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Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s 'Scary' For The Rest Of The Auto Industry (insideevs.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15089465

Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s 'Scary' For The Rest Of The Auto Industry

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

As opposed to China where there totally isn't a massive wealth gap between factory workers and their executives! Not like the CEO of Xpeng is worth 1.4 billion or anything...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s true, China Has Billionaires.

Income inequality rhetoric ignores that a class can reap the benefits of work via public investment (e.g. a bullet train), even if bosses make more as individuals. Working Chinese people are seeing the fruits of their labour despite billionaires and inequality. To recriminate them for not demanding more is recriminating the virtue of patience.

In fact, much of what passes for “socialist” idealism in the West turns out to be a mirror image of bog-standard liberal-capitalist entrepreneurship propaganda: “I will be my own boss! I will run my own business!” This idealism appears unaware that the necessity of management is foisted upon us by logistics, not capitalism. Denial of this reality results in fantasies of perfect synchrony between perfectly autonomous anarchists.

The “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” dream, embraced more by pundits with cushy lives than working people, also reveals a dark truth: western “socialists” have some awareness that a more equal world will mean losing first-world privileges. They cannot conceive of things getting better steadily and slowly, with hard work. And so they are forced to denigrate the Chinese road of self-sacrifice in favour of leisure-driven utopianism. The reality is that the victory of the working class over the capitalist class will usher in an era of hard but rewarding work, as opposed to hard work without reward.

United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Sure man, I guess the nets on the sides of the factory buildings are there to catch workers who are jumping with joy because their work is so rewarding.

I don't deny that China's economic ascendancy has been remarkable and a big win against poverty, but now that people have gotten past the starvation phase, I don't think you can use the "high tide raises all boats" analogy. It sounds a lot like tricke-down economics to me, with some hand-waving that things are different in China because the wealthy elites are actually generous patricians.