How the fuck did anyone fall for neoliberalism

seriously, I thought after 1929 everybody agreed free markets weren't the way to go?
we were doing fine under mild succdem policies after WWII but then these miserable cunts had to come out of nowhere and fuck everything up once again.
how many times do we have to try liberal economics before we realize it's cancerous? but more importantly, why did everybody jump ship on Keynesian policies when we weren't even doing that bad before the 1980s?

Historical necessity and class struggle

y do u h8 freedom m8?

Inflation was skyrocketing, investments in productivity were minimal since returns were non-existent. The compromise between capital and labor was failing everywhere in the 70s.
Also, it wasn't the Right who innovated first. It was the Democrats under Carter and Labour under Calliwhatsits who defected from the working class. Everyone shits on Thatcher and Reagan, but they were just following the policy precedents set by prior administrations, which is how they lasted so long, their opposition was blatantly not actually opposed to them in any way.

is that erich honecker or menachem begin?

what should have been done to turn this around (other than neoliberalism)?

Nothing.
It was an opportunity for the contradictions of capitalism to finally break open and revolution to sweep the west, instead the bourgie parties blinked and the proletariat went down in the flames of compromise and class collaboration.

Proletarian revolution and the establishment of socialism. It was either capital or labor and capital won.

I was looking for something a bit more practical than "HURR WE SHOULDA PUT DA BANKERS ON DA STAKES"

That was the only practical move at that point. The class cooperation meme had ended and it was either total victory for the bourgeois or proletarian class.

Bourgeois victory in the form of neoliberalism was inevitable since the proletarians had eaten the reformism meme. Even in your post you betray this attitude when you act as though proletarian revolution is impractical even when it was clearly the only other option due to class cooperation having reached its limit.

Laissez-faire capitalists had been licking their wounds in the shadows ever since FDR, until the opportunity arose to strike back.

The 1960s "culture wars" clove leftism from the working class, and by the time victory had been achieved in its various struggles (racism, sexism, environmentalism, nuclear weapons, war, etc.) in the 1970s, leftism failed to pivot back to class war. As a result, capitalists were able to isolate and strangle the heart of class struggle (organized labor), so that when the next cyclic recession hit in 1973 magnified by OPEC, labor unions were crushed, tariffs were repealed, immigrant quotas exploded, and jobs were offshored en masse.

Meanwhile, "leftism" had been utterly coopted at the leadership level by windmill-jousting shitlibs, who refused to accept victory in the culture war that had won them such prestige, instead beating dead horses and whipping up imaginary enemies from thin air. This caused all ideologically sincere leftists to abandon major activist orgs, leaving behind only powermongers and virtue-signalers. The result is an economically anodyne "leftism" that has ceded all economic debate to lolbert rightists, who are now all too happy to concede the "moral" culture "debate" to "leftists".


What Keynes said: Abolish the petrodollar in favor of Bancor, shut down Breton-Woods to create an International Clearing Union.

The problem isn't free markets. It's companies.

This, but people often forgot one of the more important aspects: Working class power had reached a critical mass, with workers and youths feeling more and more confident and militant, with events such as the civil rights movements, may 68, italian hot autumn, and swedish wildcat strikes threatening to topple capital. Neoliberalism was as much a reaction to economic crisis as it was to political crisis.

wokers picked compromise with the ruling class. and that was bad decision.

Because it was in porky's interest to have neoliberalism. In the UK wage rise caps were introduced to curb inflation yet companies VOLUNTARILY broke those caps. It was sabotage plain and simple. A largely manufactured crisis so the reset button could be pushed.

Well it's kinda related to collective memory, isn't it? The average person can hardly be expected from the mistakes he witnessed in his lifetime, let alone the mistakes of previous generations. And God knows no country ever set up an education system with the full intent of actually informing and elevating people.

Besides, probably the biggest point of the representative democracy that Porky so loves is that it keeps actual democracy to a bare minimum, so he can go on actually calling he shots n 99% of the issues. Think back on this: don't you often see news to the effect of "2/3 of Americans support policy X", or "80% of America does not want bill Y to pass", and every single damn time, the actual opposite things happen? Well the people realy hardly had to fall for free markets. So long as they didn't abhor the idea to the point of resorting to violence, Porky couldn't give a shit. He'll enact it, and mold public opinion around it before, during and after the enactment. Cue Göring's famous quote about people not naturally wanting war.


a pro-post

...

It was a direct reaction to the Soviet threat. The west feared that there would be communist revolutions funded by Soviet Union in the west so they put billions in liberal porky propaganda.

The stagflation of the '70s produced a crisis of confidence in Keynesianism and the oligarchs used the opportunity to push an ideology tailor-fit to enriching themselves.

Is the /leftytrash/ SocDem in this thread? Everyone here seems to have taken on his posting style

The big insistence in the 70s from centrists was "we all need to work through this together" and "those damn greedy unions are destroying the economy and the country." This was particularly in the case of the US' efforts in Vietnam, which were repeatedly boogered by strikes, not because the workers were against the war mind (many were, some weren't, many more gave no fuck one way or t'other), but because they were going on strike and if the war effort suffered than who the fuck cares (compare that to WW2, for example, when the union leadership pushed full collaboration with the bourgeois against the greater evil of facism).
Class collaboration and compromise ALWAYS means the workers fold and the bourgeoisie profit.

this unironically makes sense.

Strictly, neoliberals recognize the role of the state in defending the existence of markets. (And tacitly, forcing them to exist where they have no bloody reason to exist.) Where laisse faire is more about keeping the state out. I mean, some of them recognize a role in monopoly-busting (in theory anyway) for example. Actually, it would perhaps be an interesting project (for someone more prepared to engage in good faith than I ever could be.) to compare the "theory" of neoliberalism to the practice, since differences between the two are probably where the system will eventually collapse.


Permanent prices and incomes policy.
(this is actually a pretty bad solution, but it's the most aesthetically pleasing.)

A better solution would be direct statutory controls on bank lending. A major neoliberal policy was to control the money supply* by increasing interest rates. Much of the unemployment under Thatcher didn't emerge because of nationalised industries being closed, but due to regular private sector enterprise being squeezed to death by high interest rates. (Since businesses often borrow as a matter of course, even though they aren't unsustainable enterprises.)

*Actually this is controlling money demand, yeah, monetarism is fucking weird. Basically you make taking loans too expensive, so banks stop creating money, except monetarists pretend this is the state's fault. Even with all this, I believe the Bank of England still missed most of their money supply targets.

It's worth noting that in the UK - and I bet also in the USA - the banks were in a deregulatory environment and growing in power even before the 1973 oil crisis. The Heath government first tried to instruct businesses to increase output in preparation to join the EEC so Britain would be less far behind Germany when she entered fully. Business declined to do so for various reasons, so Heath then tried a market solution - he abolished the credit control policies (it had a specific name but I've been awake too long to bother remembering it ) on bank lending. Theoretically Banks would then be free to lend to all sorts of productive investment, but in practice a consumer boom resulted, consequentially pushing up prices.

Another policy option (though not incompatible with neoliberal moves elsewhere, in many senses) would be a buffer stock of employment. Basically rather than putting the unemployed on welfare, the state would guarantee jobs as an employer of last resort. This should maintain full employment while also keeping prices stable, in theory. (Welfare would presumably still exist for transient unemployment, disability, etc.)


Good degree of this is also true.


speak of the devil and he will arrive with pictures of Harold Wilson

Then you want capitalism to be some perfect system without contradictions which it isn't.

Based Wilsonposter knows his shit.

But there is also another element: the idea of government and governance. TL;DR: a wing of the tories (those who rejected Butskellism aka the post-war keynesian consensus) thought the issue was with the bureaucracy trying to run the market: and that the size of the bureaucracy was a cause of this. [2nd pic related] This was related to the fact bureaucrats ran nationalised industries so smaller government, fiscal conservatism and free-marketeering formed this perfect trifecta for the new right.