What do you mean after all? Wasn’t it the consensus since forever that there was basically 0 chance of anything actually colliding because galaxies are mostly empty space? I’m pretty sure I read about that when I was a child.

Every accusation. Every single accusation.

Multiple ways:

• Unchallenged monopoly over the highest valued African industries. The majority of African export industry, from mineral exports like rare earth and gold to high value agricultural exports like cocoa and coffee, are overwhelmingly dominated by western corporations.

• Direct theft of resources. European companies take advantage of their monopoly on extraction and transport of African minerals to unilaterally export mineral wealth out of Africa and put them into banks and reserves in Europe. For example, France import so much gold from their “former” colonies that it has one of the largest gold reserves in the entire world despite the fact that France doesn’t have a single active gold mine anywhere in it’s sovereign territory.

• Capture of added value from noncompetitive raw exports. Through the IMF and World Bank, the west has put in place a multi-decade scheme of making sure Africa can’t industrialize while pretending to help them. Due to this, African nations don’t have any industry capable of processing their raw crops and minerals, forcing them to sell as-is and let western businesses cash in on the added value of processing them. For example, Ivory coast produce over 40% of the world’s cocoa beans supply, but since until China helped them build one Ivory coast didn’t have any processing plant, Ivory coast for a long time had to sell raw cocoa beans for low prices and let western chocolate, pharmaceutical and makeup corporation earn the added value of roasting and fermenting the beans, separating the oil and making consumer products out of them.

• Exploitation of desperate workers. It is hardly a secret nowadays that Africans working in the mining or high value crops industries are horrifically exploited and work in high mortality rate, near slavery conditions for almost no pay whatsoever. Plenty of documentaries have been made on the subject, especially on Nestle’s treatment of their cocoa producers.

• Unequal exchange. Due to the IMF scheme mentioned in point #3, Africa is stuck producing and exporting noncompetitive, low or no added value products, which translate to low revenues for the countries. The complementary of this fact is that, on the other hand, African nations have to buy every finished high added value products (cars, consumer electronics, machinery, etc…) from the west, generally for very high prices. This unequal exchange, Europe buy only cheap low value goods from Africa, Africa buys only expensive high value goods from Europe, results in a net flow of wealth away from Africa and directly into the pockets of European capitalists. As long as Africa continues to produce only low value goods and buy high value goods from Europe, which the scheme ensure it does, Africa will continue to have their wealth sucked away via this mechanism.

Twitter/X to Bluesky

Why do you flee a billionaire owned centralized platform only to go to an other billionaire owned centralized platform? (Yes, I know that in theory Bluesky is federated, but as long as there aren’t alternatives to the official server(s) Bluesky is effectively a centralized platform). Use Mastodon/Akkoma/Pleroma/whatever, you’re already on the fediverse through lemmy, might as well go with a full fediverse suite.

Also, a facebook alternative would be Friendica from what I’ve seen, but I’m not on it so don’t take my words for it and go see for yourself.

Private property isn’t unique to capitalism, feudalism and antique slave society each had a form of private property even tough feudalism and antique slave society have little else in common with capitalism.

deleted by creator

You shou yan

“I have evidence! I won’t post it here and won’t say why I won’t post it here, but I definitely 100% have evidence.”

You heard it folks!

Asking for evidence before believing what the media says == blindly believing north korea

Most of the time in math, you just put the symbols you want to multiply without anything between them, the multiplication is implicit, or if you really want to make it explicit, you put a dot or a cross. The only time you would use an * is when programming.

“The US regime has laws to control some people’s sexual life.”

Like we do in Europe

This is the only form of economy that actually works with great success.

sarcastic french laugh

true

Always was.

Truly a visionary

On point

Zen browser is very good.

Economics Explained has a massive neoliberal, pro-western bias which makes his analysis very questionable to say the least.

Their latest video about my country France for example is 18 minutes of him yapping about why akshually it’s a good thing that Macron is taking away our retirement pension, during which he says such absurdities as unironically arguing that France is kinda socialist.

Your reading of the situation is correct. There is a few reasons why this is the case:

1. De-industrialization

Imperialism allows western countries’ capitalists to exploit the cheaper resources and labor of some economically less developed nations and acquire super-profits on top through unequal exchange, since doing this is much more profitable than producing industrial goods in the west directly, western industrial capitalists have a huge incentive to move their factories to the third world. This has the effect of de-industrializing the west itself, and has gotten so bad that some European countries like the UK can barely even produce their own steel anymore, which is very bad given how important steel is to a lot of industries.

This makes the west more and more dependent on supply lines they don’t necessarily control in order to get the resources and goods they need, in this situation the smart thing to do would be to diversify your supplier countries do reduce any ones’ leverage over your country. But…

2. De-localization and American influence

The US has been hard at work making sure Europe was dependent on them above anyone else for supplies.

They have also have been offering generous advantages to businesses who would de-localize to the US, aggravating the problem for their own profits.

This is part of the reasons why the US has been doing somewhat better than the rest of the west despite de-industrialization and financialization affecting them too, they’ve been sucking on Europe like a parasite to offset the problem ever so slightly.

3. Innovation vs profits

As you’ve noted, most of the technological progress lately has been happening in the third world who has been catching up while the west seems to have lost it’s drive and is being overtaken. There are a lot of factors at play here but the main issue is the profit motive. A lot of research and a lot of things that are useful for a society aren’t profitable.

Take China’s high speed train network for example, it’s a very good thing for the peoples that there is such a good method of public transportation available, but it’s not profitable, the Chinese state is running it at a loss (offset by other income sources, but still). Because of that, such a good railway network would never be built in the west because the western companies and even governments are only interested in infrastructures if they bring in a profit.

An other example is renewable energy. For many years a lot of peoples have had and propagated this narrative that, since green tech is becoming cheaper, profit driven organizations would have an incentive to switch away from fossil energy, yet this hasn’t happened. Why? Because profit isn’t that simple.

Why can a business buy a pile of woof for 1$ and sell a chair made from the wood for 2$? Where do the added 1$ come from? It comes from work, they can take this chair made from 1$ worth of wood for 2$ because it’s not just a pile of wood anymore, something happened to it, someone used their time and energy to turn the wood into a chair. If it was possible to use some kind of spell to turn wood into chairs without effort, competition would drive the price down to the value of the dead materials that makes it: 1$, and the profit rate in the industry would be 0$ or very close to 0.

This, in a nutshell, is why cheaper green tech hasn’t pushed corporation to transition to clean energy. Sure, it’s cheaper, but it’s also vastly less profitable because green tech like solar panels and wind turbines are much more automatized than fossil fuel which mean less peoples who’s work add value to each unit of energy produced which mean proportionally less profit. This is why the green transition hasn’t happened and won’t anytime soon as long as the west is driven by the profit motive above all else.

4. What can be done?

The problem is the profit motive and private property. The capitalists shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they want with the industries and infrastructures society needs, taking them to a different country whenever they feel like it, taking jobs away from us to exploit less developed nations, etc…

What needs to be done is to kick out the neoliberals, nationalize a bunch of important industries, restrict what capitalists are allowed to do with their private properties and moving toward abolishing private property altogether.

And the way to move toward this goal is to learn political theory and start organizing. Go to marginalized communities, poor peoples, even to the petty bourgeois not wealthy enough to move their business to the US and get left to die by the wealthier international bourgeoisie who are robbing their country, help them, listen to their problems and their complaints, help them understand where these problems come from and why the right’s analysis of the situation isn’t correct, and build a democratic popular movement able and willing to take power, by force if necessary.