America into a re-vitalized, progressive nation with strong social welfare. (This may sound absurd, but I have a whole set of reasonings and indicators supporting this that are too long to elaborate here)
How’d that one work out?
America into a re-vitalized, progressive nation with strong social welfare. (This may sound absurd, but I have a whole set of reasonings and indicators supporting this that are too long to elaborate here)
How’d that one work out?
In case you’re wondering, that was me (or rather, my previous deleted account). Long time news mega users will recognize me because I frequently post there.
I am still a committed Bidenist (not for the reasons you think) although I will admit that recent events had dented some of my previous calculations.
I still believe that America’s socialist future will come from Biden in an accidental manner, but we will have to see how it fares given that we still have another 5.5 years of Biden’s presidency. Many things can happen.
And no, this is not a bit btw despite what people might think. It is my deepest ideological conviction.
good bit
Is this written by ChatGPT
By… Sparking a revolution that overthrows the ruling class?
Not sure how you think anything he does is going to result in socialism other than him fucking up tremendously. What “accident” are you expecting?
He starts sundowning, gets confused and pushes the big red button. 100 years later a communist tribe emerges victorious in the Great Scavenger Wars.
See my comment to the other user here.
So what were and are your calculations? What are you basing this prediction on? Seems weird to throw it out there and not elaborate.
I did elaborate in the original comment chain (which is now gone since the account was deleted) but people didn’t like what I had to say. So I’m just going to keep it short but be mindful that this is a wild and quirky theory.
This (accidental) Biden masterpiece will occur in four stages, roughly speaking.
Stage 1: Fed rate hikes drives deficits and prevented US recession
The Federal Reserve tried to curb inflation by hiking interest rates, which is based on the faulty neoclassical economics and their obsession with monetary policy. The goal was to reduce consumer spending, create unemployment which then causes a recession to allow inflation to go down.
When everyone was predicting a recession in the US, I have been on the record saying that the high interest rates will not create a recession (this is essentially the MMT line). The US treasury securities are in enormous volume that increasing the interest rates will only end up pumping more dollars into the system (~$1 trillion USD are now entering the circulation simply through interest income channel alone! It’s estimated that it will reach about $1.5T by the end of the year), and while most of the money went to the rich people (and growing wealth disparity between the rich and the poor), even a small fraction of trickle down is enough to prevent a recession in the US. This has never happened before in history.
At the same time, the rate hikes is killing the rest of the world as central banks across the world chased the high interest rates and desperately trying to stop capital outflows to the US treasuries in vain. This global dollar liquidity drain heightens debt crisis and famine/energy crisis due to the strengthened dollar making everything more expensive.
So far, everything has happened as predicted. The recession did not happen. At a deficit of 8% GDP, there is no way that a recession could happen in the near future. What would have thrown this theory out of whack would be a huge banking crisis from the rate hikes that hits the US economy hard. However, the banking crisis in March has been well mitigated. Everything about Stage 1 is currently on track, and this positions the Biden administration to make their next move: killing BRICS.
Stage 2: The death of BRICS
Again, I have been on the record saying that BRICS has already missed the boat with de-dollarization. The best opportunity was last fall during the global dollar liquidity drain when many countries were being punished. Ironically, the dollar was at its weakest when it was valued at its strongest. However, everyone in BRICS was dragging their feet, kept taking a “wait and see” stance, too afraid to make a radical shift, and now that window of opportunity has already closed. Notice how much news reporting was about de-dollarization late last year, and contrast to the latest BRICS summit where everyone has a more sober take about de-dollarization now. Even the “BRICS reserve currency” was nowhere to be seen - and the answer is simple: it is impossible to take on the dollar.
If you are intent on taking on the world’s most established, stable, liquid asset that has unparalleled market depth, you better not miss - you typically will only have one shot, and the rare opening would be a very transient one. And that opening has already closed at this point, and we don’t know when will a new opportunity surface again.
Now, with the huge volume of accumulated dollar liquidity in the hands of the bourgeoisie, literally free money issued by the government, those money has to go somewhere other than stocks and bonds. There will reach an inflection point where the mass of the dollar will start to flood the foreign sector, thereby dollarizing the world again with a huge influx of dollars into the developing world - just right at a time when the liquidity drain last year has left most countries in economic hardship!
This is most likely to happen this fall/winter (let’s see if my prediction is correct), and when that happens, BRICS will truly be in trouble.
Let me ask you this: if you are a developing country in desperate need of dollar to repay your debt and mitigate economic troubles, would you accept the dollar investment in your country, or would you rather to gamble on China/BRICS’s ambiguous alternative to the US-led trade regime? When you’re desperate, you take whatever dollars that come your way.
This will be the Biden administration’s effort to rewire the global supply chain away from China, and with China’s investment-led growth strategy which resulted in their relatively weak consumer base, it will not be able to absorb its own massive industrial capacity built for export to Western consumers. Europe has been neutered and will follow US’s lead to purchase from their new supply base. India actually has a strong consumer base but given their hostility with China, they will be the first to ditch the BRICS formation and submit to the dollar regime. China will find it difficult to transition away from the export-oriented economic model that it had built up over decades, and will hit a slump as the Belt and Road become increasingly dollarized (if I am not mistaken it is already 60% dollarized). Make no mistake, China won’t collapse like many Western propagandists are asserting, but it might very well kick them out of being a major challenger to the US.
The rest of the BRICS are too weak to take on the dollar and will each succumb to their respective economic problems.
Stage 3: Forced industrialization under neoliberalism
This is when things start to get really strange. With BRICS out of the way, and with the triumph of neoliberal finance capitalism over industrial capitalism, we enter a new phase where new contradictions are heightened.
With the BRICS industrial economies going into a slump, who else are going to supply the treats (the real goods and services) to the empire? Yes, finance capital is all powerful, but at the end of the day the people need actual stuff to consume. The new global supply chain will take a decade or two to fully replace China, so who else can supply the treats?
This will inevitably force the US to re-industrialize as it remains the only major power whose residual manufacturing base still has a leg to stand on (and probably from cannibalized European industries). This would never have happened otherwise if China/BRICS had been allowed to serve their roles as key exporters to Western consumers, but since BRICS has been beaten, the US thus ends up being a weird configuration of a hybrid system where neoliberal finance capitalism reigned supreme but is forced to co-exist with industrial capitalism, and this will spark new levels of contradictions like never before.
Which brings us to the final stage that ends with the ultimate clash between labor and capital.
Stage 4: Growth of labor and socialist movements in America
With the re-industrialization effort ongoing, American workers will once again enjoy rapid wage growth and increased purchasing power, as the balance of power is being shifted from capitalists to labor. This will spark new labor unions, organized strikes that demand for better pay and working conditions, socialist movements that will challenge the bourgeois establishment on the political stage and across all fronts.
The bourgeoisie will undoubtedly attempt to crack down on labor hard, possibly through fascist thugs, but this will only further heighten the contradiction between finance capitalism - that seeks exploit people as debtors, and industrial capitalism - that seeks to exploit the people as labor. The weakened power structure will give way to the ultimate socialist victory in America.
So, finally you have socialism in America, but in the weirdest possible manner, and only with the rest of the Global South devastated and/or plunged into unprecedented economic hardships. And it all came from Biden trying to start a war, which led to global commodity shortage and inflation, and their misguided attempt to curb inflation by rate hikes - on an economy with such massive scale of government debt that has never existed in history before.
This is the Biden’s masterpiece, which will end with destroying all of America’s foreign enemies while accidentally turning it socialist. But since we live in the craziest timeline, never say this will never happen.
I’m gonna ignore stages 1-3 which I have various disagreements with but isn’t the main problem really, I just want to ask why you think stage 4 will be a socialist outcome and not a fascist outcome given historical precedents or revolution attempts in the imperial core.
Two things. First I got a bit carried away at the last part that I was being a bit too generous to socialism. Notice that in my original comment I talked about a “re-vitalized progressive nation with strong social welfare” which is pretty much a Keynesian-style social democratic system not dissimilar to the 1950s and 1960s America before neoliberalism came in.
Second, it is still likely that socialism will win out because for this to happen, it would have been the final stage of capitalist development where the triumph of finance capitalism has set it irrevocably against its very own contradictions: industrial capital (domestically) is forced to return because you have killed industrial capital (elsewhere) - a dialectical outcome that can severely weaken the bourgeois state while strengthening labor movement (a condition that has never really existed in the previous attempts that ended with fascist victory). I cannot say this is the only outcome, for it can just be as you have said, that fascism could crush socialism. However, for that to happen, Marx would have to be wrong. The entire thesis of Marx about the development of capitalism and its contradictions giving way to socialism would have to be wrong.
So what happens to all the ideological fascists we’ve seen grow over the last 20 or so years? At what point do they stop growing and why don’t they play a major part in any of this? Does Biden murder them all or do re-education programs?
It was wrong in that he believed it would happen in advanced industrialised countries rather than those that are at the highest level of exploitation. This was his euro exceptionalist brainworms talking at the time.
The answer to your question is surprisingly simple: the fascists are beaten by… the socialists!
Is it so hard to believe that fascists, with their liberal backers weakened, cannot be defeated handily by socialists?
Once again, the conditions by that point would be completely different than the ones we are in today. Think about it this way: the imagined scenario presumes that the parasite (finance capital) has run out of hosts to feed on (industrial capital), at which point it would be at its weakest.
Their backers aren’t weakened. Industrial and manufacturing labour simply exists where it previously did not. Their backers retain all the money and power they always had on top of gaining a far greater incentive to invest in fascists as an opposition to the growing labour movement.
Socialists will not win under these conditions, against half a country already fascist that only needs organising, and a political structure that is already seeing true believer fascists funded by democrats and getting into power. You think Florida is magically going to stop being fascist after what has been done to it? When? Why? What is happening with all the fascists? Nothing is. They’ve been on a path of growth for 35 years now and they will continue on this path.
You do also think that the US stays monolithic hegemomial due to the dollar game, while the multipolar world doesn’t come to fruition. I do think that if industrial capacity somewhere else is destroyed then other places will get to the forefront, this doesn’t have to be the USA.
Your question is already covered in my Stage 3 paragraphs - there will be a transition period where the rerouting of global supply chain will take time (a decade or two, if not more) to completely replace the Chinese exporters. This will be the phase when neoliberal capitalism will be at its weakest, which contradictorily also the moment when it is securing its victory over industrial capital.
Think about it this way: if the parasite (finance capital) is killing its hosts (industrial capital) faster than its hosts can reproduce, then you will come to a point when the parasite will run out of hosts to feed on. That will be its weakest moment, until more hosts become available for them to feed again (industrial capital being funneled to the other countries). So during this transition period, in order to survive, the parasite has to rely on some form of self-feeding or a limited ability of converting external food sources for energy (re-industrialization).
I wonder if your conception is a bit too focused on nationalism in the USA and ignores the internationalist/financial pressure pressure for low wages and control over people’s body more than is currently possible in the USA outside the prison industrial complex.
Nigeria for example is a huge country that will grow quite well for the next decades till the effects of climate change will make it much harder to live there, which will bring lower agricultural output with it and the instabilities caused by climate change, political instability (according to OP’s text etc.). Could be - just like Mexico or special development zones in the USA be used for cheap labour. Which Awoo did hint at in another comment (that just because labour due to isolationist economy is more needed, doesn’t mean it will immediately win).
I would also ask what degree of separation from the dollar you think is possible with oil/gas and gold which are convertible in foreign trade quite well. So my question would in addition be what are the fundamental texts or competencies of yourself you use to draw for your outlook (don’t dox yourself though).
The imagined scenario is based on the fact that it is impossible to replace the dollar regime, and BRICS has completely missed the boat for de-dollarization, if there ever was one in the first place (there was a moment of weakness last fall with the dollar outflow from the rest of the world - it was possible to replace the dollar with some kind of currency as the world desperately tried to prevent their capital outflow, but since all BRICS nations want to be net exporter countries, nobody had the desire to be the net importer country, the US retains the advantage of a net importer country simply because it can simply prints money to get “free lunches” from everyone else. BRICS as net exporters do not have this advantage).
Obviously, my concern/starting point is what will happen when the dollar liquidity accumulates again (increasingly fueled by rate hikes)? I think they will go to the foreign sector, which will spell doom for the BRICS exporters as I have pointed out above.
Thanks for elaborating. I’m not sure it will shake out that way but it’s an interesting possibility. How does this thought experiment go if Trump beats Biden in 2024, does it make a difference?
The reason I emphasized so much about Biden and not just the US, is because Biden has proved himself to be far more ruthless than any of his predecessors. He has shown that he is willing to go far beyond what other American presidents had done. And quite honestly I don’t see a chance of Trump beating Biden so long as the economy keeps growing - I should say limping along, because the workers’ livelihoods are clearly not improving despite “Bidenomics”, but it is also not going to lead to recession.
The truly wild card here, as I mentioned above, is that the rate hikes have placed the US banking system on unprecedented risks. Biden got lucky with the SVB collapse earlier this year, and it seems to have been well mitigated, but who knows what will happen. There is no way anyone can predict when a banking collapse will happen, there are simply far too many complex factors at play here. But if a huge banking crisis occurs before the election, then Biden will be in trouble.
Hey I know you from the news mega, lol. Idk what to tell ya outside of good luck with that.
The one true leftist has been found![biden-leftist biden-leftist](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7a233642-721f-4a23-bb8d-c98d4a9d9721.png)