Communists? Anarchists? That is not their stated aim.
To contrast with Neoliberalism - “financial freedom” of a “free market” is a core tenet, including the continued existence of a capitalist class (those who generate wealth through capital/assets rather than labour), which requires a dichotomy of capitalists and workers (cannot have a society of just capitalists since someone has to clean gutters and such) and therefore it’s not possible to fully democratize the economy.
It’s why democracies are so unpopular in the west now, almost everyone understands on some level that votes just switch colours and a few key details and have no way of affecting larger power dynamics guided by wealth. The people simply have no democratic voice in the way that actually matters.
I’m an anarchist, but as far as I understand my theory, Neoliberals don’t actually argue that this exploitation isn’t a stated aim or core part of their ideology, rather that this exploitation is mutually beneficial, even something as obviously exploitative as sweatshop labour is preferable to just having no money and no food.
I think the issue is that this works only some of the time, only as long as it is cheaper to actually borrow millions for insane R&D and megaprojects affairs that promise guaranteed returns, and otherwise it instead incentivizes the creation of extractive institutions instead where every capitalist becomes an economic rent-seeker, forcing all wealth to “trickle” up, not down, and then Marx’s predictions of internal contradictions start coming true.
The answer neoliberals pose to this is regulation, which would be good if not for the contradiction that from my understanding neoliberals also propose market solutions where possible, generally privatised/market solutions are seen as superior to Keynesian SocDem adjacent ones, which results in the assets of a government being exposed to markets as investment opportunities.
Even with all the added value that may bring, (best case e.g. shitty swamp turned into a city park by a rich investor with a vision), this will directly transfer assets and value, and ultimately - power, from governments to private entities. The end result of this is that inevitably capitalists simply have far more economic power than the public institutions meant to keep them in check, whether small corruption or mass-disinformation campaigns, they simply muscle their way into the democratic process to facilitate further and further extraction.
This inevitably leads to Fascism where the government and capitalists merge together, they disempower the working class through austerity measures while financially reckless behaviour gets them government hand-outs because they are simply too big, too important of an institution to fail anymore, they buy out the press and use misinformation to incite bigotry and patriotic fervour, while gunning for power on platforms of “cutting government waste” to further defund public programs, thereby increasing their own bargaining power to exploit the working class.
Ultimately the working class have no choice and surrender to whatever exploitation they may face once the capitalists own all assets, many of them become traitors and side with those with power in exchange for wealth, status and protection, even if it means threatening violence and following through on any workers who want to take that power back.
With enough technology amassed in few enough hands, the capitalists are now free to unleash horrors beyond our imagining on anyone they please.
The solution to prevent this is clear: we need to protect public institutions from privatisation, and enforce hard limits on how and when free market economics can play out, and strive towards more and more egalitarian distribution of power, where the creation of wealth and economic activity’s primary purpose is maximisation of happiness / minimisation of suffering for everyone, rather than elevation of the few.
Those in power would never give up a shot at near absolute power so easily, certainly not via the methods they ultimately control due to the power imbalance of their accumulated wealth, so it’s unlikely that electoralism can succeed, though reforms on the electoral level can and should be supported to limit capitalist influence on the public sector, but it’s likely that ultimately nothing short of a violent popular people’s revolution can save us now from an eternity of misery.
We may fail and end up with a politburo of apparatchiks and an army of red corpocops, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make a better world, especially when the trajectory for the current one is bleak beyond measure.
Its actually quite simple. Fascism is not a bug of capitalism, but a feature. If theres an economic crisis capitalism tends to swing against marginalised groups in order to stop the working class from revolting against their true oppressors. If you finally want to defeat fascism you have to defeat capitalism.
cause all non capitalist, especially countries have been the best countries in the world to live in, with best freedom indexes, most civil rights, happiest people and no mass murders, tortures, deaths rapes etc at all.
Just dont look at any real facts or history. Only consume propaganda from authoritarians.
You do know, that communism and authoritarianism are two completely different things? Communism by itself is neither authoriatarian, or democratic. A communist world aims at dissolving all borders to achieve global equality without any form of higher governance. This of course is something thats quite unlikely to ever happen. A totalitarian regieme is directly contradictary to the pure idea of communism, which is that everyone should have the freedom to support (or not support) society. Any form of violence (no matter what type of violence) to force people into a set system is therefore contradictory to these ideas. Just because we didnt see very good examples of communism (maybe cuba, but I dont know that much about it, so I cant really judge) this doesnt mean, that communism itself is an inherently dysunctional and bad system.
Also, we have seen much more violence being emitted from capitalistic states, even if they claim to care about human rights. Every year the EU pays quite a significant amount of money to Lybia, so that their coast guard stops refugees crossing the mediterranian sea, causing hundreds of deaths and trapping those who get “rescued” by the coast guard in a subhuman system, where rape and torture are normalised.
This does not mean to invalidate the harm done by self proclaimed communist regiemes, but to show that shitty practices are done by all kinds of different people.
If it fails every single fucking time it is not a working system.
If capitalism leads to bad wages and terrible house prices, communism leads to mass murder.
We have perfectly fine working hybrids, that are proven but seems like commies need their mass murder mix.
In the early 1900s the workers of the world were beginning to build the framework for the democratic collectivization of resources and labour. Elites considered this such a severe threat that they were organizing their own conferences on how to deal with it. This was stopped in most countries with one of two methods: concessions (like The New Deal) or fascism. Welfare or fear-mongering austerity politics.
To put this another way: some capitalists conspired to promote and ultimately install fascist authoritarians to fight socialism because it was in their class interests to do so. The various banana republics and other economic colonies of imperialist nations? Installed by capitalists. The forever wars that no one even wants? Believe it or not, also capitalists. These are not the moves made by freedom-loving people lol.
So I guess I should ask you: where are you consuming your propaganda from?
It’s because they’ve written off the populists as worthless and instead focus on the PMC liberals who are prioritizing DEI over class. Liberals see themselves as being closer to the capitalists than the filthy poors.
The truth: populists are way easier to convert than liberals because their class interests are the same as yours. They’ve been told lefties have dumb priorities but if you come in saying “jobs and families matter more than bathroom drama” they’re going to give you a chance.
Capitalism in crisis leads to right wing populist fascism and it is the liberals via the ratchet effect that give rise to authoritarian control for the capitalist class. Just wait. The liberals are too busy making investments in AI to bother with our silly rights. And you’ll see Trump will win a third term if he lives long enough. I mean, if you have framework, historical knowledge and you’ve paid attention long enough, you see the same reoccurring patterns. America is an imperialist nation and fascists are the useful idiots of empire. You know, we’ll see how this goes. Eventually, you know, it’ll get real enough for you to wake up and smell the coffee. If you’re comfortable, you won’t probably see it from… the tankies point of view. Oh, also. The United States supported Hitler during World War II. Tell me I’m wrong.
https://ohdbks.overdrive.com/ohdbks-clermont/content/media/3778967Hitlers American friends
That’s a really broad brush you got there. You can replace “liberals” with “people” here and be correct.
Even the term “liberal” is broad. Do you mean the modern political left, as in Democrats in the US? Or do you mean the original definition of liberalism, which was what the US was founded on?
That’s a really broad brush you got there. You can replace “liberals” with “people” here and be correct.
Most people tend to passively accept the political positions of their surroundings, yes.
Holy pedantry, you know exactly who I mean when I say liberals.
But let’s say political liberals, including the ones on both sides of the US political spectrum, since you need to frame it in a US centric way.
Even the most radical of the liberal thoughts in the world do not dare to think to address the fundamental issues with the socioeconomic system, though I guess that might be because they created it.
Even in your comment you can see the complete lack of political imagination, or any attempt to strive towards anything but the status quo.
I really don’t. You could be a conservative or a socialist ranting about “liberals” and those would be two very different groups of people. If you’re using it in the way a tankie would, then it’s literally anyone who isn’t a tankie. It’s a very overloaded term.
Even the most radical of the liberal thoughts in the world do not dare to think to address the fundamental issues with the socioeconomic system
That’s probably because they disagree with you on what the fundamental issues are, and what “ideal” looks like. Liberalism embraces inequality, preferring instead to focus on expanding opportunity. If your idea of the fundamental issue is inequality, of course you’ll find them unsatisfying.
There are a lot of interesting ideas within liberalism, but you need to be on board with the fundamental assumption that inequality is okay and even desirable.
I wonder why extremists hate liberals so much. They all talk of liberals with such disdain.
Liberals are capitalists first and foremost. Profit over human rights every time.
Who isn’t profit over human rights every time?
Communists? Anarchists? That is not their stated aim.
To contrast with Neoliberalism - “financial freedom” of a “free market” is a core tenet, including the continued existence of a capitalist class (those who generate wealth through capital/assets rather than labour), which requires a dichotomy of capitalists and workers (cannot have a society of just capitalists since someone has to clean gutters and such) and therefore it’s not possible to fully democratize the economy.
It’s why democracies are so unpopular in the west now, almost everyone understands on some level that votes just switch colours and a few key details and have no way of affecting larger power dynamics guided by wealth. The people simply have no democratic voice in the way that actually matters.
I’m an anarchist, but as far as I understand my theory, Neoliberals don’t actually argue that this exploitation isn’t a stated aim or core part of their ideology, rather that this exploitation is mutually beneficial, even something as obviously exploitative as sweatshop labour is preferable to just having no money and no food.
I think the issue is that this works only some of the time, only as long as it is cheaper to actually borrow millions for insane R&D and megaprojects affairs that promise guaranteed returns, and otherwise it instead incentivizes the creation of extractive institutions instead where every capitalist becomes an economic rent-seeker, forcing all wealth to “trickle” up, not down, and then Marx’s predictions of internal contradictions start coming true.
The answer neoliberals pose to this is regulation, which would be good if not for the contradiction that from my understanding neoliberals also propose market solutions where possible, generally privatised/market solutions are seen as superior to Keynesian SocDem adjacent ones, which results in the assets of a government being exposed to markets as investment opportunities.
Even with all the added value that may bring, (best case e.g. shitty swamp turned into a city park by a rich investor with a vision), this will directly transfer assets and value, and ultimately - power, from governments to private entities. The end result of this is that inevitably capitalists simply have far more economic power than the public institutions meant to keep them in check, whether small corruption or mass-disinformation campaigns, they simply muscle their way into the democratic process to facilitate further and further extraction.
This inevitably leads to Fascism where the government and capitalists merge together, they disempower the working class through austerity measures while financially reckless behaviour gets them government hand-outs because they are simply too big, too important of an institution to fail anymore, they buy out the press and use misinformation to incite bigotry and patriotic fervour, while gunning for power on platforms of “cutting government waste” to further defund public programs, thereby increasing their own bargaining power to exploit the working class.
Ultimately the working class have no choice and surrender to whatever exploitation they may face once the capitalists own all assets, many of them become traitors and side with those with power in exchange for wealth, status and protection, even if it means threatening violence and following through on any workers who want to take that power back.
With enough technology amassed in few enough hands, the capitalists are now free to unleash horrors beyond our imagining on anyone they please.
The solution to prevent this is clear: we need to protect public institutions from privatisation, and enforce hard limits on how and when free market economics can play out, and strive towards more and more egalitarian distribution of power, where the creation of wealth and economic activity’s primary purpose is maximisation of happiness / minimisation of suffering for everyone, rather than elevation of the few.
Those in power would never give up a shot at near absolute power so easily, certainly not via the methods they ultimately control due to the power imbalance of their accumulated wealth, so it’s unlikely that electoralism can succeed, though reforms on the electoral level can and should be supported to limit capitalist influence on the public sector, but it’s likely that ultimately nothing short of a violent popular people’s revolution can save us now from an eternity of misery.
We may fail and end up with a politburo of apparatchiks and an army of red corpocops, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make a better world, especially when the trajectory for the current one is bleak beyond measure.
Hear hear!!
Its actually quite simple. Fascism is not a bug of capitalism, but a feature. If theres an economic crisis capitalism tends to swing against marginalised groups in order to stop the working class from revolting against their true oppressors. If you finally want to defeat fascism you have to defeat capitalism.
cause all non capitalist, especially countries have been the best countries in the world to live in, with best freedom indexes, most civil rights, happiest people and no mass murders, tortures, deaths rapes etc at all.
Just dont look at any real facts or history. Only consume propaganda from authoritarians.
You do know, that communism and authoritarianism are two completely different things? Communism by itself is neither authoriatarian, or democratic. A communist world aims at dissolving all borders to achieve global equality without any form of higher governance. This of course is something thats quite unlikely to ever happen. A totalitarian regieme is directly contradictary to the pure idea of communism, which is that everyone should have the freedom to support (or not support) society. Any form of violence (no matter what type of violence) to force people into a set system is therefore contradictory to these ideas. Just because we didnt see very good examples of communism (maybe cuba, but I dont know that much about it, so I cant really judge) this doesnt mean, that communism itself is an inherently dysunctional and bad system.
Also, we have seen much more violence being emitted from capitalistic states, even if they claim to care about human rights. Every year the EU pays quite a significant amount of money to Lybia, so that their coast guard stops refugees crossing the mediterranian sea, causing hundreds of deaths and trapping those who get “rescued” by the coast guard in a subhuman system, where rape and torture are normalised.
This does not mean to invalidate the harm done by self proclaimed communist regiemes, but to show that shitty practices are done by all kinds of different people.
If it fails every single fucking time it is not a working system. If capitalism leads to bad wages and terrible house prices, communism leads to mass murder.
We have perfectly fine working hybrids, that are proven but seems like commies need their mass murder mix.
The United States was literally founded on a capitalist genocide.
In the early 1900s the workers of the world were beginning to build the framework for the democratic collectivization of resources and labour. Elites considered this such a severe threat that they were organizing their own conferences on how to deal with it. This was stopped in most countries with one of two methods: concessions (like The New Deal) or fascism. Welfare or fear-mongering austerity politics.
To put this another way: some capitalists conspired to promote and ultimately install fascist authoritarians to fight socialism because it was in their class interests to do so. The various banana republics and other economic colonies of imperialist nations? Installed by capitalists. The forever wars that no one even wants? Believe it or not, also capitalists. These are not the moves made by freedom-loving people lol.
So I guess I should ask you: where are you consuming your propaganda from?
okay commie mass genocide apoloigist.
lol this is the problem with liberals, they believe everyone else is reading propaganda except them.
The US is the most capitalist and the greatest abject failure.
Do not confuse capitalism with commerce. Commerce improves lives; capitalism seeks to destroy them for personal gain.
Liberalism is the old establishment. They want an extreme alternative to that. So of cause they do that.
It’s because they’ve written off the populists as worthless and instead focus on the PMC liberals who are prioritizing DEI over class. Liberals see themselves as being closer to the capitalists than the filthy poors.
The truth: populists are way easier to convert than liberals because their class interests are the same as yours. They’ve been told lefties have dumb priorities but if you come in saying “jobs and families matter more than bathroom drama” they’re going to give you a chance.
Bathroom drama is a thing that the right wing populists made up out of thin air.
I don’t give a fuck who made it up, I want democratic control of the economy. Anything else is secondary to that.
Capitalism in crisis leads to right wing populist fascism and it is the liberals via the ratchet effect that give rise to authoritarian control for the capitalist class. Just wait. The liberals are too busy making investments in AI to bother with our silly rights. And you’ll see Trump will win a third term if he lives long enough. I mean, if you have framework, historical knowledge and you’ve paid attention long enough, you see the same reoccurring patterns. America is an imperialist nation and fascists are the useful idiots of empire. You know, we’ll see how this goes. Eventually, you know, it’ll get real enough for you to wake up and smell the coffee. If you’re comfortable, you won’t probably see it from… the tankies point of view. Oh, also. The United States supported Hitler during World War II. Tell me I’m wrong. https://ohdbks.overdrive.com/ohdbks-clermont/content/media/3778967Hitlers American friends
You’re absolutely right yet for some reason everyone here hates it.
That’s a long way to say “just read theory bro”
Thought-terminating cliche.
Lazy canned response.
To be fair liberals are on average dumbasses who lack any sort of imagination of anything ever being better.
That’s a really broad brush you got there. You can replace “liberals” with “people” here and be correct.
Even the term “liberal” is broad. Do you mean the modern political left, as in Democrats in the US? Or do you mean the original definition of liberalism, which was what the US was founded on?
Most people tend to passively accept the political positions of their surroundings, yes.
Holy pedantry, you know exactly who I mean when I say liberals.
But let’s say political liberals, including the ones on both sides of the US political spectrum, since you need to frame it in a US centric way.
Even the most radical of the liberal thoughts in the world do not dare to think to address the fundamental issues with the socioeconomic system, though I guess that might be because they created it.
Even in your comment you can see the complete lack of political imagination, or any attempt to strive towards anything but the status quo.
I really don’t. You could be a conservative or a socialist ranting about “liberals” and those would be two very different groups of people. If you’re using it in the way a tankie would, then it’s literally anyone who isn’t a tankie. It’s a very overloaded term.
That’s probably because they disagree with you on what the fundamental issues are, and what “ideal” looks like. Liberalism embraces inequality, preferring instead to focus on expanding opportunity. If your idea of the fundamental issue is inequality, of course you’ll find them unsatisfying.
There are a lot of interesting ideas within liberalism, but you need to be on board with the fundamental assumption that inequality is okay and even desirable.
What about progressive liberalism?
“everything will be the same but Megacorp™ will have a rainbow flag profile pic on a site ran by a nazi in June”
Yes I think China is awful and capitalist too, what’s your next gotcha