World Systems Theory and related concepts often come up whenever people try to explain why Westerners are psychotic counterrevolutionary scum, etc. It’s often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans. We might say “White Minnesotan Joe Cracker wants child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics.” And yeah, that makes sense up to a point…
But Joe Cracker might not understand the relevant supply chain or even the basic composition of his smartphone. He probably doesn’t even know about the existence of said exploitation, much less its nature or purpose. Maybe Joe Cracker WILL revolt without his cheap goods, but he probably doesn’t actually know what goes into producing them or keeping the prices down. So what decisions is he making that render him “complicit” in the profiteering of some massive international corporation like Apple? Falling for their ads?
It’s also worth pointing out that his iPhone doesn’t actually make him richer any more than a Hulu membership does. It’s a cute little toy, but it doesn’t obtain food, housing, medicine or fuel. It’s a cell phone with a billion bells and whistles and a monthly subscription fee. One could starve to death with it in hand. Is this really the “wealth transfer” we keep talking about? This is the socialized bribery Americans perfected?
It seems to me that Joe Cracker is complicit in fuck-all. He doesn’t materially benefit from low wages in southeast Asian textile plants even if he wears one of those shirts they make every single day. It seems that he’s just a different kind of poor from the Bangladeshi serfs who make his sneakers, the kind of poor with tap water, McDonalds, and WiFi. Poor overseas workers make the stupid shit, poor Americans buy the stupid shit, and they both struggle, but at least Joe Cracker has some killer kicks to go along with the Taco Bell and the wireless internet in his shitty apartment. The Nike execs, meanwhile, can smoke cigars and watch the line go up from the VIP lounge.
“Bread and Circuses” seems like a much better explanation for the behavior of these Westerners. Who says Joe Cracker has a good reason for throwing his verbal weight behind an ongoing genocide in Gaza, screaming about nuking Moscow over a slice of Ukraine, and pearl-clutching about the 100 billion victims of Communism in Xinjiang?
insults can teach shame when necessary. they can also communicate when you’re sharing an opinion that might make people upset and make you mindful of it next time you decide to share your thoughts. in any case, there’s a very relevant difference between a response that communicates “i disagree and here’s why” and a response that communicates “wtf bro”, and that’s not simply self-indulgence
edit: in the case of this thread specifically, the insult is well earned because the post is typical of a gringo gringoing and not being able to accept all the comfort and benefits they’re granted for being gringo. it’s like shaking the poster back to reality and making it clear his line of reasoning is not just incorrect, but also ridiculous
I picked my words carefully. As I said, insults are not conducive to learning, meaning in an environment where the goal is to learn, they are unproductive and it is clear this is a thread made by someone who is trying to understand something better. Insults tend to just result in a person becoming defensive rather than considering what was said.
In a more general sense of learning in all walks of life, there are moments where harshness has its place, yes. And I’m not going to try to universalize it otherwise. But that is not what I was referring to.
“Wtf bro” isn’t an insult and could simply be said if the point is to communicate that.
An insult doesn’t communicate any of that. And that’s not even getting into how tiresome it can get when the focus of a conversation about oppression becomes an attempt to universalize oppression comparisons, not for the sake of understanding the mechanics of how stuff works or how to overcome it, but just this sort of “how dare you not get how worse others have it.” In practice, from what I can tell, the end result of that in people who actually listen to it isn’t that they become better revolutionaries (if they come closer to being a revolutionary at all in cases they aren’t at all yet) and try harder to overthrow the system; instead, they go for the catholic hairshirt thinking and the white guilt and just sort of feel bad about it and wallow in how bad they should feel about their lot in life relative to others. Maybe I’m missing cases where it is actually effective, I’m not omniscient, but it doesn’t seem like a very effective way to engage with the problem of people in the imperial core living off of the mechanisms of exploitation.
Shame as a means of helping to regulate things socially does need to take into account how a culture processes shame, I would say, in order to be effective. How a person tends to think about what shame is and how they should react to being shamed and so on.