this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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The criticism of social democracy ultimately boils down to "you're not doing a juche-style degrowth to decouple from imperial satraps". Which is fine and perfectly arguable on its face. But it does lead you to breeze over the policies social democrats are most commonly championing - public sector professional services free at the point of consumption - that would, in fact, get you some of that juche-style degrowth you said you wanted.
Asset inflation and excess waste production resulting from our Big Number Go Up strategy is undermining our ability to operate self-sufficiently without sacrificing quality of life. Any kind of economic restructuring is going to result in a huge nominal drop in the economic numbers that undergird the economy, and we need to be psychologically prepared for that if we're going to execute on necessary economic changes before they're forced on us by material limitations.
De-commodification would, first and foremost, decouple the material resources upon which our economic forecasts are based. If you go into the economy and you decommodify energy, you're going to cause the speculative price of for-profit energy companies to crater. That's going to result in a large contraction in credit markets following a wave of defaults on debt. Big Number Would Go Down.
De-commodification and distribution of energy on an as-needed basis rather than a speculative basis would move us towards a system of self-sufficiency rather than one of artificial revaluation. Microsoft no longer having an infinite well of paper currency to buy from a finite well of fossil fuels for the purpose of generating electricity to run their entertainment machines would free up enormous amounts of energy for necessary living conditions.
What are you even saying?
I believe he’s saying that, while social democracy in the global south doesn’t directly serve to cut imperialist ties, the policies implemented by social democrats will do some of that cutting in practice.
What didn't you understand?
By Juche-style degrowth, do you mean a command economy? Socialism?
That's more the method than the end goal. Juche is about economic independence. Decoupling yourself from below-cost-of-production imports and waste-exports that an imperial state uses to enrich the core at the expense of the periphery. Command economies and socialist dictatorship of the proletariat can get you there. And one might even argue they're the only economic model that can get you there. But they still need to be pointed in that direction.
A communist economy in South American Country X that harvests lumber from the Amazon in Neighboring Country Y and fills in denuded landscape with landfills of waste generated by the consumption of the lumber isn't self-sufficient, even if its leaders are democratically decided and its capital democratically owned and operated.