But Capital still have to play by the rules or get expropriated. The nation states, for all their tremendous stupidity, have retain most of their monopoly on violence within their territories.

Thus, we could easily forbid corporations to deal with China or to hide their profits in Switzerland. And they'd have to play ball...

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

But Capital still have to play by the rules or get expropriated. The nation states, for all their tremendous stupidity, have retain most of their monopoly on violence within their territories.

That, like treason, is just a a matter of dates, unless the state is prepared to go to war, which is a pretty safe bet from any individuals perspective.

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Thus, we could easily forbid corporations to deal with China or to hide their profits in Switzerland. And they'd have to play ball...

Only corporations that need a presence in your state for whatever reason. If a given capitalist chooses to convert their fortune to renminbi or lira or MoonBucks there's fuck-all you can do about it.

Huh? Where are Microsoft divisions? War with whom?

And, as to upping and going, do you really see western billionaires wanting to move to China? or India? There are good reasons the wealthy of these countries like to come to the West for R&R. Those places are dump.

Furthermore, upping and leaving would mean selling all their hard assets in the West. Not only could the state use its force to prevent that but it probably wouldn't even have to. There'd be no one so capital rich left able to buy all that stuff...

No, as I said before, if we were to return to a 1950 set-up, the rich would howl and howl and cry and beg and threaten and yell and then... go back to being the top 0.1% anyhow and thus enjoying the life of riley... with mere hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions...

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Yes I agree. But the reality is they only invest in the US becuase there is more profit to be made, not out of natural sympathy. This is slightly different to the period when makers of British bully beef really thought of themselves as being British, and had promotion of the state as one of their quite explicit goals.

And precisely becuase that situation doesnot pertain, you can't talk about national capital anymore. There is only capital, in the abstract, which will go to wherever there is profit to be made. Which is precisely ewhy we see people arguing that we should debase oursleves to the level of migrant labour in order to have jobs at all.

In R&R terms, it doesn't matter one little bit where you make your money.

So all I said was, you can't force them to proivide employment in the West, and the only way to "incentivise" them is to reduce working conditions in the West to those that exist elsewhere - i.e., to impoverish western workers. And hence we are in a zero sum game - you can't actually compel capital to create well paying jobs in your nation.

And thus the agenda of "repatriating wortk" is neither here nor there.