[somenameforme]

Authoritarian is often used as a pejorative strawman rather than as any particularly coherent concern. For instance Italy's Meloni was framed by the media, and people who still believe it, as being the next Mussolini, if not Hitler. In reality? Her time as leader has been largely inconsequential and relatively popular, especially contrasted against the leadership in places like Germany and France.

In general it's not authoritarians that are winning everywhere, but anti-globalists - which is disingenuously framed as authoritarianism. Globalist views were adopted on a wide scale, and they simply didn't lead to positive results, and so it's an ideology which is on the decline, ironically - globally.

[anonzzzies]

Globalist views didn't lead to positive results? Until very recent no one was complaining: everything was going up and everyone got better. Now it goed a little less and the underbelly starts whining. And of course people do believe misinformation. People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade and now 'only' got inflafion correction whining its the globalist issue because some guy on tiktok explained it so well. Italy (or me personally for that matter) would be have been absolutely screwed without the EU and globalism, but keep listening to propaganda while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Until very recent no one was complaining: everything was going up and everyone got better.

The stock market, and your housing and investment portfolios going up, didn't mean that everyone was happy, just the asset holders like yourself and those in your bubble but you're not majority of the working population.

You need to learn to differentiate between "the stock market" and "the economy". Working class people can easily be getting poorer while the stock market is going up. So of course they're mad.

>People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade

Huh? Who? Where? When? Maybe in your tech bubble but in the real world a lot of people's salaries haven't kept up with inflation, let alone consistency get raises ABOVE inflation. In France for example the average pension is now higher than the average salary.

>while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.

Top 10%er can't understand why those bottom 90% without assets who got screwed by globalism and saw their jobs offshored and salaries and savings obliterated by inflation caused by endless money printing are mad at the globalism that caused this massive wealth transfer from the working class to the upper asset owning classes.

You can't make this up. The sheer ignorance of reality of most people and the "fuck you I got mine" attitude is shattering. No wonder young people are flirting with communism.

[pezezin]

Man, I am reading this whole thread in utter disbelief at all the naive "defenders of freedom", and I have to say that I fully agree with every single one of your comments.

[saubeidl]

We've argued a lot on this platform before, but I fully agree with your post this time.

-- a young-ish person flirting with communism.

[somenameforme]

The current systems in many places are breaking, but communism isn't a solution. Because the main reason the systems are breaking is not because of the systems themselves, but of the people in charge of them. Communism faces the exact same issue, except in that case the people in charge have orders of magnitude greater power and the people orders of magnitude less.

In a contemporary democracy we could, at least in theory, completely vote out literally every single pro-corporate, pro-war talking head in the next election. Now of course this won't ever happen, but at least in theory its an option. By contrast in communism, if one ends up unhappy with the system you have very little ability to change it.

Furthermore, in a capitalist system one can even start a communist sub-society. In fact there are many communes throughout the country, at least in the US. But in a communist system, you can't simply start a capitalist sub-society. The centralized nature of the system entails limits on freedoms, to ensure that every person is contributing to society as a whole. And this, in practice, trends towards dystopic authoritarianism in terms of how non-compliant individuals are treated.

The reason that people always claim that various efforts at communism weren't "real" communism is because the concept and theory of communism doesn't, and probably cannot, survive first contact with the interests and whims of humanity. By contrast I'd look at the overwhelming majority of the history of the US as an argument for capitalism. It's only relatively recent times, particularly after 1971 [1], that things have gone so terribly wrong.

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[saubeidl]

> Because the main reason the systems are breaking is not because of the systems themselves, but of the people in charge of them

I disagree with this assessment. The reason systems are breaking are inherent contradictions in capitalism that inevitably lead to crisis. See Crisis Theory [0] for a more thorough description of the mechanisms at play.

Communism doesn't need to be authoritarian either - Salvador Allende famously tried for a more democratic socialism before the CIA couped him away - can't have the systemic competitor look good...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_theory

[somenameforme]

Then what would be your explanation for why the issues seem to be largely contemporary in nature, and in particular with 1971 being such a critical inflection point? That 1971 site is alluding to the end the Bretton Woods economic system. Prior to that date, 'money printing' by the government had extreme external constraints. After 1971, we became a completely free floating fiat economy.

This was a radical economic shift. And at first it yielded massive returns as one could expect with the ability to suddenly have infinite money in a world where, to date, money had been very "real." But over time, it turns out that pumping endless 'funny money' into an economy causes lots of bad things to happen, even when we can export much of the immediately apparent inflation.

Essentially the modern economic system we have only truly began in 1971. And it's separate from capitalism itself. The powers that be wanted the power to print unlimited money. And so they claimed that power. Prior to that year we lived in an entirely different world. For instance one interesting inflation index is a can of Campbell's tomato soup. From its introduction in 1897 to 1973 it cost about $0.10. Today it costs $1.24.