Wen Tiejun wasn’t wrong in that nationalism/patriotism was behind the driving force of Chinese communism. In fact, nationalism and patriotism are fundamentally rooted in most if not all anti-colonial struggles. Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh etc. were all patriots first and Fidel and Ho only came to socialism after being denied cooperation with the US. Even Mao preferred the US to Stalin’s USSR at first.

However, the US isn’t a colony (unless you go way back but that’s irrelevant), it is an imperial power. You cannot compare the nationalist movements in the imperial core to the colonial struggles in the Global South, as the historical development of both forms of patriotic movements were fundamentally different.

Having said that, it is true that a lot of boomer Chinese communists prefer the social conservative form of MAGA movements to the “white left aka baizuo” liberal movement in the West. I’ve even seen people cheering for Trump because he’s finally going to take down the “woke movement” (觉醒运动). Sometimes it’s that stupid.

this makes me want to die

Yeah, maybe this is comparable to when “well meaning” communists in the west misunderstand social dynamics in China. He isn’t looking at the class character of that sort of nationalism/patriotism in the US, and he also rightly identifies it as an online phenomenon… also gotta say I don’t think Trump will deindustrialize the USA… and the best (likely to fail) shot the US has at holding onto empire is if they are able to exploit another country more than China and isolate China’s growth in industries the US wants to dominate (they won’t)… but I really doubt Trump is going to do anything other than symbolic/perfunctory things to change the state of industrial production in the US… it might happen with one industry but the whole US government is set up to take initiatives like this and piss it into stock buybacks instead of meaningful change. just like the chips program… its just a corporate boondoggle that might only create a few thousand make-work jobs while most production continues abroad

Mao come back

Yeah let me just go and suddenly start loving the thing I got into leftist politics because I hated, and am permanently disillusioned with

That was like a month ago. Wen is not really concerned with the more social aspect of economy, i doubt he is super informed about the social dynamic within western sphere. Also, i don’t expect him to be totally ““woke””because he is pretty old.

Sure give him the benefit of doubt and ignore MAGA communism is essentially “what if we did the German national socialists bit but unironically?” It always comes back to this silly idea that there is a path to “reindustrialize” the US as if this is even possible(32s-48s). Once you reject this the entire analysis falls apart.

Time and time again it need to be understood America didn’t deindustrialize out of pure greed or naivety, but as a necessary requirement out of the already dire economic situation in the 60s and 70s that lead to neoliberalism.

Factories moved abroad because they’re not profitable. In order to be profitable it would require bringing the same levels of exploitation back to American soil, something that couldn’t happen during the cold war and can’t happen anymore today.

You can be the most naive detached “economist” you want. How do you expect MAGA communism to work at face value when the first priority is to kick the most exploited and vulnerable working population out of the country? Yes put millions of “undesirables” in a death camp at the border then turn around and pretend white chuds will line up to work 12h a day on a factory floor making cheap electronics or clothes?

Is “industry” just iPhones and TVs then? “Oh but America will have highly automated industry!” Yeah that is the point. If the workers can’t be at the factories they’ll have to be working some other useless shit that creates no value. Japan is a good example of how a high tech industry can’t solve neoliberalism. Even without US interference the Japanese economy suffers inherent problems.

The imperial core got extremely low labor productivity growth. This is due to the also incredibly low profitability at home, no investment in manufacturing tech and research because its not profitable equals low productivity growth.

I’m not saying Japan = US at all, but rather the same general hurdle exists for every imperialist nation.

Finaly is not understand the limitations of Trump’s own character, there is no plan other than short term political grifiting. He literaly scams his supporters. His merch is all made in China.

MAGA sees themselves as small business owners soon to be millionaires, the usual idiot driving a modern tank and a $800k mortgage even though he will probably not retire and can’t afford a serious medical emergency.

Trump and MAGA communism is incapable of looking at these people pointing them to a factory floor and saying “this is where we need you!” because Trump sees himself as a smart money maker guy. A negotiator, investor, business owner. He spends his time golfing etc.

This is exactly why MAGA communism will remain as an online phenomenon. There are no MAGA chuds looking forward to hugging the flag while working on a factory floor.

This is what zero Marxism does to a mfer. You don’t need discourse about nationalism and patriotism.

MR got a new post on the US

Also this good comment and mini review of the book Capitalism Unleashed

Andrew Glyn was one of the main exponents of the idea that there was such a profitability crisis in the late 1960s. He made the point in several articles in the 1980s, and then in his final book, ‘Capitalism Unleashed’ (2007).

In essence, the post-war reconstruction and restocking boom was largely spent by the early 1960s. The transfer of workers from agriculture to industry in Western Europe was largely complete by the same time, and of women from home work into industry and services (following the mass adoption of domestic labour saving appliances) by the mid-1960s. Per Robert Gordon, the ‘low hanging fruit’ of innovation had been plucked and consumed, and Pareto optimal innovations became scarce – innovation becoming more capital intensive as well. Public expectations of rising living standards had become entrenched. As productivity growth began to tail off a gap arose between those public expectations and the ability of the economy to deliver. Corporate profits began to stagnate, and then fell the gap was filled by means of improved wage settlements without corresponding productivity gains. The guns-and-butter policies of the US aggravated inflation and imperilled the Bretton Woods system of semi-fixed exchange rates, thus exacerbating the gap. All this led to strife in countries like France or Italy in 1966-69 with wage settlements being at the expense of corporate returns and governments capitulating to unions, all to the intense chagrin of the boss class. The middle classes also responded to the problem of the gap in their own way, chiefly by starting to speculate on the value of their own homes – ultimately a far more potent response than that of ‘militant’ unions.

Union power, in turn, provoked a corporate reaction (see Alex Browne’s essay in Phenomenal World for a new discussion of the US context) and the decision to invest heavily in developing nations – in effect a decision to globalise the Marxian reserve army of labour in order to tame unions at home. It has sometimes been said that the corporate class values the discipline of the sack above almost anything else, and the effects of the globalisation of credit and the labour supply bore fruit in that regard during the 1980s as the bosses returned to power with a vengeance.

At this point “Financial capital” vs “industrial capital” may as well be Harry Potter for economists imo. Once more for the “economists” at the back, the US isn’t going back to 1950, stop dreaming about it.