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The USSR collapsed
Unironically yes. The pressure of having a communist super power made governments and companies in the capitalist west pretend to care about workers. Once that pressure went off, companies started to keep all the surplus they could.
I’m not so sure. Maybe in Soviet-adjacent governments this was a factor, but the US started its neoliberal turn in the 70s, when people were still operating under the assumption that the USSR would never collapse.
They did that due to internal factors though, to break out of stagflation
But it was clear by then that it wasn’t going to overtake the US economically like was feared earlier. If it was clearly seen that the USSR was beating the US economically it would give lie to the whole system.
This isn’t going to happen with China, unless their economy fundamentally changes.
I’ve only ever heard this asserted without evidence, and am becoming suspicious of it. Will China’s current rise really compel the bourgeoisie to cede concessions the proletariat?
No China will not do anything lol. They’re looking to “increase productive forces.” There’s legitimacy to it, of course, but how long will this goal take? Who knows. All we know is that China wants your business regardless of ideology, and it has no desire to impose its ideology on anyone else. A country can go through 500 coups of various ideologies and China will be there and say “there must be respect for sovereignty, peace, and trade cooperation.”
The threat of China is one of business and military. Ideology is just a boogeyman to get people riled up. There is no reason for concessions and there hasn’t been any for decades now. The average American recognizes his suffering, but he tells himself to keep on truckin’ because he believes his treats are cheap and readily accessible and the Asians are still living in rural huts. The only thing that will compel the bourgeoisie to give concessions is if the west decouples from not just China, but a lot of outsourcing, and industry comes back domestically.
The fall of the USSR saw inequality rise globally. That is no coincidence. Perhaps it was already rising, but its collapse sped it up significantly. It’s also not a coincidence that some of the bloodiest labor and civil rights moments occurred when we still produced stuff. Of course other factors were in play, but I’m just saying. We haven’t seen a single Pinkerton shot in a very long time.
USSR gave logistics, financial and military support to leftist groups wherever they need. China would ask those leftist groups to first get into power before sitting on the table with them.
[China] has no desire to impose its ideology on anyone else
They’re looking to “increase productive forces.” There’s legitimacy to it, of course, but how long will this goal take? Who knows.
Silly.
Wdym? Which part is silly?
The goal of increasing the productive forces and moving out of “primary stage socialism” has very clearly been set at 2049/50 (centenary goal).
It’s true that China usually sets concrete agenda unlike the liberal vibes based policies in the west. But we haven’t heard too much about Xi’s successors yet. He’s been working hard to put the capitalists back under communist control and emphasizing ML ideology in the government and Chinese society. It’s unlikely that the next person will dismantle everything like the POTUS every 4 years, and China has studied the fall of the USSR extensively and determined the slander of Stalin is one of its causes, but it’s still hard the gauge the aftermath.
Got it, I misread that as saying the plan was silly.
The average westerner believes they have a higher quality of life than the average Chinese citizen, but that’s slowly changing I think. I think the propaganda is getting more tenuous and more difficult to maintain by western countries. It’s becoming blatantly obvious how developed China is.
Also the USSR’s threats were things like military defectors and brain drain. I haven’t heard of any high profile instances of spies defecting to China or selling state secrets or whatever. If that started happening, I could maybe believe there’s enough discontent among western proletariat to do something like demand concessions.
The CIA’s entire network in China was exposed a few years ago and all of their agents were executed or imprisoned. This was done by a supposed mole in the CIA. He confessed to everything, but the CIA had no evidence against him. He was convicted anyway.
Brain drain is slowly happening. After the racist investigations against Chinese/Chinese American professors in the US that found no spies, China has been offering positions at Chinese universities and some people who joined said China offered more staff members and funding for research compared to the US. But again it’s not happening on an alarming scale.
All of these things are too niche for the average American to care about, so it doesn’t have any affect on public perception of china. Yet anyway.
This was done by a supposed mole in the CIA.
You know his name?
I did it
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/us/politics/jerry-lee-china-spying.html
Jerry Chun Shing Lee. Handsome devil
The average westerner believes they have a higher quality of life than the average Chinese citizen, but that’s slowly changing I think.
restaurants cost 2x what they did earlier in my lifetime, rent probably 3x. I remember learning about career options in highschool that essentially stopped existing less than a decade later. I’m not that old. How fast is slow suppose to be?
Racism is a powerful buffer to prevent anything good happening. Westerners need to go through a lot before admitting they’re worse off than non-whites
In the gardeners’ minds better off and just better are the same. To admit they’re not doing as well materially as the Chinese would require dismantling white supremacy first.
I know you probably meant westerners but I want to imagine an evil group of racist gardeners stalking around
Calling them gardeners is referencing this:
After days of mounting international backlash, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s outspoken foreign policy chief, has apologised for his controversial remarks in which he described Europe as an idyllic “garden” of prosperity and the rest of the world as mostly a “jungle.”
“Some have misinterpreted the metaphor as ‘colonial Euro-centrism’,” Borrell wrote in a blog post on Tuesday evening. “I am sorry if some have felt offended.”
But he did not reject the figure of speech and instead doubled down on it, arguing the term jungle is an apt illustration of the lawlessness and disorder that currently rule world politics.
China is not the same as the Soviet Union.
Much of China’s prosperity is deeply integrated with the global neoliberal free market and China was able to leverage its vast reserve of cheap labor (blessed by the United States wanting to export its own manufacturing base to crush its working class movements at home, back in the 1970s) to bring material gains to its people.
China’s achievement is in its socialist policies that put people at the center, rather than the capitalists or the free market, and this allowed them to lift millions upon millions of people out of poverty and set the nation on a course towards prosperity.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a genuine alternative (or at least attempted) to the Western-led capitalist system. The Soviet Union was more or less a self-contained entity and largely self-sufficient, and did not rely on foreign export markets for economic development and growth. The workers in the Soviet Union enjoyed working conditions and social welfare that were on par with Western European social democracy, if not better.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for China today - the working conditions, especially for the 300 million migrant workers in the coastal cities, are still distances behind what the Soviet Union was capable of achieving decades ago.
And this brings me to a central point I have been saying many times on this site: de-dollarization is truly the most important first step, the pre-requisite towards the formation of an alternative system that can challenge the US/Western-dominated neoliberal capitalism. The pervasiveness of the dollar regime throughout the world means that everyone is at risk of losing if the empire crumbles. China cannot just sit back and wait for the US to fail. It needs to pro-actively decouple itself before it is too late.
You have to think that was a time back when people understood the sacrifice made by the Soviet Union during WW2. There’s been nearly 80 years of propaganda since then. As far as with China the west is trying desperately to minimize Chinas successes, which is why it’s important for us to talk about them because like others have said China isn’t really interested in providing a good life for Americans, we have to present the Chinese system as a viable alternative and ask the proletariat why we cannot provide a decent living like China can do for themselves.
Not if the propaganda machine keeps being effective.
Maybe if there was such an intense cold war again (probably preceded by another hot one). We do live in materially different times.
https://redsails.org/concessions/ has some good quotes and sources
Certainly a take
You know what, he makes a good point
Let’s start by shuttering one of the biggest expenses to the government, the US military, in order to ‘reduce socialism’
New Red Scare but for Fortune 500 CEOs doing government contracts this time
Sitting senators asking Northrop Grumman executives if they’re socialist because they take government handouts would at least be funny as fuck if nothing else
Socialism is when Lockheed Martin gets a $200 billion contract
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
CapitalismSocialism
“Socialism is when the government does stuff” but without a whiff of irony.
Me turning a giant dial that goes from ‘capitalism’ to ‘socialism’
“Socialism is the post office and roads and capitalism is when I, John Capital, buy a riding lawnmower.”
Can’t wait until these dipshits “what are we a bunch of asians?!” away the garbage pickup service and now everywhere is overrun by bears.
I’d say his brain is leaking out of his ears, but his skull has long since run dry
The metric of economic organization is just dollars then??
Bottom right image is the original version from an ad, but it looks so much worse than the edited one with them all holding knives.
I don’t care what anyone says, the one with the knives is the original
I came here to ask this. It looks terrible. The wife is holding a shirt so starched that it’s standing on its own
Back when I was a kid shirts would have a piece of cardboard stuck inside them when displayed in the shops, and that would make them look like that.
Is that not a thing anymore?
I had literally never seen any version other than the knife one and imagined it was from some schlock paperback from the 70s or something
Witness the essential kernel of fascism unfold before you in real time.
I wouldn’t even say “capitalism” straight up. A lot of this shit is the result of capitalism at least in so far as these are all WW2 veterans who got the Settler Colonial bump from a plundered American continent and a decimated European rival market.
This was a singular moment in time, during which American Fascism delivered the goods for its popular loyalist base. What changed was that the Fascists at the top of the system did what Fascists always do and began eating their own seed corn rather than share with subsequent generations. The empire turned inward, crushed the popular social democrats of the 50s/60s/70s, and consolidated their gains within the robbery barony strongholds of the modern finance system.
If you want this moment back, you need to… well…
That means either doing a Socialism or a Barbarism. And we know what @creation247 thinks the answer is, but I doubt many folks in his audience are going to be excited about serving as cannon fodder in his next Glorious White Nationalist War. No more than the poor bastards shoved up into the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war appear to be enjoying themselves, anyway.
Edit: Can I just say that Twitter, in its current incarnation, is slow and jenky af? Nothing fucking works on this website anymore.
Also FDR correctly saw that capitalism needed to be saved from itself and put a generation of administrators and politicians in position of power through the new deal to stave off the collapse, which it did, but then his head exploded and the erosion started back again (but with the working class effectively neutered then)
(but with the working class effectively neutered then)
It took decades to properly neuter the working class. I might argue that labor militarism wasn’t really put in the ground until Clinton. I’ve definitely seen a few folks around here posit that the end of the USSR was the real death blow of domestic labor agitation, entirely because there was no countervailing global force. Although I’m more inclined towards the theory that the Volcker Shock of the 70s was what laid all the union efforts low.
But its always worth mentioning how, even into the '08 crash, life in the US was relatively fat and happy compared to our global peers. Its only in the aftermath of the Great Recession that you can say quality of living in the US has taken a solid step backwards. And then COVID was another big step back. And now we’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Hard to be a labor militant when going along to get along is nice enough. Less hard as living standards grow more and more dire.
Maybe saying the working class was neutered by the new deal was a bit too strong, but I still believe the moment the labor movement in the US hitched itself to the Democrat coalition, it was joever
the moment the labor movement in the US hitched itself to the Democrat coalition
It was eat or be eaten. A populist movement divided was not going to stand. The Labor movement’s real failing wasn’t hitching itself to the Democrats but failing to hollow out its leadership and wear it like a skin-suit into the next century.
Second this.
The US objectively had the best deal post WWII. Other than Pearl Harbor, there were no bombings so our infrastructure was back in place. The war was a boon for the economy (but for once it was based since the enemy was the west), we got the economic miracle like many other countries. Noncompete has a video on it that does a good job explaining this leagues better than I can
Now thanks to capitalism becoming a religion rather than a flawed economic system where any smart capitalist would at least try to find a synthesis or side with the workers upon every contradicion, we’ve clawed our way back to “normal” in great depression/1930s times. However, the red scare has done its damage and with fascism being seen as the ‘perfect’ ideology by the lumpens. we’re going to hit the cool zone.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
We had a US president that’s considered one of the best in history, and he realized that capitalism as an absolute totally sucked.
Post-WWII Burgerland really was a singular moment, which white boomers inherited and assumed was the normal, sustainable state of affairs. It’s impossible to Make America Great Again, and given that its greatness was through neoimperialism, it oughtn’t be.
Yup turns out being the only country with a significant manufacturing output when the rest of the world has to rebuild everything is pretty much an infinite money cheat code.
Which in typical boomer fashion the next generation totally learned from by exporting all of our manufacturing and transitioning us to an economy where you have to provide a service deemed valuable by the people who took all the money.
The subsequent generation were still kids at the time. It was silent & boomer generation capitalists who implemented neoliberalism and exported manufacturing.
And white boomers were easily convinced that all the social benefits that helped them shouldn’t be shared with the unworthy. And took away said benefits.
$10,000 monthly pronoun bill
And I’m already having a hard time paying my gay fees which is especially hard now that I’m missing out on the slur dividend.
That on top of the avocado toast and the soy lattes will surely be too taxing on any hard-working American
Political correctness is why I can’t afford food
I see chuds now pushing the line that the government is giving free/cheap housing to migrants and refugees, and THAT’S why you can’t afford a home.
Chuds will go for the most racist, smooth brained reasons before blaming capitalism.
And it’s always a Fight Club avatar, do they make these kinds of guy(s) in a lab or something? Literal NPCs.
Not surprising, it’s the movie that literally coined the term “special snowflake.”
The hard part about capitlaism is eventually you run out of other people’s money
*profit
Chuds want the old 1950s capitalism where only Black people and ’undeserving’ whites suffered.
The cost of everything went up
Why?
They printed more money
Why?
Government does stuff
Why?
Class warfare, warfare, money laundering, etc.
But entitlements?
Homelessness is a societal choice, private healthcare is the most expensive on earth, food waste, administrative costs of means based testing, policing poverty is expensive, corporations don’t pay taxes, contrived tax code, no bid contracts, etc.
Which isn’t even mentioning what a farce the premise that shit was good like that without it being more complicated. You know how a hamburger looks in an ad versus when you’re actually eating it? It was also people benefitting from war profiteering, exploitation, slavery, and apartheid. Like how do you think the sweet old man baker got the sugar in the first place?
Missing the “whites only” sign on these panels
Famously it was a white woman asking whether the colored folk have a fair shot in life that caused the strong white man to whither away into leaves like in the Avengers movie. Now we all have to navigate a racial jungle where sometimes black people are on TV and women can talk back to you on Twitter.
I keep seeing people in the replies to these citing moving away from the gold standard as the reason. Which further strengthens my belief that Libertarians are the only people who bought twitter blue-checks en masse.
Nostalgic to see some early 2000s crankery though.
Libertarians are interesting because they will list out all the problems of capitalism and then say the issue is not enough capitalism.
What changed? I’m surprised not much talk here about the obvious change in conservative right wing values since then.
In the past these white middle income men would be proud to provide for an entire family, they would happily accept the women stay at home, actually they would demand it and they wouldn’t complain about them being gold diggers, in fact they would rejoice together as they bought the newest color TV or microwave.
In contrast the old “hard day at work” is far from being a conservative value and is deeply out of touch at least with millenials and younger chuds imo. They complain about the “softness” of liberals but it is all projection, as you know, they are literaly the most likely group to get scammed by get rich quick schemes. All the masculine alpha males/crypto bros are all looking for the next scam to become millionaires overnight because as the damn alphas they’re obviously entitled to it.
The other part is modern right values end up contradicting old conservative values like in this case, the dream of a house and a stay at home mother is in conflict with the toxic masculinity chud cults that demonize women for trying to work, get education or leave the house therefore helping achieve this “American dream”.
TL;DR even if somehow economic conditions improved the current all the cryptobro/alpha male generation isn’t going back to single income households anytime soon, probably never as the hate for women reached a point where old conservative dreams like this is not actually desirable for many.
I don’t think their values have changed. Right-wingers don’t believe in the meaning of words.
Right-wingers don’t believe in “hard work” and they never have, they believe in ownership and entitlement through hierarchy. When they talk about hard work, it is exclusively used to justify the status quo. If you’re wealthy, it’s because you’ve worked hard and if you’re poor, it’s because you’ve not worked hard enough. It also serves to peddle a fantasy of agency to their audiences.
I noticed that too. When they talk about ‘muh hard work’ they’re always talking about SOMEONE ELSE working hard, or putting an emphasis on finding ways to get others to do things FOR YOU.
Even getting a job. For whatever reason porky wants us all to “network” or if we have rich friends, pester them into telling the company they are an executive in to to them a favor and hire you. When “networking” becomes a job requirement, isn’t it a wacky coincidence when ‘undesirables’ can’t get jobs? That clearly means they are inferior…but please ignore the fact that being unpopular bars you from working.
I want a version of this but with those Sino-Soviet friendship posters that look like they could be a couple.
