askchapo

That isn't happening, though

Right, which is why I'm curious what the calculus is for the imperialist class: at what point do they stop eating their own tail and get serious about the New American Century? They won't just let the empire collapse. I think this is a contradiction that is almost certainly resolved with fascism, which begs the question of how we are to navigate the tension behind a labor struggle that sees material benefits in throwing marginalized people under the bus. What means do we have to oppose the marginalization and dehumanization when it comes with the promise of economic stability for white labor aristocrats working at the bomb factories? What is our strategy when it comes to organizing these workers, how can we appeal to them while also fundamentally rejecting the product of their work and the entire project it exists within? And the obvious question, already asked a million times, how does the left build power in the core to resist fascism, when a large part of the people it needs to fight fascism would benefit from it?

Imperialism uses financial instruments to extract superprofits, and without dollar supremacy that becomes a lot harder because countries don't have to get loans from the IMF/World Bank or hand over their national resources.

100% and this is why dedollarization is so important to observe; is it realistic to expect that onshoring (thx for this word btw) would contribute to the process? I think Chinese capital entering the developing world is the biggest threat to dollar supremacy, but would capitalists readily cede ground by onshoring and allowing China to provide alternative means of development? Will the west ever attempt to be competitive in this realm, with only soft power to exploit, or will the IMF and World Bank continue with the same MO despite the decline in force projection?

I think that it does come down to what you said, though. I don't think the CIA is what it used to be (go woke go broke ) so it'll be crucial to see how any potential failures in killing anti-imperialist movements end up causing another Cuban Missile Crisis or similar.

The attempts to onshore chip production, for instance, have mostly just been gobbled up by AI compute.

But that leaves an existing chip industry to be nationalised if needed, having an ongoing hype around AI just helps keeping the necessary investment down.

That has some military uses (see: Israel) but it’s ultimately a boondoggle.

If you are talking about Lavender that's hardly a military use. They basically built an elaborate RNG as an ethical fig leaf for their indiscriminate bombing and called it "AI" to gain credibility from the ongoing hype cycle. That's more of a political use than a military one I would say. ~~They must know~~ I hope they know it's bullshit, so then the only realistic use-case left is justification of their actions towards the growing number of AI believers.

I don't even get it. I like factory work. Yeah, it's hot and physically tiring and dangerous because those fuckers won't take my safety concerns seriously, but I like being able to zone out for eight hours and not talking to customers. It's fine?