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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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There's a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight, capital no longer had any reason to stay on the nicer end of the spectrum.
So in the terms of tech, this means that tech is no longer developed to just be useful/practical unless there's an exploitive monetization scheme attached or in the works. This is basically the enshittification cycle. Cool new functional thing that's cheap/free. But really it's just a ploy for market/platform capture via market share etc. So within short order, that useful tech gets bled of it's value proposition as it approaches monetization/enshittification. The profit motive has recuperated the development of tech completely. It's almost impossible to create something useful if it doesn't already have some profit/rent seeking mechanism embedded. And if you try to do a startup to challenge some market giant, they most likely just buy it out and bury it before it becomes a serious threat. Maybe if your lucky, some aspects will get ported into the existing product in some half-assed manner to appease the user base.
Sorry for the rambling rant, I had a few beers earlier.
Yeah, I know there's been a lot written on the USSR opening the floodgates for Capital, but I think it's time to abstract that out to "anti-enshittification anchors" that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary.
I don't mean like regulatory capture, I mean bodies that actively threaten capital's existence and by doing so force the concessions that ironically keep capitalism ticking over.
This just sounds like the mask-on progressive liberalism to me, but I'd appreciate more info if you can provide some readings or additional info.
I think collapse of the USSR was a symptom and not a cause
Average heights in the west started falling from 1970 onwards. Not just the US but all of europe too, so it had nothing to do with immigration
US wages have also been stagnant since 1973. IDK what the wage timeline is for europe
I agree, didn't mean to say it was the only thing that caused this shift. More so that capital no longer had as much resistance to its dominance globally as the USSRs influence in global consciousness waned. It's partly what leads into the neoliberal turn, end of history, irrational exuberance, believing their own propaganda, etc. There's no longer any real counter-narrative, only the marketplace of capitalist competition where the truth is up for bid. There's also other factors too. Global financialization and free trade agreements pushed via IMF and World Bank etc have aided the consolidation of capital to a point of concentration that's unprecedented to my knowledge. But this is still interrelated to 'no other option' ideology that propagated directly from the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
I don't know enough about geopolitics in the 70s to point to more direct events or such. But it's pretty clear that once 68 failed to realize actual socialism, most labor power blocs start to decline in the face of cold war propaganda. The window of discourse in the west gets pulled further right until the 'greed is good' 80s anchors it on the right.