DOGE is going global. It needs to be stopped..............................................................................................................

1
Dandan Zhang: China’s factory workers go gig...........................................................................................................3
As Global Conflicts Rage, Has Neoliberalism Already Won? | naked capitalism.......................................................9

Paul Antonopoulos .....................................................................................................................................12

Sergey Karaganov: Breaking Europe's Back: What Should Russia's Policy Towards the West Be..........................14
Musings Before a New Round....................................................................................................................................17
Servility and political mimicry by Ukraine's pro-Western elites as they face military defeat...................................20
America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1..............................................................................24
Trump and DOGE Defund Program That Boosted American Manufacturing for Decades.......................................52
Split Apart: How Unchecked Capitalism and Integration Divided the ADOS Community.......................................53

DOGE is going global. It needs to be stopped.

[Link]

The extreme right is organizing for a new austerity campaign modeled on Elon Musk’s
destructive efforts

Paris Marx
Mar 19, 2025

“We need a DOGE right now.” Those words were retweeted by Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke in early February,
alongside an image calling out an aid initiative funded by the Canadian government in Ghana. As the extreme right
in the United States had begun pouring over government spending to pull out any program they deemed too
“woke” or wasteful, that same spirit was being seized by fellow travelers beyond its borders.

By February, serious questions were already emerging about Elon Musk’s role in the US government and the
consequences of the cuts being made by his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). President Donald
Trump was also escalating rhetoric around annexing Canada and turning it into the 51st state, while threats of
tariffs loomed. But that didn’t stop many in Canada’s tech industry from defending Musk’s actions and advocating
for a DOGE of their own.

Canadian tech executives launched an initiative called Build Canada, aimed at advocating for policy positions they
deemed to be in their interest. The memos listed on the group’s website included everything from building more oil
pipelines and taking down internal trade barriers to firing over 100,000 federal government employees and
restricting the entry of refugees in favor of “high skilled immigrants.” It wasn’t just about promoting tech or
innovation, but pushing a broader agenda typically associated with the political right.

In the media, those tech executives focused on promoting Build Canada and the policies it wanted government to
adopt. But The Tyee reporter Jen St. Denis found that on their social media feeds, they were also directing their
followers to second organization called Canada Spends. Its website aped that of [Link], claiming to show data
about government spending and pointing to a series of tweets identifying programs and initiatives — often
associated with foreign aid — they deemed beyond the pale.

Canadian tech executives have increasingly embraced the Conservative Party, especially since changes were
proposed to increase capital gains taxes last year. Just like the US extreme right ignores the existence of the
Government Accountability Office, which exists to audit government spending, Canadian tech leaders ignore how
Canada has its own Auditor General and Parliamentary Budget Officer — because they don’t actually care about
making government more efficient.

In the United States, Silicon Valley and right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation have allied to remake the
government to serve their collective interests and ensure they’re never held accountable for their actions. That
alliance between conservatives and the tech industry is now going global as right-wing groups try to reframe
austerity and privatization through the lens of innovation by calling to create their own versions of DOGE.
Sitting on stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on March 3, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges
declared, “You know, what Europe needs is a DOGE.” He was on a panel of European telecom executives, who
collectively criticized supposed overregulation and limits on further telecom consolidation. “We need an initiative
to cut down this bureaucracy and this administration here, because there are tens of thousands of people sitting
there and administrating our industries,” he continued.

It’s hard to get a more blatant example of corporate executives seizing on DOGE to try to advance their own
interests. Höttges didn’t even try to hide how he only really wanted a European DOGE to serve his commercial
ambition. But he had political support. Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party, which got Musk’s
backing in the recent German election, called for a European DOGE to cut red tape and reduce migration, while
other right-wing politicians are supporting similar efforts.

Meanwhile, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi praised Musk’s actions with DOGE, comparing them to some of
his own efforts to reform welfare programs, while Argentina’s president Javier Milei has been lauded by the US
extreme right as an example for DOGE to follow. After taking power, Milei began rolling back regulations, cutting
state ministries, and fired 10% of government employees. It hasn’t stopped there though.

Down in Australia, tech leaders, the Murdoch-owned media, and right-wing politicians have also been trying to
bring Musk’s ideas for deep austerity to their own country. Days after Trump was sworn in, officially creating
DOGE, Adam Gilmour of Gilmour Space Technologies said, “I strongly believe we need to do something like that
in Australia.” Gina Reinhart, the richest woman in the country, agreed with him.

Three days later, Australia’s right-wing Coalition created a shadow minister for government efficiency dedicated to
cutting “wasteful spending,” despite already having a shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction.
Australia is currently run by a Labor government, but the Coalition is leading in the polls ahead of an election that
must be called by May. Yet the most worrying similarities to DOGE might be found across the ditch in New
Zealand.

In 2023, voters in New Zealand turned on the Labour Party. In its place, the right-wing National Party returned to
power with the support of the populist NZ First and the extreme libertarian ACT Party. After the election, Musk
congratulated National leader Christopher Luxon, writing on Twitter/X, “Congratulations and thank goodness!”

Luxon’s government is the most conservative to run New Zealand in decades, in part because of the outsized
influence ACT leader David Seymour has played, despite his party holding only 11 seats. In February, Seymour
was asked whether New Zealand needed a DOGE of its own. “We do have a Ministry for Regulation that is doing
what some people in America are talking about,” he responded.

After taking power, Seymour formed the Ministry for Regulation with the goal of cutting regulations across
government. He said that would be necessary to increase economic growth and productivity, and more recently
scolded his fellow citizens to “get past their squeamishness about privatization.” But Seymour’s Ministry wasn’t
just about pushing right-wing economic policy; it was also a power grab to ensure his goals can be realized.

Earlier this year, political reporter Henry Cook reported that the Ministry for Regulation had taken over
responsibility for regulatory impact analyses from the Treasury and mandated that agencies across government get
in contact with it as soon as they start developing new policy. That not only gives Seymour unprecedented insight
into what’s happening across government, but also the ability to stifle unfavorable policy early in its development.
It’s a major coup, despite ACT being only a minor coalition partner in the government, and is reminiscent of the
access DOGE has received across government departments.

Elon Musk’s DOGE is somewhat unique to the United States’ presidential system. It would be more difficult to set
up an organization with its exact structure and to enable a billionaire from outside government to direct it in a
parliamentary system. For that reason, New Zealand’s Ministry for Regulation has long felt worthy of attention
because it serves as an experiment for how the extreme right may try to seize more power within parliamentary
political systems in the years to come, especially when it can be combined with the hype around DOGE.

Watching the global extreme right rally around Elon Musk and DOGE brings to mind the global expansion of
neoliberalism fifty years ago. Neoliberal ideas and policies existed before the tenures of US president Ronald
Reagan and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, but they helped legitimize the ideology and ensure other
countries around the world pursued tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization to try to keep up — regardless of the
evidence of social harm those policies caused.

Decades later, neoliberal narratives persist. Right-wing politicians will still claim tax cuts lead to more government
revenue, not less, or that cutting the taxes of the rich will trickle down to the poor. They also claim privatizing
public services will result in better and more efficient delivery. It doesn’t matter that we have decades of
experience showing otherwise; the political right and its powerful backers will pursue their goals at all costs and try
to convince the public they’ll also benefit from a policy program thats serves the rich and powerful.

As we watch DOGE tear through the US government and leave disaster in its wake, we might imagine that no one
would support creating a similar initiative in other countries around the world. But the truth is that work has
already begun, and if explicit references to DOGE prove too controversial, its right-wing backers will find other
ways to sell it to the public through claims about combatting waste to promote greater productivity and efficiency.

In Canada, the Conservative Party seemed poised to claim victory in this year’s election. But after their inability to
pivot in the face of Trump’s threats against Canada’s sovereignty, the Liberal Party under its new leader Mark
Carney is up in the polls and may hold on to power. Right-wing tech leaders might seem out in the cold as a result,
but that’s not necessarily the case.

Carney has embraced the framing of the UK’s Labour Party that government is spending too much, economic
growth must be the core focus, and that AI must be thoroughly embraced. UK Labour’s austerity program has
already been criticized as being in line with DOGE, while the leader of its Scottish wing has explicitly said he’ll set
up his own “department of government efficiency” if his party wins regional elections next year.

The adoption of these ideas by centrist parties is when things get even more worrying. Margaret Thatcher once said
her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. When elected in 1997, Blair had thoroughly remade the Labour Party as
a force for neoliberal transformation, as Bill Clinton did with the US Democratic Party. The last thing we need now
is for DOGE to get a similar endorsement.

Dandan Zhang: China’s factory workers go gig

[Link]

Peking University professor profiles China's overlooked, rapidly increasing, poorly-

insured day laborers in export-oriented manufacturing.

Yuxuan JIA
and
Siqi Lin
Mar 22, 2025

Dandan Zhang is a Professor in Economics (with tenure) and Deputy Dean (in research, internal and international
cooperation) at the National School of Development (NSD), and Deputy Dean of the Institute of South-South
Cooperation and Development, Peking University.

She famously put the youth unemployment rate in China at a staggering 46.5% maximum in July 2023, more than
twice the official figure of 21.3%. Amid heightened attention then, the National Bureau of Statistics of China
paused the release of youth joblessness data in August 2023 and resumed publishing in December 2023 after
revising its methodology to exclude full-time students.

Another of Zhang’s studies, which shows a “very strong correlation” between left-behind childhood and
criminality in adulthood, was also featured on The East is Read last June.
The following article centers on understanding the scale, characteristics, profile, and policy implications of gig
work in China’s manufacturing industry, particularly in the 3C (computer, communication, and consumer
electronics) sector. Driven by smart manufacturing technologies, the platform economy, household registration
restrictions, and fluctuations in export demand, the rise of a gig-based employment model under China’s existing
institutional framework is an inevitable trend, Zhang says, and it is still essential to balance this flexibility with
workers’ rights.

Gig workers seeking daily work in Shenzhen, screenshot from NHK’s 2018 documentary Sanhe Talent Market:
China’s Youth Living on a Daily Wage of 1,500 Yen

The following article was originally published on Caixin and is also available on the official NSD WeChat blog.
Professor Zhang did NOT review this translation before publication.

The demand for labour in the 3C (computer, communication, and consumer electronics) manufacturing industry
has given rise to a new production model in export-oriented manufacturing—one with distinct Chinese
characteristics, combining “high-tech + gig work.” Estimates suggest that the number of on-demand workers in the
manufacturing sector is around 40 million, accounting for 31.12% of the industry’s total workforce.

Since the reform and opening up, driven by globalisation, China's manufacturing industry has occupied an
irreplaceable position in the global industrial chain. By 2023, the added value of China's manufacturing industry
has ranked first in the world for 14 consecutive years, accounting for nearly 30% of the global total. Notably,
China is the world's largest manufacturer-exporter. In 2022, its total manufacturing exports reached $3.33 trillion—
roughly one-fifth of the global total—far exceeding Germany’s $1.37 trillion and the United States’ $1.1 trillion.
However, over the past decade, both the number of manufacturing workers and the sector’s share of China’s
national economy have been on the decline.

As industrial upgrading and digital transformation accelerate, the cost of capital declines, skill requirements evolve,
and human capital depreciation speeds up, the employment model in the manufacturing industry has undergone
profound changes. With the skill level required for manufacturing workers continuously decreasing, the traditional
long-term, stable employment model is gradually being replaced by short-term and gig workers, making “gig
work” the primary form of labour in the sector.

Take Kunshan, Suzhou—the focus of my team’s research—as an example. Ranked first among China’s 100 most
economically competitive counties, Kunshan is home to thousands of labour service and employment intermediary
agencies, which supply workers daily to thousands of large-scale manufacturing enterprises in the region and its
surrounding areas. During peak periods, tens of thousands of workers enter factories for employment each day.
This highly efficient labour supply-demand matching mechanism plays a crucial role in meeting the workforce
needs of Kunshan’s 3C manufacturing industry, giving rise to a new production model in export-oriented
manufacturing—one with distinct Chinese characteristics, combining “high-tech + gig work.”

While the flexible labour model enhances the international competitiveness of China's export-oriented
manufacturing industry, reduces labour costs for enterprises, and provides diverse employment options for
individual workers, it also presents potential risks at both the individual and industry levels. In the ongoing push
for “high-quality and sufficient employment,” there is an urgent need to closely monitor the evolving trends of the
gig workforce and explore strategies to sustain the international competitiveness of export-oriented manufacturing
in the era of gigification. This is an issue that policymakers cannot afford to ignore.

Based on field research and the latest literature, this article defines “gig workers” in the manufacturing industry as
individuals working on production frontlines without formal labour contracts with their employers and without
access to basic social security benefits. This group primarily falls into two categories: first, “on-demand workers,”
who are employed under labour contracts with intermediary agencies; and second, regular gig workers, often
referred to as “day labourers,” who lack formal labour or service contracts, do not receive basic social insurance,
typically secure work on their own, and are paid daily.

The Labour Contract Law of the People's Republic of China explicitly states that “labour contract employment is
the basic employment form for enterprises in China. On-demand employment is a supplementary form and may
only be used for temporary, auxiliary, or replacement positions.” In 2014, the Ministry of Human Resources and
Social Security issued the Provisional Regulations on On-Demand Labour, with Article 4 further specifying that
“employers must strictly control the number of on-demand workers, which must not exceed 10% of their total
workforce.”

Since the introduction of the Provisional Regulations on On-Demand Labour, official statistics have consistently
reported that on-demand workers make up less than 10% of the workforce. For example, in 2021 and 2022, the
proportion of on-demand employees in Suzhou’s enterprises was 7.92% and 4.81%, respectively. However, some
survey data paints a different picture.

The 2022 China Development Report on Flexible Employment, based on a 2021 survey of over 200 manufacturing
enterprises, estimated that flexible workers accounted for 14.73% of the total manufacturing workforce.
Additionally, this study, using data from the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES), calculated the proportion
of on-demand workers in manufacturing across five provinces (Jiangsu, Guangdong, Sichuan, Jilin, and Hubei),
100 counties, and 1,940 manufacturing enterprises. The results showed that in 2017, on-demand workers made up
nearly 20.20% of the manufacturing workforce, showing a clear upward trend from 2010 to 2017.

Between 2022 and 2024, my research team conducted field visits to nearly 30 manufacturing enterprises, 20
employment intermediaries, and 10 labour markets in Kunshan of Suzhou Province, as well as in Dongguan,
Foshan, and Shenzhen of Guangdong Province. Based on the collected data, in the manufacturing clusters of the
Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, on-demand workers made up an average of one-third of the workforce,
rising to as much as two-thirds during peak seasons. In large manufacturing plants with over 10,000 workers, the
proportion of on-demand workers can reach as high as 80%.

This suggests that due to the high mobility of on-demand workers, conventional statistical methods struggle to
obtain accurate data on the scale of employment in manufacturing enterprises, leading to an underestimation of the
actual figures.

Using data from China’s Fourth National Economic Census and the Seventh National Population Census, it is
estimated that on-demand workers in the manufacturing industry number around 40 million, making up 31.12% of
the sector’s total workforce.

To further analyse the gig worker market in China’s manufacturing industry and their employment characteristics,
this study selected two unique data sets: data from an online manufacturing worker recruitment platform and a
sample survey of the platform’s registered members.

Founded in 2017 in Kunshan, the manufacturing on-demand labour recruitment platform is currently the largest
and only online recruitment platform for on-demand workers in China. It not only provides online matching
services between manufacturing enterprises and on-demand workers but has also expanded its offline network to
over 20 cities nationwide, serving more than 3 million registered members.

The platform’s data covers approximately 1,000 manufacturing enterprises, 700,000 active members, and over 2.5
million matching records between enterprises and workers, primarily focusing on high-tech industries such as
electronics manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions. These two regions are the
most concentrated hubs of China’s export-oriented manufacturing, serve as key global manufacturing bases, and
account for about 10% of China’s total manufacturing employment.

According to the platform’s data, 89.2% of on-demand workers are concentrated in electronics manufacturing. In
2023, exports from this sector accounted for approximately 23% of China’s total manufacturing exports,
highlighting the export-oriented nature of manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta. As a
result, the platform’s data is highly representative and provides valuable insights into the industry distribution and
employment characteristics of gig workers in China’s export-oriented manufacturing sector.

Additionally, this study supplemented the platform’s big data with personal information—such as marital status,
childbearing, education background, employment history, willingness to participate in social insurance, and future
expectations—through an online survey. Conducted in April 2024, the survey was designed based on active
platform members and randomly sampled 15,000 participants aged 16 to 59 who had been active on the platform.
Survey data shows that the average age of members on the manufacturing on-demand platform is 26.4 years, with
males making up about four-fifths of the total. The proportion of female members has been gradually rising,
increasing from 14.25% in 2019 to 21.19% in 2023. Most members come from provinces such as Henan, Gansu,
Shaanxi, Yunnan, Shanxi, and Guizhou, with 89.7% holding rural household registrations and an average age of
29.4 years. Among them, 79.3% are single, and 75.4% have no children.

In terms of education, 40.2% of members have at most a junior high school education, 22.8% hold a senior high
school diploma, 22.4% have a higher vocational school education, and 14.6% have a junior college degree or
higher. Overall, over the past five years, the average years of schooling for new gig workers on the platform has
steadily increased from 10.7 to 11.3 years, with a notable rise in the last two years.

Among the employed sample, as of April 2024, 54.8% of members were working as gig workers—including on-
demand workers paid by the hour, day labourers, and flexible employees—while nearly 40% had transitioned to
fixed-term employment (39.3%), and a small portion were self-employed (4%). Among gig workers, on-demand
workers accounted for 44.7%, while day labourers made up 5.9%.

From a social insurance perspective, 47.8% of the sample do not participate in any of the five basic types of social
security in China—pension, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, work-related injury insurance, and
maternity insurance—nor in the mandatory housing fund. Women, rural workers, and older workers are more
likely to be uninsured. Gig workers make up 41.8% of the uninsured group, a significantly higher proportion than
fixed-term employees (20.6%) and self-employed workers (2.86%) in the sample.

There are also notable differences in members’ willingness to pay for social insurance. Survey data shows that
members are willing to contribute an average of 1,499.3 yuan [$207.1] per month, but willingness is highly
polarised. Workers not currently enrolled in social insurance are far less willing to pay compared to those who are
partially or fully insured, with an average difference of about 1,200 yuan [$165.8].

Currently, members earn an average monthly income of 5,444.8 yuan [$752.2], with an hourly wage of 24.0 yuan
[$3.3] and an average workweek of 61.6 hours. At the time of the research, the majority of surveyed members were
still employed in general equipment manufacturing (17.9%) and consumer electronics (14.8%), with general
workers (52.2%) being the most common occupation. Additionally, 10.2% of gig workers have transitioned to the
service industry, while 11.6% have moved up to roles as professional technicians, administrative staff, or
supervisors.

Job advertisements posted by employment intermediary agencies in Shenzhen, originally featured in a report by
The Paper on April 22, 2021

Regarding future plans for marriage and childbearing, 74.1% of unmarried respondents intend to marry in the
future. However, among unmarried workers under 50, only 54.0% believe they are likely to marry before reaching
50. On average, members expect to have 1.41 children. Among workers under 45 who do not yet have children,
they believe they have a 56.4% chance to have children before turning 45.

Regarding expected living locations, 81.7% of members anticipate continuing to live in cities five years from now.
Among them, 24.4% plan to settle in first-tier cities (such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen), 27.1%
expect to live in provincial capitals, and 30.2% prefer other prefecture-level cities. This suggests that while most
members envision an urban future, they are more inclined to choose non-first-tier cities as their long-term
residence.

Regarding future employment plans, 72.7% of members hope to engage in relatively stable work (including fixed-
term employment or self-employment) within the next five years—a proportion significantly higher than the
current share of members in such stable jobs. However, 16.9% still expect to continue working as on-demand
workers, 2.5% anticipate working as day labourers, and 3.7% indicated they would “lie flat” and not actively seek
employment opportunities.

Further regression analysis found that education positively influences members’ current employment decisions but
does not significantly increase the likelihood of stable employment or improve labour productivity. Moreover, on-
demand workers and day labourers exhibit path dependence, meaning they are more likely to continue in similar
work over the next five years. This suggests that gig workers with lower education levels are less likely to
transition to fixed-term employment. Additionally, even highly educated gig workers, once caught in a “low-
stability equilibrium,” may struggle to break free from this situation.

Members with higher education levels have greater expectations for a stable life—they are more likely to seek
fixed-term employment, obtain basic social insurance, and settle in urban areas. As they age, their intentions to
marry and have children also increase. However, achieving these expectations presents considerable challenges. In
the long run, higher-educated workers may experience a greater gap between their aspirations and reality compared
to their lower-educated counterparts, leading them to make more extreme choices that resemble those of lower-
educated workers.

Additionally, manufacturing gig workers in cities of different tiers exhibit significant differences in industry and
job preferences. Those in first-tier cities show a stronger need for long-term planning and stability, yet due to
constraints such as household registration restrictions and social security limitations, they struggle to enter the
fixed-term employment pool, leading them to rely on gig work for livelihood. This finding further suggests that
merely reforming employment practices cannot fundamentally change the current status of gig workers in the
manufacturing industry.

Why is “gig work” emerging as a trend in export-oriented manufacturing employment? This can be seen as a
product of various converging factors, including the adoption of smart manufacturing technologies, the
development of the platform economy, household registration restrictions limiting rural-to-urban mobility, and
fluctuations in market demand for export products. These dynamics have led to the large-scale “gig” labour market
in manufacturing hubs like the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta.

First, rapid advancements in smart manufacturing technologies have enhanced labour productivity and product
yield, but they have also increased the substitution of skilled labour with machines. This has reduced the need for
formal hires in skilled roles while driving demand for machine operators, leading to both “technological
substitution” and “technological complementarity.”

“Technological substitution” refers to how automation improves production efficiency, lowers costs, and replaces
routine tasks previously performed by medium-skilled workers. Meanwhile, low-skilled jobs involving non-routine
manual tasks remain harder to automate, increasing demand for low-skilled workers.

“Technological complementarity” suggests that some low-skilled tasks work in tandem with automation
technologies, meaning that instead of replacing low-skilled workers, technological advancements actually boost
demand for these positions.

This polarisation effect, triggered by technological progress, is a widely observed economic phenomenon. The
development of automation and other technologies leads to job growth in high-skilled and low-skilled positions,
while medium-skilled jobs decline. This phenomenon has been confirmed in several studies. For example,
Acemoglu and Autor (2011) found that between 1999 and 2007, technological advancements in the U.S. led to a
polarisation in skill demand, with employment growth particularly concentrated in the lowest deciles of
occupations.

Between 2010 and 2015, following the peak of China’s total labour force, wages for frontline manufacturing
workers rose significantly, marking a gradual erosion of the country’s labour cost advantage. Meanwhile,
advancements in automation technologies created a critical opportunity for the manufacturing sector to upgrade.
The adoption of smart manufacturing technologies—such as industrial robots, artificial intelligence, big data, and
the Internet of Things—not only boosted productivity and optimised costs but also accelerated the shift toward gig
work in the labour market. In major manufacturing hubs like the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, job
openings were primarily for frontline roles in production, assembly, packaging, and inspection—positions that
often required nothing more than familiarity with the 26 English letters, with no specific educational background or
prior work experience needed.

Second, cyclical fluctuations in external demand and labour recruitment platforms’ ability to aggregate gig workers
have enabled “seamless matching” between labour supply and demand. Technological advancements have fuelled
the rapid growth of the platform economy, improving online information aggregation and enhancing labour market
matching efficiency. For example, 周薪薪 Zhouxinxin, a recruitment platform for the manufacturing industry,
integrates fragmented labour market intermediaries and uses big data to match workers with job openings,
significantly boosting labour market efficiency.

Meanwhile, export-oriented manufacturing firms concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta
attract global orders, with their labor demand strongly shaped by seasonal fluctuations in international markets.
These companies scale up hiring during peak seasons and downsize during off-peak periods, limiting the feasibility
of fixed-term employment and making gig workers an ideal solution to meet seasonal labor needs.

Besides shifts in the export market, fluctuations in the domestic market also drive seasonal variations in labor
demand. During shopping festivals like “618” and “Singles' Day,” consumption peaks compel manufacturers to
hire large numbers of temporary workers to manage the spike in orders.

Third, the urban-rural divide in the household registration system encourages migrant workers to pursue short-term
employment in cities, making them more inclined toward jobs that offer “higher wages, lower social insurance
contributions.” This makes gig work—where pay is higher per unit of labour—more attractive to migrant workers.

Additionally, implementing the Labour Contract Law in 2008 strengthened worker protections and increased labor
costs for businesses. In response, many companies turned to on-demand labor and outsourcing to reduce
employment expenses. By hiring on-demand workers managed by third-party agencies, businesses can avoid the
costs associated with layoffs, allowing them to flexibly adjust their workforce size and mitigate labor cost risks.

Furthermore, short-term factors have also intensified the trend of gigification in recent years. The impact of the
COVID-19 pandemic and international geopolitical tensions has put manufacturing companies reliant on foreign
orders under dual pressure—domestic economic slowdowns and rising uncertainty in global markets. As domestic
manufacturers faced declining orders and reduced hiring, labour market uncertainty further drove up demand for
gig workers.

In 2013, China’s Labour Contract Law was revised again, and the Provisional Regulations on On-Demand Labour
explicitly stipulated that “employers must strictly control the number of on-demand workers, which must not
exceed 10% of their total workforce.” However, demand for flexible labor remains high, and the effectiveness of
policy adjustments is constrained by the economic environment and businesses’ production needs.

The following chart shows that the labor price index for manufacturing on-demand workers fluctuates in line with
employment trends, with no signs of rising wages since 2022. Additionally, by the end of 2023, the platform’s
membership had dropped to half of what it was in the same period of 2021, while the average labor price decreased
by about 10%. This suggests that industry demand is dominant in shaping labor recruitment trends.

Labour Price Index for On-Demand Workers in the Manufacturing Industry (January 1, 2019 – April 18, 2024)
Data Source: Recruitment Platform for On-Demand Workers in the Manufacturing Industry

By 2021, China’s flexible workforce had reached 200 million, accounting for 43% of urban employment. The
platform economy, by bridging supply and demand, has created job opportunities for flexible workers, offering
them greater autonomy and flexibility. At the same time, it acts as a “reservoir” to ease urban employment
pressures.

However, most flexible workers do not sign formal labour contracts with platforms, have low social security
coverage, and face inadequate labour rights protection. This issue has become a key concern in social governance
and a critical topic in discussions on achieving “high-quality and sufficient employment.” While flexible
employment in service industries, such as food delivery, express delivery, and ride-hailing, has drawn significant
attention, gig work in manufacturing remains largely overlooked.

Manufacturing gig work is characterised by its vast scale, and its labour productivity directly affects China’s
position in the global manufacturing landscape. In particular, the human capital of manufacturing gig workers plays
a crucial role in shaping productivity.
In the era of smart manufacturing and flexible labour models, the growing specialization of tasks presents risks of
skill monotony and deskilling for workers performing repetitive micro-tasks on production lines, making it more
difficult for them to accumulate human capital.

Looking ahead, as smart manufacturing advances and industrial upgrades continue, the scale of gig work is
expected to expand. Therefore, guiding the career development of gig workers, optimising social security systems,
and reducing urban living costs for migrant workers will be crucial for ensuring the sustainable development of the
manufacturing labour market. These efforts will also be a key step toward helping low-income groups achieve
“common prosperity.”

Additionally, it is essential to create a dignified and sustainable earning environment for migrant workers, enhance
their income resilience during non-working hours, reduce living costs, and improve their labour market
competitiveness through diverse and flexible education and retraining opportunities.

In summary, the gig work model in manufacturing is driven by industrial clustering, market demand fluctuations,
and policy environments. Its flexibility plays a crucial role in global supply chain adjustments and corporate
production. Under China’s current institutional framework, gig work is an inevitable trend, but balancing this
flexibility with worker rights is still essential.

Policies should go beyond simply integrating gig workers into traditional social insurance systems and instead
develop more flexible, tailored social security schemes that ensure both income flexibility and basic protections for
gig workers. Meanwhile, at the micro level, enterprises and HR managers must adapt to evolving work patterns and
transform organizational management models to meet new development needs.

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[Link]

As Global Conflicts Rage, Has Neoliberalism Already Won? | naked

capitalism
Conor Gallagher
13–16 minute

There are reports that DOGE is going global as the tech industry and other oligarchs the world over use their
politicians to reframe austerity and privatization through the lens of innovation. Countries like Germany,
Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India either already have their iteration of DOGE or are looking at
creating it. Musk, the world’s richest man and libertarian government contractor weirdo at the center of DOGE has
also cultivated close ties with governments in Hungary, Italy, Israel, and is inserting himself along with the US
government into the politics of South Africa, Brazil, and other nations.

The conservative-DOGE-tech alliance might put up the appearance of opposition to the grating virtue signaling of
the liberal Davos cabal, but they’re two sides of the same coin. Samuel Huntington, who came up with the label
“Davos man”, argues that members of this global elite “have little need for national loyalty, view national
boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past
whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”.

As the dust settles on Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, there are arguments that this plan has little to do with
boosting American manufacturing and more with extorting better deals for US-based oligarchs in the neoliberal
trade model, hurting China, and “shock therapy on a civilizational scale.” The administration is reportedly already
in negotiations with countries like India, Israel, and Vietnam over “deals.” Maybe nowhere are the administration’s
intentions more clear than in the fact that hours before the announced tariffs Trump and Musk gutted the program
that aids American manufacturers.

We’ll see where “Liberation Day” leads, but if DOGE marks the next stage of global neoliberalism (according to
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that
the world is embracing DOGE much the same way it did when US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher legitimized neoliberalism nearly a half century ago.

As DOGE helps reconcile US elites, can it also lead the march towards what Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says
is a future belonging to authoritarian capitalism across the world?

Exploitative Success Stories

Any regular reader of this site will need no reminder of how decades of neoliberalism has shredded the American
social fabric. We can list almost infinite economic statistics, but maybe nowhere is it more evident in Americans’
increasing belief that they don’t belong, that they have no community, and there are no values holding the country
together. That’s unsurprising when anything and everything is justified in pursuit of the almighty dollar and “learn
to code and/or move” is the credo of the party that used to at least feign representation of the working class.

On the bright side, a lack of community is easily exploitable. And all the social harm goes hand in hand with
obscene benefits for the wealthiest. That is the great selling point among the global elite as they’re called who do
seem to have a strong sense of community.

Part of the ineffectiveness in countering them is the identity politics that has infected the politics at the same time
of neoliberalism’s explosion.

Consider the following article I came across recently: “Split Apart: How Unchecked Capitalism and Integration
Divided the ADOS Community.” It’s from Lineage First Magazine and is co-written by AI, but it describes how
the civil rights era opened doors to advancement but that predatory capitalism fostered the exploitation of the
marginalized while enriching a few.

Essentially, a small percentage of African Americans were allowed to enjoy the riches of American capitalism
while the rest continue to toil in poverty, and the US called it a success and a day. This isn’t too dissimilar to the
“success” story Vice President JD Vance peddles about his rise from poor white Appalachia.

In many ways these American rags to riches stories are reminiscent of US imperial strategy as DOGE goes global.
Europe is a fine example with its overreliance on the US and seemingly limitless number of compradores in
leadership positions.

They all seem to know that even if they lay waste to Europe, they can follow in the path of former World
Economic Forum Young Leader, British Prime Minister, and war criminal Tony Blair. After he left government he
began “operating a dizzying, and often overlapping, web of charities, firms, and foundations that have catapulted
him to the status of one of Britain’s wealthiest people .”

He travels around giving interviews warning against the dangers of populism and free public services – a task that
is no doubt more difficult with Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” no longer offering him free rides.

There are plenty of other examples of EU officials following in Blair’s footsteps.

Former EU Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton quickly became an advisor at Bank of America,
getting a waiver to bypass a rule that requires a two-year waiting period before starting lobbying jobs. David
Cameron recently joined Jeb Bush’s private equity firm.

Zelensky and company in Ukraine are maybe the best case study, however. Here is Dmitri Kovalevich writing at
Al Mayadeen:

The Ukrainian political elite has always been famous for its skills in mimicry. Many started out as Soviet
functionaries, then became pro-Russian politicians. Today, most are flirting with far-right Ukrainian nationalism
and neo-Nazism. More than coincidentally, Zelensky is a mimic and comedian by profession. The dictionary
definition explains that “a comedian is someone who entertains audiences using many techniques, one of which is
mimicry and impression.”
Ukrainian publicist Serhiy Datsyuk says the Ukrainian elite has done nothing but plunder the country’s people and
resources for the past 30 years, and Ukrainians are beginning to recognize this across the board. He writes, “It is
very difficult to destroy half of the country’s population in 30 years, but we managed. This shows that we
Ukrainians don’t need Ukraine, and therefore no one else needs it, either. Our elite has robbed the country of
resources and infrastructure and did not give a damn about the people.” In his opinion, it is pointless to ‘save’
Ukraine under Western tutelage because the country is in freefall and there is nothing left to save in such a format.
The creation of external enemies, that is, the ‘Russians’, has been just another excuse for the authorities to relieve
themselves of responsibility.

In January, a statement by Vitaliy Portnikov, a well-known Ukrainian journalist and a columnist of the US-funded
Radio Liberty, emphasized the class division of society which has only intensified during the war. His words
resonated widely in Ukrainian society. According to him, the very essence of a Western-inspired ‘democratic’
society is that the poor should perish while the rich should prosper.

Despite her disastrous time in office, German Foreign Minister and coincidentally another former WEF Young
Leader like Blair, Annalena Baerbock still provided one of the finest summaries when she explained why she
doesn’t listen to Germans’ concerns over job losses or freezing. Her real concern is Ukraine by which she means
those looking to profit off the slaughter.

With elites like this, what’s to prevent the duplication of Ukraine elsewhere? Professor Sergey Karaganov,
honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and academic supervisor at the School of
International Economics and Foreign Affairs Higher School of Economics in Moscow writes the following:

Sending Ukrainian cannon fodder to slaughter, they are preparing a new one—Eastern Europeans from a number of
Balkan states, Romania and Poland. They have begun to deploy mobile bases, where contingents of potential
landsknechts are trained. They will try to continue the war not only to the “last Ukrainian”, but soon to the “last
Eastern European”

Why might the Russians want a “deal” even though they’re winning in Ukraine? The prospect of many more years
fighting to subdue Eastern Europe (again) could be one reason.

There are potentially others.

Dystopian Multipolarity

Russia is not fighting for much of a different vision of societal organization, nor is China. As Michael Hudson has
explained time and again, the true battle being waged is between financial oligarchy on behalf of the Davos crowd
and a mixed public-private economy in places like Russia, China, and elsewhere in the global south. In simple
terms, they are what the US was before the neoliberal revolution, but Hudson also recently commented on The
Duran on how neoliberalism is what’s taught at Chinese universities and is conquering the world.

Do Russia and China simply want to build up their countries using mixed economies like the US did in order to
settle into a seat equal to Washington at the global neoliberal table?

Fiorella Isabel, Vanessa Beeley, and others are contemplating how a Russia-US detente will herald a new carving
up and exploitation of West Asia while cementing some of Greater Israel’s designs on the region. China, by most
accounts, is in the lead in the race to replace human labor. And both countries purchase and use Israeli surveillance
and population control tech. As Antony Loewenstein documents in his book The Palestine Laboratory, companies
like Any Vision developed a system for mass surveillance of Palestinians, and now operates in over 40 countries,
including Russia, China, and the US.

To be fair, China and Russia are more willing to play by international rules, are agreement-capable, and currently
fear tearing their social fabric apart — all statements that cannot be made about the US.

China isn’t afraid to cut oligarchs down to size, although for what reasons isn’t exactly always clear. In Russia,
Putin recently announced healthcare for the homeless. The US appeals to greed and has no concern for any
potential destabilization that impoverishing country will create.
But while the opposition to American hegemony and win-win deals championed by Moscow and Beijing are
welcome, they are often for the elites of countries and not necessarily workers or for the environment. Both China
and Russia are seeing rising levels of economic inequality.

So what is the fighting with Russia and confrontation with China really about?

VP Vance provided a neat summary recently when he explained how he (and his tech overlords) want other
countries trapped at the bottom of the value chain.

While talks with Russia currently appear to be taking the long train to nowhere, we can see what the US is after:
mineral deals, infrastructure, a deal to weasel its way into a reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines. In other
words, US plutocrats are after rent-seeking opportunities.

It’s similar with China, although a taller order as it involves keeping China down, but the U.S.-China Phase One
trade agreement during Trump’s first term helps show us. From Foreign Policy:

At the time, [Trump] lauded the “historic” agreement as “righting the wrongs of the past.” He was proud of
securing China’s commitment to purchase at least $200 billion worth of U.S. goods and services over a two-year
period. The agreement went even further, obligating China to strengthen its intellectual property regime, curtail
technology transfer requirements, lift barriers to U.S. agriculture exports, and refrain from currency manipulation.
China lived up to most of these commitments but fell short on its purchasing obligations.

Now Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the US is engaging in economic warfare against China to lure Beijing
to the negotiating table. Negotiate over what exactly?

This could include demanding more in terms of intellectual property protection, agriculture, and technology
transfer while adding new areas of focus, such as cloud computing. Lessons could be drawn from the first go-
around regarding purchasing commitments: making targets more realistic, conducting more regular progress
monitoring, and realigning products of interest with what the U.S. private sector is ready to sell.

…U.S. negotiators should try to curb China’s use of subsidies and financial assistance and address the factors
leading to excess production, such as limited domestic demand. But they shouldn’t be surprised if these efforts
don’t gain traction. Washington might also consider an accommodation aimed at limiting U.S. imports of unfairly
traded Chinese products. Rather than imposing unilateral high tariffs, this could be accomplished by setting
quantitative limits on select Chinese exports, like batteries

…an agreement with Beijing must also consider its growing investments in third-country markets, particularly in
the automotive and electronics sectors. Strengthened anti-circumvention measures, stricter rules of origin, greater
operations transparency, and even export bans on specific Chinese companies would concretely address U.S.
concerns about these investments.

That’s, umm, a lot, and would basically assure that the US gets to pump the brakes on China’s rise, which Beijing
isn’t likely to accept, and so China’s ambitions are beyond what US plutocrats can stomach. And Putin mostly
remains a villain because he put an end to Western-directed shock therapy in Russia.

If we take a step back from the “great game,” however, we see that whether deals are ultimately worked out or the
conflicts continue, the spoils are increasingly pieces of a pandemic-ravaged, labor-decimated, climate-collapsed
world. Altering that trajectory requires more than a changing of the guard.

Paul Antonopoulos

@oulosP
 Syria will be Balkanised with American and Russian oversight. Reuters reported on Feb 28 that Israel lobbied
the US to keep Syria weak and decentralised, including by letting Russia keep its military bases there to counter
Turkey's growing influence. The massacre of Alawites and Christians by the Sunni jihadists over the past few days
has caused global outrage to the point that Jolani is now urging the terrorists to not record their crimes. Israel and
the US, unlike the EU and Greece, reacted (rhetorically) the strongest and called out the perpetrators of the
massacres. For Israel and the US, the perfect pretext to intervene further in Syria and impose Balkanisation has
now been established. We’ve already seen Alawite community leaders and activists call for Latakia and Tartous to
go under Israeli or Western protection. If Balkanisation was to occur to appease Israeli demands that Turkish
influence be countered, a landlocked Sunni state will emerge that will be entirely reliant on Turkey, while an
independent Alawite-Christian coastal state will emerge under Western protection and normalized with Israel,
which will also have a normalization knock on effect in Lebanon. Then there is also the question of the Druze and
Kurds. I think the horrific slaughter of Alawites and Christians has set the pretext needed to break up Syria, and
tomorrow will be the start of that process.

"It's too late to save Ukraine" - step aside, it's collapsing! - the insight of a Maidan philosopher. Bandera's ideology
has destroyed Ukraine, it's too late to save it. This was stated on air by Kiev philosopher Sergei Datsyuk, who had
previously ardently supported Euromaidan, on Politeka, a correspondent of PolitNavigator reports.

🗣"It is very difficult to destroy half the country's population in 30 years, but we managed. This means that we,
Ukrainians, do not need Ukraine. Therefore, no one else needs it either. What our elite did was plunder resources,
infrastructure, and not give a damn about other people.

🗣And do national patriots need Ukraine? What do they need, besides language, culture, and historical heroes?
Read their program, is there anything there about engineering, science, philosophy? There is nothing there about all
this," Datsyuk said.

🗣“Small things do not add up to a big thing. Because you must have an idea of the whole, and the whole must be
diverse.

🗣If you think locally and temporarily, if you think in regions, in separate pieces of the country, you will never see
the whole country. If you think only about language and culture, you will never be able to understand that science
is not structured that way, because it is multilingual and multicultural. To create a monolingual engineering means
to destroy it.

🗣And this blows the mind of any national patriot - he needs to give up his principles. Because this is how any free
activity is structured. You cannot tell a free creative person: “You are a genius, but be a genius only within the
Ukrainian language,” - he will send you to hell.

🗣But we do not understand this. That is why no one needs the whole of Ukraine, not even Russia,” the philosopher
added.

🔴The host asked what project could save Ukraine.

🗣“Saving a house when it’s collapsing is pointless – step aside. There’s no need to save Ukraine, it’s in free fall.
And enemies are just a reason to shirk responsibility,” Datsyuk concluded.

[Link]
~3 minute

Portnikov crede că oamenii obișnuiți ar trebui să moară în război, nu

elita
Vitali Portnikov. Foto: [Link]

Oamenii de rând ar trebui să moară în război, nu elita.

Aceasta a declarat jurnalistul ucrainean Vitali Portnikov.

"Acum auzim de la oameni că deputații trebuie să lupte și apoi vor pleca. Nu, oameni buni, acesta este un stat
democratic. Într-un stat democratic, oamenii obișnuiți mor pentru țară. Dacă vrem ca aristocrații să moară pentru
stat, trebuie să trăim într-o țară feudală, așa cum era înainte de Marea Revoluție Franceză", a spus Portnikov.

Anterior, activistul Dmitri Korchinsky a spus că a muri în război este minunat, în contrast cu a muri pașnic la
bătrânețe . Potrivit acestuia, mobilizând ucrainenii, TCC „îi ajută să înțeleagă acest lucru”.

Iar în batalionul Lupii Da Vinci au spus că e mai bine să mori lângă Kupiansk decât să lucrezi bucătar în România .

[Link]

Sergey Karaganov: Breaking Europe's Back: What Should Russia's

Policy Towards the West Be
Karl Sanchez
14–18 minute

I should note that RT’s version of Karaganov’s Profile essay is essentially completely rewritten including its title,
“Sergey Karaganov: Russia must help overthrow Western Europe’s dangerous political elites,” although RT merely
says it “was translated and edited by the RT team.” I’ll also include a note to those who are VK users that I wasn’t
allowed to sign in to my profile account and thus spread my writings further and also communicate with my 1400+
friends. That means Peter Watson’s VK account with its vital biowar and covid files will also be lost. Very sad for
Russian Free Speech.

So, does Karaganov advocate active intervention in other nations domestic actions in violation of the UN Charter
like the Outlaw US Empire does, or is RT lying in its headline? The only way to find out is to read on:

Trump's election temporarily put the development of our policy towards the West, including its ongoing war in
Ukraine, on pause. We did not react too strongly (which is right) to the Biden's rearguard provocations, but our
soldiers continued offensive operations and grinding Western mercenary troops in Ukraine.
Now from all sides they are talking about the possibility of a compromise, about its contours. And in our country,
at least in the media, they began to briskly discuss such options.

Now, together with our colleagues, we are preparing a large-scale study and situational analysis devoted to the
development of recommendations regarding Russia's policy towards the West. I will not predict the results of the
discussion, but I will simply share some preliminary considerations. They may be useful during the preparation of
the report and are designed to create the basis for a broader discussion.

The Trump administration now has no serious reasons to negotiate with us on the terms that we have set. The
war is economically beneficial to the United States, since it allows it to rob allies with redoubled energy, update
the military-industrial complex, and impose its economic interests through systemic sanctions on dozens of
countries around the world. And, of course, continue to inflict damage on Russia in the hope of exhausting it, and
in the best case scenario for the United States, to bring down or take out of the game as the military-strategic core
of the rising and freeing World Majority, a powerful strategic pillar of the main competitor – China. Although this
war with the main domestic political point of view for Trump is unnecessary and even a little harmful, the balance
of interests is more likely to be for its continuation.

I will put myself in Trump's shoes – an American nationalist with elements of traditional messianism, but without
the globalist-liberal scum of the last three or four decades and Biden's involvement in Ukrainian corruption
schemes. Only three things can move this conditional Trump to agreements that suit us. The first is the threat of an
Afghanistan 2.0—the complete defeat and shameful flight of the Kyiv regime and the demonstrative failure of the
West led by America. The second is Russia's departure from the de facto alliance with China. And the third is the
threat of the spillover of hostilities into the territory of the United States and its vital possessions, which will be
accompanied by the mass death of Americans (including the destruction of military bases).

A complete defeat is necessary, but without a much more active use of the nuclear deterrence factor, it will cost
extremely–-if not prohibitively–-dearly and will require the death of thousands and thousands more of the best sons
of our fatherland. China's surrender is absurdly counterproductive for us. If the Trumpists of the first term tried to
persuade us to do this, now they seem to understand that Russia will not agree to this. The nuclear factor will be
discussed later.

For the current European elites, the Euro-integrators, the war is urgently needed. Not only because of the hope
to undermine the traditional geopolitical rival, to take revenge for the defeats of the last three centuries, but also
because of Russophobia. These elites and their European bureaucracy are failing in almost all directions. The
European project is bursting at the seams.

The use of Russia as a bogeyman, and now as a real enemy, which has been going on for more than a decade, is the
main tool for legitimizing their project and preserving power by the European elites. In addition, "strategic
parasitism"-–the absence of fear of war-–has grown much stronger in Europe than in the United States. Not only do
the Europeans not want to think about what it can mean for them, but they no longer know how to think about it.
Since Soviet times and based on the experience of working with de Gaulle, Mitterrand, Brandt, Schröder and the
like, we have become accustomed to considering the Americans as the main instigators of confrontation and
militarization of politics in the West. This is not entirely true, and now it is not at all true. It was Churchill, when
it seemed to him profitable, who dragged the United States into the Cold War. It was European strategists (they still
existed then), and not the Americans, who initiated the missile crisis of the 1970s. Now the European elites are the
main sponsors of the Kiev junta. They, forgetting that it was their predecessors who unleashed two world wars,
are pushing Europe and the world towards a third. Sending Ukrainian cannon fodder to slaughter, they are
preparing a new one—Eastern Europeans from a number of Balkan states, Romania and Poland. They have begun
to deploy mobile bases, where contingents of potential landsknechts are trained. They will try to continue the war
not only to the "last Ukrainian", but soon to the "last Eastern European".

NATO and Brussels anti-Russia propaganda is already surpassing Hitler's. Even personal human ties with Russia
are being systematically severed. Those who advocate normal relations are being poisoned and kicked out of their
jobs. In fact, a totalitarian liberal ideology is being imposed. They even forget about the pretensions to
democracy, although they are still squealing about it. The latest example is the annulment of the results of the
presidential election in Romania, which was not won by a pro-Brussels candidate.
The European elites are not only clearly preparing their populations and countries for war. Even approximate dates
are being named when they may be ready to unleash it.

How to stop the madness? Stop the slide towards a third world war, at least in Europe? Achieve an end to the war?

Talk of compromises, truces revolves around freezing along the line of the current confrontation. This will make it
possible to rearm the remnants of Ukrainians and, supplementing them with contingents from other countries, to
start a new round of hostilities. We will have to fight again. At the same time, from less favorable political
positions. It will be possible and necessary, if it is already completely suppressed, to present such a compromise
as a victory. But this will be a non-victory, but, frankly speaking, a victory for the West. This is how it will be
perceived all over the world. And in many ways, we too.

I will not list all the tools to avoid such a scenario. I will name only the most important ones. First, you need to
finally tell yourself, the world and your opponents the obvious. Europe is the source of all the major misfortunes of
humanity, two world wars, genocides, anti-human ideologies, colonialism, racism, Nazism and so on. The
metaphor of a well-known European official about Europe as a "blooming garden" sounds much more realistic
if you call it a field overgrown with fat weeds, blossoming on humus from hundreds of millions of killed, robbed,
enslaved. And around rises a garden of the ruins of suppressed and robbed civilizations and peoples. Europe
should be called the way it deserves to make the threat of the use of nuclear weapons against it more convincing
and justified.

Secondly, to point out another obvious truth – any war between Russia and NATO/EU will inevitably acquire a
nuclear character or escalate to the nuclear level if the West continues to fight against us in Ukraine. This
instruction is necessary, among other things, to limit the unfolding arms race. It is pointless to procure huge
arsenals of conventional weapons if the armies equipped with them, and the countries that sent these armies, will
inevitably be swept away by a nuclear tornado.

Thirdly, it is necessary to advance for several more months, grinding the enemy. But the sooner the better it is
necessary to announce that our patience, our readiness to sacrifice our men for the sake of victory over this bastard
will soon run out and we will announce the price—for every killed Russian soldier, a thousand Europeans will
die if they do not stop indulging their rulers who are waging war against Russia. We need to tell the Europeans
directly: your elites will make the next portion of cannon fodder out of you, and in the event of the transition of
the war to the nuclear level, we will not be able to protect the civilian population of Europe, as we are trying to
do in Ukraine. We will warn about strikes, as promised by Vladimir Putin, but nuclear weapons are even less
selective than conventional weapons. Of course, at the same time, the European elites must be confronted with
the fact: they, their places of residence, will become the first targets for nuclear retaliation strikes. It will not be
possible to sit it out.

And the Americans just need to be told that if they continue to throw wood into the furnace of the Ukrainian
conflict, we will cross the nuclear Rubicon in a few steps, hit their allies, and if there is a non-nuclear response, as
threatened, a nuclear strike will follow on their bases in Europe and around the world. If they decide to respond
with a nuclear weapon, they will receive a nuclear strike on their territory.

Fourth, we need to continue our military build-up, which is necessary in a super-turbulent and crisis world. But at
the same time, it is necessary not only to change the nuclear doctrine, which, thank God, has already begun, but
also to resume, if the Americans and their henchmen do not want to come to an agreement, a decisive movement
up the ladder of nuclear escalation to increase the effectiveness of our nuclear deterrence-retaliation forces. The
Hazelnut is an excellent weapon, praise to its customers and creators, but it is not a replacement for nuclear
weapons, but simply another effective step on the ladder of escalation.

Fifth, it is necessary to convey to the United States through various channels that we do not want to humiliate them
and are ready to help ensure their dignified way out of the Ukrainian catastrophe, where the Americans have been
dragged by liberal globalists and Europeans.

But the main thing is to understand that we cannot and do not have the right to show indecision before the country,
our people and humanity. Not only the fate of Russia is at stake, but also the fate of human civilization in its
current form.
If and when the Americans retreat, Ukraine will be defeated quite quickly. Its east and south will go to Russia. In
the center and west of today's Ukraine, a demilitarized, with a no-fly zone over it, a neutral state should be formed,
where everyone who does not want to live in Russia and obey our laws can gather. A truce will be concluded.

Well, after the truce, it will be necessary to work towards a joint solution to the problems facing humanity with
friends from the world majority. And even with the Americans, if they still come to their senses. At the same time,
it is urgently necessary to move Europe away from solving world problems for a while. It is once again
becoming the main threat to itself and to the world.

Peace on the subcontinent can be established only when Europe's back is once again broken, as it happened as a
result of our victories over Napoleon and Hitler, when the generation of the current elites changes. And even then
not in a narrow European context–-it is a thing of the past—but in the Eurasian context. [My Emphasis]

Vereshchagin's painting "Retreat. Flight on the High Road", which depicts Napoleon with the remnants of his
army, leaving Russia.

Karaganov’s memory is short—it was the Outlaw US Empire who since 1945 saved and nurtured Nazism and
worked hand and glove with OUN to use Ukraine as a weapon against USSR then Russian Federation. Does he not
recall the “Fuck the EU” we’re calling the shots here phone intercept that showed the world who was guilty of
Maidan and the 2014 coup? Again, IMO it’s very clear that Europe isn’t “the main sponsors of Kiev.” Generally,
Europe(an) must be followed by Elities, and all of them are essentially planted by the Outlaw US Empire as they
attended US Neoliberal Academies, so he must beware painting everyone with the same brush as he clearly has the
opposite of Russophobia—Europhobia. However, he refrained from advocating actively destabilizing internal
domestic relations of European nations as RT blared—nowhere does he use the term “overthrow” or any other term
associated with a coup. As we’ve read before, Karaganov does love his nukes—too much—Oreshnik isn’t potent
enough for him. I do get a hint that he’s attempting his own version of Divide and Rule in playing the Outlaw US
Empire off its European Colonies. But for whose consumption is that?

Another question: Does Europe’s back need to be broken? The Ukraine conflict has allowed the Outlaw US Empire
to colonize EU/NATO, although a few nations have a greater degree of sovereignty than others. Occupied
Germany needs a completely different sort of leadership that advocates for its freedom, while it’s currently in a
recession that will worsen. The Poles don’t want war with Russia and need to elect better government. The Baltics
will remain as they are for another generation, but they’re no threat. France is bad as Germany. Central Europe
outside of Germany is either neutral or Pro-Russian. No NATO member wants to pay 5% GDP to US weapons
makers who can only make very expensive junk. The UK is its own case but is also falling apart from
Neoliberalism. And the Nordic nations are docile trend followers with their own share of domestic problems. All
the pro-war bombast is coming from Brussels—EU/NATO: The Liberal Totalitarian Junta.

Mr. Karaganov says his paper is but one of several: “I will not predict the results of the discussion, but I will
simply share some preliminary considerations;” so, the above are merely his own “considerations” to be added to
others from which Russian policy is to be suggested to the government. I certainly hope when/if RT publishes
those papers it links to the originals so we can read what was actually written.

*
*
*
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[Link]

Musings Before a New Round

editor
10–13 minute
Now everyone is busy talking about a possible compromise and its forms. Within Russia too, at least in the media,
there are some excitedly discussing such options.

A team of my colleagues is currently working on a major study and situation analysis regarding recommendations
for Russia’s long term policy vis-à-vis the West. Without trying to preconceive the outcome of our deliberations,
let me share here some of my own preliminary considerations. They may prove handy in paving the way for a
broader discussion.

At this point, the Trump administration has no reason to negotiate with us on the terms we have set. The war is
economically beneficial to the U.S. as it allows it to rob its allies with renewed vigor, upgrade its military-industrial
complex, and impose its economic interests through systemic sanctions on countries around the world. And, of
course, it allows the U.S. to inflict further damage upon Russia in the hope of wearing it out and, ideally, crushing
or removing Russia as the military-strategic core of the rising and emancipating World Majority and a powerful
strategic support of America’s main competitor―China. Although this war is unnecessary and even somewhat
harmful for placeholder Trump from the main―domestic―point of view, the balance of interests is rather
conducive to its continuation.

Let me put ourselves in Trump’s place―an American nationalist having some features of traditional messianism
but devoid of the globalist-liberal scum of the last three to four decades and Biden’s involvement in Ukrainian
corruption schemes. Only three things can make this placeholder Trump bargain for an agreement that will suit us.
The first one is the threat of Afghanistan-2, that is, a complete defeat and shameful surrender of the Kiev regime
and the obvious failure of the U.S.-led West. The second thing is Russia’s departure from a de facto alliance with
China. And the third thing is the risk that the hostilities may spread into the U.S. and its vital assets worldwide with
a massive loss of American lives, including the destruction of military bases.

A complete defeat is necessary, but it will be extremely―if not prohibitively―costly and claim the lives of many
more thousands of our best sons if is not reinforced by a more active use of nuclear deterrence-intimidation (see
about the nuclear factor below). Russia’s split from China would be absurdly counterproductive for us: while the
first-term Trumpists tried to persuade us to do so, now they seem to realize that Russia will not agree to that.

The current European elites and European integrators need this war badly not only for undermining their traditional
geopolitical rival and taking revenge for their defeats over last three centuries, and also because of ages long
Russophobia. These elites and their European bureaucracy are failing almost everywhere. The European project is
bursting at the seams. For more than a decade, they have been portraying Russia as a bogeyman, and now they
present it as a real enemy, as the main means of legitimizing their project and retaining power.

In addition, “strategic parasitism”―the absence of fear of war―has grown much stronger in Europe than in the
U.S. Not only do they not want, but they are no longer able to think about what it can mean for them. We have got
accustomed ―since Soviet times and based on the experience of working with de Gaulle, Mitterrand, Brandt,
Schroeder, and the like―to view the U.S., not Europeans, as the main instigator of confrontation and militarization
of politics in the West. This was not quite so, and now it is not so at all. It was Churchill who dragged the U.S. into
the Cold War when it seemed beneficial to him. European strategists (they were still around back then), not the
Americans, incited the missile crisis in the 1970s. There are many more examples to cite. Today, the European
elites are the main sponsors of the Kiev junta. Having forgotten that their predecessors unleashed two world wars,
they are now pushing Europe and the world towards a third one. While slaughtering Ukrainian soldiers, they are
already preparing more cannon fodder―Eastern Europeans from several Balkan states, Romania, and Poland. They
have started deploying mobile bases, where they are training potential Landsknechts. So, they will try to continue
the war not only to the last Ukrainian but soon to the last Eastern European.

Anti-Russian propaganda that is being spread in Europe by NATO and Brussels has gone far beyond that of Hitler.
Even personal ties with Russians are being systemically severed. Those who advocate normal relations with Russia
are persecuted and fired. Essentially, a totalitarian liberal ideology is being imposed. Western elites do not even
bother to show a modicum of democratism, although they keep ranting about it. The latest example is the
annulment of the results of the presidential election in Romania, clearly led by a non-pro-Brussels candidate.

The European elites are not only explicitly preparing their populations and countries for war. They even name
approximate dates when they might be ready to start it.
How can the insane be stopped? What is to be done to stop sliding towards the Third World War, at least in
Europe, and end the ongoing war?

All talk of compromise and truce boils down to freezing the conflict along the line of engagement. This will give
them time to rearm the remnants of the Ukrainian army, and, reinforcing it with troops from other countries, start a
new round of hostilities. So, we will have to fight again, but this time from less advantageous political positions. If
the worse comes to the worst, we can and should present such a compromise as victory. However, this will be a
quasi victory, and, frankly speaking, the West’s victory. This is how it will be seen around the world and by many
in our country, too.

I will not name all the ways of avoiding such a scenario. I will only name some of the most important ones. First of
all, we must finally tell ourselves, the world and our opponents the obvious: Europe is the source of all the main
troubles for humankind, two world wars, numerous acts of genocide, anti-human ideologies, colonialism, racism,
Nazism, and so on. A senior European official’s metaphor about Europe as a “blooming garden” would sound
much more realistic if we call it a field overgrown with fatty weeds, blooming on the humus of hundreds of
millions of killed, robbed, and enslaved, with a garden growing from the ruins of suppressed and robbed
civilizations and peoples around it.

Europe must be called what it actually deserves to be called in order to make the threat of the use of nuclear
weapons against it more convincing and justified.

Secondly, we must state another obvious truth that any war between Russia and NATO/EU will inevitably turn into
a nuclear one or escalate to the nuclear level if the West keeps fighting us in Ukraine. This needs to be stated,
among other things, in order to curb the unfolding arms race. It is pointless to build huge arsenals of conventional
weapons because the armies equipped with them and the countries that have sent these armies will inevitably be
swept away by a nuclear tornado.

Thirdly, we need to advance further for several more months, destroying the enemy. But we must say, the sooner
the better, that we will soon run out of patience and willingness to sacrifice our men to defeat this scum and we will
announce the price: for every Russian soldier killed, a thousand Europeans will die if they do not stop indulging
their rulers who are waging a war against Russia. We must tell the Europeans straightforwardly that their elites will
turn them into the next portion of cannon fodder and that if the war escalates to the nuclear level, we will not be
able to protect civilians as we are trying to do in Ukraine. We will warn them in advance, as Vladimir Putin has
promised, but nuclear weapons are even less selective than conventional weapons. Naturally, it must be made clear
to the European elites that they and the places where the concentrate will be the first targets for nuclear retaliation.
They will not be able to sit it out.

We must also tell the Americans that if they continue to throw firewood into the blaze of the conflict in Ukraine,
we will cross the nuclear Rubicon in a few steps, strike their allies, and if there is a non-nuclear response, as they
have threatened, we will retaliate with a nuclear strike on their bases in Europe and around the world.

Fourthly, we must continue to strengthen our military capabilities needed in an extremely turbulent and crisis-
ridden world. But at the same time, we must not only alter our nuclear doctrine, which, thank God, we have already
started to do, but also resume, if the Americans and their henchmen refuse to negotiate, a decisive movement up
the nuclear escalation ladder in order to improve the effectiveness of our nuclear deterrence-retaliation forces.
Oreshnik is a great weapon, praise be to its creators and customers, but it cannot replace nuclear weapons. It is just
another effective step on the escalation ladder.

Fifthly, we must tell the Americans through various channels that we do not want them to suffer humiliation and
are ready to help ensure their dignified exit from the Ukrainian catastrophe, where they were dragged into by
liberal globalists and Europeans.

But most importantly, we must understand that we cannot and have no right to show indecision before our country,
our people, and the world. At stake is the fate of not only our own country but also of human civilization in its
current form, imperfect as it is.
If and when the Americans withdraw, Ukraine will be defeated quite quickly. Its eastern and southern regions will
go to Russia. The central and western parts of present-day Ukraine should become a neutral, demilitarized state
with a no-fly zone above it, where everyone who does not want to be with Russia and obey our laws can come and
live. A truce will be concluded.

After the truce, we will have to join forces with our friends from the World Majority in order to address problems
facing humanity, even with the Americans, if they come to their senses at last. At the same time, it will be
absolutely necessary to keep Europe away from solving world problems for a while as it is once again becoming
the main threat to itself and the world. Peace in Europe can only be established only when its back is broken again,
as we did in the past by defeating Napoleon and Hitler, and when the current generation of its elites changes, not
even in the narrow European―it is a thing of the past now―but Eurasian context.

[Link]

Servility and political mimicry by Ukraine's pro-Western elites as they

face military defeat
Dmitri Kovalevich

 Dmitri Kovalevich
 Source: Al Mayadeen English
 26 Jan 2025 11:57
 3 Shares

Dmitri Kovalevich explores how Ukraine’s political elite bows to Western imperialism, with Zelensky mimicking
Trump to maintain US favor while ordinary Ukrainians suffer under war, forced conscription, and economic ruin.

 Zelensky (whose
electoral mandate as president of coup Ukraine expired ten months ago) is now imitating Trump's foul
language and mannerisms when speaking English. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)
In the second half of January 2025, Ukrainians are observing how the battered country's political and military
leaders and economic elites are eager to bow to the whims of the new president of the United States and are hoping
that officials of the new Trump-led administration in Washington will treat them kindly. Their rhetoric is
accordingly shifting, becoming ruder and harsher as they seek to adapt and adjust to the new master of the White
House. It is reminiscent somewhat of the behavior of courtiers and lackeys in France during the 17th century
whenever a change of monarch was in the air.

French newspaper Le Monde noted on January 17 that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky (whose electoral
mandate as president of coup Ukraine expired ten months ago) now imitates Trump's foul language and
mannerisms when speaking English as he flatters and compliments the new president of the United States elected
in November 2024.

Zelensky used his new style in a recent interview with US podcaster Lex Fridman. The interview was directed to a
largely U.S. audience and it did not go over well in Ukraine, as Zelensky frequently resorted to using foul and
insulting language directed at the leaders of the Russian Federation. He also directed criticism against those in the
West who would criticize his administration. His performance was something not seen before and was likely
encouraged by the technocrats surrounding him, thinking that it would appeal to Trump and his handlers.

"This [the obscenities] were necessary," Ukrainian political scientist Oleksiy Koshel affirmed to a Ukrainian news
outlet on January 6. "This is actually one of the last opportunities to use media to reach Trump, his electorate, and
his handlers, just two weeks before his inauguration." But the same report also cites Koshel cautioning, "On issues
of corruption, either Zelensky's presidential team or the one that follows will need to talk to our Western partners
not only in the language of emotion and slogans but also in the language of concrete steps against corruption, with
an action plan backed by laws. That language will be much better received."

Koshel also noted that Western media is reporting that Zelensky has never once thanked former US president
Joseph Biden for all the military and financial assistance provided to Kiev by the Biden administration. Zelensky
said on January 16 that he is ultimately disappointed with the Biden administration because of delays in weapons
supplies and financing, as well as past refusals prior to the Russian military intervention begun in 2022 to tighten
certain sanctions against Russia.

Ukrainian economist Oleksiy Kushch explains that representatives of aid-receiving, liberal NGOs in Ukraine
operating in the sphere of the US Democratic Party are now deleting past anti-Trump posts. He says they continue
to gnash their teeth against Republicans and conservatives in general, simultaneously growling and wagging their
tails. "Like a dog that doesn't know what to expect: a blow with a stick or a piece of sausage," Kusch writes.

Ukrainian legislator Alexander Dubinsky (a former member of Zelensky's party) wrote on Telegram on January 16
that ever since 2014, one of the key tasks of the liberal elites in Ukraine who supported past-president Petro
Poroshenko (2014-2019) and then Zelensky after that has been to silence and destroy any among their elite ranks
who might advocate normalization of relations with Russia. Zelensky, in his opinion, dialed up the hate to the
maximum, using all the punitive mechanisms available to the Ukrainian state to squeeze out of media, politics, and
business any opponents of the course that was rapidly leading to war. "Anyone who allowed himself or herself to
question the suicidal nationalist course and the violent severance of cultural, economic and social ties with the
Russian Federation was labeled an 'agent of the Kremlin' and covered in mud by a bunch of hand-me-down,
foreign aid-receiving 'patriots'."

The Ukrainian ruling class benefits from prolonging as long as possible the military hostilities with Russia and
related martial law and compulsory conscription. All this and more has made many of them rich during the past
three years. But much of the Ukrainian military hierarchy is now telling legislators that it is desirable to end the
war in the first half of this year. [Link] reports on Telegram on January 17 that legislator Anatoliy Burmich
recently met with personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and was told by them in no uncertain terms that the
war should end soon. He was told that military assistance from the West was inadequate for continuing to
prosecute a war. Burmych expressed hope that the war would soon be ended by a compromise.

Another Ukrainian legislator, Maryana Bezuglaya, also from Zelensky's party, writes a contrarian viewpoint on
January 16. "The war will continue until one of the sides surrenders. I wish you could open this post in one year's
time and say I was wrong, but reality must be viewed with eyes wide open."
Zelensky told a meeting in Warsaw on January 16 with displaced Ukrainians that they should ignore the politicians
and other voices talking about holding national elections in Ukraine. He restated his argument voiced earlier in
January that elections for the head of state and the Rada (national legislature) can only take place after the end of
the 'hot stage' of war with Russia has finished and on condition that Ukraine is in a strong military position. He
advised to “unscrew the heads of those politicians who still continue to engage in talk of elections”. Thus is
revealed in ugly detail his plan to remain an unelected dictator of Ukraine, a country promoted by Western media
and governments as being a 'model of democracy'.

The Ukrainian analytical channel Rubicon on Telegram summarizes the situation, "A frankly inverted picture has
developed in Ukraine. All the attributes of despotisms are introduced into Ukraine using declarations of fealty to
Western values: From sealed borders to beatings of defenseless military conscripts. This leads, in turn, to cognitive
dissonance in government and disruption and disorder in the entire political system."

Tymoshenko joins the chorus

Yuliya Tymoshenko, prime minister of Ukraine from December 2007 to March 2010 and one of the leaders of the
'color' revolution in Ukraine during that time, is also trying to sidle up to the new US administration. In mid-
January, Trump's special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg canceled a planned visit to Kiev until certain issues
(unnamed in media reporting) are clarified. Tymoshenko rushed to meet Kellogg in Paris, joining him at a
conference of Iranian counter-revolutionaries (who have long been backed by the Western powers). There, she
joined the chorus, lashing out against Iran and calling for ever-more sanctions against the country, no doubt buoyed
by the recent success of the regime change war waged by the Western powers against Syria since 2011.

For her Ukrainian audience, Tymoshenko is criticizing what she rhetorically calls Ukraine's transformation into a
colony of the West. "Ukraine has become the first and only country in the world where its own constitutional court
is composed of unknown international players," she laments.

Tymoshenko cannot deny the dependent and subordinate status that has been voluntarily accepted by the ruling
elite of Ukraine that came to power in the coup of February 2014. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the coup,
but today reads well the negative mood in the country towards the war with Russia. Hence her adoption of rhetoric
purportedly criticizing the sad evolution of events since 2014 through which Ukraine has become a vassal of the
Western powers.

Coup Ukraine as a vassal of Britain

On the eve of Trump's inauguration, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hurriedly arrived in Kiev to conclude a
'100-year pact' of assistance to Ukraine. The very name '100-year pact' causes a great deal of skeptical comments in
Ukrainian society because people here are entirely unsure about tomorrow. Any talk of 'plans' for the next 100
years can only bring forth a chuckle. Commentators in Ukraine recall the mutual aid treaty agreed between Great
Britain and Poland in March 1939. That treaty did nothing to help Poland a mere six months later when Germany
invaded and World War II began.

Warsaw was liberated from Nazi occupation in January 1945, but not by the British army or those of its Western
allies. The city was liberated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union and allied partisan forces in Poland. The
liberation cost some 100,000 lives of the Red Army and allied Polish forces.

Ukrainian political scientist and historian Kost Bondarenko commented on January 16 about this newest agreement
between Kiev and the government in London. "Regarding the signing of this '100-year agreement' between Ukraine
and Great Britain, I can say as a historian that nothing is more short-term than '100-year' or 'eternal' treaties.
Imagine that Britain had signed a certain treaty with a certain country 100 years ago, in early 1925. Since that time,
Britain has had five monarchs and 24 prime ministers, survived World War II and seven economic crises, lost most
of its remaining colonies, and ceased to be an empire. Are there any treaties signed by London in 1925 or before
that have not lost their relevance?"

In the new agreement, Britain pledges to provide Ukraine with military assistance in 2025 equivalent to US$6.6
billion and $3 billion equivalent each year after that "for as long as necessary". In exchange, British investors ate to
secure a status of 'preferred investment partners' in Ukraine's energy industry, extraction of essential minerals, and
'environmentally friendly' steel production, according to the Ukrainian weekly magazine Dzerkalo Tyzhnya. The
magazine cites Ukraine's ambassador to London Valeriy Zaluzhnyy as a source. He is the former commander-in-
chief of the armed forces. Here in plain view, one sees the plans by capitalists in Britain to take over Ukrainian
minerals and natural resources.

The British government will also study the possibility of placing military bases and other military infrastructure in
Ukraine. Zelensky announced further on January 15 that the '100-year' agreement with the UK contains secret
clauses. Zelensky's words were received with bewilderment in Ukraine because, as usual, he and his administration
have not disclosed the content of such secret clauses.

Former Ukrainian legislator and radical nationalist Igor Mosiychuk claims that Ukraine is becoming a vassal of a
new, hoped-for British Empire. "Do you know who created the original British Empire, friends?", he writes. "It
was the East India Trading Company, which siphoned resources from India and other colonies in order to nourish
the island of Britain. It now seems that the 'East India Company' is rising from the dead, with its tentacles reaching
for the natural energy resources of our motherland. Having broken out of economic and political dependence on
Moscow, Zelensky is preparing Ukrainians to kiss the boots of a new master."

The Telegraph newspaper in Britain reported on January 17 that the British government is also now discussing the
formation of a special regiment of Ukrainians in the British army. Such an initiative would assist London in
gaining returns from its military aid to Kiev and, conveniently, it would help solve the recruitment crisis of the
British army. A parallel is now being drawn with the 'Gurkhas' (ethnic Nepalis) who served in the British colonial
army and took an active part in suppressing past, anti-colonial revolts in India.

In fact, the Ukrainians now being forcibly conscripted may be viewed as analogous to the colonial troops that
France and Britain always used extensively in European and colonial wars during the 19th and 20th centuries,
Africans and Indians, among many others, were cajoled or kidnapped into British military units and thrown into the
trenches.

Forcibly conscripted Ukrainians have already deserted from military training camps in France. Perhaps the military
authorities in Western countries will block future desertions by encircling their training camps for Ukrainians with
barbed wire?

Ukraine's comprador elite against Ukrainians

The Ukrainian political elite has always been famous for its skills in mimicry. Many started out as Soviet
functionaries, then became pro-Russian politicians. Today, most are flirting with far-right Ukrainian nationalism
and neo-Nazism. More than coincidentally, Zelensky is a mimic and comedian by profession. The dictionary
definition explains that "a comedian is someone who entertains audiences using many techniques, one of which is
mimicry and impression."

Ukrainian publicist Serhiy Datsyuk says the Ukrainian elite has done nothing but plunder the country's people and
resources for the past 30 years, and Ukrainians are beginning to recognize this across the board. He writes, "It is
very difficult to destroy half of the country's population in 30 years, but we managed. This shows that we
Ukrainians don't need Ukraine, and therefore no one else needs it, either. Our elite has robbed the country of
resources and infrastructure and did not give a damn about the people." In his opinion, it is pointless to 'save'
Ukraine under Western tutelage because the country is in freefall and there is nothing left to save in such a format.
The creation of external enemies, that is, the 'Russians', has been just another excuse for the authorities to relieve
themselves of responsibility.

In January, a statement by Vitaliy Portnikov, a well-known Ukrainian journalist and a columnist of the US-funded
Radio Liberty, emphasized the class division of society which has only intensified during the war. His words
resonated widely in Ukrainian society. According to him, the very essence of a Western-inspired 'democratic'
society is that the poor should perish while the rich should prosper.

"Now we are hearing from the people that legislators should go to war and only then will they, the people, go too.
No, people, you don't understand. This is a 'democratic' state, and in such a state, the lot of the common man is to
die for his country. If we want aristocrats to die for the state, we must recognize this feudal country and then act as
occurred during the Great French Revolution."

Earlier Ukrainian nationalists in their ideological works divided Ukrainians into 'warriors', of which they
considered themselves to be a part, and 'sheep', in the form of ordinary workers and farmers. This ideology was the
cornerstone that underlay the pro-Western desires of Ukrainian nationalists to rule the country. However, the
realities of the clash with the Russian army are leading to a revision of these basic attitudes. The nationalist, pro-
Western 'warrior' elite is afraid to be at the front. It prefers to attack the Russian army using the bodies and lives of
forcibly conscripted farmers and other disenfranchised.

The Western media is nothing but cynical before this reality. It admires the 'heroism' of Ukrainians. But in their
vast numbers, Ukrainians no longer wish to fight and are trying to flee from the concentration camp that their
armed forces and the entire country have become. In a grim irony (and tragedy), Western countries are now
supplying Ukrainian border guards with modern drones to track and catch fugitives at the country's borders seeking
real freedom… by fleeing a country that has become little more than a warmaking vassal of Western imperialism.

[Link]

America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

March 11, 2025

China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy

Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West
Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path
to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
35 minutes
1 comment on America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1
By

Dylan Patel

Reyk Knuhtsen

Niko Ciminelli

Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros

Joe Ryu

and

Robert Ghilduta
SemiAnalysis is hosting an Nvidia Blackwell GPU Hackathon on Sunday March 16th. It is the ultimate playground
for Blackwell PTX tech enthusiasts, offering hands-on exploration of Blackwell & PTX infrastructure while
collaborating on open-source projects. Speakers will include Philippe Tillet of OpenAI, Tri Dao of TogetherAI,
Horace He of Thinking Machines, and more. Sponsored by: Together, Lambda, Google Cloud, Nvidia, GPU Mode,
Thinking Machines, OpenAI, PyTorch, Coreweave, Nebius. Apply to be part of the fun.

This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear
transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is
currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical
industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not
supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive
expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to
capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the
production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in
all capacities.

This is the manufacturing playing field that China has dominated for years now. The country has one of the most
competitive economies in the world internally, where they will naturally achieve economies of scale and have
shown themselves to be one of most skilled in high-volume manufacturing, at the same time their engineering
quality has grown to be competitive in several critical industries at the highest level. This has already happened in
batteries, solar, and is well underway in EVs. With these economies of scale, they are able to supply large
developing markets, like Southeast Asia, Latin America, and others, allowing them to extend their advantage and
influence.

The impact of this in robotics will be exponential compared to their last strategic industry captures. These will be
robotics systems manufacturing more robotics systems, and with each unit produced the cost will be driven down
continuously and the quality will improve, only strengthening their production flywheel. This will repeat ad
infinitum and as quality inevitably increases it will make it extraordinarily difficult for other countries to compete.
Due to the fact that robotics is a general purpose technology, this will have horizontal impacts on all manufacturing
sectors and all other currently advantaged industries as well–textiles, electronics, consumer goods, etc. At the
moment, the West is caught flatfooted: South Korea and Japan have a birth rate crisis that is throttling their
manufacturing capabilities, European industrial sectors are being eaten alive by China and their inability to
generate power, and the US is focused on other markets and procuring cheap overseas production, all the while
China’s manufacturing capacity has gotten stronger and robotics is catching fire.

Source: SemiAnalysis, [Link].

China’s robotics localization effort is well underway. Local firms are taking over the world’s largest market,
approaching a 50% market share, compared to just 30% in 2020. While Chinese manufacturers are currently on par
with Western giants in the low-end market, our supply chain review leads us to believe that local firms are
beginning to take over the higher-end market segments. The rise of Unitree exemplifies this shift: the only viable
humanoid robot on the market, the Unitree G1, is now entirely decoupled from American components.

Source:
SemiAnalysis, [Link].

Today, building an identical robot arm (modeled after the Universal Robots UR5e) in the US is ~2.2x more
expensive than in China. Under the hood, the situation is even more alarming. Even if those components are
labeled “Made in USA”, they rely heavily upon China-made parts and materials – with no viable scalable
alternative.

Source: SemiAnalysis
Drones, DJI, GoPro, and How Iteration Speed Paves Victory’s Path
The commercial drone market exemplifies China’s scale/oversupply playbook in every strategic industry it has
entered, however, this is the first example of the strategy in a robotics-adjacent market. Local leader DJI today
accounts for over 80% of the global commercial drone market… and 90% in the American consumer market!
While the company was a first-mover, it maintained and consolidated its market position for over a decade thanks
to China’s manufacturing dominance and economies of scale/oversupply strategy.

Source: SemiAnalysis, Industry

Estimates

Let us explain how. To properly develop a functional and robust piece of hardware, the creation + recreation (i.e.
manufacturing) must be iterated repeatedly and rapidly to work out the kinks and perfect the product before
competitors. However, the most challenging thing for Western competitors is that Chinese markets are built to
reward the company that can scale the fastest, so before a Chinese competitor ever enters the Western market it has
already outclassed them in cost, all that’s left is for the quality to refine over the coming iterations.

GoPro tried to compete in the consumer drone market despite having most of its manufacturing based in China,
Malaysia, and Japan, which meant that each iteration of their drone took several weeks – likely starting the design
in California, sending over the details to the manufacturers in China and having them build it, and shipping it back
to the USA before ever finding out what needed to be ironed out in this attempt. Contrast this with DJI, which was
based in Shenzhen, meaning the company could get any needed part from any factory in Shenzhen within hours of
ordering and iterate at an unreal speed.

As a result, in 2016, GoPro’s Karma Drone + Hero5 were outclassed by DJI’s drones. At $999 vs $1,099, DJI was
slightly cheaper, had a battery life 50% longer, had obstacle avoidance already implemented, and the launch of the
Karma was plagued with hardware issues and a recall/refund program for their faulty product, which sometimes
lost power during operation. GoPro likely could have solved these problems through enough work, but the
company simply didn’t have the time, as DJI had already surpassed them in every way.

Quickly after entering the Western markets, DJI’s incredible cost advantage and sheer production capacity quickly
led to oversupplying the market, and capturing a massive amount of market share. Every other major drone
company was quickly undercut heavily by DJI’s aggressive pricing. GoPro cited “margin challenges” being a
reason for disbanding their Karma program, and many other companies crashed alongside. DJI was the only one to
understand that this was a competition of scale and had long been prepared before entering the Western markets.

In the world of Robotics, manufacturing dominance is key. To build a complete and functional robot means
recreating the robot countless times and fine-tuning each minor mistake until a solid, scalable, and cost-effective
product. This luxury is readily available to those who have the manufacturing capacity nearby and at an affordable
cost, and its absence means a disadvantage. With a share of GDP three times higher than that of the US, China’s
industrial base outcompetes that of America’s in every possible way.

Source: Worldbank, FRED

Our goal with this multi-part Robotics series is to illuminate landscape of the robotics and manufacturing industry,
and convey the magnitude of the labor transformation it is poised to unleash. In Part One, we examine the current
state of the market and take a deep dive into the hardware architecture of commercially available industrial robots.
Our analysis demonstrates that China is rapidly taking over the market, leaving competing nations behind and
preparing to capture a revolutionary technology. We also explore the broader repercussions for the Western
trailing-edge semiconductor ecosystem.

China’s ascendancy positions it perfectly to lead next-generation robotics—a field we anticipate will generate
significantly higher macroeconomic benefits. In Parts Two and Three of our series, we will delve into the intricate
hardware and software architectures of next-generation systems and address the remaining challenges on the path
to achieving “Robotics AGI” across form factors. We will also pinpoint the likely frontrunners in this emerging
market.

For now, let’s start with some basics and explain how why robots are more difficult to build than most understand.

More Than Just A “Robot”

Robotics is a systems engineering problem with the end goal being a machine, or multiple machines, that can
produce one or more human unit of work at equal or lower cost than that of a human. The feat is designing both a
system of hardware with many many interconnected individual parts integrated with the software layer, where the
software layer understands how to move and plan with the hardware. Repeated iterations are necessary to identify
the discrepancies between the two systems and resolve them toward perfect accuracy. In essence, this is a delicate
dance between two systems, with each iteration of choreography carving synchronicity from complexity. What
happens as each etch gets closer to resolution?

Engineering reliability into a system that is low-cost, performant, and scalable achieves a new type of system that
has never existed. Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability,
and a much higher attrition rate. Fusing mechanical capability with a software intelligence brings the world closer
and closer to fully expanding the capacities of an industrial economy beyond the constraints of human labor.
Similar to humans integrating sensory inputs and cognitive processing to understand and interact with the world, an
embodied AI would perform the same actions and operate autonomously, allowing a new group of systems to
contribute to all sectors. The imminent robotics transformation is promising to solve all of these and create a new
labor force that only movies have been able to depict, but there’s more depth to the field and the industry than the
words “embodied AI” might entail.
Operating in this industry has historically been traumatic, from manufacturing capabilities being subpar, to
managing a business with a product that is a nightmare to scale, with many bottlenecks constantly in place:

 Limited innovation in hardware throttling accuracy and efficiency in mobility and manipulation
 Software/AI capabilities that never enabled variety among capabilities and real-time understanding
 Exorbitant upfront CapEx for installation
 Elevated OpEx for maintenance of the systems

These have historically combined together to make automation a problem more than a solution. However,
breakthroughs in hardware and AI models have finally unlocked the floodgates for early stages of rapid progress
and unlocked the potential for general-purpose robotics.

Towards General Purpose Robotics

General purpose robotics is the holy grail of robotics: a robot that can do any task in any environment, replacing
the need for a human in the industrial process. Every step along the way the world will see massive unlocks for
whoever steps toward general purpose robotics first. The robots currently implemented at scale across the world are
rigid and fragile: environments must be predefined and tasks must be static, and any minute change in one factor
means the robot will destroy the process. The bottlenecks in place have been impossible to break and stifled the
whole industry of robotics for generations, intelligent or not. This meant the only improvements possible have been
small, iterative, and incremental developments, and any company who tried to equip robots with anything above
the current level of capabilities failed, leaving many researchers and investors sidelined and scarred, especially in
Western markets. The only people who tried to cross the chasm into general-purpose robotics have been
researchers in a lab. Building a functional replacement for a human that can achieve the same level accuracy as a
human, often requiring ~99.99%, and making sure it was worth it in cost over a long enough timespan was a
pipedream. Why would anyone believe it?

Not even Google was able to overcome the data scarcity problem, having famously constructed an “arm farm” of
14 robots running continuously for 3,000 hours simply to achieve reliable grasping. This never left the lab. Data
scarcity was a crippling challenge. Researchers were forced to build jerry-rigged robots due to the absence of
hardware standardization, and then manually gather training data, a process that consumed vast amounts of time
and resources.

Source: Google – Large-

scale data collection with an array of robots

Moreover, unlike the freely-available textual data on the internet that fueled LLMs, robotics demanded multimodal
data, which did not exist. Every person trying to train a robot had to collect all data themselves in physical space
with a functional robot. Hardware limitations compounded the issue. It was incredibly difficult to build a system of
strong enough actuators that could fine-tune movements, all interconnected with non-standardized parts that don’t
understand each other, into a robot that could perform one task with slight variations, and much less one that could
perform a wide array of actions.
However, we’re in the early precipice of this nonlinear transformation, but the bedrock the US is standing on is
shaky. Significant research and funding across the entire robotics stack have yielded a cascade of breakthroughs.
Advances in realistic simulated data, the ability to scale up real world training on multiple robots, and the rise of
foundation models have opened the door for a more intelligent system. Simultaneously, advancements in hardware,
like electric actuators, have brought down costs greatly and given robots better efficiency to operate at the desired
accuracy level, unlocking new actions that were impossible before. General-purpose robotics has finally been
unlocked as a potential real world solution.

The first movement toward general-purpose robotics will be the entrance into “partially unstructured” domains –
initially within their usual environments. In factories, this means operating outside of their isolated predefined
environment and handling more than one task. As robots slide across the spectrum toward general purpose, they
will replace more and more difficult and diverse tasks in factory settings until they can automate every step.

An even more difficult domain for robots is the human-populated domain, in which robots are considered
intelligent/safe enough to operate in wholly unstructured and dynamic environments. Since human behavior is
unpredictable, robots will need to adapt to avoid safety risks. In addition to full automation of industry, these robots
will ease staffing shortages in elder care, improve hospital efficiency, enhance surgical accuracy, and automate
dangerous construction tasks, thereby capturing nearly all labor demand.

China Is Already Living In Another World

Due to Chinese governmental investment and strategic declaration to accelerate robotics, the country has created
incredible processes all while still under the usual rigid and fragile constraints of robotics systems. While still
requiring perfectly structured environments and static tasks, China has implemented fully “lights-out” factories.
Xiaomi’s “lights-out” factory operates round-the-clock producing one smartphone per second – with zero humans
employed. This is not the only one either, China is able to achieve this level of automation without general purpose
robotics, and the implications for their production capacity when general-purpose arrives cannot be understated.
This is not a statement that the US is losing, this is to demonstrate an absurd difference in manufacturing
proficiency. This has nothing to do with cheap Chinese labor, this is a manufacturing country with a robust
industrial base that has now created one single machine that can produce goods entirely autonomously. General
purpose robotics would make this indistinguishable from a living organism, with mobile robots constantly moving
around and solving tasks to support and keep the organism alive and functional.

Source: Xiaomi

This is only the first step in creating entirely automated machines to produce goods, and they will evolve as AI
foundation models become more reliable and accurate. The country has already enabled robots to build robots at
their KUKA factory in Guangdong, and a director at KUKA said that they should be able to cut times from one
robot every half hour to one robot every one minute. They’re right. All of these aforementioned factories are
running on either minimal levels of AI or the usual structured environment with static tasks and basic
programming. General purpose robotics will turn this business into one single machine, and soon after, any
complex manufacturing task could be completed by a general purpose robotic system.

From Industrial Robots to Cobots

Let’s take a step back and first understand the current state of the industry. There are many types of robots and
form factors that have become much more diverse and feasible in the last few years. The robots that have been
most compelling for implementing automation at scale for the past decades however have been the industrial
robots.
 Source: SemiAnalysis

Traditional industrial robots, like an articulated robot arm, prioritize speed, precision, and payload capacity.
Equipped with high-torque actuators and finely tuned high-frequency control systems for precision, they are
typically found in heavy industry environments that require repetition and high throughput, i.e. automotive
factories or electronics manufacturing.

They are required to work in isolated cells for two reasons:

1. Human safety,
2. Their lack of flexibility.

These robots are not capable of adaptation: any small deviation in the environment can break their process. For
example, in automotive industries, spot welding metal panels together is often automated. This task requires
remarkable accuracy to ensure the panels are correctly positioned next to each other, the spot weld is exactly over
the designated points, and the weld is applied with the same consistent force and duration every time. Due to the
accurate nature of the task, any slight deviation in the positioning or timing can affect the weld, and consequently
the structural integrity of the vehicle

Source: KUKA’s automated spot welding

Collaborative robots (cobots) are the proposed solution to a human populated environment subject to the inherent
dynamism of the world – enabling a higher level of automation inside a factory. Similar looking to an industrial
robot but a bit smaller, they trade-off payload capacity with higher safety, flexibility and programmability – and
can easily be restaked and moved around a factory when necessary. These are often the robots that are given higher
levels of AI capabilities for some tasks today (higher variability pick and place and sorting).

Source: Futura Automation

Cobots sacrifice payload capacity and speed with weaker actuators and adding some type of safety hardware in
place such as force-torque sensors to understand collision, additional vision sensors to build a more comprehensive
view, and more onboard controllers for redundancy. They can be hand-guided or taught via some interface (tablet
typically) so that programming an action requires less expertise and enabling them to easily change simple tasks.

Typically given the tasks that require less force and more finesse, cobots (collaborative robots) might be tasked
with lightweight materials handling in between processes in a factory where the industrial robot would take the
materials and perform the heavier tasks. Cobots can also work as a companion to other industrial machines like
CNCs (Computer Numerical Control) – where they can load the CNC with raw materials, retrieve the finished
parts, and even perform routine supporting tasks like cleaning or quality checking. We show below an example of a
robotic arm interacting with a CNC machine.

Source: Productive Robotics

Naturally, the share of cobots of all industrial robot installations has been rising fast, as they enable higher
automation settings and improved factory ROI. Cobots are financially viable in industrial settings, as the
environment can be structured enough to make sure the robot’s accuracy on tasks remains high. At the moment,
there are over four million robots installed and operating around the world, with 90% of annual shipments
being standard industrial robots and 10% cobots. Industrial robots are usually implemented in automotive sectors,
packaging in food and consumer goods, and electronics manufacturing. Cobots are seen in the same industries
performing more complex tasks that require great precision, but under the guidance and instruction of human
workers

Source: SemiAnalysis,
IFR

While the scale of automation is impressive, there are reasons these robots are nearly always found in factory
settings. Not all manufacturing is easy for these robots, high-mix low-volume production where frequent changes
are common make it difficult to fully automate tasks and most tasks that require fine motor skills and dexterity
require levels of manipulation not developed yet. Cobots are posed as the solution for this as well, but in practice,
automation entails much more flexibility and capability than any of the current robots can provide.

The Rise of Mobile Robots

 Source: SemiAnalysis

Mobile robots have been the newest addition to the robotic fleet of automation, leveraging mobility to conduct
transportation tasks and coordinating with other robots, however, all have different difficulties, domains, and
advantages in their mobility capabilities. Autonomous Guided Vehicles were the first foray into mobility around
the same time as cobots. Their job is simple: transport objects, like a package inside of an Amazon fulfillment
center, to another location. These are still rigid as most other robots, requiring that some guidance be placed on the
floor for the AGV to follow.

Source: Amazon

Mobile manipulators are often wheeled manipulators that are found in factories, where floors are legally required to
be flat, and will be used for grasping and moving objects from station to station on a very strict and short
navigation horizon. Quadrupeds are four legged mobile robots and are more often found in more open-world
environments, typically found inspecting various areas of a construction site or similar, however, they are still in
the prototyping phase as well. Finally, humanoids are able to be in the same environments as the others, but are
poised to be functional in human-populated domains. These are currently in production with the aim of being an
evolved and more capable mobile form factor with more degrees of freedom, range in tasks, and domains, but have
yet to be integrated into any formal setting.
However, all of these form factors still only function in static structured environments. At the moment, mobile
manipulators are still in the early deployment phase in factories, and quadrupeds will soon begin deployment onto
construction sites. Currently, only AGVs are widely deployed and integrated, and mobile manipulators,
quadrupeds, and humanoids are still in early formats of more open-world domains, benefitted by the current
progress in AI.

Hardware: What Goes Into a Robot?

Robot component markets are dominated by a few key players, and the US is noticeably absent in many. The
industrial capacity necessary for entry—high volume, high quality, and low cost—is largely concentrated
elsewhere, particularly in China. It will be a challenge for the US to carve a position, especially when most of the
materials come from China.

On the hardware side, actuators, motors, and drives are the pieces that will physically generate motion by
converting an electrical input into either a hydraulic, pneumatic, or, more often, electrical output to generate this
motion.

At the higher-level in a factory, a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) determines how a production line will be
automated, sequencing each operation properly to ensure the entire automated process is functional. Within each
robot, regardless of form factor, there is a Microcontroller Unit (MCU), or embedded systems with multiple
MCUs, that is the dedicated processor handling low-level real-time tasks like reading sensor inputs, generating
motor control signals, and running fast control loops. These systems are effectively the “brain” for most robotic
systems.

Source: BizLink

In the world of robotics, high-precision motors are required to ensure the proper torque is applied to avoid
damaging its surroundings. Servo motors are the most common option – they are self-contained systems that
include a motor, a control circuit, and a feedback mechanism. This overhead enables the motor to actively adjust
itself and maintain a desired position or motion. Servo motors are one of the few components in a robot where the
market is not dominated by China and fairly well distributed across countries.
 Source: SolisPLC

The control circuit is referred to as “drive”. This is a power electronics box designed to regulate the voltage sent to
the motor, through an AC-DC-AC conversion (or AC-DC for a DC motor). Its main component is a power
electronics switch such as a MOSFET or IGBT, which combined with a rectifier and capacitors can electronically
modify the electrical signal.
 Source: Polytechnic Hub

Gearboxes are also a common component found in servo motors. They are able to increase the force/torque of a
motor, and increase accuracy. In essence, gearboxes reduce the speed of a motor, leading to a proportional increase
in torque, which also enables the motor to make finer movements. Most gearboxes found in robotic systems have
been largely produced by Japan’s Nabtesco.

Source: Santram
Engineers
Cameras and sensors are pivotal for the robot as well, as this has been the primary medium by which it knows both
its own positioning and the steps required to complete the task it faces. Most industrial robots use standard machine
vision 2D cameras, 3D depth cameras, or a combination of both to create a full spatial understanding of its
environment. Though they are trending toward mounted, lighter-duty, cheaper cameras with stronger software to
fill the gaps. Some form factors, typically those in a more human-populated environment, may use LiDAR to gain
a much more detailed view of its surroundings, albeit usually at a higher cost. Most LiDAR, automotive
specifically, comes from Hesai (China), and China has advanced enough in LiDAR innovation that Unitree has
already developed a proprietary LiDAR system at a slightly higher price point than the Intel RealSense depth
camera.

Industrial and precise robots are equipped with joint encoders, which allow the robot to understand the angle,
position, or rotation speed of its joints. A broad set of sensors can be included such as touch and tactile sensors to
understand pressure, texture, and more, proprioceptive sensors to understand physical internal states like balance,
force-torque sensors to understand how much force-torque is being applied by a joint, etc. This market is a bit
small/disjointed because the products are newer developments; however, most Western companies that are able to
design and assemble these sensors will still typically buy the base materials from China.

Source: Intel

Then there are the “end-effectors”, which are whatever the robot may have at the end of its arm, typically a tool or
a very basic gripper for most robots. Each end-effector has its own use-case and payload capacity, or the amount of
weight it is able to “hold”, so whatever the purpose of the robot will dictate the end-effector it has installed. This is
one part of the robot that China is not very involved in at all, most end-effector producers are German (Schunk,
Zimmer Group, Festo, Schmalz) and some are even American (ATI Industrial Automation, Destaco). However, it’s
likely that Chinese companies are simply producing their own end-effectors and not exporting them yet, as vertical
integration is their main strategy. While “hands” are catching much of the spotlight right now, these are not widely
implemented and are far from achieving sufficient dexterity. We will explore the challenges of dexterity and what
road lies ahead for manipulation in the next article of the robotics series!
 Source: IPR

Worldwide Source: Igus

Supply Chain Woes

Thanks to our friends at Silverado Policy Accelerator for highlighting this Substantial Transformation Principle
obfuscation!

In the US, the “Made in America” label is misleading at best, and downright harmful at worst. The substantial
transformation principle allows for significant processing of foreign materials, notably from China, in intermediary
countries, before final assembly in the US. This means a product can be labeled “Made in USA” even if its core
components originated in China, obfuscating the true extent of foreign dependence. Consequently, many US
companies will purchase cheap materials from China, transform them into robotics hardware packaged with
Country of Origin (COO) America, and undercut the US firms that are actually extracting from the ground and
manufacturing in the US. This is hard to talk about, but it’s even harder to solve.

It is far more difficult and time consuming than many people think to bring manufacturing capacity online and
mass produce industrial robots to introduce automation, and worse, it’s very time consuming. Supply chains for
many industrial robots are very complex, coming from many corners of the world where component production is
typically already dominated through competitive cost advantages. There have been many cases of supply chain
disruptions that have rattled Western economies. For example, in 2020-2022 during COVID the ports of Los
Angeles and Long Beach experienced a line of over 100 ships waiting outside the port for their turn to disembark.
In stark contrast to this debacle, during the same time period (2020-2021), China pivoted and increased their
robotics installation by 44% from 2020-2021 in order to implement automation to make up for the lack of a
workforce.

Why didn’t the US follow suit? COVID was the largest wake up call in years regarding the supply chain
dependencies, yet the country refused to open its eyes. As explained below, the US has no significant market share
in any of the relevant manufacturing nodes for robotics, and in most it’s essentially absent.

Mechanical Components: Gearbox, Motors, Actuators

On the hardware side, we will focus on what actually goes into generating locomotion in a robot: actuators/motors
and their respective components. There are many types of motors available for generating motion, steppers
with precise angular control in open-loop systems typically found in 3D printers or CNC machines,
brushless DC motors with high power-to-weight ratios to propel drones and EVs, but the most important in
robotics tends to be the servo motor. Most robotics companies, especially those of the Big 4, produce their own
servo motors in-house and sell them individually as well. These are not terribly difficult to build, but
manufacturing them at scale does create a bit of a moat for the aforementioned reasons: actuators must have
incredible reliability and performance, so scaling up requires advanced manufacturing techniques to be nearly
perfectly replicated. As such, the long-standing manufacturers of robotics components with the necessary expertise
hold the largest market share are Yaskawa (Japan), Panasonic (Japan), Bosch (Germany), KUKA (now China), and
Siemens (Germany). Rockwell (USA) must be named here as well because it holds some 7% of the servo motor
market share, but this is also the only segment of the supply chain that is not dominated by any one player.
 Source: Moog GmbH

Nearly 60% of the world’s gearboxes for medium-to-large industrial robots are supplied by Japan’s Nabtesco.
Their difficulty to manufacture arises from the fact that almost every order is likely to be highly customized and
tailored to the customer’s hardware specifications, yet must still meet the 99.99% accuracy threshold to replace a
human. Gearboxes are absolutely pivotal for ensuring this precision, and therefore make up the largest % of COGS
on an industrial robot at 14%. The manufacturing of these gearboxes must be accurate to an unreal degree, and as
such, typically only long-standing and established players with years of experience building them have refined
their process and process technology enough to achieve this quality, hence the Nabtesco dominance. They
manufactured their first cycloidal gear in 1980.

Source: CuratedIndustry

There are even special types of gearboxes like Harmonic Drive (Japan), founded in 1970, which uses a patented
strain-wave design for incredible precision. These are more expensive but a must-have in superprecise settings
(like semiconductor fabrication) and as such have a strong presence at 15% of the gearbox market. However, to
demonstrate what a proper industrial base and rapid iteration is capable of, Leaderdrive was founded in China in
2003 with the aim of manufacturing their own superprecise strain-wave gearbox. In just 14 years, the company had
produced over 100,000 units and captured 90% of the Chinese domestic market for strain-wave gearboxes.
 So
urce: makeagif

Magnets and Materials – Manufacturing Dependence

Motors and gearboxes are not in short supply and are fairly cheap; however, motors nowadays have undergone a
breakthrough. Most high-quality high-speed motors are now developed with permanent magnets (PM motors) to
achieve higher power efficiency and power-to-weight ratio — perfect for robots. Without getting into too much
detail, permanent magnets effectively add more magnetism into the electromagnetic field of a motor, meaning less
electricity is required to magnetize and can instead go toward generating motion. There remains one issue though,
the process and elements that go into creating your typical Neodymium permanent magnet (NdFeB) is nearly
entirely dominated by China with 90% of the market share. Of that 90%, roughly three producers in China hold a
near-monopoly on it: Jingci, JL MAG, and Ningbo Yungsheng.

Source: ERMA
While “rare earth” is a misnomer — they are just as abundant as most other elements– the process needed to refine
Neodymium and produce a final permanent magnet requires around ~12 complex steps and a strong industrial
capacity. China dominates this process as well at 93%. After the trade restrictions on Chinese strategic minerals,
there are attempts to try to minimize this dependency on Chinese permanent magnets. For instance, MP Materials
in the US to become the only fully vertically integrated rare earths company in all of North America. Australia’s
Lynas, the world’s largest non-Chinese producer, is expanding and building another separation plant in the US with
US DoD support of USD$120M, and the DoD doubled down in 2023 with another USD$94M investment in e-
VAC’s Sumter County, SC plant to produce NdFeB permanent magnets. The US is concerned with a dependency
on China for rare earths, but resolution is slow. While MP Materials went from construction to early production in
a few years, actually establishing high-volume capacity requires a 5-10 year timeframe.

Source: GAO

However, it’s likely that these companies will not catch up in scale without significant government subsidy to
match the lower cost of capital in China. We’ve heard rumblings that China has some 250-275K tons of installed
capacity for refining NdFeB magnets, and this will likely double in the next five years. For comparison, the
USD$120M investment from the DoD in Lynas will likely produce somewhere around ~4,200 tons of refined
REEs. At the moment, China’s economies of scale has given the country a nearly unshakable monopoly on the rare
earths market.

Mining and materials beyond rare earth elements are just as — if not more essential, and while this is not typically
bottlenecked, they are largely under the control of China. Additionally, having raw ore deposits or being capable of
mining doesn’t imply too much for many of these elements. Many economies struggle to process these elements
whereas China excels in this endeavor due to its advanced industrial economy. Stemming from two main initiatives
in China, the Belt and Road initiative and Made in China 2025 initiative, the country has invested and built a well-
paved path to absolute dominance over nearly the entire minerals processing industry.
 Source: SemiAnalysis,
Industry Estimates

Lithium and Batteries

All of the ore may come from other countries rich in deposits, but this means nothing without the capacity to refine
them at scale and with high enough grade. In fact, China is only rich in deposits in two of these minerals, lithium
and graphite, but countries rely on Chinese processing to refine them into usable materials. The Belt and Road
initiative came up with clever ways to circumvent the lack of mineral deposits.

 Copper typically comes from Chile and Peru, and around 76% of Peru’s and 68% of Chile’s copper exports
went to China, totaling up to 56% of all global raw copper.
 Nickel is highlighted as the one key mineral that is not refined mostly in China, as 37% is refined in
Indonesia, and “only” 28% in China. However, according to the most recent IEA report, over 80% of
Indonesia’s battery-grade nickel output is owned by Chinese producers linked to the CCP.
 Cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and accounts for 80% of the world’s cobalt
production, but China has struck up the Sicomines Pact with them and now owns 80% of the DRC’s cobalt
output.

China understands that without access to processed minerals, there is no first step to manufacturing a product. The
Western nations have not woken up to the fact that reshoring manufacturing starts at these minerals.
 Source: Visual Capitalist

Batteries, lithium-ion specifically, are critical for mobile robots, like drones, service robots, autonomous guided
vehicles in warehouses, mobile manipulators, humanoids, and especially EVs. If you wanted to realize the future of
detaching robots from a connected power source, you’d most likely equip it with Chinese battery cells, as Chinese
companies supply around 80% of battery cells globally. Chinese battery packs maintain an advantage by having a
cost of around $127/kWh, while North America and Europe see prices 24% and 33% higher respectively. The
largest producer, CATL, accounted for 37% of the global EV battery market in 2023, while BYD accounted for
~16%.

The largest producer outside of China, LGES (South Korea), only accounted for roughly 13% of the global market
share. It’s not easy to overcome the barriers to entry in this market, Sweden’s state-backed attempt to break the
dependency, Northvolt, just filed for bankruptcy. While the US was committing at least ~USD$73B to battery
supply chain investments with the Inflation Reduction Act, China was giving out over USD$230B in subsidies to
EV companies since 2009. The current layout of the battery market is a bit scary, given that Chinese companies can
and will be iterating faster than Western companies due to the massive industrial base in China and continued
government investment which will only further drive their costs down to edge out competitors.

Building a battery from an engineering standpoint is a hurdle that Chinese companies have been able to climb over
their repeated iterations. The balancing between complex chemistries within cathodes, anodes, and electrolytes
must all meet stringent purity requirements as any impurity can lead to noticeable variations in battery lifetime.
Constructing sufficient capacity to produce at scale is already challenging, especially in US, and can cost over
USD$100M in the US to construct, which is 46% more expensive per GWh than its Chinese counterparts. LG has
even paused the construction on their USD$5.5B battery plant in Arizona citing “market conditions.”
In the case of robots, batteries are all different sizes, there is no standardization, and the batteries have different
demands. Power-to-weight ratio is a much stricter requirement as a robot doesn’t have the leniency to carry the
same weight a car would, and often different robots have different power requirements. The battery that a
quadruped would use is not the same battery that a humanoid would use, and this extends to nearly all form factors.
The difficulty and cost in manufacturing a pure and efficient battery is already challenging enough, especially in
the US, but the lack of uniformity in robot batteries will be one of the largest issues as the time arrives to scale
production.

Historical Robotics and How The Current Powers Came To Be

Industrial automation through robotics has been long in the making over the past decades, and throughout this time,
some countries have prevailed as paragons of what the automated future can look like, and some have lost their
position. Let’s take a look at the current world powers, where they stand in the robotics race to automation, and the
driving forces moving their markets. So how did the world leaders in robotics end up on top?

Source
: SemiAnalysis, [Link]

The Robotics landscape has historically been dominated by four countries: South Korea, Japan, Germany, and the
US. China today is a major force, but we will deep dive into the country later in the report. A closer look at the four
incumbents reveals common factors driving their success to varying extents:
 Source: SemiAnalysis,
[Link]
 Heavy industries: they are all historically large players in heavy-duty industries like Automotive and
Electronics – which are prone to automation through robotics.
 Presence of vast industrial conglomerates – the likes of Toyota, Siemens, Samsung, Emerson
 Technology-savvy culture
 Demographics and labor cost

South Korea and Japan: Can’t Automate Birth Rates

South Korea has taken automation to an extreme level, with 10% of the workforce being automated! With high-
tech manufacturing companies making up a whopping 61% of the Korean economy in 2022, it has a clear
advantage. But cultural factors are also at play – for example, eCommerce adoption is among the world’s highest,
with north of 30% of retail sales done online, double that of the US!

And the South Korean government and Chaebols are all-in: In 2021, Samsung declared their company-wide
initiative to invest up to USD$163B into industrial automation and AI. Hyundai already acquired Boston Dynamics
in 2021. LG set robotics as a key growth area after deploying self-driving airport guide robots at the Seoul airport
in 2017, and recently just converted their stake in Bear Robotics into a majority stake. On top of all of this, the
government is upping their investments as well. In total, the country has put forth four rounds of the Basic Plan for
Intelligent Robots since 2008–2030, totaling USD$1.6B, and a new plan to invest ~USD$2.26B in the industry up
to 2030. While the country needs automation more than ever, it doesn’t have the benefit of being a major
manufacturer, having relied on other countries for ~60% of components in an industrial robot. South Korea is
running on borrowed time.

South Korea has found automation to be a necessity for the same reason as Japan: an aging labor demographic and
low birth rates. Despite government initiatives across the board, the country continues to hit record-low birth rates.
Case in point, the dearth of workers in rural areas is forcing factories to move near Seoul just to man their
operations. They’ve even recently had to remove their decades-old foreign worker ban at certain manufacturing
plants (in place due to security reasons) to make up for the labor shortage. Korea suffers from the lowest birthrate
in the world, with Japan trailing closely behind. However, Japan stands a slightly better chance in the race to
automation as they have two of the Big 4 titans, while Korea still imports some ~60% of the components in an
industrial robot.
Germany and The EU: Watching from the Chair in the Corner
Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, holds the position of 4th highest robot density in the world, and has
always been geared toward a strong industrial economy. The country introduced Industrie 4.0 to the broader
European Union in 2011, aimed at bringing the region to the forefront of integrating new technologies and
automation processes into industry to enhance competitiveness. Their heavy emphasis on industrial manufacturing
has led them down the path toward great automation, and they would be well positioned for the coming of the
robotics unlocks had the EU managed to stop China from eating away at their automation companies.

European countries have been complicit and passive in the selling of the EU’s industrial automation capacity and
technologies to China. A travesty that will echo through the robotics revolution, Germany’s stringent and
bureaucratic restrictions held them back from interfering on the KUKA take over in 2016, sidelined as it was sold
off to China’s Midea Group. They could only reform the policy after it unfolded and their goliath was gone. Italy
sold off many robotics companies (EVOLUT, OLCI Engineering, CMA Robotics), and in 2022 the country finally
made the decision to veto one of the takeovers. Now, in February 2025, an automation organization industry finally
issued a Call-To-Action to the EU to address its lack of competitiveness through robotics. Industrie 4.0 is a
transformational plan, but it took the EU nine years to realize that it required the robots China was eating.

The US: The American Dream’s Rude Awakening

Lastly, in the US, we see a strange phenomenon of having a highly advanced tech sector, but both a lack of
national strategy and the drawbacks of outsourcing manufacturing. Manufacturing capacity in the US is still a
relevant topic, the issue is that it cannot compete in sectors that China competes in due to the expensive nature of
manufacturing in America, and the “quality” moat that the US once had is slowly draining, as China now has the
means to produce most goods at similar quality for cheaper. Automating certain sectors could alleviate this pain,
but this would be a ways away. The country has a large automotive industry like its peers, but it only ranks 10th in
robot density in 2023. One study showed that according to wage-adjusted robot adoption, the US is actually 49%
lower than expected. Given the AI revolution in the country, it’s surprising to see one of the main potential
beneficiaries, robotics, diverging from the path of its other tech sectors. Should robotics become a target sector for
growth, the country may be able to benefit from the cheaper production and compete, but this is down the line.

There’s a number of reasons why the dissonance could be occurring in the US, a large one mainly being the lack of
multi-year national initiatives that other countries see benefit from. For example, the CHIPS act and the Inflation
Reduction Act, two major government initiatives aimed at bolstering domestic industry, were initiated under one
administration and under another the IRA is already on the table for repeal, with the CHIPS act being in the
conversation as well. Moreover, the economy was structured to follow different economic incentives than China.
The US found it more worthwhile to pursue digital innovation, cutting-edge technology, and services, and in the
process it outsourced most production capabilities to countries with a better cost advantage as most American
companies cannot compete. However, the US is now left at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing powers and will
need a significant turnaround just to enter the race.

To add insult to injury, a closer look at the Western world’s automation growth reveals a peak in ~2016-18. Japan’s
2023 additions are still ~13% below the 2018 peak, and South Korea has not grown since 2016. The only country
among the top 4 that has reached a new peak in 2023 is Germany… but their goliath KUKA has been acquired by
China and is shifting manufacturing to Asia.
Source: SemiAnalysis, [Link]

The Sleeping Goliaths and The Budding Davids

KUKA is part of the small set of companies referred to as the “Big 4” in robotics, having dominated the industry
for decades: FANUC (Japan), ABB (Switzerland/Sweden), Yaskawa (Japan), and KUKA (prev Germany, now
China).
 Source:
SemiAnalysis

A closer look at those four titans reveals a lot of similarity: decades of experience in the space, high-volume
manufacturing capacity among a broad product portfolio (cobots, robots, multiple industries, etc), but relatively
low R&D ratio and overall limited willingness to participate in the capital-heavy and risk-oriented goal to build
these next-gen robots that hold the same promises that have failed in the past. In addition, their business is
increasingly tilted towards mainland China – leaving a large geopolitical risk.

The situation is particularly worrisome, with Chinese players now on track to catch up and fill the gaps with
unprecedented speed.

China’s Robotics Champions

While the revenues of the major companies are much larger than those of China, the landscape has been shifting
toward western sleeping giants growing complacent and Chinese innovation. Chinese robotics are picking up very
quickly through companies like Estun, Efort, and Siasun, and their recent takeovers of the aforementioned
European robotics companies.

These companies are setting up to be powerhouses. Most are focused on strong vertical integration, like Estun with
up to 95% of core components manufactured in-house, enabling them to rapidly iterate product development. They
recognize the power of a strong production capacity, for example EFORT is planning to build out a “Super Plant”
to upgrade production capacity by 100,000 robots/year. Siasun is already well-equipped for an impressive
production output with around 2.3M square footage of factories globally. Furthermore, their R&D numbers may
speak for themselves, but Siasun has gone even further in their innovation strategy. The company went so far as to
buy a leading German mechanical engineering vocational school so that they could both train new employees
abroad and gain access to the decades of German experience in training engineers, all while setting up its own
robotics institute at a Chinese university.

The traditional industrial robotics market and the respective hardware is still dominated by the original four giants
of ABB, KUKA, Fanuc, and Yaskawa, however, they are not matching the pace of their Chinese contemporaries.
Lack of innovation and investment in R&D is leaving a door wide open for Chinese companies to enter through,
and they’re only ramping up further. This expansion is not only happening at the company level but rather it’s the
country’s imperative to cross the finish line first.

China’s Hellbent Path to Robotics Dominance

In China, the most impressive shifts are taking place, going from outside the top 10 in robots per 10,000 employees
in 2018, to overtaking 3rd place in the world from Germany with 470 robots/10,000 employees in 2024. China’s
annual root installations dwarf that of the four western incumbents combined.

Source: SemiAnalysis, [Link]

A change of this scale can only be described as a robotics revolution. Many factors can point to how this happened,
but most stem from their massive industrial sector and policies that continue to fuel it, like the Made in China 2025
plan, and aggressive government subsidies. Exact numbers are hard to pinpoint, and the EV industry is a key
recipient, but it is clear that the broad industrial landscape is benefiting from at least tens of billions of dollars
every year.

Source: Nikkei Asia

The Chinese manufacturing base is currently dominated by automotive and electronics production, as China has
been producing more cars than the US and Japan combined since 2009, and assembles some 70% of the world’s
electronics. Even with a massive sector ripe for automation, 51% of global robot installations in 2023 were coming
from China, adding 276,000 units that year alone! China’s industrial economy is one of the most formidable
players in the world, setting it up perfectly to reap the next evolutions of robotics and automation.

The Made in 2025 plan was the largest catalyst toward becoming the industrial and high-tech manufacturing giant
it is today. Signed by Li Keqiang in 2015, the plan initiated the move from 40% of domestic content of core
components in 2020 to 70% by 2025. Additionally, the plan highlights the following six of the ten priority sectors
going forward: automated machine tools & robotics, new-energy vehicles and equipment, power equipment,
modern rail transport equipment, new advanced information technology, and new materials. With a focus on the
entire manufacturing chain and the development of both advanced and traditional industries, the country laid out
the road map to become an economic juggernaut.

Source: SemiAnalysis, [Link]

In 2023 they doubled down on robotics, with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology posted
their four-year plan positioning humanoids as a strategic engine of economic growth. Within this outline, they
highlighted having a robust innovation system for humanoids and to achieve “production at scale” by 2025, with
the engine of growth coming online by 2027. This state-backed interest is significant for the sector as the US-China
Economic and Security Review Commission posted an Issue Alert in October 2024 stating that Chinese humanoid
companies raised USD$769M in 2023 alone, and over USD$990M in the first half of 2024. China believes in
robotics and its related form factors as the future of the country, just recently, Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing was
even seen at the private sector symposium seated across from Xi Jinping.
Even humanoids are now booming in China, still considered the most difficult form factor to unlock, with many
older estimates misinterpreting the coming revolution, i.e. Goldman Sachs having to revise their 2035 TAM by 6x!
At the 2024 World Robot Conference in Beijing, over 27 different humanoids were debuted and active, while the
Tesla Optimus remained motionless in a clear box. A stark contrast to the Unitree H1 which was performing
synchronized choreography with both H1’s and humans nearby in Feb 2025. While it is impressive to see how well
Chinese humanoids are performing, it’s more impressive that they can produce these at a much faster and larger
scale than any other country. UBTech is already set to mass produce nearly 1000 units by late 2025. Agibot was
created in 2023, and has started mass production already, with 962 units fully produced as of December 15. Most
importantly, Unitree G1 is already in the United States and commercially available, and the humanoid boasts a
shocking price tag of only USD$16K. There are no other humanoids in the world available for purchase by
consumers, and the price tags for most humanoids are angling to be in the ~USD$100K range, and up to
~USD$200K for a significant portion.

What Stands to Come

This is a Call for Action. In America there are many companies attempting to build their own hardware, but in-
house hardware development means the company designing and assembling it in-house, and everyone closes their
eyes when the materials and base components roll in from China. The US once had a solid base to spin up heavy
industry factories, but this withered away as cheaper overseas manufacturing cut US producers out and the
American economy shifted toward leading edge technology and services. However, with each dilapidated factory
and every “Made in China” sticker the dots connected a pointillist image of a nation depleted. Now the country
stands at the bifurcated path between limitless labor expansion or obsolescence, and the echoes of industry’s past
are shouting.

China knew 10 years ago that these robots would be a force and doubled down again in 2023. This is not a question
of ifs: China knows what comes next if they are first to unlock these robots, they will iterate faster than the US,
they will subsidize the industry to an unprecedented extent, they will achieve massive economies of scale and
oversupply all global markets, and the general purpose robotics boom will be nothing but a bad dream for the US if
nothing changes. The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own
in perpetuity.

Unitree exemplifies the threat posed by China’s rise to Western industrial semiconductor suppliers. Behind
paywall, we dive into the different types of electronic components found in robots, explain how western
incumbents like NXP, Infineon or TXN are positioned, and highlight the Chinese threat. We also discuss leading
edge logic for next-gen robots and Nvidia’s position.

Check out our friends at Edge of Automation’s Parts 1 and 2 of the coming physical AI revolution for a great
breakdown series on the current state of robotics!

[Link]

Trump and DOGE Defund Program That Boosted American

Manufacturing for Decades
Paresh Dave, Louise Matsakis
~2 minute

President Donald Trump says taxing imports will strengthen domestic manufacturing. Hours before announcing
new tariffs, his administration cut support for centers that help US firms do just that.

Photograph: Wen Ya/Getty Images

At the height of the US trade war with Japan in the 1980s, Congress established a nationwide network of
organizations to advise small American manufacturers on how to survive and grow in what was then a particularly
difficult environment. Decades later, there is now at least one Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) center
in all 50 states, and they continue to provide taxpayer-subsidized consulting to thousands of businesses, including
makers of ovens, printers, tortillas, and dog food.

AI Lab Newsletter by Will Knight

WIRED’s resident AI expert Will Knight takes you to the cutting edge of this fast-changing field and beyond—
keeping you informed about where AI and technology are headed. Delivered on Wednesdays.

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[Link]

Split Apart: How Unchecked Capitalism and Integration Divided the

ADOS Community
Lineage First Magazine
15–19 minute

Photo credit: AI-generated using MidJourney

The civil rights era opened doors to advancement within the black community that were previously closed entirely.
But this integration, while representing indispensable progress, also had the unintended consequence of growing
class divisions that strained once tight-knit social bonds within African-American society.

This fracturing only accelerated over subsequent decades, as predatory capitalism and greed fostered the
exploitation of the marginalized while enriching a few. Truly reconciling these rifts will require grappling honestly
with the complex legacy of both integration and unchecked capitalism.

Segregation’s Enforced Solidarity

Under the violently enforced segregation of the Jim Crow era, class differences within the black community were
rendered secondary by the all-consuming daily oppression of racism. No matter one’s educational or economic
attainments, the entire ADOS population was consigned to second-class status without recourse. This created a
remarkable sense of solidarity in the face of shared adversity.

Since even the highest accomplishments like becoming a doctor or lawyer still left blacks unable to testify in court
or vote, the professional class channeled their capabilities not into futile individual advancement, but into
communal uplift. Black entrepreneurs who managed to achieve financial stability lived alongside lower-income
families in the same neighborhoods out of necessity, running businesses in the community.

Their children attended the same woefully underfunded, dilapidated, segregated schools as children from poor
households, rather than isolating themselves in enclaves of opportunity. The only social clubs, associations, and
churches available excluded no one based on income or skin tone.

This oppressive closeness enforced by law and custom nurtured a sense of kinship and mutual obligation across
class lines despite economic inequality. The fortunate few with higher education, stable careers, and disposable
income felt spiritually bound to lend their efforts not to personal gain under a system stacked fully against them but
to the uplift of the race as a whole. All recognized that their fates were intertwined with those suffering most under
white supremacy’s boot.

But as the legal edifice of segregation first cracked and then fully crumbled over the 1950s and 1960s, new avenues
for socioeconomic advancement suddenly opened up to a slice of the African-American community. At the same
time, little changed for those mired at the bottom, especially in hollowed-out urban centers. This inevitable
widening of the economic ladder ultimately strained the once tightly-knit social bonds as African-Americans
confronted new inner divisions shaped by class and opportunity.

Photo credit: AI-generated using MidJourney

The Opening of a Gateway — For Some

The civil rights reforms of the 1960s legally unchained black America from the yoke of institutionalized
discrimination in employment, housing, education, and more. This enabled the gradual emergence over subsequent
decades of a black professional middle class with economic stability and security on a scale not seen since the fall
of Reconstruction.

With the gates pried open by relentless protest and visionary leadership, some gained access to the predominantly
white corporate world and elite educational institutions from which they were previously barred wholesale. Many
justly leveraged these long-denied chances to build successful mainstream careers in law, business, academia, and
more, which allowed them to accumulate wealth and comfort previously unimaginable.

Yet for those at the very bottom rungs of America’s economic ladder, especially in hollowed-out urban centers,
daily life remained largely unchanged even after the landmark civil rights reforms. With factories and low-skill
jobs rapidly disappearing in urban areas nationwide, an underclass became effectively mired in intergenerational
poverty, institutional neglect, and the trafficking of drugs and guns.

As inequality, therefore, widened substantially within the African-American community itself in terms of income,
education, and security, so too did social distance grow between the classes now emerging. Economic disparities
reinforced by opportunity gaps now overlap with a yawning and accelerating cultural gap, as two worlds pull apart
from a once cohesive whole.

Whereas in earlier decades, the fortunate few black professionals with any status lived among and directly served
lower-income neighborhoods out of necessity, now their mobility has enabled physical and psychological distance.
As new opportunities opened up, middle-class families began migrating en masse from cities to suburbs, rarely
looking back except on occasional Sunday visits.
Their children now increasingly went to integrated or even predominately white schools rather than the
systemically underinvested and crumbling inner-city ones that most blacks still had no choice but to attend. Cross-
class bonds grew more tenuous and frayed over time, no longer reinforced by the geographic and social proximity
that Jim Crow had previously enforced upon all African-Americans.

Judgment Replaces Mutual Support

This inevitable widening of class divides meant that a sense of mutual obligation and support within the black
community was increasingly replaced by negative class-based stereotyping and judgment, as many reflexively
blamed the poor themselves for their plight rather than recognizing ongoing structural hindrances. Why couldn’t
they just apply themselves in school like we did? Why can’t they just get a job instead of selling drugs? Why can’t
they keep their family structures intact?

A bootstrap mentality took hold: if some could make it up the ladder, anyone could, despite the vastly different
starting conditions and opportunities still impeding many left behind. Lingering intergenerational trauma fueled
much of this bifurcation, as the formerly oppressed often struggled most to develop empathy for others who were
still marginalized when they gained status. But healing would take decades of open self-reflection, moral courage,
and purposeful relationship-building across dividing lines.

Art credit: AI-generated using MidJourney

The Poisoned Fruits of Predatory Capitalism

While the ADOS community still faced monumental external obstacles of racism and discrimination across most
facets of American life even after the civil rights era, the greatest cancer subtly poisoning communal bonds from
the inside came through the emergence of unchecked predatory capitalism and greed.

As some black financial institutions and enterprises properly integrated into the economic mainstream, opening
their services to wider demographics, others rapaciously sought to exploit vulnerable niches of the black
community rather than empower them. They gravitated not to areas of need but to opportunities for extraction. As
society would later come to understand, merely trading white corporate oppression for black capitalist exploitation
uplifted very few while demoralizing many.

A stark example was the wave of predatory subprime mortgage lending that disproportionately targeted and
infiltrated black urban neighborhoods in the 1990s and 2000s. As journalists and activists later uncovered, too
often black-owned banks and brokers themselves cynically participated in peddling risky, deceptive home loans to
their own communities for short-term profits with long-term damage.

The subprime bubble and collapse left half of black homeowners nationwide stripped of nearly all their home
equity by 2011, compared to just a quarter of affected white families. Black America lost decades of wealth-
building almost overnight. Yet few, if any, predatory lending corporations or personnel faced serious consequences
or accountability for these egregious abuses.

This selective opportunism was replicated across spheres. As the black underclass found itself underserved by
mainstream institutions, some seeking to fill the void prized profits over empowerment. Check cashing fees and
payday loans targeted those shut out of banks, siphoning wealth from those who could least afford it. Small store
owners and landlords hiked prices higher than large chains by capitalizing on captive markets.

Too often, businesses developed predatory pricing and lending schemes to exploit low-income minority areas
rather than invest in their financial stability. Exorbitant rents in neglected neighborhoods further drain families’
limited budgets. Those unable to access traditional financial tools had little choice but to accept whatever terms
allowed basic participation in commerce and the economy, no matter how harsh.

Internalized Oppression’s Impact

Within the African-American community itself, some entrepreneurs adopted an attitude that rationalized this
exploitation as just business while dismissing vulnerability as a merely personal failure. They justified preying
upon their own people’s lack of options with the refrain, “At least it’s black-owned.” This prioritized individual
profit over community empowerment and uplift, however much it allowed material accumulation for a select few.

Other examples abound of how internalized racism and oppression can manifest in ruthless intra-communal
capitalism divorced from ethics. For-profit colleges aggressively and sometimes fraudulently recruit ADOS
students with inflated promises of advancement, while overcharging for low-quality education rarely leads to the
advertised career success.

Some black-owned grocery stores and bodegas in neighborhoods without alternatives openly maintain higher
everyday shelf prices than corporate supermarkets, cynically exploiting a lack of competition. Black radio
personalities endorse get-rich-quick schemes that often prey on the elderly and vulnerable. The handshake of racial
solidarity provides a convenient cover for seedy motives.

In these ways, under the guise of community support, heartless crony capitalism continues to thrive, enabled by the
silence of those who climbed a few rungs up the ladder and then pulled it away behind them. Those who manage to
achieve middle-class stability and security in the black community have a responsibility to call out such practices
rather than becoming passively complicit in them through a nominal shared identity.

Too often, the greater communal good of supporting each other’s authentic rise is sacrificed to ruthless individual
enrichment. Those taken ruthlessly advantage of first are invariably the most marginalized—the working poor,
recent immigrants, the disabled, and the geographically isolated. But ultimately, the entire demographic suffers
from ethical sacrifices. Reaping unethically sown winds yields a bitter harvest down the line.

Photo credit: AI-generated using MidJourney

Reconciling Internal and External Divides

Truly standing fully against inequality and marginalization under these complex circumstances requires
consciously rejecting not only overt external racism but also internal greed that exploits vulnerabilities rather than
healing them. Among oppressed groups, the deep trauma of racism and marginalization often manifests in a
ruthless undervaluing of one’s own people, contrasted with elevating whiteness and wealth above all else.

Healing these internal community fissures involves fully acknowledging past harms done, making amends,
changing destructive behaviors, and reconciling honestly around a shared hope-filled vision. As Martin Luther
King himself cautioned, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are
derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of white society.” For America, that means reparations. For
the ADOS community, it means reconciling.

None of this is to minimize the external obstacles still to be toppled through relentless political effort, protest, and
economic empowerment free of exploitation. The ADOS demographic still battles overwhelming structural
discrimination across many facets of American life, an enduring legacy of white supremacy. That war continues
against formidable resistance and must remain a central priority.

But communal ties have also frayed from unchecked capitalistic greed, selfishness, and ego, opportunism disguised
as racial uplift, class divisions exacerbated by income inequality, and the human tendencies toward judgment,
resentment, and contempt that flow downstream from suffering. Healing both together is the only path forward.

With compassion as our compass, a historically divided black community can become whole once more. But it
begins with acknowledging the internal wounds that occurred alongside external injustices, and proactively
addressing each through open truth-telling and accountability. The freedom struggle endures, now against both
inequality and our own worst impulses. Hand in hand, we continue onward.
And yet, despairing today would dishonor our ancestors’ sacrifices. What is shattered can be mended. What is
divided can be united. Where there is ignorance of our shared bonds, wisdom can yet bloom. But first, the old must
pass to make room for the new.

The Path to Reconciliation and Healing

For those who perpetuated or ignored past exploitation, defending actions as just business rather than trafficking in
human dignity only prevents progress. True communal reconciliation begins with moral courage and honest truth-
telling, not passive tolerance of injustice to preserve superficial tranquility. Let us speak and hear each other.

Next, class-based divisions must be bridged through concrete investment, not just lofty rhetoric. We must
proactively undo the segregation and inequality that allow an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality to arise.
Integration of neighborhoods, boardrooms, and classrooms—however incremental—can re-instill familiarity and
empathy between all levels of society top-down and bottom-up. But no one side can integrate alone.

At the same time, businesses must sincerely act upon ideals of community uplift and empowerment, even at the
cost of some profits. Serving the underserved should mean enabling customers, not exploiting desperation. Sincere
community development ennobles a business, rather than simply enlarging the owners’ bank accounts. Trust is
rebuilt through compassion, not transactions.

Culturally, we must resuscitate the tireless communitarian spirit of mutual support and collective economic
cooperation that historically enabled black America to lift itself amid hostile conditions when all odds were arrayed
against it. None of us are exempt from missteps in the past, but tomorrow we can choose grace.

Politically, the African-American community must rebuild the cross-class, intergenerational coalitions that once
toppled oppressive systems and can again bring power through collective action. When fractured into
socioeconomic silos, we lose not only cohesion but also agency, self-sufficiency, and the ethics of our ancestors.
Rekindling solidarity of spirit to overcome divides rooted in justice and human dignity is the only way forward.

And each of us can begin mending historical rifts through everyday acts of community across barriers.
Conscientious individuals must set an example through openness, constructive dialog, extending hands wherever
they can reach, and listening without judgment. By seeing humanity in each other first, political change will
organically follow.

None of us today created this exhausting road we walk, but all can help pave it forward. The task belongs to us all.

The path is long, but the destination is worth every step. Let bonds be reforged through truth, however searing. Let
walls be dismantled through fellowship, however imperfect at first. And let each extend a hand across whatever
chasms separate our family, knowing we all seek the same shore.

The thriving, just community we deserve to inhabit has always been waiting within us if only we could cultivate it
together. Where there is ignorance of our shared bonds, wisdom can yet bloom. The spirit that sustained our
ancestors’ journey can light the path forward — if kindled anew.