EU commission tweet in article:

The electric vehicles sector is crucial for the clean economy.

But markets are flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars with price artificially kept low by huge state subsidies.

There’s no ‘but’ mf. That’s the solution. If you need EV cars to lower emissions you need to source affordable EV cars (you could go down the transit route but that doesn’t seem to be an option on the table).

He starts off so polite as well. The presenter does not look happy at the end lol

And swoop in to buy all the assets of soon-to-be bankrupt small-business owners. Big capital does not give a single fuck about who it cannibalises and it will come for those who sing the praises of capitalism as much as those who hate it.

He’s in luck. The [b]ankers started trying to make it happen earlier this year: https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2023/feb/09/the-reserve-bank-wants-unemployment-to-rise-it-should-be-careful-what-it-wishes-for

I was going to reply but, I mean, there are only so many ways that I’d be able to re-phrase what you said, so…

ig even the concept of making/expanding an argument is just whataboutism or deflection or whatever tf nowadays.

That’s interesting, thanks for the detail.

Hah. They do pose some unique challenges for native English speakers. Can’t say I’ve looked at Japanese but with Mandarin, there is (some) vocabulary that is slightly transparent, like 卡尔吗克思。 I remember really puzzling over that one in an article about an airport until I sounded it out. But you’re right, the advantage for English speakers is significantly greater for Indo-European and especially Romance/Germanic languages.

Too much ropey-dope not enough thinking ahead in this game of chess boxing.

Eighty. Fucking. Percent. J.F.C.

The US also officially recognises Taiwan as part of China, too, right? So if the US bombs Taiwan, that’s essentially declaring war on China. It’ll be gearing to get China to do the bombing but China won’t fall for it. All it has to do is wait it out. Meanwhile, the US is fighting itself, the planet, and most of the world for its own survival. Edward Gibbons’ History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will be turned into a movie to be played around Hallowe’en in the US within the next few years.

What!? Why? How?

It’s things like this that make learning foreign languages in the twenty-first century a lot more straightforward than it used to be. If you read ‘formal’, ‘popular’, ‘non’-fiction like international news in newspapers, it’s basically all the same with a different accent and some different sentence structures. It can be recognisable aurally, too, if the other person speaks slowly.

From French, passeport.

‘Progressive liberals’ do use the term too loosely to mean people they don’t like. You should not fall into the trap of subconsciously accepting the premises of that usage.

This is a Marxist instance. We understand what fascism/Nazism is materially. As cfgaussian notes, there’s a racist, bigoted, utterly evil megalomaniac element to it. But (and I’m not saying cfgaussian is saying this) Nazism is not just some evil ideology that some evil people organised for a few years in the twentieth century. By that liberal/Nazi-apologist definition, it’s over and done with. But it’s more than that, and it does still apply today.

In a word, it’s the cold and calculated response of capital to protect itself against a progressive change in the mode of production. It’s what happens to liberalism when faced with socialism. It’s a way of crushing worker power to make it easier and more profitable to do capitalism. It provides a framework for dividing the working class by race, gender, sexuality, origin, religion, accent, anything else you can name. Anything to stop the workers from working together.

Why is the EU doing Nazi shit? Not only does the EU do the evil megalomaniac cartoon villain thing, it also does the cold and calculated defense against socialism thing. In addition to cfgaussian’s points, we must understand that socialism is an international movement.

Capitalism is zero-sum. If one wins, another loses. Socialism is logically far more co-operative. If one wins, another, somewhere else can also still win. There need not be losers, except the capitalists. Socialists anywhere work for socialists everywhere.

By manufacturing low cost EVs, China benefits the working class in three clear ways. One, Chinese workers are part of the global proletariat and they happen to control the state, which means if ‘China’ benefits, so does the proletariat, ab initio, by definition.

Two, this is very much a trade war not just against China but for (Anglo-)European capital. These are different things although they are interrelated – it’s a dialectic. This is the EU setting up the framework to do whatever it takes to protect the Anglo-European empire.

Aside: this empire is the ideological child of Nazism. While the Nazi party was defeated, in part by inter-familial war, the ideology was not defeated. It’s more glaring horrors were somewhat held at bay due to the threat of the USSR and the need to maintain good PR. But otherwise the west continued almost everything that Nazis were doing. They changed the name and some of the target-victims, and became more efficient.

Three, cheaper goods for Europe is good for European workers, directly. They mean European workers don’t have to get into so much debt for vehicles. What do you think the Anglo-European finance capitalists want more, workers borrowing €40k for a European EV or €15k for a Chinese EV?

Hint: they don’t gaf about the sale going to a Chinese firm if they can lend the money to a consumer and get a huge cut via interest payments. But they would prefer the interest on €40k over €15k any day. Not only for the car payments but also because the less debt a worker gets into, the faster they can pay off their total debt and the sooner they can become debt free, which puts a massive spanner in the cogs in hyper-financialised economies. Which means that China’s policies work to benefit the European working class (another dialectic with point one) and to the disadvantage of the Anglo-European capitalist class.

Not to mention the benefit to the fight against climate change by filling the market with affordable EVs. This benefits everyone, everywhere. Anglo-Europeans overshot their fair share of carbon emissions a long time ago. But they keep going. Most don’t have a choice. The sooner something can be done to minimise western emissions, the sooner the rest of the world can (a) heal and (b) develop without westerners saying ‘don’t you care about the planet?’

Edit: To clarify the implied conclusion, this is ‘Nazi shit’ because it shows the EU gearing up to attack socialism/ists to save capitalism. The liberal mask is slipping because capitalism is under threat. When the mask slips, the Nazism is revealed.

Note, I switched from EU to Anglo-European empire because these things are part of the same political economic ecosystem.

Great points, comrade.

I’d like to add a point (which I don’t think contradicts you). The EU and the US heavily subsidise their ruling class but, like ‘corruption/lobbying’ they call it different things. Take Dublin, for example. What are Dublin’s low taxes but a massive subsidy? There’s a market logic to it, so it’s not only for Europeans in a strict protectionist sense. But it does subsidise ‘business’ (at the expense of taxpayers).

There’s also the welfare state. By providing some necessities (albeit these systems are crumbling), employers can pay significantly lower wages. If not for welfare, the workers would simply be unable to survive and/or perform on their other wages. Plus agricultural and fossil subsidies, which keeps some prices lower, enabling the workers to eat calorie dense foods and travel to work on their shit wages (which are shit even topped up with welfare).

I agree with you, though. These redacteds don’t see these things as subsidies because their anti-trust laws say that they’re not allowed therefore the decision makers must pretend that something else is happening.

Additionally – or maybe it’s the same thing reworded – Anglo-European subsidies are often financial in nature. It’s a roundabout way of funding industrial/agricultural production but it has two major flaws that will lead to the demise of neoliberal capitalism.

First, by strengthening finance capital, they accelerate the gap between financial and, let’s say, productive capital. This is terrible for people as it contributes to rampant inflation and ‘justifies’ high interest rates. But it can only go on for so long before something like a war with Russia swings the bat of reality into their faces as they realise that increasing military expenditure to €Xbn doesn’t mean shit if the money isn’t spent on actual factories, etc. Same with the auto industry. It can only be used to leverage finance for so long before the cracks start to show.

Second, there’s no guarantee that the subsidy is applied efficiently. By that, I mean, the only guarantee is that if you give neoliberal vampires a tax cut the only trickling down they’ll be doing is with piss over the working class. The tax savings will be laundered through a tax haven.

In this sense, I suppose, these subsidies aren’t subsidies. They are a way of funneling social wealth into a few private hands. Which brings us to one of the EU’s unstated concerns: cheaper Chinese EVs (in cost, not quality) or any other commodity don’t just risk European company sales; they risk doing to the tracks of the gravy train what the yanks did to the tracks of their real trains through simple neglect. The EU top brass knows the real movement to abolish the existing state of things has started and they have zero answers. Poor them.

Do you live rent free in the minds of liberals?

While I can believe Russian health and safety standards aren’t the best, I doubt very, very much that the $4–5,400 price difference per shell is spent (entirely) on improved working conditions at western factories. That’s potentially the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard and I once spoke to a jellyfish, which did not respond. But if I were to speak to it again, it might say something like this:

The answer is right there in the prose. The price difference is because the Russians save three millimetres worth of metal for every shell (it’s probably 3mm³ but the text isn’t clear). That metal could even be wrought iron, which doesn’t come cheap.

The west should make their ammunitions smaller than the Russians’. Maybe start with just a small decrease in size, like 149mm. This would, by my calculations at the correct ratio and taking health and safety into account, reduce the cost of each shell to roughly $5–600.

The Russians aren’t silly and they do like an arms race with the west. By Christmas they are likely to go even smaller. Maybe down to 146mm @ $60. Now we see there’s a predictable trend and what the Russians won’t know is that the west has already started to produce 143mm shells at the same price!

Eventually, the west will be able to fit two shells into one artillery-thing, which is bound to have some advantages. For a start it will solve the problem of not having enough weapons because every weapon will now be twice as effective.

Eventually, if the west keeps going with this winning strategy, the cost of it’s shells will become $0. Some time after that, the size will become 0mm, too. Like a good game of Connect Jelly 4, if the west drops it’s pieces right, the Russians will get to zero first and then won’t be able to fight at all.

Personally, I would not take advice from a jellyfish even if it was sentient. It would probably just spook me, tbh, and they have the right shape to dress up as a ghost, too.

Does that support ComradeSalad’s point? I.e. because if they were meant to last longer, they’d have been built differently?

Society doesn’t exist without society. Healthcare, education, housing, and many more goods and services are the basic things that a society needs to function. It’s the same with drinking water, food, sanitation, waste management, and in modern society, roads, telecommunications, ports, shipping lanes, outdoor spaces, recreation facilities. I won’t go on because it’s a bloody long list.

Without these things there is no society, no public, no individual. It is an aberration that any of these things are treated as private goods and services to be bought and sold at all. They should all be public, cared for collectively, and free-at-the-point-of-use. That’s not lazy. It’s just an acknowledgment of what human survival involves. And humans are entitled to all this because if they don’t get it they fucking die. Healthcare, education, and housing are just the start. Societies that don’t provide the essentials and a little bit more cannot survive. Ask the Tsar or FDR what happens when enough people can’t access the basics.

Ask any society that tried to concentrate labour without water treatment. What’s that, they died off soon after because the people needed to do the work died of dyssentry and there were no engineers to build sewers, no doctors and nurses to heal the sick, and the grave digger died of pneumonia in the night because they’d been evicted in -40°?

There’s an argument, and we’re in the right place for it, for the common ownership of all the means of production. Anything else is unsustainable. It doesn’t even need a moral argument that denying healthcare, education, and housing is cruel af. It is but it’s beside the point. In private hands, as a matter of logic, these goods and services will undoubtedly fail as they have always failed.

Additionally, we are now at a stage of history where almost all production is socialised. As we saw through the pandemic, if someone doesn’t do their little bit in the logistics chain, the chain breaks and the goods don’t arrive. Private ownership creates unnecessary risks in these chains. And the thing with risks is that they materialise, given enough time.

Putting all this power into collective hands is a longer term goal. Putting the absolute essentials, such as housing, healthcare, and education, into public hands is how to ensure that we survive the middle term to make it to the long term where we can achieve our other goals. As it makes little sense for the public to charge itself (although believe be, the libs will find a way if anyone can), this means making these provisions free for users.

Ask your interlocutor of they want a doctor when they’re sick, a plumber to install their sink and toilet, an architect to design their house, a new Tesla, a serviceable road between home and work, a movie to watch on a Friday night, a truck to be driven to their supermarket with boxes of cereal and frozen meals, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc basically anything considered necessary for them to survive. Ask them if they want employees to concentrate on the job rather than trying to wait tables and carry a tray of food with a gangrenous leg, or trying to enter data while worrying about the eviction notice that came in.

Ask them if they want the valedictorian with the brain power to invent a technology that makes flight transport carbon neutral (and so sustainable) to give up their dreams because of the cost and instead spend their life putting tickets on cars parked in the wrong bay for too long. It’s not my annual holidays to the Bahamas under threat from climate change, bozo, because I can’t afford them anyway.

We need all those people: to receive an appropriate education; to have somewhere to sleep, wash, and unwind so they can rest to be able to do their job without having a breakdown; to have access to a doctor to manage their disease do they don’t give it to your kids at school; etc; etc; etc.

Incidentally, IIRC one of China’s policies in Xinjiang was compulsory school for everyone aged 5—15 and 200 Yuan/month for Uyghur children to help their families while in school (and unable to do child labour). Which makes it possible for people to have children. Trust the yanks to twist this one into ‘China is taking (good workers/) children from their families’.