The supposed superiority of the USA

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By HUGO DIONÍSIO*

Deepseek has loudly announced the human unsustainability and historical obsolescence of neoliberalism that characterizes the Western economic model.

Everything that happened with DeepSeek is nothing more than a deja vu of many other situations that have occurred over time, but which Washington has managed to keep hidden from the American people. The difference is that, in the case of DeepSeek, the scam is so big that it could not be hidden. The technological bubble linked to Artificial Intelligence has been unmasked. So oversized, overvalued and inflated, as is usual in the USA.

Ever since Trump’s attack on Huawei 1.0, the issue has been that the People’s Republic of China should not be allowed to develop cutting-edge technologies at or above the level of technology that the US possesses. The attack itself constituted a serious violation of the “China’s own rules.”free market”, whether those that apply internally to companies operating in its territory, or the rules that, through its influence and imposition, were developed within the framework of the World Trade Organization.

The links invoked to the Chinese State or the Communist Party of China are absolutely laughable, in a context in which the Silicon Valley technological oligarchy not only finances or influences, but has also taken over the very apparatus of the North American state, acting in the interests of the elite there and distributing the inflated and exorbitant gains to the most corrupt and opportunistic political elite in the entire world.

I have written extensively about how congressional representatives use privileged political information to obtain financial gains on the stock market and in the capital markets in general. It was Barack Obama – that “great pacifist and democrat” – who inaugurated this possibility, through the law that allows congressional representatives to purchase bonds from companies that benefit from congressional funds, beginning this era of technological and stock market plutocracy.

If there is a complex state with political leadership coordinated with private interests, which use it to accumulate mountains of money, which enters through excessive public funds, paid for with the taxes of American workers, that state is the one headquartered in the White House in Washington. Its political and financial interference in the defense of Israeli Zionism, Big Pharma, technology companies and the military-industrial complex is undeniable and has a substantial difference from the connection that exists between the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party: it is legitimacy.

It is in Chinese law and constitution and this connection is made in defence of what they define as sovereignty and public interest, which has had an impact on the astonishing development of the living conditions of the Chinese people. In China, corrupt people are persecuted, in the US, they are integrated into the state apparatus and asked for money for election campaigns.

On the contrary, the symbiotic connection between the “super-rich” oligarchy and the security apparatus based in Washington, although acknowledged, takes place outside the democratic principles abusively invoked. An image of transparency, impartiality and incorruptibility is sold and, from Democrats to Republicans, with very few exceptions, everyone says one thing and does the opposite.

All the enormous “support” paid to the oligarchy in the USA is carried out under a single justification: to maintain, achieve, and protect the supposedly more advanced position of the USA, or, on the contrary, to contain, restrict, and prevent others from achieving such a position in terms of technological dominance. They do so by trying to monopolize this technological supply and, using the means of propaganda at their disposal (academia, media, etc.), mainstream and entertainment), creating the absolute necessity of their adoption, as if our collective future depended on it. While this is happening, they sell billions and billions of dollars in futures, derivatives, bonds of this and that, and most importantly, American taxpayers subsidize billions of dollars of “hyperimperialists".

In practice, the average American worker, whose wallet doesn't survive the flu, sees money that should be spent on repairing infrastructure, building public housing, railroads and a free, universal health care system go to the casino gambling of an elite. junkie, who needs ever-increasing doses of his favorite drug: adrenaline, which originates from the expectation of capital accumulation and concentration.

This was the case with climate change and the environmental emergency. Considering the field of green technologies and considering it a given that the People's Republic of China would never be able to produce them in the same quality, we all witnessed an acceleration in the financing process for these companies. It was a period in which the average European – and American – taxpayer saw his money being invested in renewables, under the assumption of “energy security, sustainability and transition”. The end of dependence on oil was the goal.

The oligarchy was already seeing itself imposing its very expensive technology on poor countries in the name of saving the planet – and it could no longer use the “saving of souls”. Not only were they gagging them with debt and technological dependence, they were also holding back their development, perpetuating the neocolonial state. The Europeans and Americans ended up with more expensive electricity and the oligarchs with even greater profits.

But then China messed it up, as it had already done with Huawei. Acting as if they were the most convinced of all when it came to the climate emergency, China was telling the world: “If we are trying to save the planet, then these technologies must be produced cheaply, with quality and in sufficient quantities.” The result was astonishing, and the developing world was able to start building wind farms and solar farms.

Meanwhile, China has become the largest investor in renewables. Almost at the same time, as if discouraged by the flight of a multi-million dollar business in the West, we have witnessed a process of stagnation in some cases, slow development in others, and regression in the case of the USA. The promise of endless silver adrenaline gave rise to a depression that ended with the violation of the very rules that were created: sanctions, tariffs and accusations of illegal copying and ““overcapacity” industrial. The guilt of being big!

Of course, anyone who follows these things will have noticed that ASPI – Australian Strategic Policy Institute – says that, of the 64 critical technologies, China dominates in 57 (!!!!) and, in most of them, in an absolutely resounding way.[1] In those areas where it does not dominate, it is heading in that direction. But the most interesting thing is what has happened in the last 22 years: of these 57 technologies that China dominates, the US has been overtaken in 17 of them in the last 10 years. Areas in which it was ahead, it has fallen behind. Never to catch up.

In other words, anyone who is well informed cannot, under any circumstances, consider themselves caught off guard by what happened with DeepSeek. Quite the opposite! A phenomenon like DeepSeek could arrive at any moment, and in the next ASPI report, the US will certainly no longer be the leader in this area either.

Let's now look at the reason why the US places such an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence in LLMs (Large Language Models). This is not a coincidence and is closely related to what I mentioned earlier: in each technological area that the US convinces itself it dominates, the tendency is to convince the world of its absolute indispensability, the exclusivity of its offer and the enormous monetary value that comes with satisfying the need created. This hyping not only attracts risk investment but also attracts academic cooperation and access to technological development capacity and registration of intellectual and industrial property, almost free of charge. All at the expense of the state (the states, in this case) and with profits that are as inflated as they are fabulous.

In the case of Large Language Models, as is the case with DeepSeek, which competes directly with Open AI and its Chat GPT, this is the only – and let’s say “the only” – area of ​​Artificial Intelligence that the US still partially controls. In this specific case, the ASPI considered Google to have the most advanced model of “Natural Language Processing”. But in everything else, Machine Learning, to Advance Data Processing, Artificial intelligence algorithms and hardware accelerators, Adversarial AI ou Advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication, China already dominates in relation to the USA. In other words, the USA commands one of the components of Artificial Intelligence used to build large language models (LLM). But, in other components, it is China that commands.

So the story becomes very easy to tell. The US had to ensure that, at least in this case, the People's Republic of China would not catch up with them, using the entire trade war over semiconductors and their printers in an attempt to curtail the technological development of the Asian giant. If it reduced its data processing capacity, it might delay its ability to process data en masse or train algorithms, for example.

This entire attack was based on the assumption that without Nvidia's fabulous and most advanced semiconductors, it would not be possible to develop the necessary processing capacity to overtake the US. DeepSeek has disproved all of this, as we can see. With a fraction of the investment, processing capacity, less advanced semiconductors and a negligible fee for the service to developers, as had happened with 5G with Huawei, electric vehicles, photovoltaic panels, Cuban vaccines or Russian weapons, DeepSeek promises to halt the adrenaline rushes resulting from the exorbitant public investments promised and planned.

The disappointment is clear. In the US, while people are thrown out onto the streets when they contract a moderately serious disease, and the poorest 50% live in multiple jobs and have a quality of life at third world levels, the oligarchy hi-tech compete to see who is the super-rich, the super-richest of all! Elon Musk will ask himself, in front of the mirror, when he wakes up “mirror on the wall, who is richer than me”?

That's why it didn't take long for them to resort to the usual deception. If the People's Republic of China has surpassed the US in yet another critical technology, then it's because it copied it. Amid accusations by Microsoft and Open AI that DeepSeek is a copy of some US technology, it's symptomatic that, right after the news that the entire US edifice of Large Language Models, the Chinese application servers were attacked with everything there was to attack in terms of computing.

This happened with Pfizer during the Covid-19 pandemic, when social media was used to suppress the damage caused by the vaccine and the US imperial network was used to prevent, or at least contain, the entry of vaccines from other countries. The idea that a Chinese technological success always corresponds to a copy of a North American technology is already ridiculous. Just look at how ridiculous Trump was when he said that Russia had stolen hypersonic technology from the US. One day they will say that the wheel was invented there and that the fire started in some bonfire in the old West.

This stance demonstrates, however, the existence of an elephant in the room and that no one on average has yet mainstream had the courage to face it: the fact is that the dominance of the USA, before its vassals, is based on an idea of ​​economic superiority (the largest economy), military superiority (the best army), political superiority and cultural superiority (the most knowledgeable and evolved). Without this supposed superiority, everything would collapse.

Hence, the US’s behaviour in this matter reveals its state of mind: they know that China is overtaking them; they know that China’s advance will only increase in the future. The whole strategy of “containment” is not really “containment”. The US, as in the economy measured by GDP and dollars, tries to create the idea that it is in a position of primacy, which allows it to contain those below it. But what the US oligarchic elite denounces with this behaviour is something else: the desperation of those who see their opponents slipping away and try, at any cost, to keep them from slipping away even further. It is not a case of a winner containing the second place, but the opposite.

And this brings me to the final conclusion, which is even more difficult for the US, its army of commentators and its court of junkies super-rich. What the People's Republic of China demonstrates – as Russia had already demonstrated in Ukraine with its military superiority – is that the Western economic model and, in particular, the neoliberal model of exploitation, based on financial accumulation and the instrumentalization of production, solely as a pretext for financial gain, is historically outdated!

While others, such as China, convinced of the usefulness of a technology, try to make its use widespread, making it accessible, in the West everything works the other way around. If an electric vehicle is cheaper for the owner, per kilometer driven, then it has to be very expensive; if AI is useful for companies, it has to be very expensive; and so on. Never in a logic of technological democratization, but of its elitism.

But the most serious thing about all this is that it is not only the Western, neoliberal, imperialist and financialized mode of production that has been historically outdated. It is contemporary economic theory itself, which presents economics not as a social science but as an exact science, thus avoiding the major questions of economics itself: what resources do I produce, how do I distribute them, to whom and in what quantities.

On the contrary, neoliberal economic theory assumes that the market is self-regulating and, therefore, the big questions about the allocation of resources do not need to be answered. It all comes down to the accounting management of the money in circulation, which, not at all mathematically and very politically, will always be added and subtracted in the same accounts, with a few gaining more and more and almost everyone else losing everything.

The fact is that the policy of “containment”, embodied in massive doses of sanctions and tariffs, forces adversaries to develop real economies, in the Marxist sense of the term, in which the aim is to satisfy the material needs of their respective peoples, a process measured by the continued increase in the quality and quantity with which these needs are satisfied. And this is the main characteristic that Western “economists”, or those with Westernized thinking, do not understand about the Chinese economy.

In an economy organized under productivist and Marxist principles, it matters little how much money circulates and accumulates if it does not serve to develop the country. Economic success is measured by increases in wages, construction and housing, access to health, education and technological development. That is why they have seen China collapse for 40 years, but cannot explain why it has not happened. It is as if they are locked in a sphere, looking for a different angle.

But even when the countries that are attacked are not ideologically governed by such principles, the very model of aggression that the US and the West apply to dozens of these nations forces them to develop more rational economic models, in which rationality is not measured by the amount of money accumulated, but by the number of needs met in emergency mode. To do so, they must develop more resilient and long-lasting economic instruments that their populations see as capable of generating optimism, without which everything would collapse.

In contrast, in the globalist, Western neoliberal model, production decisions are made not based on concrete needs and their satisfaction – if they were, they would not have moved to other places – but based on the adrenaline caused by the promise of fabulous profits for a tiny cohort. And this is what I observe when I analyze the disparity in resources used between DeepSeek and the North American models. In one case, the model created is the result of a logic of cooperation, largely based on a love of science, in which a hedge fund owner does not mind sharing a model he owns, in order to, at a risk he has assumed, invite hundreds of other technicians to share with him the development of something innovative.

The result, as is typical of someone who is not here to get rich, is shared in open-source or at a very reduced price. The objective is to satisfy a need, whether for knowledge or material. Therefore, it must be accessible and for this the Chinese state contributes taxpayers' money.

It is not a question of evil or goodness, but of the system and its objectives. Thus, the Western system, based in the US, is the antithesis of the way of operating that gave rise to DeepSeek. Cooperation is discouraged and competition is exalted, and everything is developed to enrich, to produce “unicorns”. The state subsidizes to generate financial returns for the oligarchy.

In the US, all that is left in terms of production is what promises easy money in huge quantities. Everything has to be expensive, very expensive, to make a lot of money. From weapons to medicines, from vaccines to semiconductors. The American people – and the Europeans – are prisoners of a logic of accumulation and concentration that, instead of contributing to the satisfaction of their needs, aggravates them. The economy with the most accumulated capital is the economy that produces the highest costs of an essential good: health. This is a “populist” policy.

Therefore, having been historically surpassed by China, Vietnam and others who, even if they do not directly assume it, but apply the most advanced, rational and fair economic teachings, the Anglo-Saxon neoliberal model still subsists and deceives the West. Forcing us to live a neoliberal fascism, à la Javier Milei, so that what we already know to be true becomes visible.

History has already shown that modes of production are surpassed when one emerges that satisfies material needs more effectively than the previous one. After all, that is what the economy is for, to manage scarce resources with a view to satisfying material needs. When a model or mode of production fails in this regard, as is the case with the Western neoliberal globalist model, it is considered historically surpassed. This was not the case with the USSR; an initial and flawed experience, as is typical, but it will be the case with China, which, although not as economically advanced, is nevertheless more effective in the historical challenge it poses.

In the case of the West, and the US in particular, the model will continue for a long time, in constant agony until its final collapse. Until then, the oligarchy will do everything to maintain it, from internal repression to external aggression. And this is another symptom of failure. When a model is failing, the oligarchy's response is always the same: repression and aggression, and this final phase is extremely hard on the people. In order not to lose their privileges, the super-rich throw everything into repression.

History tells us that the people suffer, but fascism is always defeated, whatever its name and form. Pink, rainbow or black. In a blue suit and white shirt or cardigan boots. Only when it is possible to see it is it possible to find the way to defeat it.

And so Deepseek announced, with a bang, the human unsustainability and historical obsolescence of the neoliberalism that characterizes the Western economic model. Now it remains to put its ultimate meaning into practice: the neoliberal capitalist model has just been historically dated! All that remains is for it to die!

*Hugo Dionísio is a lawyer, geopolitical analyst, researcher at the Studies Office of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP-IN).

Originally published in Strategic Culture Fundation [https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/01/30/o-deepseek-anunciau-com-estrondo-obsolescencia-historica-do-neoliberalismo-ocidental/]

Note


[1] https://ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2024-08/ASPIs%20two-decade%20Critical%20Technology%20Tracker_1.pdf?VersionId=1p.Rx9MIuZyK5A5w1SDKIpE2EGNB_H8r


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