Ex-right-wing gang thread

Specify which right-wing ideology you subscribed and explain how to defected to the left.

Other urls found in this thread:

scribd.com/doc/315691715/Anwar-Shaikh-Capitalism-Competition-Conflict-Crises
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I’ve never been capitalist or libertarian, but I spent many years of my life vaguely affiliated with the alt-right as a communitarian traditionalist in the vein of Christopher Lasch (an ex Marxist funny enough) with a dollop of right-wing idpol. I still retain echoes of that thinking, but I would say I am now firmly in the left camp. Frustration and alienation drove most of my rightist grievances and as I’ve gotten older, more empathetic and socially experienced (I’m 28), I’ve been able to put them aside and to rein in my kneejerk reactions to shitlib bait.

Pretty much a commie now thanks to how much the construction company and managers fucked us workers over

Used to be a carbon copy Reagan conservative since I got indoctrinated from birth into it

I've always been a "everyone should get their own ethno-state and capitalist exploitation should be completely abolished so everyone lives happily with people they identify with" kind of guy myself. I was unironic ancap when i was around 10 years old (shows you how childish ancap is) then learned about corporate exploitation of people in the third world etc. Back then Holla Forums was nationalist socialist so i thought that i was with a good crowd. Stayed until last year and became disillusioned with the rampant neo-conservatism and warmongering and "fuck those sandniggers" and trumpcuckoldry. I've been here ever since.

I used to be pro-free market during my teen years because I read the communist manifesto but was too spooked to actually comprehend anything in it. Didn't really read anything besides that but downright rejected any form of leftism. I never went down the reactionary rabbit hole although I used to parrot some things close to it.

Two things changed my mind on it. First, because of my family background I was familiar with the USSR far better than most Westerners, so whenever people equated communism with breaking of traditional gender roles or called the USSR communistic when no one in it referred to it like that, I started to realize these people are not very smart. Secondly getting familiar with several philosophers, but mostly Stirner, erased my biases, made me realize that my understanding of leftism was skewed and made me much more open minded. That's when I actually gave leftism a shot and looked into it and watched some videos by Rebel

For now, from what little I read, I am still pro-free market from a purely practical point of view at ameliorating people's quality of life. On the other hand, I don't discount communism on the basis that it's a historical fact that no system is eternal and that materialism, at least for now, seems the most sensible method of analysis to me.

now read actual historical sources on the improvement a planned economy brought all ex-socialist nations and look at the quality of life change since the restoration of capitalism. then look up how the ussr's planned industry saved the world from nazism.

if you're german/russian/greek, look up the logic of history by vaziulin

Wiktor Alexejewitsch Wasjulin?

That's true, but planned economy was far more wasteful and less efficient than a price coordinated economy.

I don't think this is an entirely honest point to make. The upheaval in the 90s was mostly due to the inexperience of ex-USSR economies, that is, their population. It was a radical shift that practically happened overnight, they didn't have time to adjust.

I don't know about other countries, but I can tell you about Russia. Imagine that your entire ideology that you were indoctrinated into from childhood, to be officially announced as false by the very authorities that are supposed to uphold it. Almost 80 years of economic thought thrown out of the window, and the new economical world view was so foreign and incomprehensible that people started making things up in university courses about how the market functions. This is how an economist relative described to me her education during the 90s. Another relative described to me how the banks functioned shortly after the fall of the USSR. They were inexperienced and didn't know all the ins and outs of the market, so when he took a loan from the bank they didn't add any fine print to his contract in case of inflation, which occurred shortly after. That way he managed to pay the entire loan plus interest with a month's salary. Another example is during 1997 when the government had to default on all the bonds it issued because too many people bought it because of the attractive interest rates.

Sargon liberal, I never bought into the race realism or of the glory if battle and the other moralfag gay shit Holla Forums was pushing from 2013 on. Then I actually got a job, landcaping, for a small business. Having an unironic small business tyrant who thinks of themselves and their business in terms of Nietzschean struggle is quite an experience. Talking with people who actually depend on people like my boss so they can live emiserated made me anti-capitalist. Privilege is fragile, and getting it is way harder than losing it.

You say capitalism
I say communism
You say liberalism
I say Year Zero
You say Ludwig von Mises
I say Saloth Sar von Pol Pot

Social democrat, can't believe i thought Scandinavia was the greatest shit on Earth.

The most right wing I ever got was SocDem.

How I defected:

Lets be honest for the Americans here. Who else /exdemocratgang/?

Right wing libertarian during most of my teenage years. The first thing that got me to start questioning my faith in Friedman was getting a job in the newly privately run university system in the UK. The place collapsed while under the control of a rather pro bussiness and ex-Tory old boy Vice-Chancellor, there went my job along with my dads who had been forced to take redundancy after working there for about twenty years,

how did it collapse?

By some lucicrous definition of "efficient", I suppose you could claim the free market is "efficient". In reality, however, its efficiency is illusory. Is it "efficient" at providing those who love under it with access to healthcare, housing, food? Clearly not. There is also immense waste, but it isn't counted as "inefficient" because it's "profitable", which is a useless measure of efficiency. If, say, public transport is privatised, and because the train route that takes me to work is deemed "unprofitable" and axed, is that "efficient"? Clearly not.

Capitalism operates under absurd definitions of efficiency. If you mean "the meeting of demand", then 1. There is always a delay in a market system anyway and 2. Planning in the 21st century would likely be better than markets at meeting demand because of improvements in technology

The introduction of capitalism into Russia has been a monumental failure, and in the 1990s threw them right back into the third-world where they came from. Life expectancy declined, deaths went up drastically, wages declined enormously, and essentially the entire country was looted and pillaged by capitalist pigs.

It was far more of an economic shock in the transition from semi-feudalism to socialism than from a revisionist form of socialism (which had by the late 1980s adopted certain capitalistic mechanisms) to capitalism, yet in one case living standards and life expectancy suffered, and in the other case it did not. In every ex-Soviet republic this is the case, and in China enormous rises in living standards plateaued thanks to the introduction of market reforms.

As far as the West goes, the development of the Western nations was facilitated by two things; 1. Imperialism, and 2. Massive state involvement in the economy. "Conventional economic wisdom", those ideas espoused by free-marketeers, are only ever adopted by third world nations who've had it imposed upon them. And why? To facilitate imperialism which enables the bourgeoisie back at home to placate the workers with minor concessions to get them to settle down (these concessions at the moment, however, are being eroded due to the self-destructive craving for profits). This includes throwing crumbs at that great reserve of wasted labour, the industrial reserve army. That's right; the left is the reason why capitalism is now tolerable for a great deal of the public in the West, and utterly intolerable for those in the third world.

This is obviously unsustainable and wasteful from a purely rational perspective, quite apart from the immorality of the exploitation inherent in the system, of the hunger, poverty, greed, war, disease, and alienation that ought to compel us from a purely moral standpoint to read the whole edifice down.

I get converted to ancapism because I realized statism was retarded and authority was a spook, also the free market fixing everything made sense at the time. Then I came across actual Anarchists here and started reading shit like the Anarchist FAQ and I realized "the boss does give me more orders in a day than a cop gives me in a lifetime. He does rule over me and expect me to obey his authority". Then I came on here a few times asking classic capitalist questions like "what about the risk the boss takes? Who will build and run the factories?". It honestly didn't take me long to realize ancapism was contradictory and non-anarchistic once I started reading. Took me a little bit longer to give up my attachment to the market.

The new Vice-Chancellor decided to start laying off low wage workers at first in the name of "cost saving" so out went a number of the porters and people than used to look after the university ground quite frankly the place became a bit of a dump where no one looks after the uni. This was all rather bizarre since a number of high ranking managerial jobs still stayed around which where highly payed it would seem much better to lay these people off to save costs would it not? Well apparently they had a lot of dirt on this guy so he couldn't sack them now lecturers start getting the chop to really cut costs since students aren't turning up anymore. As the place loses teachers and isn't being looked after a cycle forms and it runs itself further and further into the ground.
Hundreds of workers have lost there jobs and since it's a small town a lot the of the economy depends on the uni and with it being slowly drained of money it's killing the town too.
It's likely he'll do a runner at the last minute with a big bag of cash just before the place completely kills itself under these new economic arrangements

Started out as a communist by age 10 or so, when I went to college everyone else was also far-left, but the idpol/sjw bullshit was literally nauseating and made me embarrassed to associate myself with the left. I started reading Evola and became fash. I never liked free-market capitalism though.
Then I was exposed to the Nazbol meme, and I immediately loved it. I unironically became Nazbol for a few months, then proud ML. I'm proof that Nazbol entryism actually works.

Capitalist "efficiency" in action

Fucking disaster innit? Ironically since a lot of these people don't have the money required to either move out or go into uni for education since you now have to pay for the thing. It's likely many of them will end up going on welfare benefits of some kinds.

By efficient I mean less wasteful. The Soviet Union had to use several times more electricity to produce the same amount of produce as Japan or Germany, for example. The reason some service or product wouldn't be available is due to it not being financially efficient, but that really means it would require more resources than it could cover.
Arguably yes, it would imply that other routes are more financially efficient. It's not probable that some group wouldn't be hurt by a technological advancement or modification, a modification that happens in accordance to the market. While you and others may lose that route, other passengers, no doubt far more plenty, would get to their destinations faster.

But that transition was during a time of a world war that slipped into civil war, everything was in chaos. You could say that that is proof of socialism's success despite the circumstances, but I'd say it's rather because of the circumstances at hand that any would-be economic shocks were unnoticed. There's also the fact that the bolsheviks had more time to plan and the power to implement their transition, both to socialism and eventually the NEP. On the other hand, the 90s transition was sudden and completely in opposition to what has been thought.
Unless you can demonstrate how close was the capitalist system in the 90s to the previous state system, I would have to disagree.

I would like to know more about that, this is really something that's largely glossed over. Any recommendations?
Although, consider the following, and I'm just paraphrasing Sowell's Basic Econ book now, but in his book he mentions two African nations - Ivory Coast and Ghana iirc - and he compares the two's economies over a period of years in which one is a market economy and the other a state economy. The former's economy is blooming while the latter's economy is faltering, in later years these trends switch after each nation replaces its economic plan with the other.

Let's face it, succdems aren't leftists. It's the reactionary ideology that got Rosa Luxemburg murdered.

I'm of the position that turd position ideologies like nazbol, Asserism and national anarchism can be good entry ways to actual leftism for rightists.

Which is why everyone tries to switch to it, when efficiency becomes paramount. Don't be a fucking moron.

Bullshit. There was no "inexperience", only calculated greed. If you can buy factory for 1% of it's cost and scrap it for 5% of its cost within several months - you are getting 400% of profit and no amount of "experience" is going to change this.

In many places destruction of industry was deliberate - to suppress pro-Socialist population with poverty.

Bullshit again. "Economic thought" got scrapped in 1961. By 1980s Western economy was quite common.

As for "foreign and incomprehensible", Soviets literally had children's books ("Dunno on the Moon" for example) that described in detail things that happen in market economy.

I know for a fact that this was no inexperience. Nouveau riche of the Russia were getting immense loans to buy privatised property.

Is this supported by a singular example of one specific product that just happens to be produced in electricity-rich environment? Or not supported by anything other than rumours?

Because most of those examples:
a) can only be used as an evidence of corrupt management (during Khrushchev-Brezhnev era), not inherent flaws of Planning
b) aren't factually sound (there was an example of some poorly-processed Soviet oil (mazut) that just happened to be sufficiently efficient to be used as is, due to overabundance of it in USSR).

You are not making sense here.

You're believe it, but i am living proof. I used to be orthodox natsucc but then i realized natsucc is inherently imperialist and became S.trasserist. now i am internationalist socialist and i still want everyone to have their own ethno-communes.

You believe it*

Easy pal, I'm just curious.

Maybe in produce if you need to speed up production, but not in terms of resource consumption.

Among the general population? There absolutely was. It's obvious that the elites knew what they were doing.

Oh please, as if the two systems were actually comparable to a point you can call it a Western economy. The markets were still lacking products much more than Western ones.
Do you really think that makes up market economy education? On a scale like the USSR?

Then how come that happened to him? He's just an average guy and you're comparing him to the elites.


I don't have a copy of Basic Econ with me atm so sadly I can't answer your question or quote what it exactly said. But most of the information in that book discussing the USSR is cited from Shmelev and Popov's The Turning Point.

Ok you have a point.

I mean if it wouldn't turn a profit to produce something then it's because it wouldn't be sustainable to produce, which follows if a government is providing that service it's running a deficit.

Now i just need to read

wtf, if animes worked that way it should become mandatory for all young pioneers
summer camps would become much more fun with cuties swapping their uniform

You're a disgusting creep and the reason why nobody comes here anymore.

...

...

storytime

Bush Jr. era imperialism and consumerism genuinely bothered me as a wee lad. I don't think I was ever content with the way things were.

I shared a two bedroom apartment in the poorest part of a city with 4 trannies and some black guy who was a tranny chaser, it was a hell of a ride.

straight-up, self-described neocon and new atheist.

influences were andrew sullivan and christopher hitchens, the latter who managed to smuggle in these ideas as being "left" or at least not of the christian-conservative right of the early-mid 2000s. never got into libertarianism, ron paul, the alt-right (though new atheism was kind of a precursor) or white ethnic shit. i was into hitchens, bernard-henri levy, nick cohen – those guys. there wasn't a U.S. war i opposed.

i'm in my early 30s. grew up in a conservative part of the U.S. south and didn't like the right-wing evangelical politics. you can figure out the weird contradictions and psychology at work here; reconciling myself to the right-wing status quo i suppose.

what got me out of it (but it took a long time) were the obvious failures of the whole project, but also the collapse in my new atheism – which was the underlying ideological structure for my neoconservatism. and what changed my mind is realizing that atheism is fundamentally amoral (which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself), and that new atheism – with all its moralizing – was actually empty at its core. so i wasn't alt-right, but i was still bigoted and arrogant, so there wasn't much of a difference there.

more of a baby marxist now and have more interest in econ stuff these days. interested in mixed central planning with co-ops like cuba. revisiting 1917. the alt-right has done a lot to push me left, as well as seeing silicon valley up close and how awful a lot of them can be.

i will never post an anime

that sounds awesome you prude

It really wasnt, only of them was a decent person, the rest were leeching sperglords

Waking up to some tranny with a bigger bepin than you humping you in her sleep isnt fun

...

My girlfriend is really sweet though

it is when you are the humping big schlong tranny

Lasch is an excellent author. The Culture of Narcissism is a must read.

There are a few. Maybe one in ten.

It aint fun for me

yeah i don't think the anime aesthetic works for the left all that well. very exaggerated gender features. works well for fascism, though.

look back at old communist imagery or of the komsomol. tends to be unisex in appearance. similar uniforms. but don't let me stop the expropriation.

Kys pedophile

That's just how women who work hard in the fields and factories tend to look, Rough faces and strong arms.

check your privilege para-normative hater


soviet school girls wore fucking maid dresses and their girl uniforms in general are adorable, the hell are you talking about overalls at workplaces?

Time to fap

If you work a factory job you aren't going to wear a maid dress, you're gonna wear something sturdy and appropriate.

I used to be a right wing libertarian before Holla Forums started transitioning towards fascism back in the day and reluctantly followed along due to the sweet talking and assurances by my peers that liberty, freedom and expression were still the underlying tenets of the consensus, so I kind of gradually got pulled along due to peer pressure and did my best to cultivate more right wing beliefs as time went on, this escalated and I got more and more right wing until one day I realized that I had destroyed my own mental health and alienated everyone around me while being morbidly depressed and that I had drifted so far from my actual beliefs and feelings that I was literally lying to myself while jerking off into summoning circles and trying to practice magic. (yes I really did go that far into right wing spookery and I would say that the slippery slope of reactionary thought always leads to that kind of shit)

More than that I had gotten so tired of reactionaryism and just the general rhetoric of the whole thing, especially when I started reading more history and realizing how most "tradition" was adopted for purely practical reasons and that the view of traditionalists is literally just live action larping that places feels over reals and is a-historical, as I read more history I learned lots of interesting things like how the Holocaust DID in fact happen and that "cutural marxism" literally does not exist. I was really tired of the daily life of getting on the internet, reading a bunch of right wing blogs and news sources getting angry and afraid and depressed than going to bed with no hope for the future and then doing it all over again. That's what most right wing rhetoric centers around btw "be angry be afraid. Every day. All the time. Until you want to scream. Until you want to die." that sums up how I was feeling. And none of the hollow virtue signaling of "tradition" and the like filled my heart at all, in fact it just made it worse.

I think the reason I drifted to left was because It offered genuine hope and positive thinking to me who was destroying myself with anxiety and negative thinking over spooks. It kind of called to a younger me and the beliefs that I truly did hold and felt much more authentic to me and I rediscovered libertarian (the left kind this time) thought and it was like a breath of fresh air. Just hearing things like "freedom is important" and "Purging the 'weak' is wrong" and "artists should have the freedom to express themselves" was like rediscovering who I was and actually gave me some hope for the future. I cant believe I lied to myself for so long.

Please do not fap to my suffering, user

that's my point

trannies and anime fans are the worst thing to happen to leftism. Both are inherently reactionary and need to be purged.

rude

komsomol construction students

...

its hot and i need my fix

Has there ever been an explanation why reactionary positions always lead to, come from, or intertwine with mysticism? Is it because of idealism? Because invoking some form of chauvinism involves some appeal to "spirit"?

I'm just glad that I don't have to rearrange my library now, I threw reactionary literature with mysticism together.

wtf man we were just having fun and you have to be an asshole

Because most of the reactionaries are born from nostalgia for a previous time, which is believed to be more safe and morally sound.

I dare you to invite some into your home then m8, you will know true suffering.
I had to listen to her screeching laughter at furry garbage on tumblr at like 4am

was it circumcised

How are they reactionary?

one of the things with fascism that marks it apart from your run-of-the-mill conservatism (liberalism) is the idea that modernity / decadence is going to lead to a crash, and out of that crash will come the ancient, lost "mythic" essence of the nation and race … reborn. pure, uncorrupted origin.

every country has a variation on this and with white people it's often germanic or celtic paganism. but it's not an exclusively white ideology by any means.

as far as why this is, i can only guess is that it's an extreme right-wing reaction to the confusion of modernity and the desire for a universal order that will give everyone a sense of purpose, racial destiny, etc.

A few years later I started reading about communism and realised that capitalists are destroying society not minorities. If I was 2 or 3 years younger I am certain I'd be an alt right faggot

dude i've been funposting for a while now but that retarded pseudo-leftist reactionary BS is so utterly retarded it's not even shitposting anymore, it's blatant Holla Forumsack retardation

Sounding like a repulsive boomer grandmother who was a feminist in the mid 70's isn't going to get the real girls or the fake girls pal.

I used to be a democrat
I learned that an actual left existed

Was a right wing libertarian for most of my life. Browsed 4chan since I was 14, started browsing /int/ and Holla Forums at 18 and thought the "whiteness" shit was a meme but I gradually got indoctrinated into it thru irony. ARGENTINA IS WHITE BTW When I went to college I got into contact with SJW type people and started becoming more reactionary. I became super nationalistic and started reading Evola and Nietzsche and started believing the whole "superman" mentality. Started looking into fascism and realized that free market capitalism always leads to decadence. Really started seeing the need for a centralize economy and state to best serve the people. Got involved with my local far right scene and tried to organize some rallies around realized how retarded the right is. I couldn't stand all the super overt racism and I was never religious so I never got the whole "God" shit. Also after being arrested I couldn't stand how right wingers sucked the cops dicks. I started looking into left wing theory and /leftpol/ got dropped as a boogeyman on Holla Forums so I decided to see what's up.
I came here posting as a Asserist but gradually became less Nazbol with time and reading theory. Now I think I'm somewhere between a mutualist and a syndicalist

This is very true. However I don't think it's fair to lump all trans women with the autistic anime obsessed autogynephiles. There is a huge difference in behavior between those two.

Actual trans women want to be female due to gender dysphoria. Autogynephiles want to be female solely because the idea gets them off.

would love to hear more about your involvement in your local far-right scene if you care to share. i was snooping on some when they started trying to organize here and it's that mix of Holla Forums kids and methed-out tweaker white supremacists who've been in it for awhile.

now it's mostly methed-out tweakers.

I've told the story a bunch on here so I'll spare the details. Basically it is impossible to unite the right because their ideologies are so schizophrenic and while on paper libertarian-ism and fascism are the same thing, their ideological adherents stress completely different tenets and believe in totally opposing things. This was before C-ville fiasco too, hell it was during the time of the Confederate statue protest at their height in mid May earlier this year. C-ville destroyed the "normies" faith in the alt-right and it has been spiraling downhill since then. I say the peak moment of the alt-right was getting Trump elected and even then he tried to distance for the white supremacist camp. Still, the whole anti-establishment alt-right appealed to a vast majority of conservative Americans (me included). However, since "revealing their powerlevel" white nationalists have once again failed to capture the hearts and minds of the American public (well they did but only slightly, most people will turn down that racial bs). I divide the alt-right into 4 main camps
Basic bitch conservatives - Most Americans, some have the chance of being class conscience but if they're over 35 chances are they believe that communism is the devil destroying America
ANCAPs/lolberts - Mostly confused early 20s who are in college and think they're smart shit because they've taken a few business classes in college (hey that's me). The job market has the best chance of turning these people into socialists/leftists/communists etc.
White Supremacists/KKK and their ilk - The most retarded of the bunch. Very violent and very stupid. Tweakers like you put it but they have a lot of retarded ideas that will alienate the average prole (drugs are bad wtf). These people are a lost cause, don't debate them just punch em and move on.
Militia types and 3%ers - Honestly, these people are the most normal out of the whole bunch, some got families and most are ex-military. If these people had class conscience, they'd be a valuable asset to any revolutionary movement. Some of them were quite opposed to explicitly pro-white message since most believe the fact that all soldiers bleed red. There is some hope for this group, try to get them on your side if possible. Also militias tend to not have a strong online presence, most organizing is done face-to-face or by walkie-talkie
Also there were also e-celebs and shit like Baked Alaska, Shapiro, Peterson etc. but they are always at each other's throat ideologically and the drama caused by e-celebs just makes organizing on the right that much more difficult.
tl;dr It was a giant clusterfuck and it single handily turned me from anything remotely rightist

If IRL political organizing being a clusterfuck is what turned you off from rightism you're gonna have a hell of a ride on leftism.

Yeah trust me I dealing with that right now too. At least the people are more chill and we can agree on the ills of society rather than blame brown people or jews for everything.
We had a pretty nice pro-Palestine rally in my city recently and while there were some spooky brown people nationalism and post-colonial shit, there was still an air of solidarity among the protestors which I never felt on the right. The left is by no means perfect and I'm still pretty critical of red liberals/SJWs/idpol/whatever the fuck but I'm not going to let that stop me from learning and getting involved with my community.

Feels really good, man.

Seeing as you are more on the libertarian side and are kind of skeptical of leftism, you might be interested in post-left anarchism.

Is autogynophelia mostly a discredited idea at this point?

From my experience with trannies, any of them that want to use their dick are almost definitely just fetishists

Like the Capitalist system that wastes huge reserves of labour? How about the destruction of food if it is overproduced? Or the closing of factories if too many commodities are created? Is this not immensely wasteful.

It is not really worthwhile to make the comparison if we know nothing of the time period or conditions under which it is being made.

This is only applicable in a capitalist system based upon profit; the profit incentive doesn't exist under socialism. Some surplus would merely be devoted to the running of public utilities and transport.

Except at that point they cease to become public services, and are instead merely rented by travellers for a profit. Regardless, your definition of "efficiency" is the ludicrous one I mentioned above; the idea that a group of individuals having to find their own way to work, and pay far more to do so, when the infrastructure exists to take them there is ridiculous. The fact some people have a minute or two shaved off or their journey is irrelevant.

Suppose all routes bar one ceased to be profitable, is this still "efficient"? Again, only by the ludicrous definition of efficiency imposed by the profit motive.

Yet this same trend is noticed almost invariably in socialist states, and not just he Soviet Union. We either suggest that in each case the economic shock was masked by war (even in the relatively bloodless cases), or we accept that socialism improves living standards very quickly with little "adjustment time". Considering the nature of the system, it's clearly the latter.

The change to socialism from feudalism in China was similarly quick, yet we saw nothing like the horrors of 90s Russia. This is because "free market capitalism" doesn't work, as the Russian experience shows, and is the reason why Western nations do not adopt anything like a free market.

Private ownership was permitted once again under Gorbachev, allowed foreigners to invest (for profit) in the Soviet Union, profit incentives were reintroduced in the '60s, and markets were introduced (to disastrous effect) under Khruschev and subsequently extended. By the time of the collapse of the USSR, it was state-monopoly capitalism.

The free-market was essentially imposed on the third-world in order to keep it that way; broadly speaking the idea of the superfluous population, flexible labour markets, security states; this is the third world model based upon the "free-market". Sadly, the West in recent years has unfortunately also began to move towards this model, and the negative effects ought to be obvious.

There are also a few highly touted success stories, notably Ghana, which you mention. Thanks to its obedience to market discipline, Ghana was showered with foreign aid, in an incredibly cynical fashion I might add, including more soft loans from the World Bank than any country except China and India. Manufacturing has declined, as have domestic food and livestock, and food self-sufficiency generally. Malnutrition has increased, environmental degradation is proceeding apace, the external debt has tripled, and since 1987, Ghana has paid more to the IMF than it has received — a standard Third World phenomenon, as the capital hemorrhage from the poor to the rich countries has been joined by capital export to the IMF and Work Bank.

So why on earth is it considered a success story? Agroexport has grown and Western creditors and investors are doing nicely.

My dad had nazi leanings, so I took on a lot of that initially. We had a lot of history books and historical novels about the period lying around the house, so that is what I read when I was young, which likely reinforced nazi sympathies. Then later I watched the news and read shitty local newspapers, and took on a lot of the populist right wing arguments from those. Keep in mind, this is all in pre-internet days.
I'm not sure when it switched, I guess it was about the time I went to college, and before that via opposition to the Iraq war. I ended up hanging with a lot of liberals and socdems, and started to follow American liberal press via the internet. I was an early TYT-fanboy, and active in a socem org. But then I got a law degree, and read Stirner, two things which left me with nothing but disdain for procedural liberalism. Then you read some more, and before you know it, you embrace Marxism.


I wish this would make a comeback. For all the talk of fluidity being the new thing, late capitalist fashions and styles are in fact in the direction of manly men and girly girls, likely because that is more profitable.

Re-enforcing traditional gender roles mostly. This motivates a lot of TERFs: they see ex-men embracing a version of femininity that they have worked their whole lives to escape from.

Was a kaczynskite (peaceful tho fbi) than found this place, read das kapital manga and now i am leftist but I don't want to decide before reading serious stuff

From that prespective, it makes sense.

I still like Nietzsche tho. I feel like he has influenced both left-wing and fight-wing movements.

No. In terms of resource consumption as well. Rationing often uses Ballod's model for this (management of oil crisis in US in 1973, for example).

Except population was not deciding anything. Consequently, "not being experienced" is clearly shifting the blame.

What are you talking about? I am talking about economic education. After most texts on Planned economy got banned in 1961 (moved to "special storage"), Soviet economic education was relying more and more from the liberal economists - since their texts were analysing economy in a more complete form, as compared to castrated shreds of Socialist economics that remained in public access.

What does this have to do with anything? Moreover, what products are you talking about?

I have no idea what "market economy education" you are talking about. Western schools don't have such a thing - not in any useful sense (it's mostly indoctrination "market is good"). Are you per chance talking about superiority of private schools over public education?

Rules were the same for everyone. You can't prevent "average guys" from accidentally exploiting holes made for Our Betters, not if you want to keep plausible deniability.

Which is hardly reliable, due to it being printed during the height of Perestroika (1989), when hugely unpopular Gorbachev government was producing the most ludicrous lies to stay in power and keep reforms going.

What you are talking about is described on page 128:
> we use 1.5 times more materials and 2.1 times more energy per unit of national income than the United States.

While the source the book uses ("research" being referenced was made in 1988) is highly dubious, there is also a problem that national income of Socialist state is inherently lower when compared to Capitalist nations due to significant amount of goods/services provided being either free or hugely undervalued (which is why nominal income of population is lower). For example, medicine was often tens (sometimes hundreds) of times cheaper than on the "international market".

Same distortions are everywhere. It's not a serious work, but an obvious propaganda pamphlet made to justify transition to Capitalism. You can't use it as an honest assesment of Soviet economy without re-checking everything thoroughly.

Additionally, it describes situation in USSR in late 1980s, when Central Planning was practically demolished, not before the 1956, when Central Planning was actually working - with corruption and disunity being low.

Just because it is unprofitable to sell something, doesn't mean that it is useless - or inefficient to produce.

For example, roads: it is commerically unvialbe to have toll booths charge you for every step you make. However, this doesn't mean that roads are useless - or inefficient.

Similarly enough, "free" services under Socialism are not "unsustainable to produce". They either represent cooperative consumption (i.e. is an "income" of "owners" - general public - in a non-monetary form), or are benefitting the economy in a non-direct way (like having healthy population means more and better labour).

...

I'll skip the other points so no to stretch this conversation beyond what's needed.

And all of this was available for the population or exclusively to foreigners? My point is that the shock was specifically because people did not know how a free market economy works. People barely know how it works within market economies, besides some general idea and familiarity through growing up, I doubt that the average Soviet citizen had even that much idea.

What would you recommend to read on it then?

Hate the player, not the concept artist.

It's not about knowing. People had no money, nor ability to influence anything.

For certain sections of the population, though it's hardly relevant because we are here talking about the nature of the economy, not the particular ruling class.

People don't know how a free-market economy works in the West, either. Though this is no matter, because the "market" in the West isn't free; the bourgeois class seeks to undermine the free-market at every turn, and the state in its wisdom also recognises that they must ensure that whatever "market" exists merely serves to enrich their own. This is quite apart from the recognition that a free-market economy, if ever instituted, would collapse in an instant.

Regardless, you could easily counter with, "well, Westerners have a knowledge of the system they live in, at least. Be it a "free" market, or something else." This, though, is a half truth. They merely understand the surface-level processes of this economy, though viewed through an ideological lens imposed by indoctrination. Prices, supply, profit; these things are recognised by the masses, though their origins are seldom properly understood. The true nature of the system is only ever revealed, and then only through an opaque, distorted lens, during period of crisis, and unless a public is sufficiently indoctrinated, they rebel against the inherently exploitative nature of the system. However, the notions elicited are not scientific, and thus peter out as the State rolls in to once again bail out its private vassals.

This fact is shown at present by those who detest the system, but cannot properly articulate it, have not been given the texts they require to properly understand it. Does this seem like a population who have any real understanding of the system?

The people must know as much as is required for the turning of a profit. Nothing more.

As far as goes Ghana, there's an illuminating paper by Ross Hammond and Lisa McGowan on it; I believe it can be found in Danaher's "50 Years is Enough".

In terms of the idea in general; it ought to be self-evident. Third-world nations are told to "pursue their competitive advantage", among other recommendations of "conventional economics". This ignores the fact that near all nations that have ever developed did just the opposite. Either the capitalist powers are uniquely ignorant of their own history, or they have an ulterior motive. Perhaps some of them actually believe what they say, maybe, but it doesn't really matter; the horrific effects are the same.

As for economic imperialism in general, Anwar Shaikh's paper attached is a good read, and if you ever get the time, read this:
scribd.com/doc/315691715/Anwar-Shaikh-Capitalism-Competition-Conflict-Crises

I never fell for the white enthnostate bullshit but I was really fucking close to doing so. My existential crisis basically obliterated by reactionary tendencies though, so for a while I was basically an enlightened monarchist.. before learning about Quentin Skinner and becoming a diehard Republican due to his interpretations on Hobbes and Machiavelli.

In the end I settled as a technocrat (in the 1930s sense). Basically a "soviet of technical specialists" are entrusted with the production of capital and basic common goods, while a free market exists for luxury goods. Of course, for said market it would basically be composed of syndicates and individual workers. Private property would be abolished.

I'm fine with a Syndicalist system though.

started out as some sort of mix of neocon and socdem (i know, this sounds stupid, but then I was like 14), was one of those new atheist types, but when i was 16-17 turned into some sort of pan-asian ultranationalist (almost to the point of liking imperial japan, which is basically being pro-nazi where i live), got back to being a liberal by the time college started and became a communist by around this year (i'm 19 now)

...

I guess I'd probably call myself a DeLeonist right now, with some interest in Gadaffi's ideas as well, but I'm still a mostly theoryless brainlet. Gonna read some shit related to what I'm currently interested in, then go into reading proper Marxist shit.