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  • Very interesting they're letting him actually do this. I would think the bourgeoisie would not like this kind of hit. He still has time to do "incredible deals" whereby these countries agree to buy $100 of US goods and he drops the tarrifs while tooting his horn but things do kind of look like the bourgeoisie (those near levers of power anyways) are serious about forcibly decoupling and reshoring pronto to be able to fully enact the plan of isolating, blockading, sanctioning, and trying to turn up the pressure on and destroy China or at least prevent their rise and displacement of US power.

    I mean it's either fail children running the show which I still can't buy because they'd love their enemies to think them more foolish and incapable than they are and we don't have that luxury OR the whole plan for drawing back, child labor, small yard, high fence, using the sword of empire to attempt to force the world to buy more US stuff to displace competitors OR they're on some sort of dark enlightenment trip and think capitalism is over and the only way to avoid socialism is turning the barbarism machine way up and trying to create some sort of techno-feudalism or something else at home.

    Why does it matter? Well if they're just incompetent then indeed the fall of the US is in order in the near future

    but options 2 and 3 spell very, very, very dire times for those in the imperial core as it's a very orderly managed decline that's liable to be able to potentially draw it out many more decades into the future and inflict incredible amounts of suffering on those of us stuck here in the mean-time (beyond just treats being more expensive).

    • Just like how the proletariat is divided thanks to class unconsciousness, I wonder if the same sometimes dogs the bourgeoisie. Wars are a key example where even a united bourgeois class can enter conflict with itself.

      There are growing divisions within the capitalists about how to navigate the latest wave of imperial crises, and with that has come a cold war of political influences and the conflict within a usually-united class. Whilst this will threaten global capital, and with it many capitalists, there will be others who take the spoils of the coming disruption for their own gain.

    • Dont forget these people like Zeihan. Meaning they believe the world will collapse without america.

    • Reshoring will never happen outside of the rest of the world imposing a Cuba-style blockade on the US (inshallah). Offshoring and de-industrialization was the only way the US was able to push off the spectre of the declining rate of profit and the corresponding class consciousness that comes with it.

      The only way this made sense to me was as a way to push through a tax cut bill through reconciliation that would essentially relieve the wealthy and corporations of paying any taxes at all. A massive and permanent transfer of wealth (because of course the dems would never repeal it). Trump’s GAO would massively inflate the expected revenues from tariffs in order to 1-for-1 cut taxes on the rich. But the I saw Scott Bessent say that tariffs aren’t factored into reconciliation so assuming he was telling the true (big if) then who knows…

      • Offshoring and de-industrialization was the only way the US was able to push off the spectre of the declining rate of profit and the corresponding class consciousness that comes with it.

        Maybe they don't care? US proles are really, really, really propagandized against class consciousness and socialism. End of history and all that. I mean inevitably it comes back when conditions get bad enough and /enough/ time passes but maybe they think something else will happen before then to prevent it? Nuclear war where they all hide in their bunkers? Automated police kill-bots to keep the proles in line? Things like AI and robotics alleviating the need for all those workers (here's where they obviously don't understand proper Marxist economics of course and it eventually breaks down to them eating each other but by then they might have exterminated a lot of us so it'll be small comfort). I mean they're attacking public education and doing all kinds of other things you'd need to do to create a downwardly mobile population suitable for harsh factory work in horrible conditions. Add in some terror of gutting public healthcare, spreading around a few ever-present diseases like covid that slowly cripple those who get repeatedly infected and only those who keep their heads down and work have the healthcare to be able to survive in those conditions while many others are being picked off and you no longer have just food and hunger but living as a weapon.

        I am not optimistic about Americans becoming class conscious quickly enough to matter in the next 20-30 years and more specifically class conscious and aware of and versed in Marxist theory as it's not enough to be class conscious, there are plenty of liberal-ish types who are but think the end all is peaceful protest and organizing and are easily put down. I just see some sort of extreme reaction taking hold as much more likely.

        They might feel (and not without some reason) that by the time there's any real risk of the proles becoming class conscious AFTER reshoring that they'll have AI plus robotics down and they'll have automated kill bots, an enforcer class (cops), plus be able to increasingly replace the lost labor, plus just kill off or cripple tons of the unruly proles by poisoning their water and air, letting pandemics ravage the population at large, and of course climate change heat effects and perhaps increasing food costs to just starve a certain amount to death every year (if kept small enough I'm sorry to say most Americans would walk atop all those bodies and skeletons and stay in line as long as their number isn't up, as long as the mass slotted for starvation is small enough every year to be put down by militarized police and for the rest of the population to keep their heads down and not join them this seems viable).

        Again this all eventually falls apart but it's little comfort as many of us here will be dead as a result long before it reaches that point.

        I say, never say never. Really they might only be trying to prod back strategic industries. Trump likes to go on about antibiotics production which is telling because in a prolonged war against the rest of the world or at least against China the US would run out of medical treatments for their soldiers who'd begin dying to preventable things because they'd be cut off. The US wants to be able to self-sufficiently wage protracted global war on the rest of the world, war for conquest, war for dominance, war for plunder. They can afford to lose iPhone production, they can afford to lose all kinds of consumer goods but they must have food (already not a problem, not likely to be given Canada is a major supplier of fertilizers and we have lots of natural gas for that purpose), they must have medicine for their soldiers, and they must have arms building capabilities. Trump talks about ship-building, he wants back massive ship-building capability in the US which is why the tarrifs on non-US made ships because right now in a prolonged war China could just keep churning out new ships and the US would be without a navy very quickly, he wants to decrease global purchases of Chinese ships to shut down Chinese shipyards and move them to places where the US has control to give the US the ability to use them to make war-ships quickly in a prolonged war and to deny China that same ability.

    • The return of old empire and the dumping of “inclusivity” rainbow capitalism is evident that the bourgeois factions are in fact okay with trump.

    • It's the national bourgoisie ascendent against the international bourgoisie. Trump's favoured businessmen will be given special exemptions while the economy gets gutted and they can pick up the remnants at a steal. meanwhile their international rivals get shafted.

      Also they are definitely on a neoreaction trip, it's just that all they've done is reinvented fascism and mixed it with older patronage networks that won't work for a modern economy.

    • Think you're pretty spot on on the incoming techno-feudalism side of things. They think AI & robotics is gonna mean they don't need workers anymore and so they're setting up for their fiefdoms.

      Owning everything's no fun if the peasants won't dance for your entertainment.

  • I knew that globalised neoliberal oligopolistic capital was dead, I didn't know that it was this dead... There's no going back to the past, the powers that be tried to restore the neoliberal order after the 2008 financial crash, and ultimately failed. This is the end result.

    • to sum up: cooked

    • Exactly so funneling people towards voting for the dems is even more erroneous and delusional than it already was. Neo-Keynesianism is also an dead end.

      • Neo-Keynesianism has been a dead end for almost a decade now, since the initial failure of the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns. They were never going to be allowed to seize power, as the working class globally was, and is, in a position of defeat, not strength. The Dems were basically running on "let's try revive neoliberalism for a third time" (after Obama and then Biden failed to do so), which is as you pointed out, quite delusional and what led to the Dems losing a section/faction of bourgeois support to Trump (Musk, Zuckerberg, et al). As much as Dugin is a borderline, if not straight up fascist, he was right on this, Trump was initially abandoned by the "deep state"/bourgeois in 2020, but gained support from elements of it, alas an "even deeper state" after they realised the state of delusion in the Dem establishment camp. Without this support from this "deeper state" (Musk and silicon valley types like Zuckerberg) Trump would have never been elected, and would not be allowed to do what he is doing now with tarrifs.

        As funny as the JDPON Don memes are, the real JDPON move would've been the USA and a flailing Europe trying to revive neoliberalism for a third time while Russia and China work together on constructing an alternative system. The USA has to try something different. Tarrifs + potential expansionism in Greenland and the Great Lakes + protectionism appears to be that difference.

  • JDPON Don continues his Long March through the institutions of the imperialist beast, in service to the heroic global working classes!

  • I'm seeing a lot of 10% countries there. Does anyone know what the 10% countries have in common that the others don't? I strongly doubt the "Tariffs Charged to the USA (including Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers" is a real number. It seems more like an arbitrary number they've invented to justify going after some countries but not others. There must be a difference between the 10% countries and these other ones that they're focused on beyond this made up number they've invented.

    Madagascar at 93% made up number, what's that about? Cambodia at 97% made up number, what's that about? Laos at 95% made up number...

    Reads like a priority target list.

236 comments