Born Backwards

You can’t do extraordinary things in the world if you’re spending time criticizing others because they don’t look or behave the way you think they should.

In the past, social democracy called for using the state to offset, correct, regulate, and otherwise manage the workings of capitalism. It sought a capitalism with a human face: one with fewer inequalities of wealth, income, power, and access to culture. The state was to manage capital investment, regulate markets, and shape the distribution of income and wealth: all in the interest of a society with a deeper and more widely shared sense of community. Economic growth and efficiency, attributed to capitalism, were to be supported while state policy would prevent or counteract the socially undesirable consequences of private capitalist production and commodity markets. State interventionist capitalism was the solution; private capitalism free if state controls and interventions was the problem. The social democratic solution thus constrained what private capitalists could do in their profit-driven competition with one another and their profit-driven relations with employees and customers. But it left them in the position of receiving and dispensing enterprise profits. Social democracy thus left private capitalists with the incentive to weaken, deflect, or remove those constraints. It also provided capitalists with the means—their retained profits—to do so. In a sense, this was the historic capitalist-socialist compromise of the 19th and 20th centuries. Capitalists could keep their positions as receivers and dispensers of enterprise profits, but the conditions of those positions would be constrained by social(ist) welfare state policies. Whatever the benefits, this historic compromise set the stage for new struggles. Welfare states became contested terrains: social democrats sought to strengthen and expand them, while capitalists sought to reduce, weaken, or eliminate them. From gains, the trend moved in the direction that favored capitalists. The trend turned into a rout in the 1970s and has remained so ever since. The capitalists used their profits to improve their business prospects and performance by, among other strategies, undoing welfare statism. By lobbying, moving production outside national borders, immigration, common markets, media campaigns, and countless other mechanisms, the capitalists succeeded in bringing social democracy to its current sorry state. Even where trade unions and socialist and communist parties were strong, they proved no match for the profits capitalists could use against them.

You’re a whole solar system pretending to be a person.

plot twist: you let someone in and they don’t fuck you over

I’d say go to hell, but I never want to see you again.

the drag was necessary and fulfilling

@cosmopolitanmagazine ain’t shit 😒😒😒