/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Nah

I've moved beyond this minor contratianism into "neoliberalism is good in theory but real neoliberalism has never been tried"

The record of communists can be split into three: countries too small to matter at a planetary scale, the dismal overrated failure of the USSR, and China, which adapted itself to most of the valuable insights of neoliberalism without giving up party control.

The biggest problem with current social democrats is not that they're wrong but that they're insufficiently ruthless. Before any social or economic reform for its own sake their fundamental task should be to decompose their opponents electoral base. In many contexts this would mean ostensibly "rightward" moves towards deregulation. (For a US example: car dealers vote Republican. Car dealers are a protected industry because car manufacturers are banned from selling directly to customers. It's therefore obvious any democrat, even a right wing one, should scrap this protection and expose them to market discipline - good for consumers, but best of all bad for the Republican party's finances.)
This is what Thatcher (sociopath LARPing as a neoliberal) did to the base of the British labour party, selling council houses to their residents below market rates and banning councils from doing more was a massive government subsidy program, but also a massive program of socially engineering people into becoming conservative voters. Her "privatisations" mostly put companies into protected state controlled markets, more an organized form of looting than a deregulated market situation. Not for nothing is the UK a dismal, reactionary little polity. It's dominated by that most hitlerite of groups: a non competitive capitalist class.

None of this is to say I've abandoned workers. Generally when you see such sentiments from "neo liberals" it's because they're tax cut obsessed sociopaths. What I've embraced is the value of competition and especially of trade. Civilisation is trade+urbanization, and a lot of people currently loathe both…

>Do you have the principles and persistence to explain why social democracy is bad

yes because it leads to shit that we have today and unlike the 20th century we do not have breathing room left, capitalism is emiserating us all and the future is a bleak place with hunger everywhere. We can't apply a bandaid to an open, gaping and infected wound

>>2941690
>bad
moralfag

Social democracy never existed and will never exist

Real social democracy has never been tried.

>>2941709
I’ll one up you, real social democracy has never even been theorized

>>2941696
Everything lead to where we are today. Maoism and Stalinism are as inseperable from the status quo as Keynesianism. A consistent approach would recognize that all forms of repeating old mistakes mean applying not just a band aid, but greater injury.

>>2941716
>Maoism and Stalinism are as inseperable from the status quo as Keynesianism.

yes exactly.

>>2941716
Pain and catharsis are good because it’s the main proof we are alive

>>2941717
So is anarchism and left communism

>>2941695
I get what you're saying, I've read your arguments many times neoliberal-san. My main critique would be that your political program ignores things like the falling rate of profit which is why capitalism moved towards the modern frankenstein "neoliberalism" in the first place.

Modern capitalism in advanced nations is only possible because of massive rentier and looting behavior like printing trillions of dollars, over-regulation to prevent new entrants, deliberately creating bubbles like housing, unproductive parasitic industries like insurance, education industry, health industry etc.

Brutally cutting all that fat is also going to destroy RoP which will make companies stop investment. So your govt will be overthrown by the capitalist long before you'll be able to do anything serious. Which means only a revolutionary dictatorship can implement those features, but when you're already a proletarian dictatorship, you can just straight up go to communism instead of these kinds of reforms.

Yes, because it only created a temporary class peace and became ideologically hollowed, with shifting goal posts from it's original goal.

Like most people who call themselves social democrats, don't understand it's history, nor it's purpose of the movement's founding.

>>2941690
>but what I want to know is what are your honest thoughts?
That Lassalle was not a social democrat and worker co-ops never gained popularity which is kind of a tragedy as we are stuck between two shitty systems now.

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that social democracy turning to reformism wasn't the original intention, really, but it happened as these parties focused more on the immediate demands of their transitional program.

Fast forward to today you can have a socialist party being the healthcare party (would be very fitting in the U.S.), and the people in the party could believe that it's an immediate demand that would necessarily "outstrip" itself to borrow Marx's phrasing and "necessitate further inroads upon the old social order." But then in reality that doesn't actually happen or the party just becomes the "healthcare party" and tends to that. So that's what happened to the social democratic parties and they gradually dropped the socialist part later on. But that wasn't how the original social democrats saw themselves, they saw themselves as putting forward an immediate program while also having some conception of moving beyond capitalism to a different mode of production.