My god, even the best chance for socialism is hopeless because of the dollar. “it’s not doomer because the party could do something different” idgaf day after day it’s more dollars and less long term hope. Nothing China does can matter because all the green energy, all the bnr, all the poverty elimination, all of it is paid for with imperial currency and little to no interest in changing this arrangement from within. The party will talk about win-win arrangements and mutually-beneficial cooperation until the fucking nukes are flying.
China could drop USD and all trade with the US tomorrow and not lose anything of value. That was their entire point in selling bonds in USD in Saudi Arabia recently. China can issue bonds at Treasury levels… Without US permission. Meaning they could, if they needed to, pay off all USD based loans regardless of the creditor… Which ends the US dollar and removes all incentives of the petrodollar.
To China, USD is now play money, worth no more or less than the euro or timber or any other base renewable trade good. It’s no more a currency than fish.
Also check this out and see what you think? It seems to be the polar opposite of your take
https://hexbear.net/comment/5663045
If you’re correct, that’s even worse, it means they could drop the dollar, but choose not to because ???
Because they don’t deal in the short term. Short term thinking without fully planning situations caused the loss of life during the great leap forward. China doesn’t care about tomorrow, just ten, twenty, a hundred years from now… And the US isnt going to make all of those milestones regardless of China’s involvement.
Now let’s say brics lead by a strong China does push to dedollar the world; what’s the US response? Probably nukes. The US is a dangerous dying empire who may just convince its military members and financial backers that a world without US hegemony is equal to nuclear annihilation, and we all know anyone stupid enough to join the US military is dumb enough to believe that. If a highly visible threat to power happens before China et al are sure the US doesn’t have the internal political will to lash out in its dying breath, then you’ve just given the empire a target, and China would very much not like to be that target.
So what’s China doing? Reassuring the world. They built up a navy not to attack the US, or even defend against a US attack, but to replace the US when it’s time – piracy is a legitimate issue after all and someone needs to be patrolling the waves. They issue bonds at the same interest rate as the US Treasury in USD, which assails any fear of defaulting on imf or US debt by the global south – China can take care of you if they act up and pull some dumb shit. This climate change thing? China builds more solar panels alone than any other country builds any kind of power generation, combined with their turbine factories they’re poised to coat the world in cheap renewable energy that lasts.
China is setting up to help the world recover from the fall of the West, to do that they need to survive the fall of the West, which means not directly fucking with the US until it is too weak and disjointed to go full nuclear Holocaust.
I want to push back on this kind of thinking cuz I see it a lot when people are trying to defend China against, what is imo, valid criticism of an inactive, excessively “pragmatic” policy by appealing to some kind of grand plan
The USSR did many of these things that people say China can’t do while they won’t do it. Dedollarization? The USSR had an almost entirely separate economic bloc where, when trade was conducted with currency it was done in the ruble, not the dollar. Ofc it wasn’t free from trade in the dollar and countries still had to retain dollar reserves (if they could get them) but this arrangement, while definitely not being perfect, allowed countries like Cuba or Vietnam and others to survive, even thrive sometimes, while being strangled by the US-led imperialist economic order despite the USSR never having the kind of technically advanced, massive economy like China does now
It didn’t result in nuclear war, even though it did get close sometime cuz this is what confronting imperialism on a world scale entails, cuz nuclear war is suicide for everyone involved. It’s not GOOD but it is better than doing nothing but selling solar panels (quite compatible with capitalism btw, also doesn’t solve climate change) while the oceans boil and a negative “peace” reigns. While an alternative economic system that actually exists is extremely threatening to capitalism, the ruling class of the West aren’t “dumb” or suicidal and I think it’s harmful to think of them that way cuz they are very “rational” considered from their perspective
Also, even if the CPC refuses to meet it right now, confrontation is inevitable and the ongoing provocations will continue to increase and increase no matter how much “reassuring” they do cuz the US cannot permit another country to surpass it in economic power or the entire structure that keeps the third-world locked into US-led imperialism falls apart and they will not let that happen passively so either China will have to submit to the US or confront them
The reason the USSR and their bloc collapsed so relatively peacefully is cuz it was self-destruction. In the end, they mostly gave up power willingly. In the CPSU, so rotted internally by revisionism, most of them watched Gorbachev destroy the country for years and then they gave in to Yeltsin (I’m oversimplifying but yeah lol) and let him finish it and the most of the rest actively helped this process, which visibly began with Krushchev, along. Not to say there was no fighting but yeh
When the US starts to go, I can’t even imagine how violent it will be cuz the ruling class of the West are quite willing to fight to keep their privileges, even if that means the state has to intervene in a collapsing economy directly against the whining of many
and traditional neoliberal ideology if it’s necessary to protect capitalism (fascism is also on the table for them ofc), where the CPSU was unwilling to protect the power of the working class in the USSR (cuz many of them just wanted to restore capitalism anyway lol) and the masses had long been demobilized
How does the west fall without nuclear holocaust? Or would it be a partial nuclear holocaust rather than a full one?
How does China building solar panels solve climate change? No matter how many renewables they invest in, it’s a group project with a group grade
For the first point; by simple collapse. We know from the ussr that nuclear powers can collapse without it ending the world (even if some of us think it maybe should’ve and we’d be better off). The government fails to stop a revolution, some rich guys get a little too self assured and back some legal separation, some banks simply collapse without anyone bailing them out, there’s a hundred scenarios, and most of them would happen if any single one happens… But the easiest thing would simply be if the global south stopped being exploited and instead was openly armed with just 13 nuclear icbms each.
To your second point, if you shrink fossil fuels customers, you reduce emissions fucking up the cycle. Moving all but the West away from fossil fuels, essentially making some countries leapfrog the technology tree, shrinks overall demand while reducing emissions enough that we might keep under 2c. We reduce demand, the producers can’t export while maintaining their economies, meaning the West must produce and consume, and use government resources to prop up both sides of that industry. The economics behind such a move from the West don’t favor longevity, and if the West becomes more poor, then renewables look even better as a survival tactic.
I gotta be honest, the example of the ussr does not make me more secure that the US would go equally as quietly into that dark night. And the only country making progress is China, not the rest of the global south and especially not India.
they probably don’t want wwiii to start today
If you agree with Putin, it started earlier this week