India is deeply infected with bourgeois ideology where we believe that we can become a "superpower" while like 80% of the adults are functionality illiterate because... no one knows. Maybe because there is something innately superior about the country. So there is zero investment in stuff like primary education, healthcare, which would create the quality workforce required for boosting the economy. Since bourgeois ideology is internalised, we believe value is created by gifted individuals and such.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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That is interesting and extremely depressing
Yea ive always felt that india is fettered by their unique past traditions and the mental colonization.
Possible if India has a socialist revolution.
Seems like there's more potential for that in India than in the west.
Haven't watched the video yet (love Ben Norton's work though so i'll definitely give it a listen when i have time), but i'd say it's unlikely unless and until they ditch the Modi era neoliberalism and adopt policies more like China's. Right now they appear to be stuck in the kind of trap that the IMF usually lays for countries in the global south, where economic and social growth is crippled by liberalization, as the country is fooled into thinking that it can skip the industrialization step and go straight to the tech/services/finance/real estate stage that the West is at in the false belief that this will lead to similar prosperity as in the West, blind to the fact that the West's wealth is really in large part a result of imperialist/neo-colonial exploitation of countries like theirs. Meanwhile their country's wealth and the value generated by its labor is not used to grow a real economy but is funneled into the pockets of local oligarchies and foreign investors. That is not a recipe for creating a superpower, even with a country as large, populous and rich in natural resources as India that would otherwise have the potential.
look at brazil if you want an example of what might happen. we have deindustrialized for a stupid kind of service economy serving foreign products. even most of that is owned by foreign oligarchs of course. we just matter for the grain, oil or other primary (is that how you call it?) products our national burgeoise class can export tax-free in spite of the people probably needing it.
we dont even have a big enough "middle class" for it to even pretend to work, it just unapologetically makes the western investors who employ and exploit us richer.
lets see how much respect they really have for india and see where they go in their little club. im guessing not high up considering us history of not being trustworthy to the third world. maybe they get something for a bit if they turn into an outpost against china or something idk. different dynamics than south america for sure but still.
That's basically what they explain in the video. They point out that China is an outlier due to Mao era policies that ensured there was a strong educated working class, social support systems, and infrastructure necessary to bootstrap the manufacturing economy. India lacks these fundamentals and it's trying to use the service industry to drive the economy. However, even here they're primarily relying on US companies instead of have developing their own platforms the way China did. They also talk about the role of the public sector in China and the fact that banking is publicly owned, meaning that China is able to direct labor and capital allocation far more effectively. It's a really good contrast of socialist and capitalist paths of development. The video is worth saving to show people who claim China is capitalist.
Much like the US, it's going to devolve to fascism first, and by that point I can't imagine it becoming much of a superpower.
I feel like India is in a far better place than the US here because it has a militant communist movement. There are probably more serious communists in Kerala alone than there is in the whole of US.
Compared to how many militant fascists there are, they are hopelessly outnumbered. There are probably more fascist sympathizers in India than there are people in the entirety of the US. I would be optimistic if India was just another centrist liberal democracy, but the ruling government there is extremely reactionary and ethno-nationalist, and theres likely more chance of an Indonesia styled purge than there is of socialist revolution.
It's also possible, I guess we'll see how things develop there going forward.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: