this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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okay but like (not particularly educated take inbound)
the biggest gripe we have with social democracy is that it's fundamentally just a more equitable distribution of plunder from the global south, but that criticism doesn't really hold up when you ARE the global south and it's your resources getting plundered by imperialists
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.
I don't see how this applies at all
I also don't see how decommodification would result in either a Juche system or degrowth (or Juche style degrowth as you put it)
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.