/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2864138
because developmentalist national liberalism is a policy position while most of people's ideological sympathy comes from underlying emotions. e.g. if i'm weirdly homoerotic about the military and don't like foreigners then i'd like my country to be rich enough to support such a military and with enough industry that we don't need imports or immigration. if, on the contrary, i want everyone to be equal and for there to be no exploitation, i also want the country to be rich enough to support such a comprehensive system of social welfare (including education health etc) and want to find a way to avoid being exposed to the destabilising effects of international markets. the policy positions are superficially similar until you dig deeper into whether our industry should be making jet fighters or tractors.
(here's also where we'll find things get weird, since some communists are clearly on the "watches USSR military aesthetics compilations and wants there to be big tank parades again" types.)

particularly unhelpfully, the aesthetic that appeals to most people (mass factory work c.1960s) is basically gone. even if you on-shore industry, you won't bring back a mass industrial workforce because the whole point of industry is that it's easy to automate. the most likely future for developmental liberalism would be for the state to build massive infrastructure projects but to interfere even less in the economy as a whole, e.g. more like high-investment neoliberalism. (which runs into the problem that most people hate markets for being deeply counterintuitive and always think "something must be done [by the state]" when a problem appears.)

First of all, stop doing Great Man Theory. Nehru and Nasser as individuals are irrelevant.

To understand Indias development path from 1950s to early 1990s, you need to understand that it was based on collaboration between middle class and wealthy farmers, large private capitalists (Tata/Birla), and gigantic state monopolies. All three of these groups had a common interest in suppressing the development of normal competitive capitalism because it would weaken their monopolies, disrupt their ability to siphon off tax money, and shut down incompetent government companies.

So under the false guise of "socialism" they set up a political economy that deliberately hampered the development of private companies and markets, while protecting the large state monopolies, a select few large private companies, and maintained the political and economic dominance of agriculture which benefited the wealthy peasants.

This system persisted until foreign reserves were finally depleted due to excessive imports and insufficient domestic production. That forced the govt to finally adopt a more liberalized capitalist economy.

So nothing about the "Nehruvian system" is desirable. It was a capitalist system based on deliberately strangling the economy to benefit a small sliver of society. It was even worse than neoliberal capitalism which at least causes some economic growth.

>>2864138
>So why do today's ideological arguments not reflect this? Why is everyone cosplaying as a fascist or a communist when their policy positions remain fundamentally liberal?
The ghosts of the 20th century larp on the minds of people

>>2864138
>Why is liberalism constantly disparaged
Honestly, because people are LARPers.
They may disparage Liberalism, but the vast majority of them enjoy the fruits of Liberalism and don't realize it yet until those fruits are yanked out of their hands.

"Ideology that actually works but leaves people restless" doesn't hit the same as "ideology that's controversial and could potentially solve all my problems".

>>2864138
>>2864151
>>2864160
The problem with developmentalism is that, ever since the rate of profit began to decline in industrial capitalism, finance capital and financial speculation have increasingly dominated—a trend consolidated by neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. With the socialist bloc no longer posing a threat and the working class weakened, the bourgeoisie no longer needs to make concessions; instead, it can intensify capital accumulation, thereby eroding the welfare state.

The forces required to forge a conciliatory agreement between the national bourgeoisie and labor do not exist today; consequently, any attempt at such an agreement would be futile, as the entire bourgeoisie has been absorbed into joint-stock companies focused on financial market speculation. Financialization means that any funds available to this bourgeoisie for domestic investment will simply be used to purchase more shares on the market.

Instead of fantasizing about an agreement with the national bourgeoisie, one should employ state capitalism—utilizing state-owned enterprises directly—to hasten the arrival of a revolutionary situation, foster the creation and maintenance of cooperatives, and develop "dual power" through popular councils. All of this serves to facilitate the socialization of the economy.

Neoliberalism offers no benefits. Monopoly capitalism actually makes it easier to socialize the economy and allows for better economic direction, helping to counter the blackmail tactics employed by international imperialist capitalism.

>>2864690
I used to sympathise with this view but I've come to see it as a set of just-so stories: industry didn't go anywhere. The UK, the number-one case for deindustrialisation, still produces more value in manufactured goods than it did in the 1970s/80s. Its output has shrunk as a proportion but not in absolute terms, and on a global scale much of this just comes from moving industry around (which on the whole has been a good thing. 1.5 billion Chinese getting to middle-income level is a world historic miracle, not some tragedy just because it means nobody makes toy cars in Britain anymore.)

The claim that the welfare state has been eroded should be qualified. Welfare structures have been enshittified, sure, but absolute spending levels have generally trended upwards. Attempts at cost control have mostly failed. As regards domestic investment: this varies from country to country, but the single largest importer of investment capital in the world is the United States. The current AI fad would illustrate that it's not just shares either: A lot of investment is being thrown at physical infrastructure in the form of datacenters etc. (whether you think this is a good idea or not is a different question.)

I'm sceptical of state-capitalist developmentalism as an approach for most countries. The problem is that since state capacity has generally been weakened and the competence of government officials has generally declined, their ability to "beat the market" is weaker than ever. The best realistic scenario I can see is the decentralisation of power to a more local level so that (a) it's easier for leftists to obtain it and (b) each area can experiment and see what works in their specific circumstances or make the trade-offs they desire, and other areas can learn from their experiences.

I think we're going to look back on Neoliberalism, like Keynesianism, as having some beautiful elements that deserved to succeed. As we head for an era of arbitrary prejudice, warmongering, and social protection for capitalists but not for workers, the idea that we were all going to live in a borderless low-tax free trade utopia is going to look more and more appealing in hindsight. I think where neoliberals went wrong was to get side-tracked on tax cuts instead of doubling down on deregulation and privatisation, leaving the main role of the state being to administer income taxes with negative bands (e.g. zero-extra-admin-cost welfare) for the poor. Which is to be expected because most of their advocates were sociopaths, even if their ideas had a lot of truth in them and a certain respect for human dignity in the abstract.

>>2864696
Wrong. There is nothing beneficial about neoliberalism. Countries enter a spiral of debt that ends up in the hands of public debt speculators. Bourgeois democracy itself, meant for mass participation, becomes even more hostile with less public participation. Countries become dependent, lacking their own technology, with privatizations entering the private sector without public participation, further facilitating capitalist blackmail. This makes countries targets for coups, sabotage, and prevents them from acting outside the lie of more austerity, resulting in an economy solely focused on exporting primary products. All of this goes against the communist cause.

The Marxist position is the opposite of what you imagine. If there is to be war, so be it. The goal of communists is to overthrow the bourgeois state, and the more monopolistic state capitalism there is, the easier it will be to socialize the economy, preventing coercion so that the economy follows only international prices and the interests of finance capital.

These quotes prove that state capitalism must be defended against private capitalism and small-scale peasant commodity production.

<1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
<2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
[…]
<5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
<6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

<Karl Marx, 1848, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

<(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
[…]
<(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

<Frederick Engels, 1847, The Principles of Communism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

<10. All private banks will be replaced by a state bank whose bonds will have the character of legal tender.

<This measure will make it possible to regulate credit in the interests of the whole people and will thus undermine the dominance of the large financiers. By gradually replacing gold and silver by paper money, it will cheapen the indispensable instrument of bourgeois trade, the universal means of exchange, and will allow the gold and silver to have an outward effect. Ultimately, this measure is necessary to link the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie to the revolution.

<Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, March 1848, Demands of the Communist Party in Germany

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm

<3. Legal minimum wage, determined each year according to the local price of food, by a workers' statistical commission;

[…]

<11. Annulment of all the contracts that have alienated public property (banks, railways, mines, etc.), and the exploitation of all state-owned workshops to be entrusted to the workers who work there;

<Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, 1880, The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm

<For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

<There is no middle course here. The objective process of development is such that it is impossible to advance from monopolies (and the war has magnified their number, role and importance tenfold) without advancing towards socialism.
[…]
<Imperialist war is the eve of socialist revolution. And this not only because the horrors of the war give rise to proletarian revolt—no revolt can bring about socialism unless the economic conditions for socialism are ripe—but because state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs.

<Lenin, “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it” (1917)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm

You are acting merely as a lackey of imperialist capitalism; this is intolerable, and you will be punished as a liberal counter-revolutionary for spreading these lies of yours about "freedom" and "peace," which hold no value for me. The only acceptable peace is the peace of a socialist society cutting off all funding to finance capital abroad; the only acceptable freedom is proletarian freedom to maintain its supremacy as a class.

My position is not Keynesianism, but rather the use of state capitalism to intensify the class struggle and the fall in the rate of profit, so that the bourgeois state collapses.

>>2864725
I think that almost everything you've said is empirically untrue. Public debts have increased in some countries but not in others, despite the GFC, the Coronavirus pandemic, and the global superpower deciding to completely lose its mind, there is no inherent reason countries need to get into debt. To take one example, New Zealand has a debt to GDP ratio of just 50% (and NZ is unusually exposed to global shocks, being almost entirely dependent on imported fuel and agricultural exports.)
There's basically no correlation between how economically liberal a country is and its debt to GDP ratio. Bourgeois democracy is a wash: it is true that many areas are no longer really controlled by politicians (power they gave up quite voluntarily for the most part) but public power over politicians has generally increased. Trump, for example, is in large part a phenomenon of a segment of the public who used to ignore politics because it is boring suddenly being engaged by an entertaining politician. The rise of Corbyn and Sanders is a similar phenomenon for the "better things are possible" side of the aisle.
>"dependent, lacking their own technology, with privatizations entering the private sector without public participation"
borders on gibberish but as best as I can respond to it: countries are all interdependent which is a good thing, technology transfer generally flows from trade (see Malaysia's rise to upper middle income country status and impending high-income country status) more effectively than from import-substitution, public sector industries have no inherent element of public participation (while nominally politically controlled, politicians very rarely intervene in the public interest in practice. look at Britain's NHS for example: there are lots of high-profile bottlenecks that could be fixed at the stroke of a pen, but politicians have in fact only interfered to remove treatment options.), and for the most part "capitalist blackmail" (e.g. deciding to dump bad investments) has served in recent years to avoid obviously moronic policies which any competent political system would've vetoed before they got that far. (e.g. trump tariffs, liz truss budget.)

Coup attempts peaked in the 1960s-70s and then declined precipitously in line with the rise of neoliberalism (~85 in 1980s, ~60 in 1990s, ~45 in 2000s, ~30 in 2010s) although obviously this also correlates with the end of the cold war, sabotage is not - on the whole - a major problem in most countries, and we do not see the situation of "an economy solely focused on exporting primary products" - the reality is that globally, growth is concentrated in the tertiary (e.g. service) sector. To my knowledge only five countries have seen their service sector's share of GDP shrink since 1980: Guyana, Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela, Libya, and Syria. The first two struck oil, the latter has run grotesquely incompetent economic policy by any standard, and the last two had civil wars. Indeed, in the last 3 primary production also suffered.

You do not adequately take into account the likelihood that there is war but no revolution given the comically dismal state of communist organisation. You do not take into account that you cannot simply wave a magic wand and socialise production. (Where, pray tell, will you find the administrators for this? Who is currently training them? Where does this magic state capacity come from?)

I am acting as a lackey of nothing. Neither you nor I will have any impact on anything by this conversation. I will be punished by nobody because you have no serious plans or mechanisms by which to punish me even if you only wanted to do so for being annoying. If the bourgeois state collapses either in the conditions I predict or in the please-don't-call-me-Keynesian conditions you desire, you will be caught completely unprepared before ultimately finding yourself on the sharp end of something much nastier.

>>2864138
>Why is liberalism constantly disparaged as bankrupt or illegitimate
because it is
> when all the alternatives to it end up looking exactly the same?
because while it's bankrupt it's preferable to being a neocolony. people want the developmentalist nationalism not the liberalism.

>>2864138
>It seems to me that the most popular political position these days is some form of developmentalist national liberalism
Not to be rude but developmentalist national liberalism doesn't mean anything. A liberal country isn't national or developmental. National developmentalism is a theory on the other hand but is associated with third world countries emerging to middle-income nations. I think that you're trying a word that fits technocratic management, but there aren't really one because it's not an ideology.

>Most people would like a strong but democratic state to intervene in the economy to eliminate […]
I don't think this is the case actually. Most people want a social-democrat state where the economy is more "fair" and regulated. The post-war keynesian consensus model has died for a long time and people have progressively stopped associating the absence of state-directed investment with unemployment. Similarly people aren't that interested in re-industrialization. It is a thing that exists in communities that have lost their primary source of income, but most of the population doesn't care about industrialization and is oblivious to the economy pivoting to service.

>Why is everyone cosplaying as a fascist or a communist when their policy positions remain fundamentally liberal?
I'm guessing that you meant the keynesian post-war consensus but it's because most people don't actually want that. The people larping Sorel or Stalin don't want a keynesian model. The ones that do don't even know who Sorel is because they're very often rural residents who have lost their job due to outsourcing to China and who have little to no education.

>>2864151
>you won't bring back a mass industrial workforce because the whole point of industry is that it's easy to automate
Not really. Automation has indeed made some plants not require human, but even then they require technical knowledge that high-skill workers provide. But as of yet, most plants still require a lot of human crews and maintenance which means jobs.

>>2864696
>The UK, the number-one case for deindustrialisation, still produces more value in manufactured goods than it did in the 1970s/80s
This is straight-up wrong. Even in absolute terms industry has declined. Coal, steel, textile and oil have declined. Manufacture has been stagnant but hasn't been able to recover from the recurring crisis. The only sector that has had growth is pharmaceutics.
The problem with deindustrialization aswell is that it diminishes the number of jobs providing high-value. And as it turns out, the western european model of wealfare was relying on jobs extracting a lot of surplus value to share the pie. Hence, deindustrialization isn't only a problem for the rural towns that have lost their jobs, it's also a problem for the whole of the population because loosing industry means loosing high-value added jobs which means diminishing the share of profit being used to fund the social programs.

>Welfare structures have been enshittified, sure, but absolute spending levels have generally trended upwards
Again this is not a good metric because it doesn't cover the actual quality of healthcare.

>I think we're going to look back on Neoliberalism
>As we head for an era of arbitrary prejudice, warmongering, and social protection for capitalists but not for workers
Genuinely what are you even talking about ? The keynesian consensus after ww2 existed because european nations had to prevent their population from siding with the USSR. Countries like France and Italy had at one point their communist parties at the top of every election. Neoliberalism is simply the return to the status-quo where the rich only offer to the state the most minimal concessions possible to not have the population revolt. Privatization, deregulation was never to improve the economic situation, it was to make a lot of money for private owners.

>the idea that we were all going to live in a borderless low-tax free trade utopia is going to look more and more appealing in hindsight
No offense but genuinely how do you even get to the point where you believe this shit ? You can literally just go outside and see the issues with all of the aforementionned point that line has. Neolibs have a very bizarre naiveté tbh, which makes their pseudo-intellectual attitude even more presomptuous.

>>2864742
No he's correct except for the debt part. Economic sovereignty is a real thing and has real impact. Whether it's being the public having a voice over decisions or keeping high-value industrial models to share the profit from, there is a pretty stark difference between being governed by a bourgeoisie aligned on the national interest and one that doesn't care about it.

>>2864988

1. Plants require humans, but the global share of industrial workers has stayed consistent at ~22% of employment across the last 3 decades despite rising output, and individual countries (like the UK) have seen output remain steady or increase with a smaller workforce.
   
2. industry in aggregate has not declined. Individual industries have declined. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is still manufacturing. (as, incidentally, is mass manufacture of food, which is a big industry in the UK. Gotta get those meal deal sandwiches to tesco.) you cannot say the sector as a whole has declined just because you don't like its compositional changes. (personally, I think it's better for everyone that we're making sandwiches instead of giving people black lung for an outdated fuel source, but that's just me.) don't get me wrong, though. The way the industry was shut down was criminal. the UK is still the world's 10th largest manufacturer by output! (see charts: one shows manufacturing output, the other "production" output. both are higher than during peak keynesianism despite british economic policy in general being really incompetent!)
   
3. Most European countries are better off today than they were before "Deindustrialisation" and have seen continue wage growth with relatively mild increases in inequality. Germany is the world's 4th largest manufacturer, France is 9th, both are punching above their population weight. The history of civilisation is the history of urbanisation and the policy failure behind most rural towns that've lost their jobs is a failure to build enough housing so they can all move to the city.
   
4. I do not consider healthcare to be welfare spending for these purposes and "Actual quality" is basically a wash. (we can treat far more conditions than we used to using very expensive techniques, but waiting lists are longer. Is quality "Up" or "Down"? Is it fair to blame "Neoliberalism" for the consequences of the population getting older and so healthcare demand growing slightly faster than the large real-terms spending increases it has seen?), I'm even slightly iffy on pensions for the same reason - but I will give you a pension example: the UK's triple lock is an extravagant hand-out to pensioners (basically it's a constant guaranteed real-terms increase in per-head pension spending.)
   
5. The idea postwar keynesianism was driven because of the USSR is another just-so story that cannot explain why the consensus collapsed before the Cold War ended. Also, pedantically: the pcf only came first twice and the pci never came first in a real (e.G. Non-eec) election.
   
6. Neoliberalism has several distinguishing features from the status-quo pre-ussr. Most notably central banking, reliance on international institutions like the IMF and WTO, globalisation as opposed to empire-building (which is a worthwhile distinction even if you regard the underlying trade relationships as exploitative), restructuring instead of dismantling of the welfare state, and (though I personally think this was heresy) the massive creation of state-regulated larp markets (e.G. UK energy, water, etc.) and the pivoting of public facing organisations to a "Customer service" model.
   
   

You miss my last point: I am not saying that low-tax free trade utopia was possible. Public choice theory (neoliberal!) can explain why the incentives of neoliberals never aligned to make it so. What I am saying is: the world is going to become such a bleak place that you are going to wish they had succeeded, just as you're currently wishing, however much you may deny it, that the keynesians had stopped history in 1975.

Economic sovereignty is a meme in an age of trade and the ending of such an age is precisely the kind of bleak situation I envision. You imagine some cutesy little thing where the government can plonk a factory down in some ex-mining town and bring it back to life, rather than the reality that the primary driver behind it is that the us wants to bomb Iran without impacting oil supplies and wean westerners off Chinese goods so they can bomb China without domestic backlash. (what, you feel poorer now that we've taken all those high-quality goods away? no worries, just join the army, well paid job that…)

There is no mythical age where the public had "A voice over decisions" (did our lovely Keynesian nhs give the public a voice when it gave people hepatitis tainted blood and then covered it up? Did our lovely labour party give the public a voice when members were refused a vote on who the leader was until the 1980s? Did the public all get together and decide to take backhanders from John poulson? For all the nostalgia for mass housebuilding, have you ever wondered why so many tower flats were so shoddy they had to be pulled down after a decade or two, or why so many housing estates became ghettoes due to poor planning? Were the people there fully consulted, but just too stupid to know how to fix it, or were they powerless?)
You are gushing over an outdated form of bourgeois democracy which did not in reality admit public participation, but which could cover it up much better than nowadays. You are nostalgic for a conception of "National interest" that you imagine means a return to an idealised cuddly welfare-state past and not towards britain serving her "National interest" by sending you to die on the coast of hainan.

>>2864696
> The best realistic scenario I can see is the decentralisation of power to a more local level so that (a) it's easier for leftists to obtain it and (b) each area can experiment and see what works in their specific circumstances or make the trade-offs they desire, and other areas can learn from their experiences.
socialism in one municipal district

>>2864742
You remain wrong. Puppet agents of finance capital exist in all countries on the periphery of capitalism. For there to be socialization of the economy and solidarity with the workers of the world, it is necessary not to depend on imports; therefore, there must be economic sovereignty. However, for this to be done, there is no agreement to be made with the bourgeoisie; therefore, state-owned enterprises must be used so that technology is democratized in a country that is under the control of capitalists who use blackmail against countries that do not have technological sovereignty. The solution is the use of state capitalism with state-owned enterprises competing against capitalists; this will facilitate democratization to prepare for the socialist revolution in a revolutionary situation.

This follows what Engels and Marx wrote:

<(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.

<Frederick Engels, 1847, The Principles of Communism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

As for what to do if the petty bourgeoisie wishes to nationalize something or propose taxes, the Marxist position is not to be a lackey to deliver property into the hands of capitalists nor to defend them:

<2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, then the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive tax, then the workers must insist on a tax whose rates rise so steeply that big capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of the state debt, then the workers must demand national bankruptcy. The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.

<Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, London, March 1850

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

Public debt is used by speculators buying these public debt securities to coerce and discipline governments to always follow austerity plans and to sabotage and punish if these governments do not obey the so-called "fiscal responsibility," so as to become a deindustrialized colony without control of any technology for the export of raw materials by countries in the global south to keep them dependent and prevent communists from taking power. The Marxist position is to audit and cut all contracts with private companies and speculators, deliberately antagonizing them to cause more chaos and facilitate the revolutionary situation arriving with the intensification of the class struggle. The pursuit of economic sovereignty is necessary for the advancement of the class struggle, and this must be done with state-owned enterprises competing against private companies, deliberately driving them into bankruptcy. This must be done even if it causes suffering, or if workers have to endure more hardship or sacrifice more.

>>2865156
>For there to be socialization of the economy and solidarity with the workers of the world, it is necessary not to depend on imports
If the workers have the world have united, where the fuck are imports coming from? Mars?!
The rest is just wishcasting. If you think that Air New Zealand has the bourgeoisie seething because it's an SOE (which incidentally furnished the country's current leader) you're delusional. If you think state ownership leads to the "democratisation of technology" just like that, you're delusional. (Quite famously one of the few good things to come out of privatisation is that waiting times for landline installation fell from 6 months to about 1 week max.) There is no inherent reason to assume state employees are benevolent. In practice public services are just as prone to empire building and cover-ups as private sector ones.
(This, incidentally, is why I am a fan of decentralisation. I am not some market dogmatist who thinks that the private sector should run all bus services, but I do think that each local area should commission the services it needs via a local council sufficiently close to the public that you can personally know someone with some decision making power. It is pointless having a national bus company subject to "democratic oversight" by an MP who also represents 80,000 other people, or to have a russian-doll system where you have to complain to your block leader, who reports to a councillor, who reports to a regional leader, who reports to a national MP, who maybe reports to the bus committee…)

Governments choose to issue public debt and do not, as a general rule have austerity enforced upon them when they are spending within their actual capacities. The last time the UK ran a surplus was in 2001, France hasn't run one since 1974, USA 2001, Germany 2019, Portugal 2025, China 2007, Indonesia 2000, Brazil 2013, Chile 2022. Greece is an unusual exception, but behaved profligately by any standard and found itself bullied by other Euro member states rather than international markets. There are only a handful of countries in the world worse off today than they were in 1980. Your just-so story about "becom[ing] a deindustrialized colony without control of any technology for the export of raw materials" is just total nonsense - most of the global south has been industrialising throughout the neoliberal era.

Finally, a point on trade: all trade is inherently balanced. If New Zealand swaps mutton for commuter trains (as it once did with the eastern bloc) neither country has been ripped off. Trade deficits and surpluses are accounting identities only. The deal would not suddenly become a rip-off if, instead of trains, one side had paid hard the same value in hard currency. (e.g. say NZ pays for soviet trains in cash, the USSR can then buy lamb from Argentina. if the two-way trade with NZ is acceptable, getting upset about the 3-way trade with Argentina is very silly!), the only reason trade deficits are a problem is when you're buying more than you can afford (which is basically what you imagine you can side-step because "what you can afford" makes you think it's a money problem, when really the money is merely symbolic for underlying underdevelopment of the productive forces, something that is quite easy to resolve by importing capital, e.g. FDI.)

>>2865023
>Plants require humans, but the global share of industrial workers has stayed consistent […]
That's true to an extent but this is also because of the poor state that industries are in. Compare to China's manufacturing sector and you see that, although automation has replaced many workers, it has also created new fields for engineers alongside new jobs in more technical plants for workers.

>you cannot say the sector as a whole has declined just because you don't like its compositional changes
The composition does matter because when people complain about deindustrialization, they're complaining about losing sovereignty, losing regional jobs, losing low-skill high-value gigs and lastly losing technological savoir-faire (and the jobs that go alongside it)
More over, the general claim on deindustrialization is that it made the nation loose its economic sovereignty. It made unions powerless and stripped the state out of an effective investment potential.

>Most European countries are better off today than they were before "Deindustrialisation
You need to compare to the potential we lost rather than the state we had

> I do not consider healthcare to be welfare spending for these purposes and "Actual quality" is basically a wash
You're making a category error here

>The idea postwar keynesianism was driven because of the USSR is another just-so story
It's not, it's commonly accepted historiography.
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271759503_The_early_Cold_War_and_the_Western_welfare_state
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/26907860

>the world is going to become such a bleak place that you are going to wish they had succeeded
>Neoliberalism has several distinguishing features from the status-quo pre-ussr
Oh yeah I agree that it's going to get worse but what I was trying to say in my original reply was that neoliberalism is simply a transitional period towards the re-establishment of pre-USSR economic situation. There'll be some outliers (like Trump), and some economic woes (2008 crisis or Covid), but what you call neoliberalism is just the financial institutions and politics pivoting towards a pro-market situation as a result of a loss of external and internal factors. It was never going to be permanent in the first place.

>Economic sovereignty is a meme
I'm not claiming that the people had control over the economy. When I mean economic sovereignty I mean 3 things :
<1. The possibility for the state to be in a position where it can impose taxes and regulations without having to fear the backlash from the bourgeoisie. I'm not saying that the backlash didnt exist, but that the type of blackmail we see today was made possible by the removal of protectionnist barriers, the threat of nationalization, and 3rd world countries catching up
<2. The ability for the state to actually invest in things rather than creating specific tax-reliefs in certain sectors. Again, I'm not saying that we completely lost that power but that we lost a good chunk. Green planning is one example of a policy that would be possible under a keynesian state, that has historic precedents under different names, but that isn't possible in the 2000s-type of neoliberalism
<3. Some limited public bargaining. Whether sectoral bargaining or union bargaining, both historically relied on physical constraints that existed for the firms. Neoliberalism removed these constraints.

>>2865156
>For there to be socialization of the economy and solidarity with the workers of the world, it is necessary not to depend on imports; therefore, there must be economic sovereignty.
doesn't everyone depend on at least some imports? especially island nations without much biodiversity or ores?