this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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that claim is just nonsense there is vast wealth in the US more than in Europe and the Americans have an outsized impact in European politics. For example the UK's terf problem has been greatly exacerbated by funding from the US right wing.
this as evidence America is poorer than Europe is extremely dubious as there are many in Europe having these same problems
also it's fundamentally unmarxist to see poverty in the US and think ah yes this is because of foreigners and not because of the capitalists of the US
I think the user you're responding to is referring to an infographic which idk is accurate.
That said, almost all reliable statistics say that the top 10% of the US population hold something like 70% of all wealth in the US, so it's not exactly inconceivable that a global redistribution would bring the bottom 90% of Americans a bit more wealth just because of how much wealth is being horded
i think "average" is doing a lot of work here but with how unequal the US is, yeah i'd believe it.
when they say "average" person they really mean "median" person. otherwise there'd be no point to making the top part of that picture
(yes anglos are notoriously bad at english)
I'm curious how this is calcualted, is it purely money? Cuz I think a lot of consideration should be given to things like infrastructure and industrial capacity.
Also, surprisingly, Scandinavians and Germans would be getting a slight upgrade, yet Canada is part of the true imperial core unlike the US. Spain is a bit of a weird outlier here too.
first paragraph: interesting data point, thanks for sharing
second paragraph: heinous, ridiculous take
Death to America
Ikr lmao such whiplash
Imma call bull on this one. America is an empire and it’s not subservient to Europe. America on its own agenda decided to destroy Europes access to cheap energy and no one has called them out on it. Don’t get me wrong I understand where your argument is coming from, but it’s just not really true. Yes the average European worker benefited more than American workers under the American empire, but I would attribute it to their proximity to the USSR rather than because America decided it liked Europeans more than Americans.
mainly the reason Europe is better for workers is that at the height of their labour political strength at the end of WW2 they codified some proper protections while the US constitution being as it is fuckwitted and written by a bunch of noted fuckwits prevents anything being done
That’s also true. We just have court cases and allow precedent to be the backbone of our entire lives without really making concrete changes so they can be altered at the whim of the ruling class.
this is a patently absurd claim
You're right though when you say the US is not the richest country, but only if you mean the people of the US
Yeah not my best take I was pretty baked this morning
The part I will stand by is “Most Americans do not benefit from US empire in the same way Europeans do”
wait what the fuck? is this because of cost of living / purchasing power adjustments? Is wealth much more concentrated than income and weirdly internationally distributed or something? Please post if you have a link where I can read more, this implies that Americans [edit: all proletarians, not just lumpenproletarians] have way more revolutionary potential than third-worldists think
There is a ton of revolutionary potential in Amerikkka. There is an entire army of able bodied people living on the streets, totally dispossessed and disposed of by society. A lumpen proletariat revolution is possible, in the same way that China surprised the international Marxist community by waging a peasants revolution. It's just different than what has happened before.
This was the party line for the Panthers. They believed the lumpens were the material base for revolution within the material core.
Yeah of course there's revolutionary potential here in the US there are 200 million miserable workers here
I'm not a third-worldist. I'm talking about the people who say that Americans workers benefit so much from slavery phones that even under socialism they'd be worse off without the slaves. This would roundly disprove that.
How is global socialism not third-worldist? You're saying that the median American, even under completely equal global redistribution, would still be a little bit richer than before.
Doesn't this argument support Third Worldism? And isn't the concept of global wealth equidistribution a core tenet of Third Worldism?
No, I don't think so. I'm talking about people who believe that the imperial core has no or limited revolutionary potential because of the benefits they reap from imperialism. They think that the necessary global socialist revolution will begin in the third world, and it's only once imperialism is no longer an option that socialism will have mass appeal in the core. If socialism is already better than imperialism for first-world workers than you don't need to be a third-worldist, revolutions can start anywhere. I admit I'm not super familiar with third worldism, maybe I'm caricaturing them as more pessimistic/defeatist than they are.
I've been frustrated recently how hard it is to talk in hypotheticals on this site. I say "interesting this would disprove X because of Y" and I get several people saying "obviously X is false because of Z". I don't believe X (and I'm literally presenting an argument against it!), why are you all trying to argue with me about it? I'm trying to talk about Y.
Okay, I was not clear on what third worldism actually meant. I thought it meant "global socialism including the third world" and that the NON-thirdworldist position was "bougie white imperial core socialism for citizens of westoid countries" which would basically be in the same direction as europe right now, but more goodies for European proles and less for European elites, while the third world stays poor. I'm against that.
However, if ThirdWorldism is simply the belief that the revolution will start in the third world, then:
All of that stuff literally already happened
That's what the CPC is, and why communism is even vaguely on Gen Zs radar today but never before
Chinese did socialism in 1950, socialist education was superior at making high skill workers, now China eats America's lunch, hence communism (and nuclear war) are on the American population's radar. Some are sane and want communism, more are mayobrained and want to nuke China, but all of them have some type of reaction to the Chinese disruption. So you can't "not be a thirdworldist" because thirdworldism is what literally happened over the last 70 years (and continuing, as China continues to invest into Africa and SEA)
well part of the problem is that I can't even see the original comment that guy posted
However, even if the avg American benefits from a worldwide equal-wealth distribution under a utopian government, some people would still benefit MORE. For the American it might mean less mental stress, while for a Bengali it would less mental stress AND being able to afford enough calories to grow past 5 feet tall. Obviously one of these parties has much more to gain, so rationally the revolution would begin to take place first in one of these areas (and it already did)
is this like, 1850 where america was primarily an export economy to supply britain with raw cotton and clothes?