Bulletins and News Discussion from September 9th to September 15th, 2024 - Viva Sandino! - COTW: Nicaragua

we are on our 'its so over' arc

I am posting only one source in English but have been following the Russian readouts since 2022.

You should realize that Russia-China trade is hugely imbalanced at this time - Russia’s export to China is 13 TIMES higher than its import from China (in metric tons of mass). With the secondary sanctions starting just in the last few months, it is anticipated to fall even further. All the Russia-China trade turnovers posted seem like things are doing great, but if you inspect closely these news often don’t look as rosy as they seem.

And uncritically use it because it supports her view that the dollar basically can't be defeated

It is not that dollar cannot be defeated, but because nobody is mounting a challenge against the dollar. The yuan is the only currency at this moment that has the capacity to defeat the dollar, but that would require China giving up its long privilege of enjoying being a huge trade surplus (super net exporter) status, and you can see why China would be hesitant to do so. As such, the dollar continues to win, because nobody wanted to face the problem head on and everyone keeps dragging their feet thinking it will somehow return to normal soon.

Inaction is what the US had gambled the rest of the world would do, and it might just turn out to be right .

But it does mean that the critical window to challenge the US hegemony has passed.

there was never a "critical window" imo, it was always going to be a gradual process just like the transition between the sterling and the dollar was. and even that wasn't a process of linear gains; things went the dollar's way until the Great Depression fucked it over and then it seemed like the pound might be there to stay, and then WW2 starts and things turn against the pound again, etc.

honestly I should write something up at some point about how the pound sterling (and the gold standard, once you reach the 1970s) fell once I've completed more reading, I think it's a fairly comparable process. hell, maybe something on the whole British Empire.

Russia and China aren’t going to collapse lol. But it does mean that the critical window to challenge the US hegemony has passed. We are slowly returning to the “status quo”, in quotation marks because everything will only get worse from here and unlikely to avoid the consequences of climate change.

This whole talk about the optimal time for dedollarization is ultimately cope that anti-imperialism/decolonialization/counter-hegemony will be a largely bloodless affair. If only it were so easy that the US will be dislodged from its throne from fiscal decisions.

the critical window has not arrived yet. every other cycle of accumulation has undergone a gradual geographic transition of the core only after the extant capitalist system was thoroughly in the process of collapsing in on itself, heralded mostly by a withering in overall trade volume and corresponding with widespread conflict and a retreat into everyone's respective national economies

so basically, we're waiting for the us to sanction/declare war on china

in the meantime, so long as the powers behind the us political classes remain incapable of formulating a new framework of hegemony, the dollar will only continue to decline, taking the world economy along with it

We’re also seeing that either the Chinese government has less control over its own banks than we previously thought, or they believe that the economic benefits of trading with Western countries still far outweigh a closer relationship with Russia (a very tiny economy compared to the collective West), indicative of their inability to wean off an export-oriented economy.

My hunch is that it’s the later. It tracks with all the other moves China has made in recent years, where trade with the west is prized over potentially harming that trade with “hostile” moves like de-dollarization.

Or there is the simple fact that China allied with the west during the cold war and is viewing America's sudden interest in domestic chip production as a quiet preparation for surrender of Taiwan.

I love your posts assuming you're the most recent alt but good lord this is just silly

We’re also seeing that either the Chinese government has less control over its own banks than we previously thought

China has been unwilling to challenge the dollar with yuan

IMO this is actually a good thing for socialism and potentially signals China's long-term commitment to it. Of course it would also be great if the dollar were replaced, but replaced with what is very important.

If the yuan were internationalized, China couldn't impose the kind of strong capital controls which have allowed it to develop the economy toward socialism while retaining markets to a (likely necessary) degree. Further, there would be much greater incentive to export capital internationally rather than use it domestically, which could lead to a kind of social imperialism.

The synthesis of maintaining capital controls and dehegemonizing the dollar IMO is that the dollar is replaced not by another single nation's currency (which is just a different kind of unipolarity, after all), but instead by an international currency like the Bancor proposal.

(A dual-circuit thing like the USSR under Stalin would be better for transitioning away from money itself ofc, but I have no clue how that would work across borders and it seems impossible that any capitalist countries would accept such a system. If the world got to that point, socialism as a world-system would have practically already won)