There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9…
There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined.
But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1
https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj https://t.co/7k3XesG07e
It’s universally common to describe the world as made up of nations. Ever since Westphalia in the 17th century, we’ve framed the world as competing States.
That was the global team sports carve-up of human life. Nearly all human history precedes it. /2
To this day we try to create global unity by getting these nation States to agree with each other.
That’s literally like trying to put Humpty together again. We have it completely backwards. /3
Framing the world in this team sports way misses all of the material ways that world was already profoundly connected, before we carved it up with maps.
Through processes like trade. Fast forward to today, and to China’s manufacturing revolution. /4
China is often called ‘the world’s factory’. And it really is that. But why don’t we fully allow what that means to sink in?
That fact alone allows the West for example to pretend it runs ‘free market economies’ without significant State planning. /5
But that planning is still happening. It’s just being done in China, for us. We outsourced it.
We live lives replete with cheap consumer goods trading in ‘free markets’, because China makes those cheap goods. It does all the massive planning that makes that possible. /6
Our market democracies are a fantasy. They’re still doing all the same centralised planning we mock in communist countries, in fact the communist countries took over that role, for us.
So that we can pretend the cheap goods trading in our markets happen all by themselves. /7
All nation States are really functionally equivalent, in social terms. Human life is carried out in pretty much the same ways, worldwide, with only relatively minor variations.
None of the -isms are real. The world isn’t some capitalist States, and some socialist States. /8
It’s people living in social ways pretty much equivalent everywhere, wth the same sorts of material needs.
Redraw the world map *materially*. Ignore the hot air of the ‘political’ and nationalistic team sports. /9
You could see the world as one giant State, materially, with each country contributing different things.
For years China for example has been planning and building the renewables infrastructure to fight climate change. /10
That’s why the prices of renewables plummeted, due to that astronomical effort. That’s exactly what the world said it needed, and China did it, because it’s the ‘world’s factory’.
It’s doing the same with EVs. Materially (rather than politically), it’s getting on with it. /11
If you swap the filters and start to see the world materially (what I call reality politics), all the nation State team sports appears for exactly what it is.
Hot air. Games we play above the actual material reality of the world.
/end