That wouldn't really be capitalism anymore if there are no employees whatsoever.
Biden team faced "tirade" at meeting with Chinese over America's poor human rights record in "Diplomatic humiliation"
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No, that would be peak Capitalism. That's where its heading. If everyone starved because there was no jobs available doesn't cancel out the Capitalness of a system. The only other way to go is to make most of the population slaves
If everyone starved because there were no jobs, that would be a result of adherence to parts of capitalist ideology but it would not be capitalism. Capitalism requires employers and employees. When employers stop employing, they aren't doing capitalism anymore. They're doing something else.
You're technically correct in that Capitalism explicitly has two classes of people, Capitalists and Labor, and if Labor dies off entirely the Capitalist class is technically living in something that is Not Quite Capitalism
It's not really a useful distinction though, transferring from Late-Stage Capitalism to End-Stage Capitalism.
It's okay, guys, the US doesn't do human rights violations, merely installs the dictators that do.
I don't think you choose the right example. Chinese "investments" in Africa come with a lot of conditions. There is always a counterpart.
Either the investments are built with money borrowed from China by Chinese companies and with the possibility for China to take full ownership of the infrastructure if the loan is defaulted.
Or it has to be paid by things like giving up fishing rights or other things which are often much more valuable than whatever China provides. The problem is that this happens in countries run by dictators or pseudo presidents with a lot of opacity and the people is either not aware of how much they are being ripped of or if they are there is nothing they can do about it.
It's a bit like how they sometimes by agricultural land by paying the corrupt leaders and than exploit said land with 100% Chinese labor and send the produce to China. Gain for African population? None. Gain for corrupt leadership? Money. Gain for China? Access to more agricultural land.
That would be because for something to be officially designated as a "genocide", it generally requires recognition of such by specific official organisations, such as the State Dept. or the ICC.
It provides numerous other sources for actual details of what's happening-- including a Uyghur journalist, and escapee women with first-hand experience of assault and sexual abuse.
I mean, we do have the numbers for the numbers of inmates in the internment camps, and we have the numbers for the prison population in the US and in China.
It's scarcely "speculative" to say that the proportion of political prisoners in the US does not reach 80% of the overall population. Yet that's what would be necessary for the scale to equate with the scale of internment in the camps (which, remember, is solely on the basis of ethnicity and religion).
The content, leak and publication of the cables had nothing to do with Adrian Zenz. Cables themselves can be viewed here.
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Which Vietnamese? The ones who remained in Vietnam, or the ones who fled?
I did Google it.
The US does exert influence over countries to some extent, but it hasn't stopped many countries from trading with Cuba. The trade embargo hasn't been that effective in stopping actual trade, let alone the subsidies Cuba relied on from the USSR up to the bloc's collapse. As I pointed out, the EU trades with Cuba. Australia trades with Cuba. That the US refuses to is its own business. Key difference being that conditions in Cuba haven't gotten better, whereas in Vietnam, they have. And Vietnam did get improvements by opening up sectors of its economy, even if its economy remains tightly controlled.
First of all, I'm not American (as my profile spells out), so I don't know why you're calling me one.
Second of all, I don't deny the crimes you listed (though I don't think Vietnam and Afghanistan is simply "America's fault," since both have been a battleground between multiple powers), but of the two, at least in the year 2021, I have to call China worse, for the reasons I've described in this thread.
I think that's assuming that Africa will have a middle class in two decades.
Africa simply hasn't taken off in the same way that Asia has. There's many reasons for this, but I'm skeptical of the continent's future. And that's not even factoring in stuff like climate change, which is going to hit Africa the hardest.
And, paradoxically, an African middle class consuming more might only make that worse, but on the other, no-one with any basis of morality would say that Africa shouldn't aspire to wealth, which leads to debates of green growth vs. degrowth, and yes, this keeps me up at night, but this isn't the thread to debate that, so I'll shut up now.
Not quite; the US also sanctions companies that aren't based in the US, but also do business in/with the US. So it also depresses trade that doesn't have anything to do with the US, but could benefit Cuba.
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Fantastic argument, I am defeated, mocking aside that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about and is therefore completely irrelevant.
Maybe you should learn how to read then.
I'll grant you one thing in that I get results in Spanish from latin american universities which are overall more aware and critical of economic imperialism so they tend to go into far more depth into how much it actually affects the Cuban economy and a lot less charitable to how shit the USA actually is, I'm guessing that you're getting results that are more biased into proving the contrary which is typical western minimising of the harm they actually do, still I'm sure if you put just a bit more effort you can find it on your own, just finished a 12 hour shift at work, don't really feel like explaining anything to anyone (In fact most of this post was written in the morning before work)
All imperialist countries founded on genocide seem pretty similar to me so, sorry if I get confused at times.
Joking aside I did notice after I already clicked post, and I don't really give enough of a shit that I'd go back to correct it.
Anyways, it's pretty astounding that I made my reply criticizing your whataboutism and yet you chose to continue with that exact same line of thought, but at least you did bother to engage just a little bit with what I was saying.
You're right in one thing, the real fault is at it's core imperialism, more relevantly to this discussion euro-centric imperialism and the EU, UK, Australia, South Africa and so on aren't any better, though imperialism in general is bad, this shouldn't be a controversial statement, anyways the problem with your line of thought is that it's fundamentally flawed, it doesn't matter if the the USA or China is worse, what matters is that they're both bad and that we should want to stop both of them as their tyrannical influence is horrifying, by claiming that the USA is somehow the lesser of two evils your basically just spreading propaganda in order to sanitize the USA and claim that we should accept them as our evil overlords because otherwise we'd get China, you're saying all of this to me a Mexican person that lives near the border and has friends that have been locked up in ICE facilities, so I find your attempts as minimising and sanitizing the USA by making it "the lesser of two evils" laughable at best and insulting at worst, not to mention that moving the goalpost to just last year is pretty pathetic overall.
Look I understand that these are concepts that must be hard for "westerners" to come to terms with because it comes with the acceptance that their countries are the evil that is destroying the world, subjugating people and lifting up fascist and as an Australian a country that is definitely one of the bad ones as it does engage in the economic exploitation and basically enslavement of the global south, but sanitizing the actions of these regimes is in no way something that should be acceptable.
Honestly I often wonder if you overprivileged suburbanites from the "1st World" even have the capacity to understand all the deaths and suffering economic subjugation actually causes, I don't say that because of a lack of intelligence, just the fundamental truth that you live in a snow-globe completely separate from the actual suffering going on where you just get to hear about it in the news, to the point where you reduce it all to numbers and statistics as if it's something that can be quantified and measured, the sheer disconnect from reality is pretty astounding and I'm starting to think that you people wouldn't be able to understand it unless you lived through it as I have.
So it sounds like the US prison system, then.
And yet they still have a prison population that is lower than the United States per capita. Why is that? Is it because the United States has deliberately made policy choices that tend to cause crime? Or define harmless behavior as crime? Where is this supposed moral high ground again?
Snark. I like it.
Actually, it is relevant, because Vietnamese fleeing Vietnam parallels Cubans fleeing Cuba, after both countries adopted socialist systems. Relevant in the sense that Vietnam is doing much better than Cuba these days, and as such, the refugee flow stopped.
Not an argument.
Oh come on, I know you're desparate here.
First, if we're comparing countries, Australia ranks higher than Internet freedom than Mexico, so that doesn't hold up. Second, if you're browsing from Latin American universities (universities being left wing in general), then if anything, you're going to get more biaised results. I doubt that's actually the case, but that's not how search algorithms work.
Third, I have put effort into things. That's why, as opposed to decades ago I was under the assumption that the US was literally blockading Cuba, I'm less willing to simply go "US bad" and consider other factors, including the collapse of USSR subsidies, the Cuban regime itself, and its bizzare economic system.
Um, if you want to make the "founded on genocide" argument, you do realize that applies to Mexico as well, right?
Also, neither Australia or Mexico are imperialist in any real sense of the word.
To make things clear, I try and avoid whataboutism, but the thread's morphed into the question of which imperialist power is worse - the US or China. That isn't whataboutism.
Again, to reiterate, I have, and will, happily critcize both.
To respond to that:
-I don't know why you're throwing in Australia and South Africa. These aren't imperialist powers. Not in any real sense, in that Australia has no real ability to project power beyond its own borders, and South Africa even less so.
-Of course imperialism's bad, that isn't the question.
-I agree that the US and China are both imperialist powers who've caused harm to the world. If you think I'm arguing against that, you're misread me.
-I don't believe I've 'sanitized' the US, but even if I have, that's again irrelevant. The question is who's worse? China, or the US? That isn't the most pressing question in the world, but I've presented my case as to why I believe the former is.
-I didn't move the goalpost to just last year, that's a gross misreading of what I said. I'm not literally focusing on the year 2021, I'm making the case that what's going on in the present is more important than what's gone on in the past. It's why, if we're listing the 'sins' of both countries, I've focused on more contemporary events than ones centuries, or even millennia prior. It's why, for instance, when people try to excuse China's treatment of Ughyrs to the US treatment of Amerindians is frankly appalling. You're comparing a past genocide to a present one, and the present overtakes the past. Otherwise, we can play this game, go through all of human history, and therefore not have to worry about genocide ever again because there's barely a place on Earth that hasn't experienced it.
-Your friends have my sympathies. However, if we're going by the friends angle, I also have a close friend whose family had to flee China during the Great Leap Forward (and who had to flee Indonesia as well, but that's another matter). But if you want to press the case that the detention centres are the border are on the same moral level as China's mass detention centres, then I disagree. Both are bad, one is worse.
To address these points:
-Australia hasn't subjugated anyone. I mean, yes, there's the indigenous Australians, but Mexico belongs in the same club (technically most countries do, but semantics).
-Yes, the West has backed dictators. I never denied that. However, the Eastern bloc has done the same with dictators. Heck, China's still doing it. I can, and have, criticize(d) both. People outside both blocs are doing likewise.
-"Destroying the world" is hyperbole, no matter who you apply it to (same reason why I wouldn't say China is destroying the world), and to attribute all of it to economic exploitation is extremely naieve and dishonest. Probably in some cases (see the DRC), but hardly all. Furthermore, this conversation has focused on the US and China, but plenty of other powers are similarly involved in projecting power - some in the West (e.g. France), some elsewhere (Turkey, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.)
-And even if you followed the train of logic that all conflict in the world is due to economic exploitation, what's China doing in Africa? What's its fishing fleet doing in the oceans? What's it debt traps doing? To come back to Australia, Australia is China's economic *****, and it knows it. Our leaders know it, the people know it, the media knows it, and thankfully, the government backed down when China told it to, because like it or not, our economy is dependent on China buying raw materials. So to claim that Australia is on the level of China, a country that practices literal enslavement, and backs regimes that do (North Korea), yet is also counted among the Global South...really?
(It's part of why I think "Global South/North" are terms that need to be retired, but that's another discussion.)
I don't deny that I'm almost certainly more priviliged than you, and have had the fortune to grow up in the country I have. However, if you're talking about your personal experiences, those begin, and end, in Mexico (I assume). I don't need to live in China, or North Korea, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or any number of countries to accept that they're carrying out appalling actions, nor do I have to live in the US to know that its democracy is corrupt, its gun culture is insane, the level of inequality is unacceptable, and a myriad of other problems. None of us live in China, yet we're still accepting its crimes actually exist.
And again, I contest the idea that all suffering in the world is down to economic exploitation. Especially since, by any measure you care to use, the state of human existence is getting better on a global scale. Feel free to argue that it's not getting as better as it should, as quickly as it should (I agree on both counts), but again, the trends themselves remain. Even Mexico itself - over the course of the 20th century, infant mortality has plummeted, life expectancy has risen, PPP has risen overall (but fell in recent years, don't know why), literacy rate has risen (again, fell recently, but by a fraction - again, don't know why) etc. You're obviously in a better position to tell me about stuff on the ground, but the overall trend is clear. As it is for most countries.
Finally, I'm going to interject that this has gotten way off topic - this started off as "China vs. US, which is more evil," now it's gone...well, places. How/if you respond is up to you.
Does the United States imprison political prisoners en masse?
Does it round up entire groups en masse?
Does it imprison its own scientists for trying to warn the world about health concerns?
Does it carry out more executions than the rest of the world combined?
Does it use more slave labour per capita than the US (spoiler: yes, and I'm not talking about hyperbole, I'm using the GSI)
Then, no. These are differences, and important ones at that.
There's a saying I believe holds true here - "don't attribute to malice what you can to stupidity."
I'd argue that the US's prison population per capita is so high due to the following:
-Extremely punitive measurements of justice (e.g. the three strikes rule)
-A militarized police force that's led to a high incarceration rate and/or overpolicing
-The privatization of prisons (which creates an incentive for those running the prisons to get prisoners inside them).
Again, all of this is terrible (frankly, I have no idea who thought privatized prisons were a good idea), but if this conversation is still on which is worse (frankly, I don't know if it is anymore), then I'd still put China as being 'worse.' Everything above is down to a misapplication of justice. China's incarceration is direct application of state power. There's a chance for reform in the US prison system that simply doesn't exist for China.
Moral high ground?
It imprisons people arbitrarily en masse.
An approach that looks more like a lottery is not any better.
Does it properly heed the warnings given anyway?
Do drone strikes count? How about supporting military coups that go on to murder protestors? Or is that arms length enough that you don't care about it?
Please explain why I should give a shit about a particular opinion published by a particular group.
There might be a credible claim that the explanation is stupidity if there were even minimal effort by the ruling class to rectify the problems which have been evident for decades, or if the problems weren't outlined by people in Congress at the time that these "mistakes" were being made.
Moral high ground?
Moral high ground?!
Oh, it's for profit, moral high ground!
And yet 'reform' doesn't seem forthcoming no matter how many protesters get beaten by police.
Because they can hold you for 6 months before they even formally arrest you?
Because they execute thousands of prisoners each year?