/siberia/ - Off-topic

you know your shitass economic arrangement destroyed the planet and kicked off a mass extinction moment?

>>766854
Yes, though not in full/comprehensively. Marx appears to be a classic case of a very intelligent person getting overly fixated on certain ideas to the point of crankery.

>>766857
Purely unrestrained capitalism can be kind of bad and create externalities like that, but it's somewhat of a red herring. Socialist nations like the USSR and China were/are often quite bad for the environment and the extinction of animals.

>>766862
And to be clear, I am not opposed to governments imposing certain rules on corporations to limit damage they cause to the environment and others. (So long as the rules are constrained, reasonable, and empirical and not dumb bureaucratic inefficiency serving no real positive benefit.) But how do you jump from "okay let's prevent corporations from fucking things up for everyone else" to "let's make it illegal for an individual to create a corporation". It's childish.

>>766862
>but it's somewhat of a red herring.
Why bring it up then? We don't have to talk about what could have been because we have already been given a death sentence by actually existing, non-"Purely unrestrained" capitalism.

I hate authoritarianism so long live the US military global hegemony!!!

why didn't marx just consider using the parliaments to have corporations no longer act in their immediate self interest

>>766864
>It's childish

Why?

i can understand not being down with communism but being a neoliberal in 2026 is insane. at least be a keynesian

>>766864
> "let's make it illegal for an individual to create a corporation". It's childish.
Making wage laborers exploitation illegal is in fact not more childish than forbidding people to own slaves. It just hasn't happened yet and you're just normalizing the current status quo.

>>766850
politics is determined mostly by disposition. in your own worldview, you should understand the downside of socialists as 90% "sounds good, is actually harmful" (for example: excess safety regulations - which are more liberalism than socialism, but socialists share a lot of their disposition with liberals, so they're also instinctively for this even though you could have a socialist state with no regulations as-such.) and 10% righteous fury (which most ideologies have, and where socialists pick their targets better than most)
r.e. cuba specifically, the question is more institutional. can the cuban government weather the short-term pain of changing economic model? will doing so work for a country subject to arbitrary sanctions rather than - as china was - welcome to trade with the US?

t. some weird kind of socialist libertarian.

>>766864
corporations are visible and sound bad, the negative side effects of banning them are invisible while the visible factors (avoiding exploitation etc) sound good.
what you must understand is that most socialists are lovely people who do not think too hard about certain specifics and want to think very hard indeed about other specifics. they want to engage with (say) the fun challenges of economic planning, or what color our military uniforms will be, or imagining a world where their job doesn't make them want to kill themselves and where their housing situation is secure. the negative side effects of banning private corporations or whatever are boring to such a person, they are a question for someone of an economist's disposition.
(similarly, economists/neoliberals tend to eye-roll, or even lie, if you point out that a free market creates a lot of losers, particularly if you consider loss relative. i say this, not as a condemnation, but as a matter of disposition. a chart showing the relationship between taxation and GDP growth generates more enthusiasm than a few hicks who lose out to a good trade deal.)
i quietly hope socialists, neoliberals, libertarians, and other similar types can come to some kind of accommodation to see off the right, which has become a sort of unhinged death cult with all the worst vices of the strawman version of both ideologies.

>>766875
the problem is that if you don't have an actual economic solution to exploitation (e.g. the development and ownership structures of a functioning socialism) you're just screwing people over. the net result is almost always that they're still exploited, but now poor.
moreover, if we're to abstract it into accounting terms, creating 60k of value and only getting 30k is better than creating 6k of value and getting 6k. (i use numbers here only for convenience: "value" means not shareholder value, but concrete goods and services. if you want, imagine a worker taking home one really shitty car instead of producing 2 good cars - in a better factory, so not working any harder - and taking home 1 of them.)

uygha dont vaguepost, if you want to have discussion you have to formulate what specific issue with communism you have, otherwise you will end up with people just talking past each other.

>>766850
>I hate authoritarianism too obviously so fuck the Chinese state and free Taiwan etc
fucking kys you retarded lib imperialist, your kind aint welcome here

The average quality of reply ITT shows why OP is smart to be a neoliberal (based on the information and evidence available to him) even if he's wrong. The average socialist is nice bit dim, the best socialist is the best there is, but the average leftypol poster has more in common with an orc from /pol/ than with the nice socialists elsewhere and almost nothing in common with the best socialists.

>>766896
not really. once again nothing wrong with being a non commie but at least be a socdem or something. i genuinely dont understand how someone could still believe in neoliberalism 40 years after its failure

>>766896
>its your job to convince neolib imperialist retards they're wrong on an obscure radical left imageboard
>and you also need to be nice to them
no, fuck off

>>766898
it has its successes (e.g. airline deregulation basically succeeded at everything it set out to do, mass produced commodities like televisions have plunged in price and rocketed in quality, most countries economic development has actually been pretty good in aggregate) which are usually underrated by focusing on its failures or making questionable assumptions (e.g. that the postwar economic miracle could've continued indefinitely)

postwar social democracy failed. it's painful to say, they had a lot of wins, but it's true. had it not failed, it'd still be here. that failure is why we got neoliberalism plus a lot of socdem nostalgia. neoliberalism has failed too, despite its successes which i'd say are fewer than social democracy, but eh, but what's coming next is going to be so horrible that even the socdems will get nostalgic for the era of high-neoliberalism.
it helps that there's a lot untried. just as socdems could never fully apprehend the implications of their beliefs and stopped short of building paradise, so too did neoliberals. the ideals of flat taxes and road privatization a much better idea than it sounds! we subsidize highways to compete with - often privatized - railways that would be much more efficient!! gave way to something chasing an arbitrary budget target by implementing welfare means-tests that actively increased the interference of the state in daily life, and cargo-cult tax cuts without any coherent philosophy or any exciting new ideas.

more than anything, that lost potential is why people get into it, whether it's social democracy, neoliberalism, the dead USSR, whatever. neoliberalism just appeals to those of the kind of disposition that takes you to business school or economics class rather than to the humanities, creative fields, history, etc.

>>766901
your only job is to make good posts and you're not doing it.

>>766902
What lost potential? Potential has been fulfilled, even you pointed that out. Its done, its job has been finished, anyone still being proponent of neoliberalism in 2026 is dragging around a zombie munching on their brain.

>>766850
>free Taiwan
From what? Having to pretend it's not an independent country despite de facto being one?

>>766906
anyone still being a proponent of social democracy or (soviet style) socialism has a different presentation of the same disease. what if gosplan had computers? what if the NHS actually covered dentistry? what if america had universal healthcare? what if we privatized the roads and implemented negative income tax instead of welfare?
moreover, a chunk of its best ideas (like free trade) are in active opposition to where we're going next. didn't like free trade? great, but you're not getting the postwar consensus back. welcome to the era of arbitrary tariffs, personality-led trade disputes, and suddenly finding out that 20+% of the world's urea supply has been cut off at precisely the point it needs to be shipped out to be turned into fertilizer in time for farmers to make use of it because we didn't even get forewarning and consent manufacturing for an illegal war. didn't like caution about the state interfering in the affairs of private companies? great, but you're not getting the postwar consensus back. welcome to the era of being put on the supply chain risk list because you wouldn't let the state use your technology to spy on US citizens, welcome to the era of bending the knee to get a tariff carve out, welcome to the era of the state demanding you hand over a chunk of your shares or revenue for special treatment, welcome in short to the era of open naked gangsterism and oligarchy.

now obviously actually-existing neoliberalism lead us here, just as actually-existing social democracy lead us to neoliberalism, but you cannot fault someone for looking back nostalgically at the best of what came before in contrast to the worst of what we have now.

>>766909
>what if gosplan had computers?
That is a rather non-trivial what if. Not that Soviet economy didnt suffer from systemic issues unrelated to computation, but having technology to carry put a detailed economic planning vs not having it are two meaningfully different scenarios.

>>766902
>postwar social democracy failed
It could have probably survived with proper reforms and maybe some painful but temporary austerity. In spite of criticisms from both the left and the right, the Nordic model works fine and Norway is a great country to live in. It is completely unprepared to deal with the doom that's coming, but then, besides maybe China, who is?
Instead of building a path to that system, "everyone" decided it was impossible and that uncooperative antisocial liberalism was necessary because it was the only system that wouldn't fail, and now whoops, it's failing.

Anyway, the gist of modern socialism (which is not a single unified ideology but does have its common ideas that nearly everyone today agrees on) is that private ownership of the means of production structures society as an antagonism between those who own them and those who don't, and those who don't tend to lose, often badly (you're hopefully not so sheltered that you need examples of this). It is generally desirable to live in a society where this doesn't happen, and so the goal is to build a system where prosperity doesn't rely on the existence of this antagonism.
I stress: the goal is to build a system, not to "ban corporations" or anything like that. Socialism is not "capitalism but with a ton of prohibitions". Sometimes the solution proposed is quite soft, e.g., market socialism.

Have you ever tried reading a book in your entire life

>>766903
How much you paying

>>766850
>muh authoritarianism
<I don't get it
Read fucking Marx and Lenin as well as the following PDFs as well.
TL;DR: The poor are poor because that's how the system works, empathy is mostly useless without a systemic means to actualize it. It may help a few individuals or in some cases a large number of individuals, but on the greater scale is inconsequential.
>free Taiwan
uygha Taiwan isn't controlled by the Chinese State, Taiwan is literally a US puppet state inhabited by and governed by the descendants of Nationalists that fled China after losing their war with Mao.
>socialism… a silly idea
The fuck does this mean? Do you actually know what Socialism even is?

>>767043
There's no point in arguing with a self-declared neoliberal. Even most outright conservative types have grievances with the economic reality that you can explain the root causes of. But if someone says, "I actually fully align with the current economic/political system" its pointless to even engage.

>>767043
>>767074
there is a legitimate case that the poor today are, on the whole, the richest the poor have ever been. even if you discount china (we'll give that one to communism, just for fun) and go "ah, but the american poor have lost a little" (odd that this time, and only this time, do amerikkkan treatlerites get such sympathy) that remains true.

most conservative types are braindead morons with stupid grievances and the current way of doing things is, if anything, zombie neoliberalism just waiting to be swept away by a reactionary wave that'll deliver all the stagnation and misery of late neoliberalism without any of that nonsense about individual choice or the market not caring if you're gay.

>>766850
>(I'm a progressive neoliberal type)
>I hate authoritarianism too obviously

How is "progressive neoliberalism" not authoritarian?

>>767097
neoliberalism has resulted in deindustrialisation, less government regulation, worse living standards, working conditions and urban spaces, decaying infrastructure, no public transportation, less jobs, more low quality jobs, and less benefits to the poor
overall its a net negative. if youre not a wall street shitlib your life has noticeably gotten worse. and these are just effects on the west, outside of it neoliberalism has been even worse, to the point of destroying entire economies in the global south and locking them in subservient positions to the global north

>>767104
deindustrialisation is a half-truth (industrial output in most first world countries is the same or higher as it was in the past in terms of value, it just employs less people because inherent to industrial production is the efficiency of using capital to substitute labor), a for-whom (yes, we no longer assemble computers in Scotland due to their low wages, but Scotland's loss is the gain of China, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico, India… and Scotland, because Scotland gets cheaper computers!), and a not-so-bad. (while a reasonable number of people would prefer to work in a manufacturing job and can't get one - maybe about 20% total - most people prefer white collar work.)
less government regulation isn't always a bad thing (airline deregulation, for example, has been wildly successful) and many regulations are just plain dumb (why, exactly, does the state require Coca Cola to franchise coke bottling to some small business dickhead giving him a monopoly on the coke supply in hicksville, USA? why, on the flip side, does it not require Apple to assemble iPhones in the same fashion?)
worse living standards simply isn't true for most people (although the rate of improvement slowed), working conditions are arguable and to a certain extent unavoidable (e.g. yeah, if you hate service sector work I'm not gonna tell you it's good, but it's also entirely possible that technological change would mean you'd still have a service job in the world were we dragged the postwar-consensus period out to 2026)
urban spaces and infrastructure are arguable (the US has fucked it, sure, but Australia and New Zealand stand out as two obvious examples of places on the up-and-up), public transportation is almost entirely a matter of local and national policy (again to go with Auckland: in 1990 they had basically no rail system, in the 2000s they slowly built it up, and today they have a very good rail system.) and there's a reasonable case to be made that more neoliberalism would give better policy (privatize the roads! or at least charge a market price to use them during congested periods! stop subsidizing the car against the train and bus!!)
less jobs another "for whom?" - yeah, you go from 2% to 4% unemployment as normal in the first world, but the flip side of that is a much greater number of third worlders in work. (which, contra the obvious counter, is much better than subsistence farming. drop your stardew valley fantasies, subsistence farming is just about the shittiest way of living that you can get), job quality is difficult to evidence one way or the other (you don't really want to spend all day moving metal plates in and out of a stamping machine), and benefits to the poor ambiguous.
(if you mean welfare: i think welfare retrenchment is one of the big blunders of the neoliberal era and neoliberals getting hooked on it for fiscal policy reasons really shot them in the foot. a more generous welfare state would've generated more buy-in for more radical economic reforms. the more miserly state they created, on the other hand, is a mess of market-distorting incentives thanks to means testing. if you mean benefits like being able to have more stuff or better conditions: this varies from case to case, but is basically a wash at-worst. stagnant or lower incomes for the people who really lost out are matched by falling real-terms prices of many consumer goods and foodstuffs.)

many of the changes that ostensibly make life worse have little to do with economic system per-se. twitter would still exist under keynesianism. outside the west, the negatives are overblown. most global south economies were always subservient to the global north. economic development allows them to be much more assertive than they otherwise would be, and the worst performing global south economies are those with the least access to the global economy.

—
and i say all of this as someone who broadly regards the whole era as one of evil blundering by bad people, and the preceding keynesian era as one of laudably high-minded idealism. the old arguments against neoliberalism have come to seem unconvincing, but still, it has evidently failed. new arguments for why are needed.
broadly: i think the economic ideas are better than they seem, but the people who actually implemented them were evil cunts who did dumb things.
e.g. much of the UK's privatization program was basically fake, a lot of Trump's actual base are small-business weirdos (like soda bottling plant owners) who're protected by regulations which should've been abolished decades ago, empowering reactionaries - but government time was wasted on welfare retrenchment instead of economic deregulation because mr. soda has lobbying money and welfare recipients don't, tariffs and protections stick around on a basically piecemeal and arbitrary basis, particularly for the US, creating all sorts of similar distortions (and really screwing people in the developing world when those whims change), etc.
plus, as you left it out: the externalities. nobody's really got a good carbon pricing scheme going, which is a problem.

>>766850
Have you tried reading?
All your questions have easily available, standard answers that are basically established ideological core of any serious communist movement

But tbh I myself only stafted reading after i got these answers from angry socialists correcting me. Maybe that you're even asking puts you on the right path

>>767116
You are right in that "neoliberalism hurts us" coming from first worlders is cowardly half-truth leftoidism.

The actual conflict is that it hurts the overwhelming majority that is the global working class. For first worlders, it is a management problem. Some good, some bad.

The global working class cares for its own interests, not the american who could take it or leave it. The american can either join the global working class (not the other way around), or oppose them. either way it's an irreconcilable war of conflicting interests, you just gotta understand where the battle lines actually are, instead of trying to push your own interests on behalf of the global proles "neoliberalism hurt my retirement fund" vs "neoliberalism dropped a bomb on my kids school"

Only after that can we start making sense of marxist theory

>>767097
>there is a legitimate case that the poor today are, on the whole, the richest the poor have ever been
Yes. Many Marxists would agree. But so what? The interest is in curing the disease, not giving palliative care.

>>767116
>nobody's really got a good carbon pricing scheme going
And why is that? If you think the answer is a lack of competence or lack of good people in government, that's the fundamental divide between worldviews here. (And you're definitely wrong on that one.)

>>766850

"free markets" benefit the few at the expensive of the many.

I'd like to see the private sector so small that you can drown it in a bathtub.

>>766850
>I'm a progressive neoliberal type
Not sure if libertarian or democrat. I hate this muttspeak about liberalism so much its unreal.

I have leftlibs i hate leftlibs I hope you die die die fucking die i hate your "authoritarianism", "good", " totalitarism", "communism is just fascism"…

>>767119
the case that it hurts the global working class more than alternative forms of capitalism has not really been made. (which should be distinguished from saying that capitalism doesn't hurt the global working class. one can - and i'm not saying i do - believe that neoliberalism was historically progressive, but that ultimately capitalism must go.)

i would also, pedantically, say that bombing isn't an inherent part of neoliberalism. Korea and Vietnam, after all, took place under Keynesianism. The neoliberal era briefly gestured towards what a market-lead world should really have (UN peacekeeping, or at least the facade of it) but, as it draws to a close, you now see more or less naked gangsterism paired with a hostility to trade. this is an ominous portent.

>>767126
"so what?" > so, the case against self-declared neoliberalism has not really been made. it rests on the idea of neoliberalism (and the status quo) as a regression, rather than a local maximum.
this is less like palliative care, more like a patient clearly improving (but not yet sufficiently). if someone was in a coma, and is now awake and weakly speaking following treatment, you wouldn't go "clearly the treatment isn't working - they're still not healthy like me!", even if ultimately they'll have to progress on to a different form of treament in future.

>>767128
it is not so much want of competence as want of a structure that can generate competence. it is not a series of individual failures, but a series of institutional ones. that neoliberalism couldn't assemble the institutions to make itself viable (for example: by allowing lobbyists to frustrate a carbon tax, by generating an anti-tax bias stronger than a "hey, this is a good tax that will generate revenue to cut bad taxes" bias, and so on) is, if you like, the big tragedy at the heart of the thing. (just as Keynesian political-economy's doom was fortold by Kalecki)

partially, i also think this is dispositional. people of different dispositions are drawn to different ideas, and neoliberalism simply isn't appealing to the kind of person who'd push a carbon tax hard enough. it can draw in the kind of person who'll model a carbon tax for a blog post and go "wow, this would be neat", but not the kind of person who'd be a zealot for it. meanwhile, the kind of person who becomes an environmentalist isn't going to be drawn to a carbon tax when they can be drawn to more direct market interventions. (and, rounding off the dispositional theory of politics, they're all about to be swept away by trump types who want actually existing killeveryonewhoisntmethenillkillmyselftooism.)

>>767131
fundamentally untrue. even if we say that socialism abolishes free markets and generates higher prosperity, the vast majority of non free-market systems remain inferior. it is, in most cases, madness to give some dickhead the power to say that you cannot do things. kings and mob-bosses should not decide whether or not your neighbourhood gets a grocery store frankly, even city government should probably keep their noses out, nor should they be able to punish someone for opening a competing store with lower prices and better produce.
(this is important to remain because the most plausible forms of neoliberal collapse will drift in that direction, not in the direction of postwar keynesianism or socialism.)

Communism will never happen because virtuous proletarians have infinite patience.

>>767136
>it rests on the idea of neoliberalism (and the status quo) as a regression, rather than a local maximum.
Not quite, and "local maximum" is kind of the crux of the issue; the point is, if neoliberalism is good because it's preferable to certain alternatives, why is the case for it restricted to those alternatives at all?
As I implied earlier in the thread, there isn't even really a neoliberal case against Nordic-style social democracy. When the case has to be made neolibs act much like the dull-headed leftslop socialists you were replying to earlier: they have to act like the happiest countries on Earth are these nanny-state dystopias and as if historically contingent problems in social democracy are insurmountable monsters that should make us afraid of ever even trying. They also, ironically, act as if welfare economics doesn't exist and isn't working on addressing all their fears daily. (None of this is a defense of social democracy per se, but it seems neoliberalism can't even properly justify itself as being "the worst system except for all the others".)
Hence my so what: yes, the thing is certainly better than feudalism or early capitalism, it's certainly not a regression from those things, but that is not a sufficient case for it when more and more people can see the alternatives from here.
The palliative care comment: the point is that alleviating poverty is not enough. We don't want people to be less poor, we want them to not be poor.
>it is not so much want of competence as want of a structure that can generate competence
Well, we certainly agree, then. I thought you were actually defending neoliberalism.

>>767136
>the case that it hurts the global working class more than alternative forms of capitalism has not really been made. (which should be distinguished from saying that capitalism doesn't hurt the global working class. one can - and i'm not saying i do - believe that neoliberalism was historically progressive, but that ultimately capitalism must go.)

>i would also, pedantically, say that bombing isn't an inherent part of neoliberalism. Korea and Vietnam, after all, took place under Keynesianism. The neoliberal era briefly gestured towards what a market-lead world should really have (UN peacekeeping, or at least the facade of it) but, as it draws to a close, you now see more or less naked gangsterism paired with a hostility to trade. this is an ominous portent.

Yeah, I was tactically using the leftoid terminology ("neoliberalism") to bridge the theoretical gap and help a potential leftoid reader make the leap.
The particular forms of imperialist bourgeois self-management are highly relevant only to the imperial bourgeoisie and its internal opposition (middle class, petty bourgs). To the enemies of the system, it is only important in so far as there is a need to understand and exploit the contradictions within the enemy camp.

To the recepients of imperial violence, it more or less looks like a straight line from early colonization, to the american revolution, to nazi germany (inter-imperialist confllict critical point), to victory of america in the inter imperialist conflict and absorbtion of nazi germany into the now unified imperialist hegemon, to weakening and disintegration of the socialist camp, emboldening the empire and creating the unipolar world.

neoliberalism isn't particularly responsible for bombings because neoliberalism is a particular slice in the timeline of imperial strategy, the genocide of the third world is an ongoing cyclical process and was never "interrupted" for as long as capitalism existed.

keep dickriding the epstein class bro

>>767074
True, just screaming into the void and allowing anyone that isn't completely libpoisoned to pull out of it.

>>767097
The Poor are only 'richer' because of technological progress and because the goalposts of wealth have become unclear. The fact of the matter is, people who were once lower-middle class are now considered poor, skewing the results. The income of the top billionaires also skews the results of average wealth. Finally the USSR and China are the reason for this increase in living conditions, even the fall of the USSR still left Russia with infrastructure that put it ahead of Imperial Russia in 1913 (materially) and the USSR's focus on improving its HDI forced capitalist states to have welfare programs and be organized and managed so as to remain competitive and not have the proletariat completely revolt. African-American and Women's rights were only granted because the USSR's influence and the fear of said influence. China's population also significantly contributes, as they went from the same Feudal living level as the USSR and rose up dramatically.

Liberalism and Neoliberalism and Conservatism may all portend to be different from one another, but really they're all part and parcel of the same system with the same ideology, that morphs like some eldritch monster to fit whatever niche its trying to fit, like a dying hideously rotted octopus.

>>766850
Actually, moralism is the weakest argument around socialism
Controlled economies work. Socialism is inevitable. Marx said so. What separates positive socialism from negative is what class benefits. When workers benefit it's progressive socialism, when the bourgeois benefits it's fascism.

That's not just a bad word, its a fact.

>>767141
i think vis-a-vis the case against nordic social democracy, you run into the structural and dispositional problems with self-declared neoliberals that i was getting at. in terms of the big picture, the nordic countries are still neoliberal - their tax rates are high by US standards, but low when compared to their own history, their labor protections are strong by US standards, but since the 90s they've pivoted to "flexicurity" (e.g. easier to fire/hire, higher welfare to compensate.), their government provides some more essential national services, but others (for example Scandinavian Airlines) are standard mutlinational corporations (in the case of SAS: they have an Irish subsidiary to avoid Scandinavian Labor laws, and 2/3 of the national governments that used to own it have privatized their share in the company.). they offer a social democratic flavored version of neoliberalism, if you like.
the best possible neoliberalism (in terms of being sustainable) would pair an aggressive deregulatory attitude with an extensive welfare state. the problem (everywhere, but particularly in the US) is, if you're a neoliberal you're probably not dispositionally enthused by proposing boosting the welfare state - especially if you wind up in the worst of all possible worlds, with both more welfare and more regulations. so you wind up, generally speaking, fighting against welfare and for tax cuts, while regulations fall to the side despite over-regulation being a much more logical barrier to economic growth. (a tax is just a tax, moving the price slightly. pay and move on. a regulation requires you to pay, to undergo uncertainty, to wait, and to generally mess around with the possibility it's all for nothing. depending on the circumstances, it may simply be that you legally cannot open another coca-cola bottling plant despite being able to do better than the incumbent! madness!)

if neoliberals had thrown in with the liberal-left instead of the right, somehow, they might've had a future. (what leftist would surrender a welfare package to save the coca cola bottler? what liberal would reject the case against individual choice, coherently made?) by throwing in with the centre-right they find themselves adrift amongst socdems and liberals and utterly hopeless among the deranged base of the modern right, bought and paid for by our qanon-believing coca-cola bottling transgender daughter hating monster.
oh well.