RedDawn [he/him]

Oh you don’t like being exploited? Well, you’re free to starve and die instead! Freedom!

The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under a bridge at night.

Everybody is equally free to turn down a job when they need money for food, housing, medical care and other necessities of basic life.

Chinese poverty elimination didn’t come on the backs of any of those things you goober. “Well have you considered that sometimes OTHER countries did bad things to reduce domestic poverty, and therefore China doing so is inherently bad actually !?” Grow the fuck up, this isn’t a real argument.

The Chinese government has much higher approval ratings from its people (consent of the governed) than the U.S. and most any other western “democracy”. It uses less violence against its citizens (US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world plus high rates of police murder and brutality) as well as internationally (China hasn’t bombed or invaded anybody in like 40 years while the U.S. does so daily over the same time period). Objectively, for the word to have any meaning at all the US is far more authoritarian. It uses its authority more violently and malevolently. If you can’t admit this you aren’t engaging with reality, you’re just afraid of challenging the propaganda you’ve been indoctrinated with.

It’s not a no brainer, it’s a point of debate for like over a hundred years and the people who recognize the concept of the Labor Aristocracy as Lenin described it have generally shown to be correct, I don’t have much faith in the revolutionary potential of the people in the imperial core until the empire itself begins failing.

The idea is that superprofits from exploiting foreign workers are distributed broadly enough to the domestic “middle class” to make them comfortable and give them a stake in imperialism and therefore capitalism, so they have little revolutionary potential. And this has mostly been true, though I’d say neoliberalism has been short sighted enough to concentrate the wealth so tightly at the top that conditions have been getting worse for even the “labor aristocracy”, so it may be less true going forward. That and if the third world with the help of China/Russia etc can effectively give imperialists the boot, the imperial core bourgeoisie won’t even have the option of buying off their workers anymore. But that’s something that will take decades to develop.