US, EU, even China and India. Regardless where you are, the economy sucks, housing is not affordable, prices are high, jobs are stagnant and class mobility is nonexistent (except maybe in China).
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As the other users have said, it is due to the refusal to abandon the neoliberal model of capitalism, which equates concentration of wealth with its efficiency of production (as centralization = efficiency). This is, of course, horseshit, but it is the moral and economic justification that the wealthy use to continue to concentrate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer ‘productive’ individuals.
yeah more and more i believe neoliberalism was never developed as an actual ideology. it was just a way to paper over total seizure of all public wealth by the bourgeois and give them an “intellectual” justification
i honestly don’t think anyone but normie rubes believe in it wholeheartedly.
first you had ayn rand and her ideologies basically felicitate the bourgeois but it was just too much and too extreme.
so a “tamer” version was developed and tied to post-fascism instead of right-libertarianism, and laundered through the corpse of dying Keynesian economic liberalism.
It was also atheist. You needed to figure out a way to get the Protestant psychos on board.
like radical vs moderate market libertarianism or something (i just made that up)
needed the moderate version tied to Prosperity theology becoming dominant among evangelicals the timing was perfect.
Refusal to abandon the neoliberal model, because why would they?
I can feel the spectre of a user in this post.
The more and more I learn, the more and more I’m drawn to XHS posting.
That poster always has good takes with deep analysis and then someone responds “nuh uh”
That is 100% not true. XHS often takes credit for socialist achievements that they had no hand in creating, using that to belittle American leftists, and is subsequently a complete dunce when it comes to american domestic politics. They had paragraphs of justification on why voting for Biden is the best choice, while also believing that Biden was some Machiavellian mastermind, as opposed to a senile old man herded by staffers.
Just because their takes are long and have some degree of justification and reasoning does not make them ‘deep’. XHS has only been right in so far as ‘nothing ever happens’, and as long as nothing continues to happen, they will continue to be correct. Are they correct for the right reason? Who knows! But if their reasoning for why China is doing what it is doing is the same quality as why Biden was doing what he was doing, then they are wildly and completely off base.
I wasn’t around during election season, so I can’t comment about the Biden thing in particular, though I do know my pain point with their analysis was of the American left, where I thought they were correct in a sense, but one that was somewhat myopic in nature and missed details that are easier to see on the ground here, as well as some things just aren’t said loudly via organizations’ public broadcasting.
They are good at reading books and articles particularly around international finance and then synthesizing that myriad information into a fairly cohesive whole.
However, to be a bit lib about it, they are not actually in the room where it happens. Which becomes painfully clear when I read anything they talk about that deals directly with my personal organizing experience in the U.S., within and without the Democratic party. It’s my pretty typical criticism of most journalists.
Shipwreck had their awful election takes in their other alts. They would post these massive tl;dr screeds about how Biden was a brilliant mastermind in leveraging the power of USD as a financial weapon only to end the screed with “anyways, you should vote for Biden in 2024 because he’s better for trans people.”
anyways, you should vote for Biden in 2024 because he’s better for trans people
when the bit is good the bit is good lmfao
Biden was a brilliant mastermind in leveraging the power of USD as a financial weapon
That’s not what I said. I said that Biden’s big gamble with raising the interest rates had exposed the weakness of the American financial capitalist system and could lead to global de-dollarization. However, they correctly bet that China (the only large economy capable of challenging them) would not be willing to take up the challenger role, and as such the US got away with it.
This position still remains completely correct, for China has only continued to defend the “free trade” against America’s protectionism. Until China has shown a willingness to abandon its IMF export-led growth strategy and turn away from the neoliberal model, I remain correct.
There is a lot of misrepresentation of my arguments as though people who don’t like what I’m saying are unwilling to discuss something complex and nuanced.
Not them, but I think the world needs a big shock that affects everyone for something to happen.
Neoliberalism was in part started (at the least massively helped) by Israel’s wars, I think it will play a role in whatever comes next, ie something happening.
We will see. The biggest thing that I am seeing is that we are going to get to a point in many countries where you will have a lack of elite reproduction (proletariazation), which will inevitably trigger a class crisis. Especially if they aren’t able to reproduce the liberal institutions that keeps the entire justification machine going.
There are several things coming to a head. I just don’t know which of them, if any, will actually be the X-factor.
I mostly see Shipwreck as someone who doesn’t take their posting seriously. Their posting is actually pretty funny if you don’t take what they say that seriously. There’s that time when they asked whether China should nuke the US after getting nuked by the US. It’s not a serious question.
Even them being wrong about the US all the time is a lot funnier if you imagine it’s an extended bit about how people here praise China despite never actually setting foot in China nor even personally knowing Chinese people. Perhaps Shipwreck is wrong about the US in the same exact way people here are wrong about China.
If that is the case, then they should be banned because it’s a tiresome bit. I doubt it is one though.
I praise China, or more reasonably, give them the benefit of the doubt because the Chinese people I meet do like China, and in general I think their way of doing stuff makes more sense than whatever backwards ass way we do, even with their neoliberal brain worms. They at least take the idea of having companies compete in a market seriously.
often takes credit for socialist achievements that they had no hand in creating
I never took credit, I took the lessons.
using that to belittle American leftists
I did not belittle them, I pointed out their mistakes.
They had paragraphs of justification on why voting for Biden is the best choice
Shows that you didn’t even bother to understand my arguments. I said that if the American left is not willing to fight it to the end, it would be better to have a Biden/Harris Democrat for another 4 years while accumulating strength in between.
Turns out I was right: Trump DOJ is looking at ways to ban transgender Americans from owning guns
The American left has no answer to that.
while also believing that Biden was some Machiavellian mastermind, as opposed to a senile old man herded by staffers.
I have pointed out many times that Biden’s team made a huge gamble on raising the interest rates, which exposed the weakness of the American financial capitalist system. However, they correct bet that China - the only superpower that has the economy to challenge the dollar hegemony - would be unwilling to take on that task and challenge the global neoliberal free trade order.
This stance remains to be correct, until China shows a willingness to abandon its IMF export-led growth strategy and turn domestic consumption. Again, shows that you didn’t even bother to understand the nuances of my arguments.
With respect, I find many Americans like to see things in very black and white with little room for nuances. Maybe it’s the comic books, I don’t know.
And I explained to you, repeatedly, that the American Left does not gain strength under Biden or Harris, they are pacified. Again, you are pretending insight as if you are here, on the ground, as if the lessons you have learned didn’t come from second hand knowledge of other people’s accomplishments.
Do you actually think that ‘it’s good for the PRC to have allied NATO and to have crushed the USSR’ was a good take?
I didn’t see that 🤯
I never said it was good. I said that China had to respond to Soviet aggression, or at least the perception of it. When you’re threatening China, you are playing with fire.
Besides, are you going to deny the success of the Chinese model?
I never said it was good.
You are quite literally going to justify the PRC doing that in the rest of your comment.
It is a shame that you deleted your old comments despite, apparently, still sticking to the same beliefs. Now you get to say whatever is convenient for you about the claims you made then (unless relevant parts have been quoted).I said that China had to respond to Soviet aggression, or at least the perception of it.
No, it didn’t have to respond to the Soviet ‘aggression’. Especially not by allying the most evil polity in the world in order to support the horrors of colonialism.
This is extra silly considering that you said that the USSR and the PRC engaging in joint military preparations to oppose NATO was somehow an offense of the PRC by the USSR.Besides, are you going to deny the success of the Chinese model?
If by ‘the Chinese model’ you mean the economic system of the PRC since the privatisation, then you have to contend with facts like the worse situation with workers’ rights and guarantees compared to how things work in planned economies, like the loss of guaranteed housing and guaranteed healthcare, as well as the PRC becoming dependent on colonial exploitation of the rest of the world by NATO.
People love to point to the PRC advancing technologically at a faster rate than NATO, as well as to the bullshit ‘extreme poverty’ statistic that doesn’t actually convey anything of note, but fail to actually point to any benefits that workers get that compensate for the loss of housing and healthcare, and seem to think that the PRC wouldn’t have access to a large force of highly educated researchers without NATO’s investments.
People also like to forget that, because of the PRC’s reliance on NATO and NATO’s exploitation of the rest of the world, its leadership is interested in maintaining the status quo, rather than in helping liberate the rest of the world (which the USSR did contribute to).If you meant the PRC allying with the most evil polity in the world, then the world is generally in a worse place than it was when the USSR existed - both because of the garbage states that arose on its corpse, and because there is now no such force that is willing to help anti-colonial liberation movements of the world, - and, considering that you seem to believe that the PRC had a significant contribution to the destruction of the USSR, you are saying that making the vast majority of the world worse was somehow good and successful.
Like, one can argue that the PRC privitising its economy was somehow necessary (though, let’s be honest, it wasn’t at least until the USSR got Gorbachyov), but there isn’t a serious argument about the PRC allying NATO being necessary.
Because we are losing the class war.
No, the class war is finally kicking back into gear.
Both can be true. Some workers have finally started to realise they’re even in a class war. We’re still losing horribly on every front.
Some stupid people at the negotiating table calm themselves with talk that we can retreat further, as we have a lot of wages, a lot of treats, a lot of free time and that there will always be much bread for us. They want to justify the infamous behaviour at the workplace. But such talk is a falsehood, helpful only to our enemies.
Each union organizer, union member and communist should understand that our means are not limitless. The territory of the working class is not a desert, but people – workers, peasants, intelligentsia, our fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, children. The territory of the working class which the enemy has captured and aims to capture is bread and other products for the working class, railways. After the loss of USSR, GDR, Poland, and other areas we have much less territory, much fewer people, bread, metal, plants and factories. We have lost more than 300 million people, more than 3 trillion dollars of surplus value annually. Now we do not have predominance over the capitalists in human reserves, in reserves of bread. To retreat further – means to waste ourselves and to waste at the same time our class.
Therefore it is necessary to eliminate talk that we have the capability endlessly to retreat, that we have a lot of wages, that our class is great and rich, that there is a large population, and that bread always will be abundant. Such talk is false and parasitic, it weakens us and benefits the enemy, if we do not stop retreating we will be without bread, without wages, without treats, without grill, without factories and plants, without railways.
This leads to the conclusion, it is time to finish retreating. Not one step back! Such should now be our main slogan.
Other than the DPRK and Cuba, there is no country that has rejected the global neoliberal market economy completely. And in the cases of the countries I just mentioned, it wasn’t by choice given the sanctions war waged against them by said system.
Will this change? It has to, but the devil is in the details and the US is getting ahead of that transition post-COVID and projecting military and economic assaults everywhere.
I bumped my ass into the button that makes the economy bad
top quintile getting more treats after covid, hoovering (😉) up all the labor
if one were to look at the profits of all corpos inside amerikkka, one can notice profits increased by like 20-30%
euros are doing that + paying vassal tributes, china still meh mehs around socializing means of production, although they do be curbing profit part of porkies shits
There Is No Alternative
the vast majority of resources of the world are tied up in the hands of unproductive people and sectors, like finance.
Tesla market cap is 1 trillion dollars
Imagine if we liquidated that shit and spent it on hospitals. Or schools. Or rail.
TBH, market capitalization is even less real than other fictitious capital.
The profit motive.
Everyone else beat me to it. Neoliberalism bad but still popular.
its the economy! stupid
Mute compulsion
Look up the phrase “smash and grab”.
part of the reason is no one has a solution to the massive increase in elderly people due to modern medicine.
the longer they live the more of a problem they are on the social security side of a given nation, and the reason why population growth keeps on getting pushed regardless of country.
part of the reason is no one has a solution to the massive increase in elderly people due to modern medicine.
solution: richer people get slightly less treats (possibly), put un/underutilized labor into better work. don’t fall for dependency ratio propaganda.
also, this isn’t because of elderly people, most third world countries, including India have young populations who are un/underemployed, instead of improving the productive forces and material conditions, their labor is being wasted. they will get old, stay poor and the country won’t be able to utilize its ‘demographic dividend’.
hence why i mentioned part. unless we consider countries like china lib now, they are faced with the same problem.
i do agree that theres a massive missmanagement of labor hemce why I only said it was part of the problem. not THE problem.
They are practicing Socialism with Chinese characters. Those Chinese characteristics are an adherence to the neo-liberal model set in motion by Nixon and codified under Reagan and Clinton. It basically means that while they do follow a neoliberal model of finance, as opposed to Marxist, they are also willing to exert far more direct productive control over the bourgeois in their nation.
In the U.S. the government gives money to companies and banks that it needs to do well for the sake of the nation, but does not gain a share of the control over the investment, instead opting to exert it’s power over the populace through an ever increasingly complicated and yet shrinking, policy of regulations and tax codes. They are essentially attempting to manage the company from outside the company. The Chinese state on the other hand has controlling shares of companies, particularly the inherent monopolies, that it gives money to, in addition to that regulatory regime, which is much similar to how the U.S. operated in the 50’s, it then also uses that money for massive infrastructure and educational projects.
So China are libs, which is why they are experiencing the problems that they are experiencing, but they, unlike the U.S., have a possible ideological off-ramp from neoliberal finance that currently is holds some degree of power over the bourgeois they can take.
The question is will they be able to recognize it and use it, or if they themselves are dogmatic adherents to the tenants. Basically, are they truly practicing Dengist socialist theory, or have they converted themselves purely towards neoliberal economics.
The problem is sound finance neoliberal mindset.
China doesn’t face a demographic crisis in the way many think even in its present form. It can even reverse some of the birth rate decline if it pushes up wages, guarantees employment and puts a cap on working hours.
You are pinning something that may happen decades from now as an excuse for unemployment and wasted resources today.
Does “saving” money by allowing unemployment help mobilize Healthcare resources in the future? No. In fact it does the opposite. Real resources cannot be transferred across time by “saving” money. People get older, demographics change as time passes and austerity only hurts in this regard.
China doesn’t face a demographic crisis in the way many think even in its present form. It can even reverse some of the birth rate decline if it pushes up wages, guarantees employment and puts a cap on working hours.
Then why are government workers at some point going around asking woman to get pregnant, I understand that its possible for them to push up wages and lower working hours, but the current situation doesn’t all point to that direction (im aware of them trying to cut down and enforce the removal of 996, however effective or not it may be)
China has the opportunity to as you said, just pay them more, but they haven’t quite yet done so.
I’m saying what should be done. Calling asking women to get pregnant is analogous to YIMBYs calling for just building more homes, a very micro “solution” to a macro level issue. It is very much linked to growth for growth sake attitude.
Free childcare, guaranteed employment, fixed hours, labor protections is how you fix declining fertility. Do all this not focusing on fertility rates but because it’s the right thing to do for workers.
no one has a solution to [problem with obvious solution]
yup, it’s libbin’ time
This is wildly incorrect. If it was that case then we would not see the amount of young person unemployment. You would expect to see full youth employment and elder care falling through the cracks due to a lack of availability of labor. This simply isn’t the case.
Again the reason for this is that capitalism ideologically justifies itself by claiming that it creates efficiency by concentrating productive forces into the hands of fewer and fewer ‘productive’ individuals. However, all that means in practice is that unless you are some kind of born genius, capital will not invest time and money into you, and even then, you have to be born to the correct family with the correct connections to recognize that genius.
It is a form of economic eugenics.
This, coupled with the fact that financial capital is much easier to generate than real productive capital, means that wealth will continue to be concentrated into the hands of the financial markets and the few industries that facilitate them. A bare bones structure will be kept in place to trade around, but their ideal scenario is them trading a closed briefcase back and forth, speculating on what is inside the briefcase, but never opening it up, forever.
“kill the elderly” isn’t the clever solution you think it is
Death camps are the solution to the useless eaters. You are straight spouting Nazi ideology. Before the green revolution something like 90% the population was involved in food production now it is less than 20 but yet somehow we still cannot care for our elders because we lack workers?
its not lack of workers, rather its usually work that not many like to go into. Its for example sorta like trucking. It ends up requiring a specific kind of lifestyle in order to get people who want to be in the position. Back then, people would have more time at home so elderly care would be a family thing. That has slowly started to shift away overtime as core families are more likely now to not be in the same household as back then. There’s a lot of aspects to it.
Your first post says it is a lack of workers and we have no solution to that. Now you say there are plenty of workers.
im not saying theres plenty of workers at all, its not a desireable job. the labour still exists, its just divided unevenly because some jobs are way more desirable than others
