Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
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Join the matrix room for some real-time discussion.
ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:
"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.
Period.
If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.
There is no pro-capitalist Left. That's a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."
Keynesian economic policy resulted in unprecedented prosperity for 60 years. It ended by Reagan's trickle down supply side economics.
Seems now there's a false dichotomy between supply side economics (which is an obvious failure) and communism (which was an obvious failure).
Crazy idea, maybe we should consider using economic policy that was proven to work? I guess that makes me hated by both the "right" and the "leftists" (two peas in a pod). So where would that put me in your made up political spectrum?
Compare any communist country to a capitalist country at the same level of technological development and the communist country comes out ahead in wealth and happiness. Communism only seems like a failure because US and EU propaganda does a trick where they compare isolated (often literally blockaded) Communist countries to the wealthiest empires on the planet and say "look how much more money we have! Our system must be better!"
The trouble with Keynesian economics is that it created the conditions for Reagan's neoliberal revolution to occur, and any country that tries to recreate that economic system will fall into the exact same trap that America did, because the fundamental underlying problem in Capitalism is the ownership of Capital. Capitalists accumulate wealth, and they use that accumulated wealth to capture the system that is supposed to keep them in check, and they sabotage that system for their own profits, and they will do that every single time.
Could you name an example of this happening?
North Korea was ahead of South Korea in economic development up to the 1960s, IIRC. Happiness is of course mandated by the party.
This has little to do with communism though. Centrally planned economies can transform an economy rapidly from agrarian to industrial, improve education and healthcare immensely. The Human cost for this is can be extremely high though.
I found this article on the subject which was pretty interesting. It seems they did develop faster right after the war:
Since then, obviously, they have fallen far behind
The Soviet Union also did pretty well overall. The Russian Empire went from a backwards feudal agrarian society and economy to a world superpower in a handful of decades. It wasn’t clear if the Soviet system might have superior outcomes until the 1970s. The Soviet Union ran into huge difficulties after the introduction of semiconductors and computers.
Happiness wise of course it’s mixed. The lack of political, artistic, and economic freedom made people‘s lives smaller and more grey. There was a huge desire among the population in the Soviet block to leave to a western country. The millions who died from hunger, forced labor, horrible conditions from the 1920s to 1940s certainly weren’t happy.
That sounds more like "pretty well initially" than "pretty well overall"; I guess it's an effect of the authoritarianism that they get stuck after a while, as people can stay in power even if they're not doing well
If there’s a ton of low hanging fruit to be picked and large developments possible just by sheer brute force, you can achieve quite remarkable effects. These brute force economic developments were effective, but not efficient.
A huge issue for the Soviets was the immense coverups of failures and underachievements. The plan demands a factory make 10,000 widgets per year. Failure is not an option, because you might get thrown into gulag as a saboteur. So they sacrifice quality or outright lie to meet the quota. If you get that all over the system, you end up with bad data and thus bad decisions.
I remember reading somewhere that one of the main reasons for the USSR's failure was that they immediately shot down any idea that had the tiniest bit in it that could be interpreted as capitalism-related. Even a suggestion that's 100% communist values but was using some capitalist-sounding terminology would get immediately disqualified and place it's supporters in hot water.
I think the USA - even if not as extremely - is doing the same thing but from the other side.
With such a mindset, "using economic policy that was proven to work" is outright impossible. Any policy that works (and not just in economy) will need to address the problems raised by all major ideologies - because even if an ideology got the solution completely wrong, at the very least that problems it was born from are real. Refusing to acknowledge these problems on ideological basis will not make them go away.
You're getting close, but you're still not quite there. The solution isn't to address all of the concerns of all the ideologies since that would be impossible. The solution is for people to realize that ideology is the problem. When we get to the point where we realize capitalism and socialism are tools that are good for different purposes we could have a healthy economy and we'd all be prosperous. But as long as we continue think in ideological terms which centers around creating false dichotomies that prevent us from using the best tool for the job we're always going to be living in a failed economy.
We'd be no better off living in a failed socialist economy run by the ideology obsessed than we are living in a capitalist economy run by the ideology obsessed.
In the end politics is always tribal, ideologies are just rationalizations made by a tribe to make them feel like they're the rational ones while the other tribes aren't. It's all bullshit.
In politics outcomes and goals often get confused with the means over time.
I disagree. Completely solving all the problems is indeed impossible, but it should be possible to address them. Or, at the very least, acknowledge them. At least the major ones.
And I do agree that ideologies should be treated as tools. More specifically - tools for analyzing the existing and desired structures and for framing the problems. There is no reason not to try viewing the world through the lens of each major ideology in order to get the most complete perspective. These views may not agree, and that's fine - the disagreements may provide some interesting insights.
I think what you're saying is true of modern politics (probably for the last few hundred years in state bureaucracies. I don't think it's necessarily true universally though. We seem to think that global politics has explored all the options, they all suck, and now we have to choose between them. But there's infinite possibilities for how a society can be structured, and it's fairly likely that there are many that are better them the ones we've tried over the last few centuries. The section in Wengrow and Graeber's The Dawn Of Everything that describes political debate and decision making in Wendat society really hammered that home for me.
Kneejerk rejection of forbidden trigger words is rampant today as well. Liberals are rejecting "gray area" concepts the way conservatives have rejected science. It's a binary world where you're either a hundred percent right or a million percent wrong.
Nuh uh.
Foreign economic policies can't work in America because America is exceptional.
No I will not elaborate further.
GoDdAmN SoCiAlISt!!!