TikTok, India, Global Capitalist Crisis

Source: We Can Trust The Others Though

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

4-25-23

 

I have not had the Wall Street Journal for some time as I haven’t found a decent deal, so I buy it a couple times a week if I can. It is very important for social activists, socialists, trade union fighters etc. to read the serious journals of capitalism as we learn how the enemy is thinking, what they are discussing with regard to their governance of society. In short, they tell the truth in these pages as they know that workers don’t read them in the main and there is a lot of pertinent stuff there.

 

Just today there’s an optimistic piece about India and how its population boom is an opportunity, for US capitalism in particular, not for the Indian masses. India’s population is expected to hit 1.429 billion by mid 2023 making in the world’s most populated nation. There are dangers of course, the poverty, the fact that the wealth in the country is in the hands of a small group of people and that industry is lacking. Manufacturing is 14% of India’s economy and 27% of China’s. There’s a long way to go but the west, in particular the US, considers China a serious threat and a peer competitor and hopes India might be an alternative hunting ground. Every effort to sow division between the two is on a fast track. The US mass media explains China’s competitive rise to thievery, hacking and anything but ingenuity, better financial guidance and control and smarter investment decisions. Not spending billions on its military industrial complex and invading countries all over the globe helps.

 

But here’s a little gem in this article: “India stands at a crossroads. It will either leverage its enormous human resources to become a superpower—attracting enormous investment inflows in the process—or miss the moment and scuttle its potential.”

 

US Won't eliminate Poverty, India Won't either

Think about that. The US and its western partners welcomed the end of Stalinism in the old Soviet Union and a shift toward the free market in China, but it wanted Vietnamese capitalism, Cambodian style capitalism, a weak ally dependent on the US for protection, arms, raw materials and labor power available for western capital. It did not want a peer competitor never mind a superpower. US support for Ukraine in this disastrous war is in order to prevent Russia from becoming an economic superpower. India, at the slightest move toward becoming a peer competitor will receive the same treatment as China is now.

 

And while we’re on the subject of China. The US claims the social media video app TIkTok is a threat to national security. TikTok is owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance A Wall Street Journal Poll of eligible voters found that “most voters” agree. Yes, they agree with the findings of the US government (the one that normally most Americans hate). Not only that, 62% of Republicans (the party whose members hate the government most) support a TikTok ban against 33% of Democrats.

 

“Support for a ban is driven heavily by the 58% of voters who say they have never used TikTok, the survey found. Among that group, 57% support banning the app from operating in the U.S.” WSJ

 

There is legislation pending that will strengthen the executive orders issued by former President Donald Trump and President Biden. One New Yorker quoted in the article is suspicious but “I don’t like the government banning anything—this isn’t communist China.”*

 

It’s important to remember, and for readers outside the US take note, that almost a hundred million people never voted in the 2016 election that gave us the degenerate Trump. Over the past decades fewer and fewer US workers have any faith at all in the political system or the two big business parties that dominate our economic and political life. I have stated, and I am still of the same mind, that the era of the domination of US political and economic life by these two parties of Wall Street is over. Biden has announced he is running again (sorry young people for the lack of any real choice especially for you) which will exacerbate the political crisis even further. Will it force people to emulate our French brothers and sisters and/or build an independent working class political alternative?  Will there be turmoil within the ranks and at the top of organized labor? It’s hard to say but that’s for another post. I have learned not to be too conditional in these historic times.

 

But I’ll end with another little gem in this article. “The U.S. contends that TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., poses a threat because China’s authoritarian government could demand access to data on U.S. users and influence content on the app.” My added emphasis.

 

One has to laugh at that one. The US, mass media is principally an outlet for US state department dispatches. The local news is generally dominated by murders and mass killings, which are designed to demoralize and maintain a mood of despair and lack of any hope for change among the populace.

 

*Some of the information from the WSJ is from the paper edition and some from the online edition of the article linked.