Govini—some Lockheed/Palantir/Satan cutout—has a (2023) report out showing how America cannot, in fact, cut China out. To attack China, they need China's help! They'd be attacking their own supply lines, which is a novel concept in warfare. Also called dumb.

It's like that classic skit from the 53rd state, Australia, where the guy says, “so under this scenario we're spending close to 30 billion dollars a year to protect our trade with China from China. And that doesn't strike anyone at this table as odd.”

For decades, America has listed China as a ‘pacing’ threat, whatever that means. In that time, however, they've only increased their dependence on China.

It's like R. Kelly said (sorry), “My mind is telling me no, But my body, my body's telling me yes.” Americans are what I call Nacis, National Capitalists, and their nationalist side is saying no, but their capitalist side is saying ‘that shit cheap tho.’

There is, in fact, nothing wrong with a little bump and grind. China would happily supply America, but America is so fucking bitter about being #2 that they're blowing it all up in record time. When Trump tariffed China they reacted by A) tariffing right back and B) tactically cutting off the rare earths that go into everything. Now the tariffs have been paused, but when Trump tried to ban Chinese AI chips, China kept the rare earths ‘ban’ on (it's really a slow walk on permits). And this is just one level that America is completely dependent on China.

As the Govini report says, “More than 40% of the semiconductors that sustain DoD weapons systems and infrastructure depend on Chinese suppliers.” And, “between 2005 and 2020, the level of Chinese suppliers in the U.S. supply chains quadrupled… Between 2014 and 2022, U.S. dependence on China for electronics increased by 600%.” As mentioned, if you're a wrongheaded racist, this is all going the wrong way.

Trump cannot do anything about this ‘problem’ without shattering American ideology. What we are seeing is that socialism is actually a better production system than capitalism. Even the capitalists depend on socialist production! We are where Deng Xiaoping predicted, ahead of schedule, when he said, “it is only in the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately-developed countries, that we will be able to say with assurance that socialism is really superior to capitalism and that we are really building socialism.” This fact is too traumatic for the American id (Trump) to process, so he's just throwing his toys out the pram and screaming about it.

Systems Of Production

How did this happen? The ghouls at Govini almost get it when they say, “when the Soviet Union collapsed and U.S. military spending shrank, America’s defense companies adjusted by merging and through adopting lean production and other financially driven ‘efficiencies.’” This is indeed what happened, just look the mergers in the murders and executions department.

Hundreds of military contractors became five, at which point you might as well nationalize them, they're already centralized. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” and that's exactly what happened. By the Biden era, the Defense Secretary walked straight in from the Raytheon boardroom and no one batted an eye. Even the authors of the Govini paper are Lockheed/Palantir alum that rotated through the Defense Department. The corruption is casual and it's causal. The foxes are running the hen house. Private companies consolidated to the point that you might as well nationalize them, but in ass-backwards American fashion, they privatized the nation instead.

This consolidation is textbook capitalism, according to communism. The rate of profit declines, firms merge, at which point it makes sense to have public ownership. Communism and capitalism are not necessarily different systems, communism contains capitalism as a stage, whereas capitalists try to stand athwart history yelling ‘stop!’ Indeed, you can see American capitalism going through a phase change here, and suppressing it like an increasingly insistent fart. It's like the story my Amma used to tell me about the greedy nariya (fox). The nariya wanted to eat more so he put a stopper in his butt, but this, of course, didn't work and had explosive consequences.

Americans are like a fat capitalist caterpillar that doesn't want to evolve into a socialist butterfly, because that would be gay or something. They just want to sit there chewing the same leaves and shitting on themselves indefinitely. Honestly, capitalism crashed already, historically speaking. In 2008, their whole system crashed into the ground, but rather than getting out and walking they just bailed out the same sinking boat and floated it on a tsunami of funny money. After 2008 America pumped capital into the banks (et al) without taking equity, violating basic business sense. If you pay for something, you own it, unless you're the American people, in which case you get thrown out of your house. Capitalism doesn't even make sense on its own terms anymore. It's just a zombie ideology, eating brains.

America really cannot change ideologically even though reality keeps giving it plenty clues. The Lord Buddha said, “Monks, I will teach you the Dhamma compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto.” So it is with capitalism, a much lesser vehicle. But capitalism has no sense of progression, except up and to the right forever. So it devolves into fascism, and attacking people. Even its own suppliers.

Socialism With Chinese Characteristics

China drew very different lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union. They knew they had to change something, but they also knew they couldn't change everything. Something didn't work about the Soviet system, but after shock therapy, everything went to shit. “Russia experienced a rise in mortality beyond that of any previous peacetime experiences of an industrialized country (Notzon et al., 1998).” (via Isabella Weber).

China didn't want that so, “instead of liberalizing all prices in one big bang, the state initially continued to plan the industrial core of the economy and set the prices of essential goods while the prices of surplus output and nonessential goods were successively liberalized. As a result, prices were gradually determined by the market.” All these quotes are via Isabella Weber btw, read her essential book. Note that while prices might be mostly market-determined, the state still makes the market. The vast majority of the economy is still state-owned, and this trend is actually increasing now.

China is both able to execute industrial policy and execute billionaires, there is no misplaced power here. The only people who say China isn't communist have no concept of communism as a process (we'll get to that) and haven't read Chinese history at all. In pretty standard Marxist-Leninism, China is building towards communism, though it says it has 100 years of socialism to go.

As a socialist country, China can make decisions that wouldn't make sense for private companies but which make a lot of sense for the public. In this way, Chinese policy is continuous through the Soviet period when, as Weber said, “The Chinese followed the Soviet example of generally low prices and profits for means of production and high prices for light industry products, in particular for inessential consumption goods such as cigarettes, wine, and watches.” In fact, today we all get cheap consumer goods because the means of production (semiconductors, magnets) are socialized and thus affordable. That's why there's microchips in everything now (why, I ask, of my bricked refrigerator). This is a socialist market economy (as Uncle Deng said) that America benefits from.

As Deng said in 1984,

It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only [a] “capitalist” market economy. Why can’t we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism. While maintaining a planned economy as the mainstay of our economic system, we are also introducing a market economy. But it is a socialist market economy.

How Did This Happen? Layer Cake

To circle back to our initial question, how did this happen? This is because of the difference in systems of production. While socialist China invested in education, basic research, and a non-profitable industrial base, America found it more efficient to just buy stuff from the socialists. The NYCrimes reports that “Rare earth chemistry programs are offered in 39 universities across the country [in China], while the United States has no similar programs.” And more generally, “Making rare earth magnets requires considerable investments at every stage of production. Yet the sales and profits are tiny.” Within the capitalist system, why would you do this when you can just buy the inputs from the socialist system next door and profit? America thus reaped the benefits of the socialist market economy, and sowed next to nothing at home.

In so many ways, America went from a shipping nation to a drop-shipping nation. A lot of American businesses just import stuff, literally white-label it, and jack up the price. People literally think that ordering stuff is making it. It's a nation of designers and managers and marketers and assorted bullshit. This makes their GDP rise and they think everything is fine, but it's empty calories. All icing and no cake. Most of America's ‘wealth’ is just capitalists rent-seeking atop an increasingly socialist production system somewhere else. If you slice the layer cake—as the ghouls at Govini have—it's socialism at the base. America does not own the means of production anymore. They rent it from the socialists.

Americans are waking up to the fact that this is a problem, but they don't get it. A) there is no problem, China will keep selling you shit and B) you're the problem, the problem is you. You can't have your layer cake and eat it too. As I've said in The Two Contradictions Of Nacism, “The catch is that America needs, nay, requires government programs to beat the communists, but they can't do it because that would make them fucking communists!” This is the central contradiction of National Capitalism (Nacism), the pride that goeth before the fall.

Capitalism has this idea that it's the best system possible, which categorically prevents any real evolution, because how do you get better than best? This is why the suggestions of this Govini paper are so limp and useless. They are, in total, “ramp up the purchases of critical arms and platforms,” “Incentivize partnerships,” “Give every DoD acquisition manager artificial intelligence-enabled software platforms” (the product they're selling), “Form a $10 billion fund to acquire critical components,” and “Create a Defense Intelligence Agency open-source office to detail China’s entire domestic defense industrial base.”

Bro, what? America has completely lost the idea that the government can just do stuff. The old saying, if you want something done right, do it yourself, is lost on these people. If these five companies aren't working just nationalize them instead of throwing more money and ‘incentives’ at them. If you want to refine rare earths, educate people in your state universities, hire them into your state-owned companies, and just do it. That phrase, however, has been trademarked by Nike in America and the public sector isn't allowed to even think of it. That's why they're losing. They don't need an office to study China's industrial base, they need to study the socialism with Chinese characteristics the whole thing it's based on. But they can't do that because that would make them commies. So they'd rather die dumb, attacking their own supply lines with China, and incinerating children to stop the future from coming. The old world's dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of morons.