this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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I feel I need to point out that there have been those who for years have been crowing about the imminent collapse of the US, how they're helpless, powerless.
How there's no hope of re-shoring, how it's all boondoggle with all the profits pocketed but seeing this along with some news on Intel's progress on a US fab has left a need in me to push back on that.
There are frankly some people here who are optimistic to the point of being misleading about how things are going to go.
The US is still incredibly strong. They still have incredible assets, decent universities, they can attract talent from Europe and many other parts of the world and they can build these facilities.
Let's not forget the Americans were the first to develop this field of technology. It was exported to Asia for cost cutting but the knowledge was never burned and the key chip-making tech of perhaps the rest of this decade is in western controlled hands in the Netherlands.
I want to point out this is a very real re-shoring achievement. And how it means even with inefficiencies compared to production in reactionary occupied Chinese Taiwan the US will hardly suffer their ability to make electronics imploding should they start something over Taiwan and blow up the factories or have them denied use of them through extended PLAN naval blockade.
Frankly I feel the US still has decades of life in it left not as a uni-polar hegemon (I believe the Ukraine situation has been the start of that, the end of their unipolarity) but as a great power, as the perhaps dominant power with advantages as it was vs the Soviet Union despite the many proud achievements.
This is not exactly news any of us want to hear but I think it's important to swallow and understand. What broke the spirits and brains of so many comrades in the 90s was the fall of the USSR and the loss of hope. I believe it is ultimately counter-productive and dangerous to rigidly insist all is going great and that our victory is very close at hand with all these very specific predictions like the US being helpless about this or that or how they can't reshore this or that when practice is bearing out they can. Because when you do that, many comrades when it doesn't come to pass become dispirited because they were told to be ready for a 100m dash race when in reality the race is a marathon spanning 4000m and they must pace themselves accordingly.
Now obviously some of this has a cost but the contradictions aren't going to really hit home at crushing levels that might overcome all the propaganda I feel for some decades yet in the US even in a situation of extensive decoupling from China and enforcement of cold war era bloc politics including blockades and sanctions. I just think the US has a lot of reserves of strength to draw on and that they're beginning to fortify their position and prepare to hammer China, hence the project is going to take longer and most likely though conditions in the imperial core will get worse they will not get revolutionary I fear in this decade and maybe not even in next.
I fell we have lost ourselves in the analysis of the situation and therefore need to take a step back, return to the basics and as MLs remember to use diamat to try and see the big picture.
Since the fall of the USSR in the 90s, the principle contradiction in global economics has been the Us-China one. And for most of this period the Us has been the leading aspect of that contradiction, as it already started as a imperialist potency while China was still in the middle of its poverty alleviation plan, but since the 2008 crisis China has begun a process of reducing its dependence on western economics and preparing itself to take the place of the main aspect in the future.
And in my opinion ever since COVID and the consequences of how each country handled it, China has taken the leading role in that contradiction and consequently it is now what defines the nature of world economics, which is why we are seeing so many changes in geo-politics recently, both from China trying to assert its position with the de-dollarisation of global trade and the increase of allied countries with BRICS, and from the Us reaction with the Ukraine war and now with the government trying to re-invest in its own industry.
Without discussing the important aspect of imperialism and whether or not the Us still has the infrastructure to produce goods at a competitive price with China, the main focus of my comment is to bring attention to the fact that this is all part of a ongoing process with both sides struggling for the leading role in the global economy contradiction. So even tough saying that the Us is collapsing or they are powerless is hopelessly unmaterialistic, we should exalt the fact that China is becoming the principle aspect and that process is only going to keep changing, in both quantitative and qualitative ways, until the Us has no more place in the global economic contradiction.