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Not defending the OP post itself, but this is close to saying why hang around a capitalist country. There aren’t many options. You have to play the game to survive, or thrive, and have a non stressful life worried about a big bill
I get your point but I disagree. It is hugely difficult to gain new citizenships and residencies. It takes huge amounts of money and effort to overcome these obstacles for most people.
Whereas there are a million internet forums and mostly anyone can join any one of them for free. Maybe they don't have the same quality of conversation as here (although quite a few others do) but if the thing he hates (captialism, investment firms, etc) produces a culture where the quality of conversation is so high that nothing else can compete, shouldn't that be it's own signal?
There are very very few non capitalist forums. If you’re heavily against capitalism, non political forums will still normally be pro capitalist to some degree. It’s the society almost every one lives under. Not sure where one would go besides hard left forums which are very few and very far between. And then those places are only political. What if you don’t want to just discuss leftist things
That’s why after the country thing I included there aren’t many options. You have to play the game.
Oh cmon. Reddit, has about 10000 forums for every minor variation of hating capitalism. Its like a buffet of capitalism hating.
As far as i cab tell there are probably 20 anti capitalist sub reddits per pro capitalist sub reddit.
Again, a lot of those subs might have low quality discussion but if the reality is that certain topics attract low quality discusion then maybe that ideology simply isnt interesting to many intelligent people. And to be fair thwre qre definitely well moderated anti capitalist forums out there with good content.
Reddit banned chapo subreddit. Reddit does not take kindly to more serious hard left subreddits. As if any platform does (Discord, YouTube, etc). To be fair, this isn’t only anti capitalism issues communities or people though.
> Buffet
Probably because it’s a trendy edgy thing to say online and casually in real life. Can you point me to some harder left subreddits or communities? Being casually or meme focused anti capitalist isn’t the same thing to taking it seriously. I know there’s stuff like that late stage capitalist one.
> 20 per pro capitalist
I believe we are using pro capitalist differently. I used it in an earlier comment for any community that will relate to serious status quo issues in society and be okay with capitalism and/or not make it a priority/superficially put it down at times. So all those big subreddits like their main news, political news, every country’s main subreddit, would all be pro capitalist.
> low quality
Exactly. The subreddit without low quality content was banned. There’s a funny thing of being anti capitalist but not wanting to upend the status quo as much. Those two ideas don’t add up of course. But that’s why low quality makes sense then.
> but if the reality is that certain topics attract low quality discusion then maybe that ideology simply isnt interesting to many intelligent people
I assume you will say you didn’t mean to point this specifically at anti capitalist ideology. Why write this sentence then? Why specify ideology vs topic if you weren’t at some level pointing a finger at anti capitalist ideology?
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I know we are getting a bit contentious here. I’ll admit my side is primarily because of the last bit above where I’m perceiving my assumptions. I could be wrong.
I do want to point out I’m not anti capitalist in the same way the OP was. I don’t much care if capitalism is or isn’t the economic system in a society I dream up. I prefer focusing on status quo issues en masse. So I have little bias for specifically caring about anti capitalist communities being given their respect because of being anti capitalist.
On the one hand, there is the troubled exit from the pandemic crisis, still under the threat posed by the emergence of new Covid-19 variants. The pause on redundancies has come to an end in Italy. This, albeit partially, would have "spared" about 520,000 jobs in Italy up until now, according to Centro Einaudi’s estimates [25th Annual Report on Global Economy and Italy, June 2021]. Company closures and staff reductions (in a mixture of arrogance and callousness) have marked the summer months, only to announce a difficult autumn, when the redundancy ban will be lifted also for small businesses and services. However, it is clear how uncertain the workers’ condition remains, regardless of any collective agreement signed, and how necessary it is always to organize and fight for the defence of our class.
One must add future prospects to the lasting effects of the past. And the future is now called electrical and digital restructuring which, in the third decade of this century, is the updated version of the European restructuring. They indeed both follow the same rules and have the same raison d’être: the world contention, which pits industrial systems of a continental scale against each other, from Europe and America to China. One should not be surprised to see the ideological armour of this contention painted in the fashionable green of environmentalism, so that the poisonous content of an 1mperialist clash — which embitters workers against other workers — is concealed.
If at the beginning of the 21st century electrification had technological limits in batteries, both in terms of cost and range, these are now partly overcome, because electric cars have a range of 240-450 km, more than enough for 95% of journeys of less than 50 km. The major obstacle remains the construction of a network of charging stations and their integration with the electricity grid.
The race between China, Europe, and USA
UBS Evidence Lab, a team of UBS bank experts working in 55 specialised labs to provide data on investment decisions, predicts that cost parity between electric and internal combustion cars will be achieved in 2024 [Inside EVs, October 20th 2020]. By then, the development of car electrification will be self-sustaining without government subsidies.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), in its report " Electric Vehicle Outlook 2020", estimates that by 2022 carmakers will have 500 different models of electric cars available and that sales will rise from 2.1 million in 2019 to 26 million in 2030. The share of electric cars in total car sales will rise from 2.7% in 2020 to 28% 1n 2030. For the International Energy Agency (IEA), in the " Stated Policies" scenario, which considers evolution of the situation according to the policies already in place, the circulation of electric cars worldwide will reach 145 million by 2030, 7% of total circulation, and sales will be 35% of the total in China, 35% in Europe and 15% in the USA [LEA, Global EV Outlook 2021, April 2021].
According to these forecasts, China is leading the process of automotive electrification, the EU is racing hard to catch up, and the USA is lagging behind, although the Biden’s administration is attempting to make up lost ground with its electrification plan.
The charging network
In 2019, there were 6.5 million private and 800,000 public charging points (aka charging stations) worldwide [IEA, Global EV Outlook 2020, June 2020]. Private charging points are those owned by households, while public charging points are owned by companies and are freely accessible to all motorists, just like any petrol station.
Another BNEF analysis [Bloomberg, March 23rd, 2021] shows China’s dynamism in building an infrastructure network: its 300,000 available public columns in 2018 have risen to 516,000 in 2019 and 800,000 in 2020.
According to McKinsey January 5th], by 2030 the USA will have between IT and 30 million private and 400,000 to 600,000 public charging points, the EU together with the UK between 28 and 35 million private and 500,000 to 900,000 public charging points, and China between 15 and 17 million private and 1.5 and 2.2 million public charging points. This large difference between the public and private charging points in China, the USA and Europe lies in the different distribution of the population in the territories.
In the USA and Europe, as people move to the suburbs, half to twothirds of the population now live in single dwellings with garages. This is why McKinsey predicts that by 2030 there will be twice as many private charging points as in China, where urbanisation is leading to a concentration of the population in cities with large apartment blocks and therefore twice as many public charging points. According to the McKinsey report, by 2030 there could be 54 to 82 million private and 2.4 to 3.7 million public charging stations in the world. A worldwide market has opened up, triggering a race to invest in this sector, and with it speculation.
On August 15th, 1971 (50 years ago) US President Richard Nixon declared that the ‘gold window’ was closed. The era of the convertibility of the dollar to gold was over, and the system that had been agreed upon by the victors of the war at Bretton Woods in 1944 collapsed: the regime of fixed but subject to periodical reviews exchange rates had lasted a quarter of a century.
Jeffrey Garten, Bill Clinton’s former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and managing director of the Blackstone Group and Lehman Brothers, is now a historian who has written about Nixon’s decision. He recalls that the turnaround came at a time when the amount of dollars in circulation in the world was four times the amount of gold held in reserve, inflation was rising, Washington was withdrawing troops from Vietnam, and Nixon, the month before, had announced his visit to Beijing, a historic event.
In 1959, the economist Robert Triffin had explained to Congress that there were "absurdities associated with the use of national currencies as international reserves" and that the contradiction was an "built-in de-stabilizer" of the national monetary system. The end of convertibility did not eliminate these "absurdities"; instead, it removed the only limit its creators had provided: the gold standard.
Very interesting points; there is a scientific clarity in your analysis. But, I would like to add a point: the reality is that the production is in global scale now, the production has no borders, races, nationalities, but the capital has its local interests. The working class is a global class, while bourgeoisie is a local class. But since the bourgeoisie is the dominant class, it makes the working class divided. Like the role of black bourgeoisie in the disguising class struggle under the hood of racial issues. I think this small piece of text helps make my point a little bit clear: http://www.theinternationalism.org/2020/07/return-to-marx.ht...
A lot of work is moving abroad without becoming imports. US companies own significant chunks of the services and R&D workforce the world over. Even in production, it's not uncommon for a US company to buy a factory rather than importing goods produced in that factory.
I didn't mean the point is the imports. The fact is that US is loosing his share of world GDP for decades, and new powers like China are rising. It is just like the decline of British empire at the late 19th and early 20th century and rise of new powers like US, Germany, Japan. We are witnessing the same phenomenon that Lenin called unequal development of capitalism in the imperialist stage. We would also see the same tensions and wars that we saw in the first half of 20th century.
Global GDP is irrelevant for US workers, the value of US exports has grown even as wages stagnated. At some point it just stops being about how much value is produced and becomes a question of how much value is captured.
If a factory produces 10x as many goods with the same number of workers the work those people are doing has increased in value. But, their unlikely to see a 10x wage increase.
Friedrich Engels memorably describes the poor sanitary condition of working-class neighbourhoods in mid-19th century England. At a certain point, typhus and cholera epidemics began to threaten bourgeois neighbourhoods, and only then was the government forced to take remedial action. Well, with the pandemic of the century, it is as if Engels had entered the 21st century, and the same contradiction was laid bare for the whole world. The Covid-19 catastrophe in India shows an elementary truth: Europe, America and China are completing colossal vaccination plans, but they will never be truly safe if the rest of the world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, remains at the mercy of the virus and its mutations. And yet, even in the face of the evidence, the contention between powers to take advantage of vaccine diplomacy does not cease. The United States has put forward the promotional idea of suspending the patents of the pharmaceutical giants, perhaps in order to counter the Chinese offensive and drive a wedge between the EU and Beijing; Europe has laid the blame precisely on British and American protectionism; China, and to some extent Russia too, are always on the offensive in offering their vaccines. But those offers are a drop in the ocean of the billions of doses which are required. India, which aspired to be the world's pharmacy and a supplier for Africa and Asia, has been dragged into the maelstrom of its worst crisis since independence - one that is casting a shadow over its viability as a state and its ambitions as a power. It is now acknowledged that the world population must be vaccinated, but there remains a gulf between words and deeds. Furthermore, how many millions of deaths, in the end, will the deadly mixture of a lack of foresight, the struggle between capitals, the struggle between powers and the inability to unite efforts towards a collective goal have cost?
We can only repeat the same thing: the pandemic simultaneously shows the enormous potential of the productive forces, but also the fatal contradiction of which they are prisoners - that of a society divided into classes and the contention between states. Communism is a necessity for humanity: that is where the commitment to a truly humane society lies.
Engels in the New Century. (2021, June). Internationalism, 12.
