• 20 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: September 13th, 2019

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  • Oh yeah, the media has always given the far-right party (Chega) a disproportional amount of screen time. Meanwhile the communists get suppressed. The problem is that the far-right managed to steal a lot of votes in former communist bastions. Regions in the interior that were far-left (for decades), have now shifted to the far-right. So PCP went from ~7% to barely above 3%. They also stole a lot of votes from the center, so forming a stable government is quite hard. But this is probably good because the right wing has more votes now.

    What shocks me is how the media has managed to turn so many people into neoliberals. I hear so many people parroting neoliberal talking points like, how they are tired of paying high taxes (hilarious, because our taxes are average by EU standards), they claim public companies are a burden and should be privatized. Even public healthcare is seen as a burden, many think just relying on private insurances would be better, since they’re paying “twice”.

    People here just don’t learn anything from mistakes from the past. Examples:

    • Privatization of our public gas/petrol company -> Results in one of the highest gas/petrol prices in EU.
    • Privatization of our public electricity company (to China lol) -> Results in one of the highest electricity prices in the EU. (While exporting electricity to other countries!!!)
    • Privatization of our public mail company -> Results in shitty degraded service.

    But now the privatization of healthcare and the public airline company will suddenly fix everything? My god, how can people be so blind? It feels hopeless to argue against this.







  • Another thing about western communist parties, is that they are rich. They have a lot of money which they just waste on electoral campaigns. So imo, they should send some of that money to third world communist parties, that have an actual chance of doing revolution. Basically, fill the void left by the Soviet Union in exporting revolution.

    I don’t believe it’s possible to build revolution, in any European country right now. Even in Greece, during the brutal austerity years, the best the Greek people were able to do was to vote for Syriza. So it’s hopeless in countries like Germany and France.




  • Mostly because of Neoliberalism, which started with Reaganomics. It’s the same here in Europe. The state can’t do anything directly. The only intervention states have is, either via public companies that have yet to be privatized, or taxes (which are slowly being removed).

    For example, if you need a road fixed then the regional government has to create a public competition, for a bunch of private companies to enter against each other. The one that presents the lower cost wins, and then proceeds to fix said road. This needless bureaucracy slows down things a lot. Also, since reparations are being made by private companies, they have an incentive to do a shitty job, so that roads break down sooner (planned obsolescence).

    So you see, every job that the state should do directly is being outsourced to 3rd party private interests. This creates a group of companies that need to leech of the state to survive, the more they leech the better their profits. They also have no real incentive to properly fix things. So this is why everything in the West is slowly becoming worse over time.