Accelerating the Decline Under the Banner of Renewal
Added 2025-04-12 00:24:26 +0000 UTCBreht begins by preparing to read his Night School lecture on Socialist Revolutions, but then gets monumentally sidetracked into an hour long extemporaneous analysis of the Trump Tariffs, Industrial Policy, Manufacturing, neoliberal globalization, the self-immolation of the U.S.'s international reputation, and the possible domestic trajectories over the next half decade: from the hypothetical rise of a new FDR to do a Trump-style takeover of the Democratic Party to techno-fascism in an isolated, reactionary, oligarchic United States to full-on collapse and the conditions for revolution. Somehow he ends up talking about our human nature as socio-linguistic beings, the likely evolutionary ancestry of intelligent aliens, the difference between ants and snakes, Spinoza's God, and the universal cosmic nature of Love... He never quite gets to the lecture. But he will next time. Probably.
Outro Song: "Knafeh" by spinitch
Comments
Love the episode. Globalization helped capitalists save on labor costs even if they had to spend more to transport shit around the world. Now that the assembly lines and textile production shops are automated, the math has changed. They don’t need the cheap labor that was required in the 90’s and 00’s. Bringing back automated manufacturing will not bring back jobs, but it will help capitalists save on global transport costs.
Mark Morrison
2025-04-25 12:04:09 +0000 UTCGreat analysis, and tbh that might be behind some of the hesitation to start a war with Iran, and for similar reasons. To say nothing about China...
Revolutionary Left Radio
2025-04-22 13:06:45 +0000 UTCThis push to re-shore manufacturing is a prime example of how capitalism undermines itself. The Ukraine-Russia war did not go the way the US elites thought it would. Everyone thought Russia would bulldoze the Ukrainians in a matter of a few weeks or tops a few months; after all, the Russians have all the fancy weapons, the hypersonic missiles, the next-gen fighter jets, the latest drones, etc. But what actually happened was that, in the third decade of the 21st century, the conflict settled into trench warfare. Despite one side having a big advantage in technology, the course of the war was determined by good old-fashioned manufacturing capacity. Russia ground the Ukrainian forces into the ground because they were firing 10 artillery shells for every 1 the Ukrainians fired. The ability of each side to produce enough for attritional, grinding conflict was the key factor, not who had the most advanced weapons. Previous US military orthodoxy stated that we lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam due to the asymmetrical nature of those conflicts, but if we were ever in a "real war", our technology would allow us to flatten any standing army that we faced head-on. The Ukraine conflict shows that modern warfare doesn't look like that. This war changed the American bourgeoisie's calculus in a major way, and they realized that the reason their proxy war failed was because they couldn't out-produce the Russians. So now there is this scramble to repatriate manufacturing capacity, but capitalism has no mechanism through which they can achieve that, so instead we get these tariffs. The US ruling class is freaking out about their defeat in Ukraine, and they are floundering to course-correct, but they can't, because of the anarchy of the market. Wall Street has undermined the material basis of the military that enforced their rule over the world.
Jack Sauer
2025-04-17 14:11:48 +0000 UTC
