It's afraid :sicko-yes:
"My hope is that the neoliberal project can grow enough that it becomes another option as an edgy, young people, cool ideology that can compete with communism or Trumpism."
:michael-laugh: :michael-laugh: :michael-laugh:
So edgy and cool to support the new status quo
This reminds me of Nate Silver, who maybe 8 or so years ago predicted that young millennials/Zoomers would start becoming conservatives to get back at their liberal parents.
Literally no conception of material conditions
I honestly feel like Nate Bronze is more often wrong than right. It's hilarious.
reminds me of the article that said the "dad bod fad" was a rebellious reaction to having an in-shape president (obama)
Radical centrists have grown a lot in the last couple of years. They weren't even a thing a decade ago.
Yeah and those dorks are about as edgy and cool as college Republicans
IMO, most of those guys seem to basically be moderate Republicans/ libertarians that are just aware that calling yourself a rightwinger would make them unpopular.
(moderate, meaning they are okay with gay people and maybe don't like the fact that Trump is rude, but secretly voted for him anyway because they like his policies, and think that Biden/Hil are "too far left")
Do they really think Trump isn't economically neoliberal? I don't go on the sub but do they object to Trump on an economic level?
he's not neoliberal, look at all his protectionist policies, he's almost like some sort of weird neomercantalist
Yeah, nothing got the neolib knickers in a twist more than all the tariffs Trump was putting out
Yeah I get your point. Even though he wasn't successful at most of it he did want to reign in a lot of outsourced labour
A mass disruption of the service industry that caters to the brunch demographic
Material Conditions, motherfucker! Gee, what a surprise as conditions become worse and worse people become more radical and the vague reforms offered by neoliberalism just aren't appealing.
But, yeah, sure it's actually because communism is "edgy" so all you have to do is be edgy. Definitely don't try to fix people's material conditions under neoliberalism, that isn't going to help at all. LOL, love to see them realizing this neoliberal world order is doomed to slip away.
Love him or hate him, Stalin called this shit a hundred years ago when he called Social Democracy a shield for Capitalism. The whole post war consensus was not tenable because it was predicated on the cohabitation of two classes conscious of themselves, eventually there would be conflict and one would win hence the 70's and the neoliberalturn. Now these morons are surprised that the exact same ideological opposition that arose to liberalism now re-arise in opposition to the conditions engendered by the reemergence of hegemonic liberalism.
Love the smooth brain comparing what COINTELPRO did to the KKK vs what it did to the Panthers and other socialist movements. The FBI made up 1/5th of KKK membership at one point, and still couldn't do shit with all those assets because local law enforcement was partaking in Klan activities. On top of that, the FBI dedicated 3x more manpower towards black movements like the Panthers. Wonder why there was no Fred Hampton moment with the Klan?
Also love the the more nefarious implication that the KKK was comparable to the Panthers.
You bring up this type of argument against these assholes, and suddenly you'd get a thousand comments about whataboutism. Punk asses are trying so hard to rationalize this bullshit instead of just admitting they're fucked. It's hilarious.
Literally dead behind the eyes. These people should be covered in hot tar and feathers whenever they step outside.
They want to make neoliberalism "edgy?" Lololol. These people are so far out of touch with reality. I cannot fully comprehend it. "Hey guys, what if we were all like, wage slaves serving our rich oligarch master, but like, we were all happy about it? Wouldn't that be a totally hip thing to do?" "Oh and by 'we' I mean you. I see myself as more of a (wage) slave handler than an actual (wage) slave, per se. I mean someone has to keep the (wage) slaves in lime amiright?" lol So edgy.
They want to be cool so fucking bad, and I'm sure we all know there's nothing less cool than trying to be cool
Like how do they even imagine this could work when they worship objectively lame shit like the West wing and Pete Buttigieg?
hence why I made a post recently talking about dealing with "CIA bad" issues
Well, thank goodness someone is a voice of reason. Let's see what they had to say:
In arguing with leftists, I often find that their knowledge of economic history is somewhat lacking. But where they make up for it is that they have an absolutely encyclopedic knowledge of abuses carried out by capitalists against anticapitalists. These generally include:
Killing striking union workers and arresting labor organizers
The CIA overthrowing democratically elected socialist leaders
Western military intervention to secure access to natural resources
Police or FBI using force against domestic nonviolent socialist organizations
Something something conspiracy theories to spread propaganda that socialism doesn't work by covering up successful experiments and arresting activists
Often sources like this get circled around https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md#imperialism or just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_United_States
Their thesis is that all of these atrocities are incentivized by the profit motive and are unavoidable in a capitalist system. Hell, there's even an nber paper that validates their arguments that US interventions were concentrated in areas where domestic industry had a comparative disadvantage: https://www.nber.org/papers/w15981
Every now and then somebody posts a thread here asking for counter-arguments, and to be honest many of the responses seem quite weak to me and are poorly sourced. Literally almost every "capitalism vs socialism" debate inevitably ends up on US foreign policy, and for the amount of lefitst literature dedicated to that issue, I can hardly find anything in defense of capitalism beyond Soviet whataboutism, which is only really effective if you're arguing with tankies or if you can somehow get AnComs and DemSuccs on the defensive about Stalinism. Our World In Data doesn't necessarily hold here either, because these are concerning killings and military interventions, rather than poverty and exploitation.
Okay, I think this might be a bit. Is @jeb_brush one of you nerds?
If this is a bit, dropping that NBER paper in there makes this trolling go from good to great. The neolibs are compelled by their worship of academic economics to at least read the abstract.
:sicko-yes:
Right? Whoever this is, they deeply understand the mind of neoliberals. It's infuriating, frankly.
Probably someone who used to be a neoliberal, or at least a liberal who understood the academic bullshit lying at the foundation of neoliberal ideology (at the bottom of the superstructure, and just above the material base).
i desperately want to see the post dealing with the "CIA bad" issues
Lmao I love the top comment that's like "this sub is the only place that can handle a nuanced discussion of Chile" and the reply is like eight pages of declassified info talking about how the US conspired to shit on them :sicko-flipped:
why do I have a feeling a ''nuanced discussion of Chile'' just implies excusing pinochet for the horrific shit he did because ''economic freedom''
Because Pinochet's Chile was a playground for the Chicago school that that sub trips all over themselves to suck the dicks of
You should have seen these worms when Pinochet's constitution got repealed by 78%. And yet there are still foolish internet "leftists" out there who think these turds are a part of the left or some sort of allies lol (not on here thank god, but on twitter and reddit it seems fairly common)
DemSuccs and Tankies
STOP👏TEACHING👏LIBERALS👏WORDS
Every time I see the word "tankie" being used by a liberal something in me dies.
I checked out his CIA post he references and it’s just him complaining that leftists seemingly have an airtight argument about all the evil the CIA has been behind and is basically him begging for counterpoints against it because everything he’s seen from his fellow neolibs has been too weak. Lmao.
Hey sup bros I’m an edgy and cool neoliberal.
Y’all wanna fucken, like, means test some charter school vouchers?
And yeah, I skate, but I make sure it’s done on recreationally zoned land 🤙
Why do neoliberals think that capitalism helps the global poor?
They keep saying that farther down on that thread
I remember reading a jacobin article debunking the World Bank's poverty bullshit even before that Gravel Institute video. This info has been available for a while and these dipshits still repeat the World Bank propaganda over and over to this day.
edit: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/07/international-poverty-line-ipl-world-bank-philip-alston
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
This Jason Hickel letter to Steven Pinker is also great.
Jason Hinkel is a great source for these debunks, he was on a very good ep of Citations Needed slapping the shit out of Stephen Pinker's mouth
His book the Divide Covers it in detail too. Basically, they keep moving the poverty threshold to paint the picture they want and most of the poverty alleviation has been in China who hasn't really liberalized its banking sector.
Also the Alston poverty report from the UN is pretty good: https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf
Article about it if you don't want to go through the whole thing: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/06/global-poverty-rampant-un-misleading/ EDIT: From the article about it:
"For 10 years, economists, the United Nations, and world leaders have celebrated a reduction in global poverty, heralded as “one of the greatest human achievements of our time” by then-World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim in 2018.
If only.
Those claims of victory appear to be misleading, at best. A scathing new report published on Monday by Philip Alston in his parting shot as the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights paints a world where poverty is rampant—yet undercounted, due to the World Bank’s reliance on outdated metrics.
The report comes at a critical juncture, as the coronavirus pandemic is set to push half a billion people into poverty and is expected to double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million.
“Even before COVID-19, we squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston said in a press release issued alongside the report.
“When combined with the next generation of post-COVID-19 austerity policies, the dramatic transfer of economic and political power to the wealthy elites that has characterized the past forty years will accelerate, at which point the extent and depth of global poverty will be even more politically unsustainable and explosive,” the report says.
Alston, who stepped down as special rapporteur in May, places much of the blame for misplaced global optimism on international institutions and economists’ over-reliance on the World Bank’s international poverty line of $1.90 per day as the definition of extreme poverty. In his six years as special rapporteur, Alston has produced a series of withering reports on global poverty—and the world’s richest countries, including the United States, were not spared his scrutiny.
The number of people living below the $1.90 threshold is down from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 734 million in 2015, but even those who eke their way past the extreme poverty line may still struggle to secure basic necessities, such as food and housing.
“The IPL [International Poverty Line] is explicitly designed to reflect a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” says the report, which was presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council today by Alston’s successor, Olivier De Schutter.
“It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this report. It’s a direct, high-profile challenge to the dominant narrative about global poverty that has for so long been promoted by the U.N., the World Bank, and international NGOs,” said Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist and senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London."
Barefooted children from the global south need to toil in sweatshops for two dollars a week so they can squirrel away some savings for their down payment on a used Funko Pop. How else would this be possible if not for Capitalism?
People who used to be subsistence farmers growing food for themselves and their family now get a whole $2 a day working in sweatshops for some asshole so that they can barely afford the rent they now owe. Therefore, global poor == helped!
Poverty is when you don't have a job in a capitalist's factory.
I know, that's why I said it lol. It's the most succinct summary of neoliberalism there is.
They argue that sweatshops are good because the only alternative for those workers otherwise is prostitution or backbreaking work on a farm. They also use the widely misleading World Bank graphs about the supposed drop in poverty over the last 40 years (where if you make a whopping 2 dollars a day you’re no longer in poverty!).
Interesting thanks!
I'm familiar with all the rebuttals of the talking point but I couldn't figure out why they actually believe it. I guess it's pretty much just that world bank graph and the fact that it supports their ideology
Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has done a lot of work exposing neoliberal poverty reduction myths. From his response to Steven Pinker and Bill Gates:
If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
The narrative that you and Gates peddle relies on a poverty line of $1.90 per day. You are aware, I’m sure, that this line is arbitrary. Remarkably, it has no empirical grounding in terms of how much money is necessary to satisfy actual human needs.
If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period. It’s time for you and Gates to stop using it. Lifting people above this line doesn’t mean lifting them out of poverty, “extreme” or otherwise.
Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).”
In fact, even the World Bank has repeatedly stated that the line is too low to be used in any but the poorest countries, and should not be used to inform policy. The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin. Lant Pritchett and Charles Kenny have argued that since the poverty line is based on purchasing power in the US, then it should be linked to the US poverty line – so around $15/day.
Your argument is that neoliberal capitalism is responsible for driving the most substantial gains against poverty. This claim is not supported by evidence. Here’s why: The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia. As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation).
Not so for the rest of the global South. Indeed, these policy options were systematically denied to them, and destroyed where they already existed. From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion ($7.40/day line for achieving basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy). In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%. In other words, the imposition of neoliberal capitalism from 1980 to 2000 made the poverty rate worse, not better.
Since 2000, the most impressive gains against poverty (outside of East Asia) have come from Latin America, according to the World Bank, coinciding with a series of left-wing or social democratic governments that came to power across the continent. Whatever one might say about these governments (I have my own critiques), this doesn’t sit very well with your neoliberal narrative.
As I pointed out in the Guardian piece, only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.
Here’s how well it’s working: on our existing trajectory, according to research published in the World Economic Review, it will take more than 100 years to end poverty at $1.90/day, and over 200 years to end it at $7.40/day. Let that sink in. And to get there with the existing system – in other words, without a fairer distribution of income – we will have to grow the global economy to 175 times its present size. Even if such a feat were possible, it would drive climate change and ecological breakdown to the point of reversing any gains against poverty.
Hickel also had a great episode regarding this topic on Citations Needed.
Like we don't all know what they're going to do when they're forced to pick between "Trumpism" and anti-capitalism. And Trumpism is a dumb term for the consequences of neoliberalism's manifestation of media. Just like in the liberal era a hundred years ago, this is an era of yellow journalism and the result is an uninformed, perpetually confused, and angry public. Everything they hate is directly generated by their own ideology's death grip on our politics, which insists on smothering all other ideas out of existence. What else could be responsible for literally any of this? So of course they're going to stick with the sickness they cause and choose "Trumpism".
Why do neoliberals especially love admitting that they are dumb and don't know what they're talking about? At least normal libs and conservatives mostly just do it accidentally
