceful coexistence". On what basis did the Americans have to be enemies with them at all? Second, emerging socialist and left-nationalist states in the third world were often far from hostile to the US. Ho Chi Minh for example openly praised America when he proclaimed Vietnam's independence, even quoting the US Declaration of Independence. The US responded by helping France re-invade the country to restore direct colonial rule. Cuba is also another example of this, with the revolution not even being of a communist orientation originally, but being pushed towards the USSR as a result of American hostility. It's pretty telling that most countries in the Non-Aligned Movement ended up being closer to the Soviet Bloc in practice, because the Americans simply refused to acknowledge their neutrality.

Another question I have for you is whether or not you think that there was exploitation going on during the era of formal colonialism? Are you of the opinion that Britain didn't exploit India? That France didn't exploit Indochina? This would be in spite of pretty strong evidence that directly links colonialism to the artificial underdevelopment of these regions, e.g. Britain deliberately sabotaging India's manufacturing economy over the course of the 19th century. If you acknowledge this as exploitation, then that begs the additional questions of when and how this relationship became non-exploitative, and why the same capitalist powers would suddenly lose interest in exploiting their former colonies through new, neo-colonial means.

>>2828966
You post good citations of the devil keynes, but what im about to provide is most critical to grasping fact that keynesianism is fascism. We never see any keynesianite admit the true essence of the grand science of keynesianism is simply printing more money and giving it all to capitalists to cut wages in order to reckon with crises.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch02.htm
<Now ordinary experience tells us, beyond doubt, that a situation where labour stipulates (within limits) for a money-wage rather than a real wage, so far from being a mere possibility, is the normal case. Whilst workers will usually resist a reduction of money-wages, it is not their practice to withdraw their labour whenever there is a rise in the price of wage-goods. It is sometimes said that it would be illogical for labour to resist a reduction of money-wages but not to resist a reduction of real wages. For reasons given below (section III), this might not be so illogical as it appears at first; and, as we shall see later, fortunately so. But, whether logical or illogical, experience shows that this is how labour in fact behaves.
>Though the struggle over money-wages between individuals and groups is often believed to determine the general level of real wages, it is, in fact, concerned with a different object. Since there is imperfect mobility of labour, and wages do not tend to an exact equality of net advantage in different occupations, any individual or group of individuals, who consent to a reduction of money-wages relatively to others, will suffer a relative reduction in real wages, which is a sufficient justification for them to resist it. On the other hand it would be impracticable to resist every reduction of real wages, due to a change in the purchasing-power of money which affects all workers alike; and in fact reductions of real wages arising in this way are not, as a rule, resisted unless they proceed to an extreme degree. Moreover, a resistance to reductions in money-wages applying to particular industries does not raise the same insuperable bar to an increase in aggregate employment which would result from a similar resistance to every reduction in real wages. In other words, the struggle about money-wages primarily affects the distribution of the aggregate real wage between different labour-groups, and not its average amount per unit of employment, which depends, as we shall see, on a different set of forces. The effect of combination on the part of a group of workers is to protect their relative real wage. The general level of real wages depends on the other forces of the economic system. Thus it is fortunate that the workers, though unconsciously, are instinctively more reasonable economists than the classical school, inasmuch as they resist reductions of money-wages, which are seldom or never of an all-round character, even though the existing real equivalent of these wages exceeds the marginal disutility of the existing employment; whereas they do not resist reductions of real wages, which are associated with increases in aggregate employment and leave relative money-wages unchanged, unless the reduction proceeds so far as to threaten a reduction of the real wage below the marginal disutility of the existing volume of employment. Every trade union will put up some resistance to a cut in money-wages, however small. But since no trade union would dream of striking on every occasion of a rise in the cost of living, they do not raise the obstacle to any increase in aggregate employment which is attributed to them by the classical school.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch19.htm
<Except in a socialised community where wage-policy is settled by decree, there is no means of securing uniform wage reductions for every class of labour. The result can only be brought about by a series of gradual, irregular changes, justifiable on no criterion of social justice or economic expediency, and probably completed only after wasteful and disastrous struggles, where those in the weakest bargaining position will suffer relatively to the rest. A change in the quantity of money, on the other hand, is already within the power of most governments by open-market policy or analogous measures. Having regard to human nature and our institutions, it can only be a foolish person who would prefer a flexible wage policy to a flexible money policy, unless he can point to advantages from the former which are not obtainable from the latter. Moreover, other things being equal, a method which it is comparatively easy to apply should be deemed preferable to a method which is probably so difficult as to be impracticable.

It's actually crazy how many people don't understand the basic history of globalization. Like I was learning shit about United Fruit Company (Dole) exploiting Latin America and the Carribean back in high school. idk we need to do a better job of educating people on basic stuff like this. I'm pretty bad at explaining things personally. We need like a playlist of easily digestible YouTube videos on this topic.

>>2829099
The problem is people conflate productive with hard-working. They're not the same thing.

>>2829148
>the true essence of the grand science of keynesianism is simply printing more money and giving it all to capitalists to cut wages in order to reckon with crises.
sounds more like corporate bailouts than anything

>>2829148
>keynesianism is fascism
Well, in Keynes' Preface to the German edition of his work (1936), he praises Germany in general, and speaks of hoping to meet their current "conditions", ending with this sentiment:
<Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.
Thus is the illiberal turn, which is also present in Mises (1927), with his praise for political Fascism [Liberalism: Chapter 1, Section 11]:
<It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at theestablishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that theirintervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization.The merit thatFascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though itspolicy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which couldpromise continued success. Fascism was anemergency makeshift. To view it assomething more would be a fatal error.
Still as yet, he only sees its temporary defense of civilisation against the scourge of socialism, which he regards as the worst evil. The British Fascist, Oswald Mosley, also situated himself as a Keynesian loyalist against the free market orthodoxy of the political right in his country, battling with fellow racialists like Enoch Powell on this point. Keynes praises Silvio Gesell (1918) in his General Theory, who was also praised by Rudolf Jung (1919), an early theorist of National Socialism, who saw Gesell's diagnosis of positive interest put on money as a cause of its lack of circulation (which obviously appealed to antisemitic writers), and so promoted a theory of negative interest (e.g. inflation) as a cause of circulation, which is now given to the legacy of Keynesian thought. So there are fascist connections to Keynes, but I doubt whether Keynes had sympathies.
>keynesianism is simply printing more money and giving it all to capitalists to cut wages in order to reckon with crises.
<quote
The quotes do not follow from the former claim; the quotes of which simply explain that the capacity for employment requires lesser real wages per worker, but at the preservation of the same money wage. This is later translated into the Phillips Curve, that inflation is linear to the rate of employment. Keynes on long-term prospects speaks of 15-hour work weeks and a scientifically-managed society based in the sharing of labour (1930):
<what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! […] The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things—our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.
https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Economic_Possibilities_for_our_Grandchildren.htm
Of course, this never came to be, but in spite of Keynes, not in service of him.

>>2828748
Marx thought Russia will usher in world communism before his death
https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2024-05-28/marx-s-newly-unearthed-letter-reaffirms-the-necessity-of-internationalism-and

>imperialism is progressive
All countries today are monopoly capitalist. Progressive compared to who? The proletariat? libshit retard

it's not really that hard to understand or demonstrate. I direct you to Norman Girvan's 'corporate imperialism'

you really need to get out of 20th century thinking if you want to understand modern geopolitics. the way things work in the world today doesn't really have any analog in the contemporary post-19th century history that we are familiar with, we still tend to think in terms of nations and borders and industrialization and world wars between nations battling over territories and things like that because that's what we tend to study and be taught in school due to the teleological assumption that the more recent events of history are more relevant to our current circumstances.

but the reality is, we are well past that now and the current state of the world is really more like the pre-19th century period of history, the latter part of the age of discovery where the sovereign states territorial expansion and infrastructural development had mostly leveled off and gave way to huge private corporations like the east india company with wealth and power that exceeded that of sovereign states, and the wars that took place in that period were not nations battling for territory but wealthy sovereign states and private corporations working in tandem to control and exploit economic resource nodes and chokepoints in poorer parts of the world.

>>2828957
Exactly, anon is bullshitting. Humans are a product of their surroundings: autism score is not stored in the (lack of) melanin or whatever crap rightoids believe in. The better the education and upbringing, the more intelligent a person will turn out to be. Ethnicity does not matter.
<REDDIT SPACE TO MAKE THIS GIANT WORD SHART OF AN ESSAY READABLE
China is filled with the same ethnicity of people, yet today they are leading the world, while forty years ago they were a backwater. According to the rightoid view, the Chinese people must've been subject to the CCP aryanization beam or something to achieve that. Common sense argues that the money spent improving the Chinese education system and the vast reduction in poverty caused it.
<REDDIT SPACE TO MAKE THIS GIANT WORD SHART OF AN ESSAY READABLE
In fact, I would argue that China's rise is because the US let the interests of the bourgeoisie take precedence, so education spending and public infrastructure was cut, for less taxes on porky. On the other hand, China kept developing their nations infrastructure and educational institutions.
Because of that, not only does China now has 3x the population of the US, they have a populace with a much stronger educational foundation – hence China rapidly overtaking the US when it comes to innovations/inventions in almost every field.

>>2828641
>I find it hard to believe that rich countries "exploit" poorer ones, in the Marxist sense.
Duh

>>2829799
>The quotes do not follow from the former claim
how dare you notice

>>2829854
we can take India as an example. Indian nationalists managed to unite India's peasantry and landlords against the British. especially British industrialists. what has been the result of this? India languishing in underdevelopment

>>2830309
Per Marx the British maintained India's feudal structures at the expenses of its young bourgeoisie while the nationalists abolished them and empowered the bourgeoisie just like Marx predicated.

The only reason colonialism was historically progressive is because it created national liberation (bourgeoisie-democratic) movements in the third world. That's what Marx meant by colonialism creating its own negation.

kys illiterate retard

>>2830332
delete this

>>2830309
Are you retarded? India has seen a gigantic improvement in virtually all metrics after independence.

During British rule from 1900-1950 they completely stagnated with zero economic growth and millions died from famines.

From just 1950-1990, even after economic mismanagement by the ruling party, they tripled their GDP per capita, more than doubled their life expectancy, and achieved massive advances in literacy, and completely eliminated famines.

And from 1990-present their real GDP per capita increased by 500% and standard of living continued to improve greatly.

The British were an awful curse for India, the Indian bourgeoisie managed the country a thousand times better.

>>2828857
From WW2 up until 1970s, trade between first-world and third-world was MINISCULE compared to trade between first-world countries. It didn't matter what the third-world produced because the first-world barely bought any of it. Exploitation of the third world was irrelevant economically.

Most of the imperialism of that period was Great Power political shenanigans rather than any actual economic need.

When the economic need finally arose in the 1970s due to declining rate of profit, it led to the first world outsourcing its industry (and later services) which was massively beneficial to the third world.

This is what I'm talking about. You need to completely update your understanding of imperialism, because your simplistic narratives has no basis in reality.

The big economic story NOW is first-world countries implementing protectionism against newly industrialized countries in order to prevent their own deindustrialization. The roles have completely reversed. The old and tired analyses are of no use to understand present day reality.

>>2828921
No your analysis is completely wrong. The West doesn't stop other countries from growing, because the trend for the past 70 years is for poor countries to converge with Western standard of living.

You have to look at GDP (PPP) per capita and not nominal GDP. Russia is almost as wealthy as New Zealand. Mexico and Brazil are just half of Portugal. Turkey is close to Greece. Indonesia is half of Serbia etc. The US is only 3x of Argentina.

The gap is closing rapidly. Just use Google Street View and look at "third world" countries. Apart from superficial things like overall cleanliness, you'll find people with decent houses, they have bikes and cars, they have TVs and gaming PC, they have ACs etc.

>>2830457
>No your analysis is completely wrong. The West doesn't stop other countries from growing, because the trend for the past 70 years is for poor countries to converge with Western standard of living.

This is total bullshit.

>>2830424
>From WW2 up until 1970s, trade between first-world and third-world was MINISCULE compared to trade between first-world countries
If it was so miniscule and unimportant then the West wouldn't have cared what those governments did with their own resources. If they were so unimportant, they wouldn't have been colonized in the first place. Turns out they care quite a lot actually. You can't square this narrative with the actual behaviour of capitalist imperialist states over the last 200 years.
>Most of the imperialism of that period was Great Power political shenanigans rather than any actual economic need.
Meaningless handwaving. If there wasn't an economic motivation then post-WW2 imperial interventions wouldn't have been triggered by resource nationalization or land reform, wouldn't have installed governments that went out of their way to ensure Western access to resources, wouldn't have broken unions and socialist parties to keep labour costs down, etc. In fact if there was no economic benefit to colonialism and neo-colonialism, then it would behoove these Great Powers and their "shenanigans" to avoid it, since jt would mean enormous expenditure of blood and treasure for literally no gain. The strongest powers of the last 200 years wouldn't be those with the largest colonial empires, since thess would simply be massive drains on their economies. Your understanding of the world requires us to just close our eyes and ignore what is plainly obvious to anybody who studies world history, and expects us to believe that all the frantic empire building, colonial meddling, and mass slaughter of recent centuries was all done for basically no reason or benefit, even to the conquerors. It's completely absurd on the face of it.
>When the economic need finally arose in the 1970s due to declining rate of profit, it led to the first world outsourcing its industry (and later services) which was massively beneficial to the third world.
It was an improvement, but it was born out of necessity and didn't disrupt the overall dominance of the West in high-tech, high value added industries as well as rent-seeking/FIRE industries. The vast majority of this outsourcing was low efficiency and low tech. Many of the major economies in the Global South like Brazil still rely heavily on agriculture and raw materials. Others like India rely heavily on extremely crude and inefficient industry. China is really the only country that was able to break out of this position on their own terms and without Western approval, and they did it on their own, not because the West gave them the tech.
>The big economic story NOW is first-world countries implementing protectionism against newly industrialized countries in order to prevent their own deindustrialization
The US is the only country that really did this and its mostly because Trump is a retard who doesn't know anything about economics. Most other Western states were content to maintain and pursue free trade.
>>2830457
>Apart from superficial things like overall cleanliness, you'll find people with decent houses, they have bikes and cars
If you had ever actually been to a Global South country you would know what an embarrassing thing that is to say.

>>2828959
Unfortunately he was right.

>>2830424
>It didn't matter what the third-world produced because the first-world barely bought any of it.
lmao, how do you think colonialism worked? also its pretty apparent the people challenging marx havent read him in this thread

Embarrassing thread, embarrassing OP, embarrassing argument. I see a variation of the "people in poverty are now richer than a king during x century because they have phones and even air-conditioning lol lmao!!l1!!l xD" argument used, which is frankly an embarrassing argument to make as an adult. Poverty, as we know, is measured by taking a snapshot of a certain time and place, comparing that to a snapshot taken more recently and then disregarding both time and place, very smart, very science.

>>2828959
>keynesians literally think you fix the reserve army of labor by hiring people to dig holes and fill them back up for no reason
>>2830472
>Unfortunately he was right.

Expand on this.

>>2828641
The town-country contradiction is kind of fucked. IMO you still want free trade on staple crops in order to lower the cost of labor despite the havoc it wreaks on the latent reserve army. It makes sense to tariff everything else though.

https://www.macroscan.net/anl/jul06/pdf/Petty_Production.pdf

>>2828748
The MoP here is land and land reform indeed makes sense in the imperial periphery.

>>2828780
In marx the only decinition of "productivity" is surplus value. And nowhere in marx is it implied that the problem of capitalism is that surplus should be given back to the individual worker at the point of the commodity's creation

Your argument is proudhonian

The classic definition of imperialism according to Lenin is tied directly to the export of capital and import of commodities from less favored nations. The export of technologies comes with heavy strings attached; in particular exclusive contracts, debt, and privatization requirements that are designed in such a way as go keep the cost of labor in these nations as low as possible. Capitalism holds back the productice forces - there are plenty of automatable extractive industry jobs in the developing world that would be automated in a socialist economy based on labor quantums; but remain cheaper than automation in our current system. Nations host capital; and low income nations are put into a position in which their ability to attract capital is dependent upon extreme exploutation. In particular, since labor is the source of value we can look at unequal exchange in terms of labor and see the discrepancy openly