Nuttula [comrade/them]
I think that people who react strongly to this are perhaps projecting their own situations and experiences to others. Like if I was a parent and my children told me they have the opportunity to move to a better life somewhere else with their family(or maybe a change to start their family) then I’d say yes please go I’ll be fine. Throw in climate change and I’d be begging them to leave me.
Of course not everyone is the same, and I’m sure some parents will never really want to say goodbye or whatever for one reason or another, but my main point is not everyone is the same and not every situation will be the same. So acting as if emigrating is impossible is just as silly as acting as if everyone can do it.
If we talk about the requirements look around and you’ll see immigration requirements are quite achievable if you are American you’ll likely have some inherent advantages or be in a position where this could be a realistic goal.
Yes surely if you are poor and working retail two jobs overtime or whatever I don’t see any path to emigration other than English teacher route and even that is a shitty job. There is no denying this. The poor will be hit the hardest exactly because of these reasons.
But if you have some decent job now(literally anything in IT can get you a job abroad) or a bachelor degree you can leverage to find a job offer than it is quite possible.
I don’t think giving this suggestion is “privileged”, if emigrating is the best option then you should be able to say it, yes it is sad not everyone can do it but that does not change reality, when shit hits the fan due to climate change there will be millions of climate refugees anyway. You can either consider it now and/or plan for it while you still have time or become desperate and try to do it 10-20 years from now along with hundreds of millions of third world climate refugees. Ah and you’ll be quite a bit older too so that wont help either.
From a Marxist perspective yes and no. According to Marx there is a law for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This tendency has been empirically verified by Marxist economists among them Michael Roberts(post about the world rate of profit).
So will the rate of profit eventually fall to zero and what does that mean? Well, if the current rate of secular fall in the G20 economies continues, it is going to take a very long time to reach zero – well into the next century! Among the G7 economies, however, if the average annual fall in profitability experienced in the last 20 years or so is continued, then the G7 rate will reach zero by 2050. But of course, there could be a new period of revival in the rate of profit, probably driven by the destruction of capital values in a deep slump and by a severe restriction on labour’s share of value by reactionary governments.
This tendency is simply the organic composition which is a fancy term that just means technology and automation rises, the profit margin necessarily must fall. Why is this true is tied to the basic Marxist principle of the labor theory of value which is only human labor generates real value and nothing else, from that surplus value can only be created from real value. An autonomous robot that could manufacture its own repair parts and recharge itself would not create value, and a semi-autonomous robot that requires only minimal human maintenance creates very little value.
In general terms all technology that improves productivity also reduces profit for the capitalist economy. This may be counter intuitive but the classical mainstream economics “common sense” that more productivity = more profit only considers individual capitalists, e.g the first capitalist to replace his workers with machines. In the long term the other capitalists must do the same to compete or they’ll go bankrupt, either way eventually if one capitalist replaces everyone with machines eventually everyone will be replaced by all other capitalists.
To be clear here I’m not talking about “use value” but “exchange value”. An autonomous robot that takes care of the elderly obviously is creating “use value” but not commodities that can be exchanged.
So to get closer to the answer as I said “yes and no” we have to understand that even though Marx was right about the falling rate of profit, he also predicted counter tendencies, measure to restore profitability without necessarily being tied to productivity/technology.
The classical example is how WW2 saved US capitalism. More recently the “neo-liberal period” that starts in the late 80s-early 90s is a clear period of a counter tendency, attempts to increase profitability by basically screwing workers in every way possible.
If we disregard climate change for a moment this means that if nothing happens and we keep going for the next 10-30 years there will be recurring crisis with a collapse at some point. However what is very likely is that before that happens there will be some counter tendency to restore profitability it could be anything like a war or even outright eco-fascism.
Is it just up to the Fed then? No as far as Marxist understand of capitalism is concerned the stock market is irrelevant, only profitability of the productive forces can dictate the frequency and whether or not there are going to be recurring crisis or even collapse.
There is a reason the “line goes up” meme is kind of relevant here, it doesn’t matter how much the line goes up, if you squeeze the population enough the system will crumble.
Look at the destruction of WW2 which was not caused by nuclear weapons. There are videos of the aftermath of the fall of Berlin for example, pretty awful stuff but just looking at the amount of destruction you’d think it is amazing everyone involved let it get to that point. You should not have blind faith that these psychopaths wont put the US on the path of destruction for many reasons including because they are literally incapable of imagining defeat or caring about the potential “costs”.
Conventional weapons are more than enough to destroy any country.
China, Vietnam, Cuba and DPRK all have COVID under control so? What it takes to handle a highly infectious pandemic is a government capable and willing to enforce a quarantine by force along with providing the necessary resources and precautions to make it happen like making sure people don’t starve by establishing delivery services or get evicted because they are earning less.
Climate change is going to be about mitigation. Countries will have to invest in very large, expensive and time consuming(also labour consuming) infrastructure projects to prevent climate change damage. Again socialist countries can do this because they are not entirely bound by the whims of capitalism and the profit motive. There is no profit to be made here so most capitalist countries will not invest in climate change mitigation infrastructure until they are literally living through the disasters.
Is it sufficient?
Of course not if we hit 4 degrees C we all basicaly die. If we hit 2.5-3 very few parts of the world will be habitable no matter what geoengineering projects you can think of.
Using authors intent to justify a moral lesson is a vicious circle though. The only reason Light develops a god complex is because the author says he will. There is no science here, we are not seeing a careful study of many different personalities or cultural/social-economic backgrounds being given a Death Note. No we are seeing one very stereotypical Japanese highschool “genius”. Heck not even political theory is developed or studied here either since everything starts from the very basic point of view of Japanese society where crime and corruption are the biggest problems, not any inherently social/cultural/political foundations of the nation itself.
It is why fictional works should not be the basis for real world analysis and theory. Another anime that pisses me off so much for this exact reason is Fate/Zero which the reactionary weebs simply think it justifies capitalism realism “see? you can’t fix the world that is idealistic!1!!! because humans are flawed and you can’t have world peace blah blah”. No shit the only reason you can’t have “world peace” is because of that concept itself is just liberalism, but most importantly because it is a fictional story bound by the authors vision and will not actual empirical evidence or science. You could definitely use any reasonable amount of power(doesn’t have to be an all powerful wish granting device) to create a better and much more peaceful world.
lol someone’s been playing too much MGS, is that you Kojima? “Biologically enhanced supersoldiers” is pretty much a sci-fi trope for at least 2 decades now and the credibility of this “US Intelligence” is pretty much zero.
They make these shitty claims because the truth is harsher to admit. What China is likely doing instead is using human exoeskeletons which they’ve openly shown and bragged about. Human genetic enhancement is just not going to be practical and it is extremely questionable to worry about it at this point.
In fact articles like this are an attempt at gaslighting, blatent statements like this make it clear
Specifically, the scholars explored Chinese research using the gene-editing tool CRISPR, short for “clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” CRISPR has been used to treat genetic diseases and modify plants, but Western scientists consider it unethical to seek to manipulate genes to boost the performance of healthy people.
Obviously only the great western scientists views matters and of course only we are morally right. See the evil immoral Chinese wants to develop “genetic” weapons!1!1!!! What are the chances the US wouldn’t use this technology if given the chance and the necessity like an actual war with someone armed with more than mountain goats anyway?
There are no sources to this article which is reporting an oped posted on the fucking Wall Street Journal other than US own propaganda machine, WTF is this?
I call its approach of economic espionage “rob, replicate and replace.” China robs U.S. companies of their intellectual property, replicates the technology, and then replaces the U.S. firms in the global marketplace.
There is no read to read that nonsense oped which is worst than your average reddit poster.
"wrote the scholars, Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese defense technology at the Center for a New American Security
“Center for a New American Security” I think a fucking 5 yo could come up with a less shameless name. I too would love Chinese supersoldiers, but this is just sad bait, don’t fall for this shit guys.
Marx would be an unlikeable asshole if I brought him into modern times
This is not an argument but a child’s vision of morality. Pretty sure modern humans will be absolutely despised hated for the next few hundreds if not thousands of years given how we are likely going to destroy the planet as we know it today(certainly the planet as it was 100 years ago is long gone now) and yet we fail to create a better world for ourselves despite near omnipotent technological capabilities. All our problems are political and social, technologically we could have (near)post-scarcity probably since the late 80s already, certainly by now.
Whether [insert generic historic figure here] would be up to our moral standards today or not is about as relevant as asking if vanilla ice cream always tasted like vanilla ice cream.
Not just harsh words though. The US is certainly willing and capable of putting sanctions against everyone and their mother to achieve their goals. The reliance on the US market means Japan can’t just “take it”. A geopolitically conscious Japanese government would be looking to strengthen ties with China ASAP so that they can finaly leverage that into a push for kicking out the US.
But Japan just isn’t likely to do it until there is a war between China and the US. I don’t believe for a second Japan would just accept the prospect of becoming a target in that scenario. But that is also not happening anytime soon so essentially US threatens sanctions, Japanese politicians shit on their pants because Toyota and Sony may actualy go bankrupt if that happens.