rotting bones wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2026 2:08 am
Note that when I say "neoliberals should be thrown out", I mean the neoliberal equivalent of fascists who kill people.
Now where did I argue against throwing people like that out?
I don't think society should be ideologically uniform.
And yet you are hoping for the global triumph of forces which, if they triumph, will create a world of ideologically uniform societies.
Personally, I think "neoliberalism" is one of the most consistent words in contemporary political discourse. It means economically conservative, socially liberal.
Nope, pretty much everyone with right-wing, or supposedly insufficiently left-wing, economic policies gets called "neoliberal" by some people, no matter what their policies on other issues are. One of the first people many people think of when they hear the word "neoliberal" is Margaret Thatcher. Well, she was leader of a Conservative Party, and aside from her evil economic policies, she was also a committed homophobe.
Neoliberals use "economic conservatism" in a novel sense to mean using government intervention to keep exploitative systems going.
No real disagreement, except that I think that sense is not as novel as you might think. Capitalism, of which what you call "neoliberalism" is one variant, is about a bunch of people looting the rest of us, and will use either government intervention or rhetoric attacking government intervention depending on what serves that purpose best at any given moment.
Compared to that: "Fascism" can mean saying things you don't like.
So can the word "neoliberalism", the way some people use it.
"Democracy" can mean bombing civilians.
Democracy is not about guaranteeing good things forever. It's about being able to fight against bad things.
Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2026 1:24 am
Under what some people call "neoliberalism", you can usually argue for and try to work for changes in economic policy.
No, it's totally blocked. Workers side with the employers. Hurting profits means hurting their job prospects.
I was talking about the ability to argue and work for changes. Of course there's no guarantee of success. Neither is there anywhere else. But under a system where saying the rulers should do more for the well-being of the people drastically shortens your life expectancy, there's no chance of success at all.
If there is any kind of radical movement, neoliberals start supporting fascists. In the Third World, neoliberals are completely ruthless. See Chile.
That all depends on
which of the various people who get labelled "neoliberals" you're talking about. Since I don't accept the validity of the label "neoliberal" in the first place, I don't see how the fact that some of the people to whom you're attaching that label are repulsive scumbags says anything bad about any
other people to whom you're
also attaching that label.
I don't find logic along the lines of "
Alice has murdered many people. Bob hasn't. But I've come up with a creative way to attach the label 'blubbibluppists', err, I mean, 'neoliberals', to both Alice and Bob. So the fact that Alice is a mass murderer means that Bob is bad, too." in any way convincing.
I think they will be nicer to Ukranians because they are "civilized". There's no guarantee.
There's never a guarantee of good things. There are often guarantees of bad things.
When regime change came to the USSR, millions of Russians starved as part of their policy of "shock therapy".
After a quarter of a century of rule by people whom people around the world see as glorious fighters against neoliberalism, Russia still has the basic economic setup instituted during shock therapy. Except it's now a lot more likely to last for a very long time.
Google it.
You seriously think I'd still have to google what happened in 1990s Russia? Thank you for demonstrating how little you know about me.
I've said all of these so many times. You don't remember my points because they don't affect your life.
I remember your points perfectly well. I just don't agree with them. But it's true that I first and foremost have to worry about things that directly affect my life. Such as the fact that some people with whom you've chosen to side might well end my life, and the lives of the people I know in real life, in the not-too-distant future.
Fascism never lasts.
What are some plausible ways how the current fascist or not-at-all-fascist-we-swear systems in Russia, China, or North Korea might stop lasting any time soon?
Neoliberalism is a global system. (Hence the meme against "globalism" appropriated by Nazis.) There's no such thing as one neoliberal country.
What you call neoliberalism is one variant of capitalism. It is very much possible to have capitalism in individual countries. But to some extent, everything is global now. All major political, religious, and economic movements are trying to win on a global scale.
Third World regimes were installed by the West to obtain cheap products. Where leaders resisted, the CIA targeted them with regime change. Without Third World puppets, the West wouldn't be wealthy in the way it is now.
Wait, are you saying that, if a country in the Global South produces and exports a lot of cheap products which raise the material wealth of the West, that means that that country is ruled by puppets of the West? Hmmmm........
While China is an authoritarian country, I'm not advocating emulating them, and it's impossible to achieve political change in their model, it's not impossible to change the way things are run in their model. Unlike in India, where most of the power is centralized, the decision-making power in China is far more localized. This has been confirmed by capitalist sources. China changes its economic policies all the time. Under Xi, China has moved away from the free market towards more state control.
Hoping that the good-but-tragically-misguided king will have a mood change that turns him into a Good King is not much of a plan.
In a neoliberal country, moving entire industries under state control is politically impossible.
In the pre-neoliberal period, that did sometimes happen in previously old-school liberal countries.
This is a general problem: The West imagines countries like Iran are static. This is Western propaganda. After the West conducted regime change in Libya, Iran spent decades decentralizing their military structure to prepare for the war that just happened. Just because you don't know of any changes doesn't mean countries aren't changing! Stasis is physically impossible! Everything is drifting all the time!
Details change all the time. More basic chance is the less possible, the more autocratic the system gets.
Of course, these are all bad models. I support direct democracy.
How to you propose we get from the "temporary" world of global autocracy which the forces you've aligned yourself with are trying to build to direct democracy?
This is the position of Orthodox Marxism.
It's the position of anyone who pays close attention to global political structures and developments.
However, many leaders around the world have tried many ways to reach socialism. They were crushed by the neoliberals and their ravening "civilized" fascist pets.
See my point about "I'm using the same label for different people, and some of them are clearly bad, so this proves that they're all bad"-logic above.
Unlike the West, which JUST THREATENED TO DESTROY A CIVILIZATION
Yeah, sometimes (though not always) the enemies of the West prefer to do their civilization-crushing without openly announcing it. Very polite of them.
(it's like the West Westerners live in bears no relation to historical reality), China interferes much less in the internal affairs of their clients.
Yeah, their client rulers are usually good enough at spreading misery on their own initiative.
the scraps from what the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henry Kissinger and his CIA fail to fix. The West is also allied with Nazi countries like Israel.
All of which can be, and is, criticized and opposed in the West. No option of doing that in China when Xi Jinping does similar things.
I did say fascists are scarier. On the other hand, people construct memorials to the victims of fascism because fascists are so obviously, dramatically evil. I see no memorials to the homeless. Neoliberalism conducts a much more insidious erasure. I'm not sure how much longer I can resist falling through the cracks of the neoliberal global order myself. I wouldn't be surprised if I freeze to death on a park bench next month.
Same for me, if the glorious fighters against neoliberalism whom you're cheering on should succeed in their plans for Europe. That is, if they don't just kill me first.