woodenghost [comrade/them]

TIL about attendance based school funding in the US.

The thing with the bike must have been long before graduation, right? So there were probably consequences already. Seems kind of petty to deny him the stage.

Technology transfer was critical, and it lowers the barrier to constant capital heavy industries, but doesn’t remove it completely. You still have to get the physical machines. Also not all technology serves capital heavy industry. A lot of it is also needed for labor intensive industries just to keep up with the overall development of technology and demand. It’s hard to quantify how much of the technology transfer served to break out of the trap and how much just kept it going.

No one mentioned the economic law behind this yet.

The fact that “everything is made in China” is often framed like a China win, because China managed to turn it that way, but that’s a recent development. Historically it’s a consequence of decades of unequal exchange to the benefit of the imperial core. China lost unimaginable amounts of value because of this. But let’s start from the beginning.

Marx discovered the tendency of the rate of profit to equalize across industries with differing organic compositions of capital. All value comes from human labor, so capital flows first into labor intensive industries. This increases supply and lowers prices of goods produced with lots of labor below their value (think clothing from sweat shops). In turn, capital is slow to flow into industries with lots of constant capital (machines etc.). The initial investment is a barrier and machines don’t produce value, only humans do. The prices of goods from industries with lots of constant capital rise above their value. In the end, profits equalize by means of prices. Otherwise, if one industry were more profitable, capital would flow there, until it’s equal again. But for profits to remain equal, value has to flow constantly in the direction of high concentrations of constant capital.

In the context of globalization, the same thing as for different industries, also goes for countries. Countries with high concentrations of constant capital, like the imperial core countries, sell commodities above their value. Countries in the so called global South with labor intensive industries sell commodities below their true value. In this way, the poor countries subsidize the rich. This is unequal exchange.

China was the “workbench of the world” for a long time and lost enormous amounts of value to the US and Europe by selling commodities produced in labor intensive industries below their true value (which is their socially necessary labor time). In turn for this period of servitude, they got left alone. The cold war focused on the Soviet Union and China mostly stayed out of it. They were little more than useful vassals of the empire and toiled away to fill the shelves of Walmart and the homes in the suburbs with cheap goods. But at least they had peace and time to develop. Now they have developed and they rightfully want out of this disadvantageous deal.

That’s why US relations to China deteriorated the moment China started building up capital intensive industries like for semiconductors. It wasn’t just about wanting China to do “cheap labor”, but about restricting China to labor intensive industries and keep the unequal exchange via the equalization of the rate of profit going.

The full text of the communist manifesto in fine print on the inside and this on the outside:

Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. Religious framings are just an add on.

Trauma and grief can’t run their course if your mind is so senile and your short term memory so feeble, that you’re basically forced to live in the past. Forever repeating old arguments, reliving past trauma and never overcoming old fears. With your mind so set in it’s tracks, that you can’t even imagine leaving the place where you lived all your live — your “old haunt” so to speak. How could you live in the present, if you can’t even recognize your own children half of the time? But the long term memory often still works. Ghosts are real and if you’re lucky enough to live that long you might well become one. Of course aging isn’t always like this, it can be graceful and dignified but when it isn’t, that’s what people are afraid of.

People are scared, when they see older relatives acting stranger every day, especially in times before any way to diagnose Alzheimer’s and other forms of neural degradation. They might seem like they are not quite here anymore, like the person they were had long since died and yet, something lingers. Ghost stories are a socially acceptable way to express those fears.

Just observe the effects ghosts have on their victims: first, they are reminded of their own mortality. Then their hair suddenly turns white or gray or falls out, they lose sleep, wake up tired or grow old over night. They might lose their mind or die themselves. That’s all just normal aging.

Here is a handy key to select monsters and their meaning:

• ghosts 👻: aging, death, old people
• vampires(folk believe): plague, infection
• vampires(literature): landlords, feudalism
• zombies(modern): alienation, capitalism
• witches: women who stand up to patriarchy
• Frankenstein’s monster: the proletariat gaining class consciousness (no seriously)

I recommend the podcast “the horror vanguard” for details.