i am into accessibility and game design. i go by sysopod on other platforms as well
i have a neat trick i do, if i see someone spouting anti labor neolib garbage in the shitty forum i go to sometimes, i remember to look at their avatar and realize they are trying to be the Smart Adult Liberal on an Internet Forum for a Webcomic, while using an avatar of a Cartoon Hamster. i simply do not need to take them seriously or engage.
i recommend this technique in general.
Neoliberalism destroys while blaming everything else. The only real solution is to end neoliberalism.
The seeds of every notably, remarkably bad offshoot of capitalism, from fascism to neoliberalism to Ron Paul "libertarianism" to whatever the hell the LaRoucheites are calling "MAGA Communism" these days, are inherent in the entire ideological chain from about the Crusades to each of those endpoints.
Scandinavian social democracy, in trying to hold its welfare state just for the most pallid whites in the world, decayed into paranoid, racist neoliberalism; the Keynesianism of the Labour politicians who built the NHS, in frantically trying to maintain some fragments of Britain's colonial holdings and prestige rather than utterly renouncing its old bloodthirsty "glory", laid the groundwork for the hellscape built by Thatcher, Blair, and an endless parade of contemporary Tories; and the New Deal, in failing to comprehensively end and redress the horrors of Jim Crow and the US's continued genocidal domination of Indigenous people all the way from Hawai'i to the Great Plains to Puerto Rico, at best delayed the ascent of Nazis like DeSantis, Cotton, and thousands of others rather than strangling that ideological current in full.
neoliberalism basically works like planned obsolescence as a political theory, but with the added self-delusion that it's actually the ultimate end of obsolescence (see Francis Fukuyama's brain poisoning treatise, "The End of History and the Last Man")
excuse me while i get a little Marcuse-pilled here, i've been reading him pretty heavily lately and so i've got the ol' "guy who has only seen Boss Baby thinks every movie has got some real 'Boss Baby' vibes" thing going on.
we can think of the flawed balance of neoliberalism like there's a three part ratio that it tries to skate on; it's a balance between our society's productive capacity, the intentionally discarded or hoarded excess capacity necessary to maintain scarcity, and the general populace's perceived well-being.
once those numbers start to veer out of balance, as they have and inevitably will in the future due to the inherent flaws in the system, it breaks down. the only way to maintain that balance would be for our productive capacity to be ever-increasing, the discarding/hoarding of our post-scarcity potential to never increase too fast comparitively, and our perceived well-being to stay perfectly controlled within the limits to make us not really feel too bad about all that waste and hoarding compared to all our work.
once that impossible balancing act causes the system to break down, the forces that had power in the now-broken system start to fill the void with whatever fits the origin of that power. if our productive capacity outweighs everything heavily enough that scarcity no longer can be conceived of, well, that's how we get to some sort of post-scarcity revolution. if the general populace's understanding of our material circumstances breaks out of the controls placed on it and we reckon with the waste and hoarded excess capacity, that's how we get some sort of popular revolution- presuming that increased social consciousness is spurred on by a pure increase in the political identity and engagement of the general populace, not by a shifting of perspectives from fascist propaganda.
but those two options are pretty unlikely. as we are observing now, what's more likely to happen is the hoarded wealth and excess gets applied to authoritarian ends by the kelptocrats that desire to keep their reign eternal, aided by those fashy-inclined people who have only broken containment of their desires enough to be made to think that the reason they feel unfulfilled is that they don't have a boot to stamp on someone else's face.
