No, the global economy was not rigged to the benefit of US workers. It was rigged to the benefit of the US economy. Let's go with a concrete example. When the argentinean currency collapses it's not the homeless grocer who stops eating. It's almost everyone. If the USD collapsed, then anyone whose networth is mostly based on owning a house suddenly sees that disappear. Even if US elites - for the past 40 years - have chosen to financialize and nickle and dime the workers to their last credit card, you still have a situation where inflation and economic stimulus can lead to workers gaining some bargaining power. When you print trillions of your currency and you don't have the USD hegemony, workers have less than no bargaining power. They are more than desperate to make rent. They become the targets of ecofascists.
CarmineCatboy2
Here's the thing, the labor aristocracy is global. The labor aristocrat can always just move to an anglo country and make many times what they'd make in the Global South or Europe. That's what brain drain is all about. Which is why I never even mentioned them. What I compared are the conditions of service industry and farm workers, and how global financial policy alters their status.
When you add the labor aristocracy to the equation you have what can be considered an inflection point. The indentured servant in a large american city has to compete with the labor aristocrats for amenities - housing, services, and so on. The indentured servant in, say, Rio de Janeiro has to pay rent to live in a favela just so they have the opportunity to clean the a middle class house.
People struggle everywhere, especially people at the bottom of the rung. But there's a real appreciable decline in US living standards due to deindustrialization and financialization. The only ones safe from that decline are capitalists, high value workers, capitalist family members, and the real estate gentry. Those all benefit from american fiscal policy and the USD. What we are saying is that's only the tip of the iceberg if USD hegemony disappears and the US government actually starts having to pay its bills. It's like in France. Revolutionary conditions arrived when hunger knocked on the doors of rural aristocrats, the lower clergy and even the tax paying bourgeois.
Now what do you think happens outside the USA?
Because you're talking about homeless people. The discussion there isn't about how much a worker is being exploited or the purchasing power of currency. It's about wether the country has safety nets at all and how brutal the police is. Not to mention weather conditions.
and the other person telling me baristas are the labor aristocracy.
I'm sorry, what?
I don't know why you stop at homeless people
I don't.
talking about how US homeless people technically are better off than in the periphery. I'm sure that's true
You shouldn't be because that's an absurd statement.
The point is that the rent-paying barista in the US is better off than the rent-paying barista in Bolívia because they simply have more purchasing power by virtue of, among other things, USD hegemony. Likewise, whereas the overexploited farm worker in the US is paid enough of a pittance where they can still send remittances home, in Brazil you'll find actual slaves here and there.
The american could be even better off, but that would require a political process for investment in public services, which happened elsewhere in the wealthy world and generally not in the post-80s US. Part of the reason why this struggle could never get off the ground is because the US government just didn't have to fund itself. It didn't have to think in terms of industrial and fiscal policy, or in terms of rising incomes. The world subsidized the american population's balance of payments and some small crumbs made it to the base, enough at least to pacify them. As such living standards can still decrease a lot in the United States if even the mildest forms of redistribution aren't enacted.
I also have to pay rent, a health plan, education fees, numerous taxes and so on but if you convert my costs to dollars they'll seem like a pittance to you. Moreover, inflation in education and healthcare are something that exploded in the last generation. Nobody is disputing that, as a matter of policy, financialization lead to the american state deciding to exploit its population more and more.
The point is that not every benefit from USD hegemony has been taken from the workers. At least not yet. For one, since the US doesn't have to actually pay for its imports every other administration can campaign on cutting taxes. Sure, you might say that most of those tax cuts go to the rich. Well, here in the global south we have to acquire dollars to pay our commitments, otherwise our credit rates and currencies collapse. Meaning that every administration has to raise taxes, primarily on the poor.
At the end of the day the question is: if USD hegemony goes away, who's going to pay for that shortfall? Will it be the elites, who spent the last 40 days reproducing themselves by creating new ways to financially exploit the population? Will it be the MIC? Or will it be workers via consumption tax hikes and the further privatization of social security? It would have to be a combination of all three and more, but we know who's going to get the short end of that stick.
It does make more sense than saying 'actually the chinese spend 3 trillion dollars on their black ops military'. Which would be projection from the US.
That's the difference between having the Yuan be a trading currency or a reserve currency. From what I understand, creating bilateral agreements allows China and it's trading partners to de-risk from the american political system. But allowing the Yuan to become a reserve currency, which is then speculated upon overseas, would give China currency hegemony. Yes, the Chinese could then use that metaphorical gold mine to invest productively. But all the incentives the US had to export their industries overseas would still be there. If the USD hegemony can be understood as a resource curse, then an Yuan hegemony can be as disruptive to the chinese political system as it was to the post war american political system.
Yes. Because in short consumer price inflation is like a novel thing for the american population, whereas it's the ever normal in the global south. Of course the capitalist class makes the most of the USD hegemony, but there's a certain panem et circenses policy where the US can just subsidize gas, energy and food costs to no impact to it's financial credibility. The US government could do the same with health care and education, it just chooses not to.
In a way since you live in the core of the imperial core you remain an exploited worker, but there are extra layers of exploitation elsewhere. That's why people can go live in your country, get paid less than the legal wage, and still send remittances home.
Well, the cold machine of capital has no use for what it deems to be unproductive populations. Those groups are to be policed. With climate collapse you have strains of thought who tend towards the idea that 'humans are the real plague', which serves to mask the reality that when the cookie crumbles and billions die they won't be billions who live in the Champs Elysee or Martha's Vineyard. Ecofascists outright see death as the solution to industrialized climate change.
What happens instead when the 'pie' shrinks in a militarized police state? The same thing that's happened for the past 40 years. People are blamed for their choices, told to learn to code, told to seek services that haven't been provided since before Reagan became a vegetable. Except that with the loss of the USD what was once the slow boil of financialization becomes a steep cliff. People who had otherwise been well off suddenly find out that their house isn't worth much and neither is their assets or their money. Taxes go up to meet investor expectations as bond yields rise. Interest rates must be kept high at all times, because the country no longer has an aura of unbroken credibility. In short, Argentinification where every solution possible to the economic woes of the country takes so long to take effect that by the time the next president is in power everything is worse.
The United States has all the capital in the world to steer that ship away from the rocks. It has chosen not to for 40 years because there's simply too much money in exploiting reserve currency status. Now they are threatening that status by sanctioning countries that are too big to ignore. Soon they might even sanction China, but Brazil, India, Russia and so on are all sanctioned already. What happens when the only people recycling dollars and sending their profits to the US are moribund in Japan and the EU?