/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