(Some) ignorant leftbros: "Class first! No idpol!"
Scholars of right wing politics/economics: "All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests."
Above remark from "The Extravagances of Neoliberalism", an interview of Melinda Cooper (author of "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance") by Benjamin Kunkel, in The Baffler.
@SallyStrange@bookstodon I always feel that those on the Left who wish to reduce everything to class to the exclusion of all else care more for what is usually a very superficial dogma than manifesting actual change
Without recognition and due value for the experiences of different communities, there can be no intersectionality and without intersectionality there will be no change. As you say, the Right gets this only too well
Jonathan Chait is real mad that leftists aren't taking liberal shit anymore. I got the link from archive.is to avoid giving his BS any extra clicks. It's way longer than it needs to be. This paragraph caught my attention though because it's at least an attempt at clarifying what liberals see as leftism and why they're wrong (which is why they should shut the fuck up, because they have been proven so very fucking wrong, so often, and for so long):
I don’t want to bore you...
lol
by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism,
Funny how liberals hate defining liberalism
so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective.
This is incorrect. Leftists differ radically on how much state action over markets is needed. What unites leftists is the belief that we need democracy in economic realms as well as political ones. (I personally don't accept fully authoritarian MLs as leftists, one can debate that, but that's where I stand.) Liberals think it's just fine for us to have democratic politics but for most people to work for institutions that are run as dictatorships.
...On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed.
Sort of true, but Chait tellingly leaves out the substance of the leftist critique, the reason why they think that political liberalism is a recipe for maintaining inequality, to wit: the lack of democracy in most people's workplaces. If economic power is concentrated while political power is distributed, then inevitably political power will become concentrated as well. Because money is power.
Anyway, Chait hates "Solidarity" the book and he also hates solidarity the concept. Of course he gets paid to represent left-of-center thought at major USA publications. Feel free to discuss your disgust for this type of guy further in replies.
"There is a reason for these broken promises and dysfunctions, which explains why the UK suffers more from them than most comparable nations. It’s called neoliberalism.|
"We're also competing against a lot of people in politics who come along and say... it's those rich people's fault, we'll just take even more money off them and give it to you."
This is the fundamental lie of neoliberal politics. A total inversion of the truth, which is that neoliberal parties say 'it's those poor people's fault, we'll just take the money off them and give it to you', and they do.
What social democratic parties like the Greens, TPM and TOP say is that people only get obscenely rich because the state allows them to plunder - or does it for them - from funds that could be used to fund public infrastructure and services. They propose that we stop doing this, so the real wealth created by the workers and professionals of this country can be shared fairly across the population, instead of hoarded by a few hundred neo-feudalist families.
A classic example is the food situation. According to a recent article on food rescue projects in the NZ Listener magazine (May 11-17), enough food is produced in Aotearoa to feed 40 million people. Yet every week 7% of kiwis - a population of roughly 5 million - go hungry.
Yet what does the new government Seymour is part want to do? Cut funding for school lunches, while giving a tax cut to landlords, who are - compared to those struggling to get enough to eat - comfortably wealthy.
"breaking Scotland from the shackles of #neoliberal thinking should be very high on its agenda, and yet it keeps getting leaders who seem more than happy to embrace that approach, and make Scotland suffer for it" – @RichardJMurphy
#Neoliberalism#Economy#PoliticalEconomy#Freedom: "As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.
Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”"
#EU#Neoliberalism#Neoiliberalism#Censorship#Surveillance#DSA: "Despite the significance of digitalisation in mediating these political-economic shifts, mainstream platform regulation scholarship remains largely disconnected from these wider trends. EU laws are predominantly analysed using normative framings aligned with ‘progressive neoliberalism’, as efforts to balance growth and innovation against fundamental rights and ‘public values’. Schematically, EU regulation is distinguished on this basis from a free-market US approach and authoritarian, state-capitalist Chinese approach.
Against this, the paper makes two key claims. First, EU platform regulation can more helpfully be framed as manifesting an ongoing shift away from progressive neoliberalism and towards neo-illiberalism. Fundamental rights and liberal-democratic norms which previously legitimised EU policy are increasingly sacrificed in favour of unrestrained state surveillance and private-sector-led innovation. Second, methodologically, researchers should not only consider how these laws are being implemented currently, but also look ahead to an increasingly-plausible ‘far-right Europe’.
To demonstrate this framework’s analytical value, the paper examines the 2022 Digital Services Act, arguing that its overall regulatory approach is characteristically neo-illiberal: economically, it embraces marketised media governance and corporate power, while politically, it creates extensive possibilities for state censorship. Broadly, it seeks to strengthen platforms’ accountability in three main ways: individual consumer rights; empowering civil society via transparency and consultation; and technocratic risk management procedures."
@Doomed_Daniel@aral yeah conservatives definitely are prime targets for fascist takeover. But 1 funny thing to keep in mind is that in the case of trump, lots of his voters had previously voted for Obama. They’ve been flip flopping Democrat and Conservative Party ever since the Regan Administration.
@jberg@aral
I think one needs to differ between people with a conservative/liberal/fascist/whatever stance (incl. politicians) and voters who might not have very deep political convictions and just vote for the other party because the one they voted for last disappointed them.
Of course that braindead two-party system of the US where it's basically impossible for a new party to get any influence makes this especially bad..