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I have said it before and I will say it again: people still pretend like American imperialism is still rooted in industrial prowess. That era is long gone.
No, America is a landlord/rentier capitalist and as such will always behave like a landlord.
A landlord does not have to work. I repeat, a landlord does not work. A landlord extracts what other people have worked hard on.
American tech giants like Microsoft and Google aren’t dominating the market because they are the most competent at making the best products out there. No, they dominate because they were able to leverage on various legal and financial means to bully their competitors out of the business, and they are able to do so precisely because the sector works just like a rentier economy. Every time you use their product, you (or your employer) pays a rent to those companies.
America is never going to re-industrialize because industrialization raises the price of labor, and thus confers labor with leverages against capital. America didn’t de-industrialize itself in the first place for nothing. It de-industrializes itself precisely to defeat the trade unions and working class movements that had been gaining momentum by the 1970s.
This is how US imperialism functions. Nobody is ever going to invade America so long as it has nukes at its disposal. And as long as the dollar reigns supreme, it will continue to behave like a landlord that extracts concessions from all over the world.
Incidentally, this is a fantastic read on the subject https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-nothing-capital-versus-growth/
That was a great read. I’m working my way through vol 2 of Capital. In it, Marx talks about how it’s in the sphere of production only where value is created. Distribution, beyond what is technically necessary, does not add value. I think this is particularly relevant for the non-financial sector of the US economy - Apple, Nike, Gap, even Amazon and Walmart to an extent. For the most part, these firms are not creating surplus value, they are extracting surplus value from, for example, contracting factories in the global south. That strikes me as inherently unstable: all it takes for much of the surplus value in the non-financial sector to just evaporate is for imperialism to be severed.
Oh yeah, very much agree with all that. And I've only got through the fist volume myself so far, really gotta read the rest. 😅
This is why they're so fucking scared of Huawei and Bytedance
tbf losing a hot war w/ china would def help the dedollarization process one way or another, main problem is dedollarizing via nuclear winter is less than ideal
It's even more involved than just the renting. US imperialism demands large consolidation in order to exert control over the markets. Tech giants are supremely important to consolidate because they offer all of the intelligence any empire could want, thus it is in the interest of the empire to ensure that a handful of giants rise, and those giants run uncontested.