MeanwhileOnGrad

Communists? Anarchists? That is not their stated aim.

To contrast with Neoliberalism - "financial freedom" of a "free market" is a core tenet, including the continued existence of a capitalist class (those who generate wealth through capital/assets rather than labour), which requires a dichotomy of capitalists and workers (cannot have a society of just capitalists since someone has to clean gutters and such) and therefore it's not possible to fully democratize the economy.

It's why democracies are so unpopular in the west now, almost everyone understands on some level that votes just switch colours and a few key details and have no way of affecting larger power dynamics guided by wealth. The people simply have no democratic voice in the way that actually matters.

I'm an anarchist, but as far as I understand my theory, Neoliberals don't actually argue that this exploitation isn't a stated aim or core part of their ideology, rather that this exploitation is mutually beneficial, even something as obviously exploitative as sweatshop labour is preferable to just having no money and no food.

I think the issue is that this works only some of the time, only as long as it is cheaper to actually borrow millions for insane R&D and megaprojects affairs that promise guaranteed returns, and otherwise it instead incentivizes the creation of extractive institutions instead where every capitalist becomes an economic rent-seeker, forcing all wealth to "trickle" up, not down, and then Marx's predictions of internal contradictions start coming true.

The answer neoliberals pose to this is regulation, which would be good if not for the contradiction that from my understanding neoliberals also propose market solutions where possible, generally privatised/market solutions are seen as superior to Keynesian SocDem adjacent ones, which results in the assets of a government being exposed to markets as investment opportunities.

Even with all the added value that may bring, (best case e.g. shitty swamp turned into a city park by a rich investor with a vision), this will directly transfer assets and value, and ultimately - power, from governments to private entities. The end result of this is that inevitably capitalists simply have far more economic power than the public institutions meant to keep them in check, whether small corruption or mass-disinformation campaigns, they simply muscle their way into the democratic process to facilitate further and further extraction.

This inevitably leads to Fascism where the government and capitalists merge together, they disempower the working class through austerity measures while financially reckless behaviour gets them government hand-outs because they are simply too big, too important of an institution to fail anymore, they buy out the press and use misinformation to incite bigotry and patriotic fervour, while gunning for power on platforms of "cutting government waste" to further defund public programs, thereby increasing their own bargaining power to exploit the working class.

Ultimately the working class have no choice and surrender to whatever exploitation they may face once the capitalists own all assets, many of them become traitors and side with those with power in exchange for wealth, status and protection, even if it means threatening violence and following through on any workers who want to take that power back.

With enough technology amassed in few enough hands, the capitalists are now free to unleash horrors beyond our imagining on anyone they please.

The solution to prevent this is clear: we need to protect public institutions from privatisation, and enforce hard limits on how and when free market economics can play out, and strive towards more and more egalitarian distribution of power, where the creation of wealth and economic activity's primary purpose is maximisation of happiness / minimisation of suffering for everyone, rather than elevation of the few.

Those in power would never give up a shot at near absolute power so easily, certainly not via the methods they ultimately control due to the power imbalance of their accumulated wealth, so it's unlikely that electoralism can succeed, though reforms on the electoral level can and should be supported to limit capitalist influence on the public sector, but it's likely that ultimately nothing short of a violent popular people's revolution can save us now from an eternity of misery.

We may fail and end up with a politburo of apparatchiks and an army of red corpocops, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make a better world, especially when the trajectory for the current one is bleak beyond measure.