The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an…
The world was international before it was national.
National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism.
Exhibit A. The car industry. /1
https://t.co/nxSkCnfKwY
China’s threat to Western automakers isn’t just their offering of cheap, quality EVs. As the article notes, even before we had EVs, Western car manufacturing was completely dependent upon Chinese industry.
Nearly everything we use in the West is. /2
We talk about a ‘globalised’ world, but then act as if it doesn’t exist, playing the team sports of national sovereignties.
You could see China and the West as the same international society. China builds all our stuff, and we play aristocrats, living lifestyle lives. /3
Reality politics. Focus on the material realities, ignore the hot air of the team sports. Somebody, somewhere, has to build all the stuff we use in modern life.
That somebody is mostly China. We’re at war with ourselves. /4
We accuse them of being the big carbon polluters, not even noticing many of those emissions are to build OUR stuff.
And the enormous drop in prices of renewables and EVs is all them. The things we desperately need. We’re not building them. /5 https://t.co/8CJDnKZHbv
We get stuck in the idiot team sports of sovereignty, pretending each country has a ‘system’ of government, in competition with the other systems. The ‘authoritarian’ communists versus the ‘free market’ democrats.
All adult fairy tales. There are no systems. /6
Go back to the material realities of running any society. More or less equivalent, across the world. Requiring more or less the same action, everywhere.
The world is just people acting socially. Nobody really lives via an ideology, material realities determine how we live. /7
If we don’t build the advanced, cheap goods we all live with today, somebody else has to, for us. That somebody else is nearly always China now.
We never stopped being an international community. If you focus on actual material realities, not hot air ideologies.
/end