>>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 twice as deregulatory and twice as welfarist. in my view, this is the best path to developing the productive forces to a situation where socialism (of some new sort) and communism can then arise. unfortunately, the emotive appeal of neoliberalism has always been with sociopaths, selfish bastards, and (in the 90s onwards at least) "reasonableness fetishists", so they've never really understood the implications of their own theories. (except a handful of academic econ types who will occasionally realise the insane implications of their charts, that if we really stripped the deadwood we'd find an unimaginable boon.)
>>808814>>808831while i'm not going to simp for the soviet system (its collapse speaks for itself), a certain degree of emigration is basically inevitable. soviet net emigration was ~0.2% while the UK hit ~0.39% in 1970 and ireland hit ~0.9%. east germany was much higher at 4% during the berlin wall period, but they weren't really "emigrating" so much as moving within a split germany. (For comparison: 4.7% of british people move to a different council area each year) when the USSR collapsed, russia saw ~2% emigration (mostly from minorities like germans, jews, etc.) but net immigration as russians from elsewhere in the former USSR moved to Russia. this should put to bed any serious notion that people were moving for living standards (moving
to 90s russia!?) rather than for other, more mixed reasons. (like intellectual objections, dislike of the structure of life, family/friends/etc in a foreign country, just wanting a fresh start, etc.)
the big reason for strong controls was to prevent brain drain rather than because the whole population would simply leave if allowed to do so. most people are quite good at resigning themselves to their station in life, living by default, and have to be forced to hope for better things. more generally, the reason for such a controlling structure over life in general is due to the states themselves having an underlying weakness and an insecure hold on power. bourgeois sentiments were criminalised because the state was not strong enough to allow for impotent dissent. (whereas the status quo is quite comfortable with us posting harmlessly on leftypol.org, although recent authoritarian turns are an ominous portent of collapse.)