thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them] @ thethirdgracchi @hexbear.net

ἐγὼ τὸ μὲν δὴ πανταχοῦ θρυλούμενον κράτιστον εἶναι φημὶ μὴ φῦναι βροτῷ·

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What products can the United States sell in Vietnam that will displace Vietnamese industries? Virtually nothing. Everything the United States makes is far too expensive or useless to be of any benefit to Vietnamese consumers, nor is American manufacturing at all a threat to Vietnamese manufacturing. The United States exports mostly agricultural products like soybeans and cotton to Vietnam, as well as some cameras and probably some computer chips. Total exports are around $10 billion (compared to Vietnamese exports to the US, ~$115 billion). So even if that doubles, that's not really doing much.

Vietnam's median income is around $9000USD. They're not buying $90k+ pickups and SUVs lol, even if their infrastructure could support cars of that size. The next step up from mopeds is a ~$5k small Chinese EV, not a giant SUV.

Yeah Williamsburg was a total blowout. The bastion of brunch libs is the Upper East Side, that went heavily to Cuomo.

But can that security detail be bought? If you're a high profile socialist, you need committed socialists as security.

I mean he's got time to build an ideologically committed security detail like right now. None of that is dependent on him being mayor.

I hope so!

When are the Zohran Fedayeen sign ups coming for New Yorkers? Only somewhat kidding.

If armed socialists in the United States got into a full confrontation with ICE I think you'd know because this site would probably be shut down by the FBI lol

Dual power, Zohran has to build it himself tbh. He's the new mayor in all but name, if he wants to enact his agenda he's going to need to take on the biggest gang that actually runs NYC, which is the NYPD. He's gonna need goons for that. If he's got any brains and is actually serious about enacting an even remotely socialist agenda he needs armed goons like a supervillain, and they've gotta be loyal to him. I don't think you'd be able to get an org to do this.

Yeah I was mostly bullshitting, I too wish we had actual third places in reality. Love you folks but nothing beats hanging out in person.

Buddy, you're posting in the tankie third place right now

If Zohran has any sense and is "hiding his power level" even a tiny amount, he needs an armed guard of committed socialists like yesterday to prevent this exact scenario from happening. If deporting him is at all hard for ICE to do without making it into a big public Incident, they'll have to come up with some other shenanigans unless they want riots in NYC.

It's because North Korea has no bourgeois class to speak of; both Russia and Iran have a ton of rich businessmen who desperately want to normalise with the West so they can make more money. This class of people simply does not exist in North Korea. Likewise, let's say you want to bribe a North Korean to work with you; how the fuck do you even pay them? Pay them with what? North Korea is entirely cut off from the global financial system, there's no workarounds that exist, unlike places like Russia and Iran.

You combine this with the DPRK state taking collaboration and intelligence far more seriously because it's a communist state, not just a global South aligned would be capitalist state like Russia or Iran. The DPRK is run by communists who watched the United States devastate their country in living memory, they take security extremely seriously. There's a reason the DPRK has nukes and Iran doesn't, and it's entirely because of this difference. Communists have no hope that they'll be able to work with the West, they see no benefit to working in good faith with those who would seek them dead.

I have read Lenin, and yes it's a bit more complicated since he does talk about financial imperialism but not in the same way things have developed post war. Also this is Jameson, in the introduction, describing his choice of "late."

What 'late' generally conveys is... the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.

And Mandel on "late":

... will enable us to explain THE history of the capitalist mode of production and above all the THIRD phase of this mode OF production, which we shall call late capitalism', (page 42)

Neither of these convey the idea that this is the last stage or a terminal stage, just another, most recent stage. And indeed Mandel does try and claim late capitalism is different than the imperialism described by Lenin, writing

the structure of the world economy in the first phase of late capitalism is distinguished by several important characteristics from its structure in the age of classical imperialism. (page 69)

The dollar is going to remain central to the global economy until either China offers a replacement for a massive consumer market for other countries to dump their excess production into or the American empire is not longer capable of threatening other countries into using dollars. Also, that article you shared is using a long debunked rumour from a few months ago. SWIFT is still far bigger the CIPS, it processes around ~$35 trillion a day (per https://archive.is/YEWAx), which is far larger than even the figure the article you shared uses as a source (which says that CIPS processed ~$2 trillion in one day). Likewise, that source itself has been disputed by the Chinese central bank, per: https://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202504183381053098.html

昨日，市场有传闻称，当日人民币跨境支付系统（CIPS）的单天交易量出现天量增长，引发社会各界高度关注。今日上午，中国银行相关人士向财联社记者表示，上述网传消息不实。

No this is actually false, the living conditions of 19th century capitalism for labourers were substantially worse than subsistence farming, so much so that the only reason capitalists could even get people to work in factories was the enclosure movement, which forcibly kicked people out of commons, making it impossible to grow your own food, and thereby forcing people to either work in factories or starve. It wasn't until the late 19th century that, for example, life expectancy began rising in England, the home of the industrial revolution, and that was only because England had begun to outsource the most horrific of its jobs to its larger empire, using imperialism to bribe the working class English folk with quality of life improvements. Capitalism actually lowers living standards for all but the wealthiest; it just so happens "the wealthiest" began to include workers in the imperial core.

Yeah, and neither lived until now and I think both would agree that what they wrote about was not the last stage of capitalism. Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was mostly correct for his time, but imperialism today (especially the American financialised imperialism that Michael Hudson has so thoroughly explored in Superimperialism) is meaningfully different and "higher" than Lenin's rather vulgar imperialism, which was naked territory grabbing and domination. Unfortunately we've yet to see "late stage" capitalism, nor will we until capitalism itself is smashed. For it's not on track to destroy itself any time soon, and every crisis it's encountered it's been able to absorb and change to suit its needs rather well. Capitalism will not die of its own accord, it must be killed.

The worst part is that "late stage capitalism" as a term isn't even real. It's a corruption of "late capitalism," a concept invented (at least in the English speaking world; in German it's a much older concept) in the 70's to describe neoliberal financialised capitalism (as opposed to industrial capitalism) that had just been unleashed upon the world, most famously in the book Late Capitalism by Ernst Mandel and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson. Both of these writers use the term "late capitalism" not meaning "late stage capitalism" ie this is the last version of capitalism and it's close to collapsing, but "late" as in "the latest." So really "late capitalism" is "capitalism as of late" or "the latest stage of capitalism," not "the last stage of capitalism." The term has taken on a meaning of its own, morphing into this "late stage capitalism" by commentators who don't actually read these works and don't really know what it means, wishcasting "late stage capitalism" as a fact of the world rather than a fundamental misinterpretation of a long standing term.

Well you just listed one point of leverage right there. Canada doesn't have to trade with the United States. It could reorient its economy around exports to places like China rather than the US. It could try to develop its own internal market, take down barriers to trade between states, and rely less on exports entirely. It could take temporary pain, withholding exports to the United States entirely until they get a better deal (ie play hardball like China). These are all realistic options that are available to Canada, but because the Canadian leadership believes Canada should be a vassal state to the United States, it is virtually impossible that they pursue any of these options.