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Why do so many defend capitalism?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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Country X importing from country Y doesn’t magically equate to country X exploiting country Y. Exploitation is a matter of unequal exchange, and not every exchange is unequal. Exchanges coerced through classical imperialism or through neoliberal debt trap peonage are unequal.
Looking at the top 3 exports of China (by a wide margin before anything else):
Electrical, electronic equipment $1016.58B
Machinery, nuclear reactors, boilers $603.82B
Vehicles other than railway, tramway $248.31B
That's all high price stuff.
Combined with its huge trade surplus, this is a classical "Buy cheap resources - sell expensive highly processed commodities back" scheme, the same as e.g. the uprising European industrializing nations employed as a strategy during their colony exploiting times (and to some degree still do in a similar fashion as China).
No, there is nothing equal here.
Somehow you’re still ignoring how those Euro-American exchanges occurred under duress, at the point of a gun.
Buying raw materials at a freely-agreed upon price, and then applying labor to them to create a finished good, is not exploitation. No one was coerced into anything.
Where are China’s guns? In China. The US has over 800 overseas military installations, while China has one, an anti-piracy port in Djibouti.
But that free international market argument applies to all (well, most of all...) countries, which is exactly my point. Modern China is as exploitative as any other highly developed modern country, independent of economic system.
Sure, as long as you insist on misdefining exploitation in that way, then by your self-serving definition, modern China is just as exploitative as the imperial core.
That’s the definition the imperial core wants to promote, because if they can’t look good, they can at least claim that their enemy is just as bad. But the majority of the world isn’t buying the hogwash that the always the same map minority is pushing.