EPTOn April 06 2026 02:07 Nebuchad wrote:
I've been thinking about this as well. It was important for the political health of our societies to have an alternative model that could be pointed to in order to put a leash on some of the excesses of our systems. If there's a superpower where workers are treated better, this limits the options of treating workers badly for the other superpower too, as there's a clear alternative to point to and workers can easily picture it and rebel against you. Now that the alternative has been shown to be shit and it's broken down, there's no longer anything to point to as an alternative and capitalists can go full exploitative, there's no other narrative to oppose them, except like, should we exploit brown people more than white people or not, and stuff like this that they don't care about at all. This is for sure one of the major drives in pushing societies to the right, the lack of an alternative model.
If you could recreate the cold war climate today that would for sure be beneficial, but unfortunately China is a lot less of an alternative model, it's very much still capitalism with a few small differences, so I'm skeptical that they can be used as a replacement for the soviet union in the same way.
I've been thinking about this as well. It was important for the political health of our societies to have an alternative model that could be pointed to in order to put a leash on some of the excesses of our systems. If there's a superpower where workers are treated better, this limits the options of treating workers badly for the other superpower too, as there's a clear alternative to point to and workers can easily picture it and rebel against you. Now that the alternative has been shown to be shit and it's broken down, there's no longer anything to point to as an alternative and capitalists can go full exploitative, there's no other narrative to oppose them, except like, should we exploit brown people more than white people or not, and stuff like this that they don't care about at all. This is for sure one of the major drives in pushing societies to the right, the lack of an alternative model.
If you could recreate the cold war climate today that would for sure be beneficial, but unfortunately China is a lot less of an alternative model, it's very much still capitalism with a few small differences, so I'm skeptical that they can be used as a replacement for the soviet union in the same way.
Fair enough. I'm a bit curious about those "few small differences" and whether something like "class consciousness" is among them and/or presents any opportunity in your view?
