As long as neoliberal capitalism remains the predominant ideology in the west, we will continue to shoot ourselves in the foot with austerity.
Austerity isn't the ruling class shooting itself in the foot. It's effectively in a world of limitless free trade, immense inequality, where collective action has been rendered literally unthinkable by neoliberal ideological hegemony, "tightening of the belts" for working people and endless credits, bailouts, and tax cuts for the rich are the new normal. Rates of profit are falling and wealth is permanently draining upward, so austerity is the political-ideological apparatus constructed to justify this state of affairs. Thats why they have to sell it as temporary, but the truth is that it's permanent - capitalism's inherent contradictions can't be resolved, only delayed and laundered through ideology.
Agree with most of what you wrote, but this also depends on your perspective. Neoliberal policies like Austerity, Outsourcing and globalisation is actively hurting the purchasing power of the west, destabilising it's democracies, as these contradictions continue the global economy will shift east and eventually the contradictions will become to much to bear. This is very clearly creating a new world order and is clearly freaking out western capital.
It’s hard to articulate this, but like it’s not that austerity is an irrational policy choice that keeps capitalism from working, it is the fact that capitalism doesn’t work, and has reached a stage of perpetual crisis, that makes austerity necessary from the perspective of the ruling class.
The perspective of the bourgeoisie worldwide is indefinite austerity.
To be honest austerity doesn't even feel like a real thing to me. I wasn't an adult in the era before it became bipartisan consensus in America, so what people call austerity just seems like the ambient state of things. To "end" austerity would feel much more like starting something new that didn't exist before rather than ending an intentional regime of denial. People's imaginations of what is politically possible have been so limited, even if you know better is possible it still doesn't feel real.
Yup. But what is more amazing is Dems talking about this even before the election happens. Why can't they just STFU for the next few months if beating Trump really is "all that matters"?
because we are STILL in the post-2008 zombie economy that never actually recovered from the crash. It was only papered over with 12 years of interest rates at rock bottom and gig economy expansion. And COVID made this bizarre schizophrenic zombie economy worse. We're basically holding our breath for the shoe to drop and the stock market to reconnect with real conditions.
"Sometimes mommy and daddy have to say no to things like a new car when the old one still works just fine"
They see it, they just dont care. They can just jet off to their high tech bunker in New Zealand when the proles come for them.
Or ya know, just have the police crackdown on anyone who's protesting.
Ideology. They're not particularly smart up in the upper crust, no more than anyone else, but they're believers, and they're empowered.
Austerity benefits companies that need interchangeable low-training expendable workers, because it makes those workers more desperate, so they're cheaper and more exploitable.
Social democracy benefits companies that need a supply of highly trained knowledge workers. Like, Google would prefer if they can work their engineers until they burn out, let them quit for a year and recover, then re-hire them. And not have to pay for the time it takes to recover.
Since so much of economic growth has been in tech, and so much of that has been companies like Amazon and Uber, you should expect more austerity-based policies.
It's pure economic garbage, but look at the UK. The Tories implemented austerity to unrivaled political success. Every time they were challenged from the left, they deflected to Racism, anti-Semitism, or Socialism. And they successfully absorbed the right.
Big Tent, Baby!
All it cost them was a place in the EU and international relevance.
Couldn't you just, you know, put the taxes back up? Maybe even add a little on the top for good measure?
Silly leftist, taxes are for poor people, if you tax billionaires we loose all our precious innovation.
Biden's tax plan during the primary was about halfway between Obama-era level taxes and Trump-era taxes, so he already gave up half the Trump tax cuts while running in the Dem primary. Expect this to go to zero during the general election or if they win.
Come on this election was a slam dunk with covid, Trump will have murdered 300 000 people by election day. Never underestimate democrats ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
The murals and shit would be good if actual action accompanied them. Instead they're meaningless gestures to try quell rightful anger towards the settler colonial Amerikkkan empire
"We care so much about black lives a segregationist who lied about helping Nelson Mandela is our presidential nominee! Isn't that so cool and normal!"
Or telling a bold faced lie about helping Mandela that basically was the equivalent of saying you could drive from LA to New York in a few hours. (He said he drove from robben island to Tshwane lol) Like it's actually extremely racist that he think POC are dumb enough to fall for that lie
imagine socializing amazon and merging it with the usps, mandating unionization :sweat:
it could be america, what a huge win that would be in every way
Well fundamentally, their goals and the republicans' goals are not far from each other and the gop doesnt need to pander to libs' civility etc. whilst working towards these goals. So the dems letting the gop win the election whilst looking like they are fighting against it is win-win for all relevant elites in the us and especially good for the dems, as the things their sponsors want get accomplished really fast and they still get to keep the moral highground and pose as a resistance against the right, so good pr. Atleast thats how i see it..
Nah, they legit think this is what you people want. They just hold you in contempt.
This trick has been around in Canadian politics as long as I can remember. Alternating Conservative and Liberal parties, federal or provincial, always say "wow, we had no idea the books were this bad" the week they take power.
100%, except there’s a fundamental difference in that the Liberals always actually balance the budget, through austerity, while the Conservatives just fucking cut all revenue streams and also do austerity anyway because fuck you
Ie. the Conservatives actually have no real reason to do the austerity beyond anti-human ideology, whereas the Liberals at least, ostensibly, actually do have to balance some shit out, every time...
...NDP when?
(government deficit doesn't even fucking matter anyway, money's all made up, especially when it comes to the state's money. it's just an excuse for austerity so people will swallow shit without questioning it)
Funny how Mulcair was within spitting distance of leadership... and then claimed that he was going to balance the budget. How'd your effort to embrace the fiscal responsibility crowd work out, Tom?
Jesus fucking christ, Tom 'the closest to leadership the NDP's ever been' Mulcair decides to walk to the right of the fucking Liberals, despite no one asking him to. What if... the NDP's base was actually leftists??
Lesson: fucking be a left-wing party you fucking NDP fucks! Hahaha
Will they learn that lesson? Fuckin' prolly not. I miss Jack. Singh's pretty alright, but Mulcair just did so much damage it's hard to walk back on... like... taking the word socialism out of the party mandate cuz it's 'just not relevant these days'.
Fuckin' fuck you, Tom, and your creepy-ass fake grandpa smile, no one likes you or your sweaters. We're taking the NDP back, starting with Singh.
Ok fine, maybe starting with the next leader. Did you see his latest shit on Palestine? Y u gotta be bad, NDP, you're all we have 😭 (I still stan the NDP, but, like, come on haha we're dying to love you NDP, just give us a reason, any reason)
The NDP didn't go right of the Liberals in 2015. The only reason people thought that was because the Liberals promised a $10 billion deficit for the following fiscal year (which is not far from a balanced budget all things considered), and they had a phony "tax the rich more, the middle class less" scheme with good branding.
The other elements of the NDP platform were fairly traditional socdem stuff - childcare being one of the biggest. But you're right that Mulcair did shift the party right, like Layton before him. They haven't been anything remotely radical since they were a much smaller party. I don't think Singh will go left of that generic socdem stuff, but he's solidified his ideology and goddamn some of their policies could have really helped me out last election. I'm still going to vote them or Green depending on my riding, but I have little hope for them at the moment.
I am fully done with the Greens, and I used to be a huge supporter. Now they’re mask off about ‘trying to appeal to both the left and right wing’. I have no time for their ‘both sides’, ‘apolitical’ lib shit. They have never included ‘challenging capitalism’ as a part of their ideology, and I definitely don’t expect them to just start one day. Imo they’re far to the right of the NDP, and now just irrelevant seeing as all of the left pretty much gets climate change these days.
So, as much as I’m a little fed up with the NDP, they’re still the best party imo. You’re right, they didn’t march all the way to the right of the Liberals or anything. But they did choose to present to the centre, instead of the left, at a time the Liberals were presenting to the left, and it was a really bad look. Trudeau was able to basically snag all of the lib NDPers, and the NDP hasn’t been able to recover since.
They were the official opposition ffs hahaha. One day, they’ll form government. And I will be happy because, hell ya, their policies would be fucking excellent for me, and I think could generate a new wave of normalizing socialism, like we got when health care was socialised, and who knows how far that could take us these days
Meantime, here’s hoping Daddy Twodeau gives us that UBI experiment, real pharmacare, and legalizes shrooms lmao I fucking hate the Liberals, so they could at least pander to me a little harder ahaha
I think I’ll prolly just vote NDP until I die at this point, unless I’m in a swing riding and there’s another harper looming, I might be tempted to line up behind another trudeau to oust them. Hoping it doesn’t come to that and the NDP can finally form government federally
and the NDP hasn’t been able to recover since.
I do have a bone to pick there - the NDP has never been a big party. Their only time as Official Opposition was their biggest result. Mulcair's loss of half those seats was their second-biggest seat result, third if you go by percentage of the house. Even Singh's 2019 drop isn't really far out of traditional NDP territory. There's still room for the party to come back. I only vote Green when the local candidate is better.
I can't bring myself to get more involved in elections than voting at this point though. I did some organizing and direct action right before COVID and I'd much rather get back into that than sit around waiting for another election.
That’s a really great point. No one expected that orange wave to sweep Quebec, not even the Quebecois NDP candidates haha, and everyone correctly expected it to subside.
I’ve supported Green candidates when they’ve actually had a shot, but generally just can’t support the party. Capitalism is just too ingrained in their ideology. They want like adam smith era capitalism, and I just can’t haha
I hear you though, I’ve been turned away from doing work in elections. If there’s ever another super critical moment like getting harper out or something I might again, but until then I’m fine just putting like a half hour of my life into going to a poll and ticking a box. If the NDP manages to position itself as a threat again, I could see myself getting involved
I also did some organizing and direct action before covid, because shutting down canada in solidarity with Indigenous peoples is based :red-fist:
imagine thinking anything the democrats say is in good faith lmao
I expect about two weeks before the election they'll say they're not sure if they can beat Trump. And if they don't, that's okay, there's always next time.
The FBI's gonna reopen that Hunter Biden-Ukraine investigation aren't they?
Fyi, Stephanie Kelton is the author of a book called The Deficit Myth about modern monetary theory, and while lots of it is arguable (and not necessarily new), it is nonetheless an interesting read.
Can you summarise MMT? Or link to a credible 10k ish word intro to it?
In short (and this is ripped almost straight from The Deficit Myth):
- Propaganda about the deficit is presented as "we have to Tax And Borrow before we can Spend anything" (TABS, for short). It's equating national spending to your personal spending, essentially (something most people will agree is silly even if they don't fully understand why).
- What's the #1 reason your personal spending isn't the same as national spending? You don't have a money printer. If your expenses outpace your personal income, you have to borrow money to cover those expenses. If the federal government's expenses outpace the income it brings in via taxation, it can borrow to cover those expenses -- or -- it can print more money. And this is functionally how the federal government actually operates; it's not some thought experiment or hypothetical. There's an example in the book of Congress approving billions more in defense spending, no taxes or borrowing being arranged to cover it, and the federal government just printing more money to fill the gap. Reality is closer to Spend, then Tax And Borrow (STAB, for short).
- So can we just print infinite money and do fully-automated luxury gay space communism tomorrow? No, for two big reasons. First, there are still real resource and labor constraints that apply even if we have all the money in the world. Say you want to buy all the yachts in the world. There are only so many now, and if you want more you have to build them, and if you want enough more you eventually have to re-tool a bunch of the economy to continue building them, etc. And because it eventually gets harder to build more, it gets more expensive to build more, which brings us to the second reason we can't just print infinite money and achieve utopia: inflation. If you print too much money but you're not increasing real-life production at a similar pace, you have more and more dollars chasing around a similar amount of real goods. This drives up the price of those goods, and if this gets out of control (for example, if you printed infinite money) it creates all sorts of larger economic problems.
- What about Vuvuzela? And Greece? What I described in Point 2 only works if (a) your government owns a money printer and (b) the debts it owes can be paid with the type of money that printer prints. Greece lacks the former, as it adopted the Euro and doesn't have the authority to print Euros. Vuvuzela lacks the latter, as a lot of the debts they have to pay must be paid in foreign (to them) currencies. The U.S. (and a number of other advanced economies) have both. Note also that this explains why individual U.S. state budgets don't work the same way the U.S. federal budget does: states (and smaller political subdivisions) can't print their own currency.
- Wait, why even have taxes at all, then? Taxes serve a number of functions even if they aren't necessary to finance government spending. They can be used to combat wealth inequality (which is corrosive to democracy), they can be used as incentives, and they can be used to restrict the supply of money in the economy to help curb inflation.
- OK, so we can deficit spend without it really being a big deal. Are we anywhere close to the point where we'll be spending so much it will produce inflation and those larger economic problems mentioned in Point 3? Probably not. We're running historic deficits but inflation is also low. It's likely we can do a lot more deficit spending before it becomes a problem, and we almost certainly will do so -- the question is what we're going to spend that money on.
Would you like to know more? Here's a Citations Needed episode on deficit mythology where they interview the author of that book.
Good description! Just to add, proponents of MMT are also proponents of a Job Guarantee that I think is very interesting and could even be used for a post revolution society transitioning to socialism (on how to get rid of private property, one of the thing Mao struggled a bit with).
To expand on this, IIRC their support of a Job Guarantee comes from the idea that (a) it's a way to use deficit spending to better meet everyone's basic human needs while (b) getting some production back for the money, which is good for society and helps avoid the risk of inflation.
MMT is wrong and bad. It's yet another Keynesian reformism, and the mainstream left attaching itself to it will repeat the exact same process as post-war Keynesian consensus. There will be a crisis that cannot be adequately explained by MMT. No one will know what the fuck to do. Austerity will become entrenched again in order to protect profitability. Whatever minute existence of radicalism that is growing will be brought back into reformist social democracy, or be purged.
JFC what Idiots.
Also, Hey! thats Stephanie Kelton, MMT guru extraordinaire, read up on MMT people, it'll prevent you from making silly mistakes like listening to centrist on the economy.
