Lu Zwei wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 3:40 pm

ChudFusk wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 3:38 pm

Lu Zwei wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 3:32 pm

oh, I see you. You're such a Marxist bitch, John.

This is what a Google Image search for "marxist bitch" came up with:

I dunno

WOULD!?

Right?! I'm in love. I just want her to slap me while I tell her the dictatorship of the proletariat will never work.

losthighway wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 5:04 pm

Lu Zwei wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 3:40 pm

ChudFusk wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 3:38 pm

This is what a Google Image search for "marxist bitch" came up with:

I dunno

WOULD!?

Right?! I'm in love. I just want her to slap me while I tell her the dictatorship of the proletariat will never work.

I just want her to stick up that finger up my ass while shouting "AM I STALIN' IT ENOUGH FOR YOU!?"

losthighway wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 7:52 am

Gramsci wrote: Sat May 24, 2025 6:59 am Actual Economics is studying human behavior, markets etc and then seeing patterns and formulating theories from there. Friedman started with an ideological position then formatted a concept of human behavior around that. This Neo-classical Economics has no real connection to actual human experience and that political parties implemented it's bullshit theories played a massive role in the reason for our current state of "Enshitifaction".

Yeah, that's right where my curiosity puts me. I suppose my curiosity has tended to put me onto a kind of Keynesian idea, as far as the theoretical stuff goes. But really I feel like right now to the casual observer, just watching brash policy moves and seeing markets react is enough of a head full without subscribing to some grand manifesto.

Another thing to really internalize is that Markets and Capitalism are not the same thing. You can have an economy based around markets, in fact to get a bit Marxian, you can think of Markets as the Superstructure of economic activity. Capitalism is a form of ownership, not a form of markets. You can have a thriving market economy that is an entirely worker/employee owned economy. Complete with competition between businesses and some failing. Our friend from the former Yugoslavia can probably elaborate in an attempt at implementing this in a deeply flawed fashion. Former Yugoslavia operated as a collection of worker owned businesses and for a time they had one of Europe's higher living standards, and certainly the highest of any communist state. Thatcher and Reagan hated Yugoslavian communism not for its failures, but for its successes. Yugoslavs in general had no travel restrictions, were not part of the Soviet sphere of influence and had reasonable access to goods and services.

I need to reiterate that this was not a perfect model and in the end collapsed, but it did show that markets and capitalism are not the same thing.

https://jacobin.com/2017/07/yugoslav-so ... ia-balkans

The distinct Yugoslav path to socialism found admirers around the world. In Eastern Europe, the combination of market socialism and self-management offered a model for anti-Stalinist reformers. In the capitalist West, democratic socialists hopefully viewed the experiment as a more “human” socialism. And across much of the Third World, Yugoslavia — a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement — demonstrated the viability of a “third way” between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union.

There was a lot to love about our former economic and republic system that existed for 10 or so years of my life. We could go to Poland for ski trips and couldn't wrap our heads how they lived so poorly and we had more than enough to afford those trips ourselves.

We were, for most part, the Chinese equivalent of production in those post WW2 years until the unfortunate collapse. What really did us in was greed in the end. Greed and hatred and nationalism. Greed for more centralized power, hatred between Serbs and Croats and patriotism disguised as desire for free will, which all of it we had in the past as well.

In comes early stage crony capitalism, 100 elite families were given the keys to manage the economy, and out of that a mafia state was born. Sprinkle some social benefits for people, and a slow (but noticeable) progress in standard and you have your voting base that will never turn your back on you. No matter how much crony you as a ruling party are.

Our demise was not economic, it was political and combustive, the economic demise was the consequence. It was always this prevailing feeling that someone was "stealing" from us different nations inside the Yugo land, and it was always tilted towards Belgrade and Serbia. That was an easy target to set of a chain of events that led to our collective demise.

FWIW, Tito really had balls of steel and he really did not give two fucks what Stalin wanted us to do.

You're in Slovenia right?

Croatia

Lu Zwei wrote: Sun May 25, 2025 10:54 amCroatia

Oops... damn I forgot that Croatia was a member. My brain was it is only Slovenia... Considering I studied the breakup of Yugoslavia as my final year of my first graduate degree I really should have know that!

Nice beaches you have there

Not just the beaches, the people are super nice too, beautiful women, great food and super corrupt government. So corrupt, we have an EPPO breaking news investigation breaking news on a weekly basis.

It is what it is, you can't have it both ways. But it's night and day how it was in the 90s and 00s, from what I can remember. I started working fairly early in my 20s, so I remember a lot of it firsthand.

I remember for one of my classes I had to sit through the whole of Milosevic's nationalist triade he gave on the back of a truck in Kosovo that basically triggered the civil war. It was fucking grim.

...and from many with the ins and outs of the proceedings, it was a both sides orchestrated undertaking. Our fearless leader Franjo Tuđman and Slobo have met many times before and during the war. There is even a funny story how they tried to divide Bosnia on a piece of napkin. It borders on conspiracy and too many lives have been lost in the process, not to mention the irreparable intolerance between the nations.

But we digressed...