Living in China is getting cheaper. Because rents in my neighborhood in central Beijing are dropping, my wife and I pressed our landlord to reduce ours by $140 a month in a new lease that we signed last month. He wasn’t too happy about it, but he’s lucky that we didn’t move out. Given the desperation of local landlords, we probably could’ve saved another $500 a month had we switched to a comparable apartment nearby.

BUT AT WHAT COST?

  • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    19 hours ago

    In the US’s case, post-revolution with a DOTP, we would probably want more price deflation than wage increase. Wage increases would necessitate a bigger gap between American workers and the rest of the world. Instead, eliminate capitalist profit margins to drop costs and allow some wage increase outside the US by newly state-seized firms. Price reduction is also necessary when you want to transition out of commodity production. The revolutionary state’s goal should be to drop a threshold of necessary goods out of commodity pricing entirely, being entirely by virtue of membership in society. In parallel, it would need to facilitate to collectivization and communization of property and production (ala the Venezuelan communal projection) using state capital and technical support to allow individual communities to remove as much of their subsistence and eventually abundance ™ from commodity and wage production as possible. Then the state assists in networking communes together, directly accelerating its own dissolution as the communal state grows and replaces the centralized state’s functions.

    This is uniquely possible under a US revolution due to both its extremely high level of accumulated capital and its lack of external imperialist threats. A US DOTP, properly managed, could slingshot the entire planet towards post-state, post-class communism in a matter of less than a century, I believe.