Obviously the corporate class seeks exponential growth at all costs. From that perspective the most evil actions will make a kind of internal sense. But what doesn't make sense is that so many of the decisions made by major Western corporations seem actively self-destructive. It's almost the equivalent of internal sabotage or following spectacularly bad advice, yet they all seem to be doing it.
You can see it across the auto industry, fast food, retail, entertainment. pretty much everywhere. Like If I were an amoral, profit-maximizing CEO, I'd focus on keeping my customer base in the imperial core happy, well-fed, and dependent, while paying workers in the developing world as little as possible and using coercion to suppress resistance if necessary. That would at least be internally consistent with maximizing profits. Instead companies keep raising prices, cutting quality and generally making life worse for their own customers. These decisions aren't just going to fuck them over in the long term, they're imploding their businesses right now, yet they all keep making them anyway. This trend seems to have accelerated after COVID. What happened?
>>2867494> But what doesn't make sense is that so many of the decisions made by major Western corporations seem actively self-destructive. Thousands and thousands of professionals working day and night against your feels and vibes about their decisions.
>>2867520“Professionals” that slept through their college courses that barely taught them and got there by having a friend’s uncle give them a reference
no one seems to be aware of this, certainly not anyone on the left, but we've long since in the west passed through the historical stage (in a dialectical materialist sense) of capital where it has the ability to innovate and develop the productive forces. this process was already underway towards the end of the 70s where you started having various crises that followed in the wake of the various failed revolutions of the late 60s and early 70s, and the answer to this was neoliberalism, in which the ability for capital to innovate and build anything was entirely abandoned in favor of what is essentially a scam: financialization mutated capital into being pure speculation, a casino for the rich that is kept on life support by draining the coffers of 20th century neoimperialism and then scraping the bottom of the barrel by exerting increasingly more downward pressure on the relatively wealthy first-world proletariat, because there simply is nowhere else for the productive forces in the developed world to go at this point.
there is even increasingly less to exploit in the third world now that it's begun to develop its own productive forces and go from being an entirely economically and geopolitically marginalized entity to a real force to be reckoned with (as the Iran War and the so-called Chinese Century demonstrate). we're currently in the stage where capital is cannibalizing itself and its apparatuses of power (i.e. the bourgeois liberal democratic state) in order to keep the speculation going. capital and the bourgeois state not only no longer have the ability to innovate or develop the productive forces but are no materially no longer to even act in their own self-interests, because its contradictions can only be resolved by socialism; there is simply nowhere else for us to go as a civilization without socialism. the Trump regime, private equity, "enshittification", the general self-destructive ineptitude and societal decay of the west and particularly the US are all exemplary of this; we've quite literally reached a "socialism or barbarism" stage where we either will transition to socialism one way or another or will start to see a slow collapse and regression, or possibly an unevenly distributed mix of both.
>>2867520>>2867528But they weren't this retarded less than a decade ago. they only care about themselves and their profits and this is objectively losing them money.
>>2867536I think it’s because profit rates are so low that it’s genuinely not worth the effort to make correct decisions
>>2867535Iran and China are different beasts compared to most of the third world. Many third world countries are hybrid regimes with two entrenched, corrupt political parties (and sometimes a military establishment that takes its own cut). Neither side wants to rock the boat, so the country stagnates while public services deteriorate and people live in Shit. Iran and China by contrast have centralized vanguard-style leaderships that can actually push through major political and economic changes.
>>2867535 (me)
and as for covid, all it really did was accelerate processes that were already underway. a good example of this is that a lot of businesses never recovered from their pre-covid hours even though there are lots of people who are desperate to work and unable to find jobs, because it turns out that you can simply choose to not have a business that functions as what its nominal purpose is and still be able to game the system to make money. this is what private equity is, why it's such a cancer that is materially reactionary in a dialectical sense, and why it's often said that McDonald's is in the real estate business and not in the business of selling burgers.
>>2867539they're undoubtedly the vanguard of what I'm describing but unless you believe the western propaganda about how China is doing neoimperialism by investing in infrastructure in Africa, it's a rising tide lifting all boats sort of situation as far as I can tell, and it also works the other way. for instance, the Iran War in particular has done a lot to erode any confidence the comprador third world states (e.g. the Gulf States) previously had that by capitulating to western interests they would benefit as junior partners of imperialism. the US has thus far in Trump's second term shown itself to be a totally inept decrepit empire and I expect this is only going to embolden to more radical nationalist groups in the third world to push for greater sovereignty and third world solidarity against western neoimperialism. I know BRICS is sort of a meme but that and the decline of the petrodollar in the wake of the Iran War are again further examples of where things are likely headed unless the US manages to somehow rally itself from all of this and not continue to stab itself to death and possibly take down the entire world's economy with it.
Because America's economic model since the end of the Cold War has been built around perpetual growth. During the Cold War capitalism in the West was kept in check by the existence of the Eastern block. The social protections and welfare policies adopted by governments in were implemented out of fear that socialism would become seem appealing. Once that threat disappeared in the 90s, governments gradually rolled back many of those protections.
It was always going to eventually happen after any sort of major depression and despite the post-COVID economic downturn corporations are still chasing exponential growth even though it isn't materially possible. The executivess can't change course because any slowdown means the stock price or quarterly earnings might dip, even temporarily and "the line going down" is treated as unacceptable. Normally, governments might step in to cushion the effects, but that can't happen anymore and now these companies are now with problems created by their own decisions. Meanwhile corporations that have been more sensible(or simply less retarded) are gaining an advantage with American and broader Western consumers.
>>2867494> focus on keeping my customer base in the imperial core happy, well-fed, and dependent,ML's are so retarded that they believe in trickledown economics lmao
Because they hired a bunch of low autism score non whites
I believe it is because capitalism is designed for infinite growth. That's not going to happen anymore though. After COVID, governments around the world tried doing what they had done always: stimulating demand. However, unlike previous recessions, COVID also affected supply, not just demand. There were less workers in the US, China, Europe, *everywhere*, because of all the casualties from the virus, and low birth rates.
This caused inflation, which caused wars and political instability, which caused even more inflation. Eventually the governments of the world got inflation under control, at the expense of now having very low, and sometimes negative, economic growth. And again, people realizing their standards of living aren't improving anymore, or in many cases, are going down, will cause even more instability.
>>2867608 (me)
That said, I very seriously have my doubts that the situation will improve. The world has become very reactionary in response, seeking to blame an "other", rather than fix the underlying problem.
One wonders if a slow decline is the destiny of our world.
>>2867603How is that trickledown economics?
>>2867603Man shut the fuck up fed. Go choke to death on Trump's farts the say hi to Moloch along with McConnell.
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