>>808784what an unusual post.
t. anti-populist communist, but for the opposite reason: that populists want misery, despair, and death, while i am for joy, rising expectations, and life.
>>808793i don't accept this notion that it's a step down for middle class workers. a prole today lives better than many medieval nobles in almost any material sense you care to measure while his relative social status is at-worst the same. why would developing the productive forces even more make us worse off? even if the curve equalises (e.g. poorer people get better off faster than richer people) i can see no reason to imagine an absolute decline except an underlying calvinist love of misery.
even for petit bourgeois, what they're likely to lose is not so much material status (at least at the small proprietor end. many small business owners are perpetually broke and would in net-position at least be better off under communism.) as social status (e.g. they'll no longer be able to boss others around as the owner.)
>>808811i will undermine the appeal of my points to say that while a tempered form of neoliberalism is, in fact, the best system we've found so far, what the US has now has proven disastrous. "actually existing neoliberalism" focused too much on tax cuts and fiscal rectitude and not enough on deregulation, so a bunch of petit-bourg weirdoes in regulated and protected sectors like car dealerships, soda bottling, agriculture, etc, bankroll a republican party which has turned sharply against trade and picked up a fetish for utterly arbitrary economic interventions and open corruption, and they do so mostly because they resent that "coastal elite PMC" (e.g. upper-proles) have more cultural status than them despite not being business owners.
in the UK, where Thatcher barely deregulated and mostly privatised industries into state-regulated LARP markets precisely because she feared the social consequences of real competition - undermining Britain's insular ruling class with market discipline - is it any wonder that the reactionary tilt has been particularly severe?in another world, neoliberals would've been
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