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.

[Zanza]

Xi Jinping will be our Thatcher. Also the devastation of East German industry in 1990 was at least as severe as what Thatcher did.

[Sheilbh]

On the Xi point I think this is a European story of the last 10-15 years of the crisis of globalisation - and the worst hit are Germany and the UK because we were the true believers in globalisation, that we'd reached the Elysian heights of post-history. So it first hits the UK as we're particularly exposed on financial globalisation - but I'd note the European financial sector as a whole has not recovered (not just the UK but Deutsche, Switzerland), you look at the top banks in 2007 and it's Euro-American plus one or two Chinese if you look now it's Sino-American with one or two Europeans.

Uniquely in Europe we do not move to cauterise the financial crisis which metastasises into a debt crisis and our response is swingeing, brutal austerity. Some of the biggest cuts, because least politically contentious in secure post-history are to defence but also to capital expenditure problems. And you end up in the grotesque situation of having to send shipments of weapons to Ukraine by barge because our infrastructure is so degraded it cannot bear the weight - plus (despite warnings from Gates, despite Trump I, despite the two invasions of Ukraine) the "shock" (to whom? Couldn't they read or see?) of Trump II and, finally, spending programs on defence and infrastructure - with a significantly higher cost of capital than was available in the preceding 15 years.

And now as the project of a politically-directed state capitalism that is no longer biding its time and hiding its strength, we see China Shock 2 which is disproportionately hitting Europe and Germany in particular. As this period started with the champion of financial globalisation taking a huge hit, it now (I think) closes with the champion of industrial globalisation taking one. And just remember that in 2020 at the end of her time in office Merkel (and Macron) were pushing a deal that would have left the EU even more exposed to the China Shock.

Running through the period like a stick of rock is this profound inability to read one's opponents, or perhaps imagine the existence of opponents or of other world views. Whether it was the long slow process of understanding Putin's Russia or the delusion that what Xi's China wants is a rules-based relationship, while accepting its place lower down the supply chain (a legacy of the century of humiliation and the European imperial order), as opposed to revising the world order to reflect Chinese power and moving up the supply chain to build that power. I think even with Trump there is an inability to comprehend or accept what he means - which is not difficult because he says it all the time.