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economy, depression

Partly I think I’m having a depressive bout due to personal stuff like my relationship ending. But partly I’m bricking it because we’re staring down the barrel of a heist to steal our future and we’re individually at the mercy of the owning class.

They are coming for your savings, and for your debt, and for your buying power, and for your job security. All four. How do we individually defend against that? We can’t! But where is the class consciousness?

Daniel

economy, depression

Your savings will get eaten up, either by inflation or KiwiSaver shenanigans or by haircuts. Your earnings go bye bye as inflation is turned up, and employers are pulling every dirty trick to undermine labour, even though they killed enough people to create a labour shortage.

Your debt is in some ways safer than your assets, but not if the debt interest rates go up. You better be able to service it or say goodbye to the mortgage.

economy, depression

And who have we got in our court? Some (not all) of the unions. A couple of politicians within broadly Liberal parties.

A socialist network largely dismantled and sidelined by a labour peace that is now dead. The next few years are going to HURT, and not hurt equally, which is the point.

economy, depression

And this in the context of a global pandemic (and death cult response), climate extinction, energy crisis, and the deliberate turn towards fascism to protect Capital in case the Left get too powerful.

And meanwhile I’m trying to convince my Liberal friends to become Leftists before it’s too late, but they don’t want to “contribute to polarisation or radicalisation” when it’s “a complex and nuanced situation”. Fuuuuuuuuck

economy, depression

And we don’t have the luxury of 20th Communism as a successful model to reach towards. To be a socialist of any flavour today is to believe in values like universalism and integrity that mean we don’t get to lie, cheat or take short cuts, but to not have a surviving model to work towards. We can’t be utopians, and we can’t rely on 20thC ideology and vision. We’re back to improvising with the few tools we know can’t be coopted.

economy, depression

So materially it comes down to harm reduction and risk mitigation. But there’s just no fucking money for it, so its all scraps and personal virtue. How many refugees can you shelter? How much of your income can you put aside for ko-fi and patreon and give a little? It’s not enough, never enough.

economy, depression

And every regular, neurotypical person I talk to is like "you are correct, but don't worry about it, like me." and it's like... but people are going to suffer and die, and "people" doesn't mean "other people far enough away to pretend it doesn't matter" here, it means all of us. It's not a hypothetical, Darren.

economy, depression

We don't even have a fucking newspaper, that's how bad it is. In Aotearoa NZ, we've got the basically-liberal Spinoff, and they are as likely to run a soft piece about riding along with the fucking police helicopter as to call out the RW.

economy, depression

@dznz

Yeah, we have this worldwide grim situation 😟 Make me feel super powerless from time to time.

economy, depression

@caranha I wouldn't feel so lousy if it didn't already feel like those that get it, get it, and those that don't are refusing to get it. Literally how do we get people to care about themselves, even?

economy, depression

@dznz

Yeah, it is super hard to get people to change. Even if you make someone change for a little while, unless they want the change themselves, we will go back to our old ways when the world makes us too exhausted.

I don't know. Keep trying? Keep working on smaller steps? Bring out the guillotines?

economy, depression

@dznz Maybe go out for a long walk when the noise gets too loud inside our heads.

economy, depression

@dznz With you up to “we can’t be utopians”. I think there’s an urgent necessity to articulate what a better world would look like, so that people can work out their paths towards it.

We mustn’t pretend that the better world we describe already exists, but we need to describe it.

economy, depression

@dznz This is why I’m excited by the renewed trend in written SF towards exploring utopias. It hasn’t broken through into TV or film yet, where they’re still mining dystopian cyberpunk tropes from the 80s and 90s, but it’s a much more hopeful scene again.

economy, depression

@dznz Re: "And meanwhile I’m trying to convince my Liberal friends to become Leftists before it’s too late"

As a market liberal who agrees with you that corporatism is bad for ordinary people, the reason I'm not interested in becoming a leftist is that when allowed to do, markets do a better job providing opportunity for those at the bottom than command economies do.

(I'm not saying that to be a hater, I promise.)

economy, depression

@stevefoerster
(no hatred inferred!)

I don't have any particular beef with markets or commerce per se, just the private accumulation of capital, if that helps. Folks like Yanis Varoufakis propose markets *without* capitalism, which suggests it may not be the strict binary choice popularly portrayed.

The "opportunity" framing does bring me to one of my core problems with the ideology (1/2)

economy, depression

@stevefoerster
which is that of unemployment. It is economic doctrine that some amount of unemployment is desirable to the economy as it functions. BUT the unemployed are treated as moral failures deserving of their circumstances. That contradiction/double-think is close to the heart of the problem of liberal capitalism. A system built on exploitation that blames its victims even as it benefits from them.