It's not like there's only two options.

How about they just don't treat their workers in the Global South as lesser than ones in rich countries, for starters?

> objectively improving conditions there

Which conditions specifically? The very act of picking conditions and what constitutes an improvement introduces subjectivity already.

But if they don’t hire anyone there they’re being exclusionary and protectionist, possibly imperialist, maybe even racist.

Foreign companies suddenly increasing local wage levels isn't popular with local governments because it means all the local essential workers, doctors, government employees etc quit their jobs to work for the foreign company.

What you’ve just described there is capitalism, and the capture of crystallised labour-time by the capital classes.

Thing is, we tried the alternative. Quite a few times. The outcomes were considerably worse for everyone than capitalist economies.

I would say it’s no less convenient for those that tend to overuse the word to label anything as colonialism or terrorism. It absolves them from building any sort of coherent and substantiated argument.

Do you play factorio and use a prediction market?

Or restrained them from imperialism.

> You left out "choice" part.

Could you rephrase your argument here? I'm having some trouble understanding this sentence fragment.

If you're trying to pull up some old trope about how people are choosing to get shit wages for shit work, then let me remind you that the alternative is starvation . Some fine choice.

> And you confused capitalism with colonialism.

I didn't confuse anything, I linked a famous piece of political theory positing they are interlinked phenomena.

> If you did that on purpose, you brought up whataboutism.

I'm also confused by what you are trying to say here. Who brought up whataboutism? I never spoke of it? Didn't you just bring it up? I'm confused.

> I aint playing your game diverting attention from my comment.

Nobody's diverting. I was directly engaging with it and providing some theory to further understanding and illustrate different perspectives on a term people sometimes get tripped up by.

It is telling you perceive anything but uncritical agreement as diversion. I would encourage you to bring the spirit of curiosity the guidelines call for.

Most people are poor because being poor is the natural state of sentient beings. You should be amazed anyone is ever not poor.

"Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like force over smaller and weaker countries, for economic gain,"

that's definitionally colonilism under imperialism.

"but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left."

not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction. Nations that kick out the foreign influence under libertaory action often are sanctioned or invaded to try and topple them and revert to depedance on western intervention, but, when they succeed, rights and success often are much increased for the people in them, see "Human Rights in the USSR" by albert syzmenski, who uses only western sources for the book to steelman his position.

The western dependence happens through layers of coordinated and planned proxy vasselization. See the books "Unequal exchange" by Arghiri Emmanuel and "superimperilaism" by michael hudson for more details and scientific treatments of the question. "Inventing Reality" by Micheal Parenti might be another good read for you!

"But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're all serfs of usury by the international banking system which runs on getting us addicted to debt which we and future generations are forced to pay off without being asked if we agree with it,"

Glad that one of the other sibling comments looked this quote up so I didn't have to. Fully "growing the scope:"

> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.

> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.

> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.

-- "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"

"Then that's not colonialism, it's just serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest."

This distinction collapses under the scientific understandings of imperialism and colonialism, linked above in more detail.