Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Sheilbh]

But that's impossible to know or imagine - and the reason neoliberalism emerges and succeeds for a while is because it has a coherent answer or solution to the crises of the prevailing hegemony at the time. There's no reason to think that absent it we would have just reverted to the trente glorieuses. The crises would have continued to mount, provoking and feeding on themselves - it's not for nothing that the 70s were also years that produced other radical alternatives. It is a similar process that we're going through now.

The other point is make is that I think many people here are profoundly sympathetic to the radical social liberalism and cosmopolitanism produced by the neo-liberal order economically. You cannot atomise an economic order, break down bonds of solidarity and globalise markets without producing mirroring social effects which are, or can be experienced as, liberating. But I'm equally not sure you'll produce individual self-expression and cosmopolitanism from an economic order reacting to the (real or perceived) failure of neo-liberalism. So I suspect that whatever replaces it is probably going to evolve in different ways socially and culturally (I think some of the technological conditions also push back against the lightly worn cosmopolitanism of the peak globalisation era).

There's no one cool trick or answer - there are processes and change (action/reaction, dialectic etc) so if the neo-liberal experiment failed it would not simply have been a continuation of what had already ended. And obviously the greatest moral success of neo-liberalism and globalisation was a massive redistribution of wealth and productive power from a world still built to a 19th century colonial blueprint (based on the Atlantic), which lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty - with attendant huge reductions in, say, child mortality. That was above all driven by an authoritarian state capitalist regime running a planned economy - because every order contains in it the seeds of what may replace it.

[Josquius]

Sure you can't say for sure either way. Always a chance of anything.
But it's not like we don't have counter examples to look at of countries that made smarter choices.

[Sheilbh]

I can't think of any country in the developed West that didn't broadly go down the same route (France tried). There's differences in the details and the local peculiarities but the big picture's the same.

[HVC]

It's always worked this way. Even Rome had the same pattern. Downtrodden rise up, either violently or at such great numbers the elites cave in before things turn ugly. Rights are give, greater prosperity for the masses much cheering and self congratulations. Rich and elite start chipping away, greater and greater inequality. Repeat until your civilization collapses and the next one follows the same path

[crazy canuck]

Sure you can't say for sure either way. Always a chance of anything.
But it's not like we don't have counter examples to look at of countries that made smarter choices.

Who? Every industrialized economy went down that road.

[Josquius]

Sure you can't say for sure either way. Always a chance of anything.
But it's not like we don't have counter examples to look at of countries that made smarter choices.

Who? Every industrialized economy went down that road.

Germany, the Nordics....
They had some lesser later vandals but broadly escaped the Thatcheresque economic self destruction.