The Western paralysis

Written by Luis of Slayangad. Originally posted on SLG Analytica

Why the West can’t build anything even when needed and what it means to Russia and the war

Many people are waiting for the moment Russia will win the war against the entire collective West by WO: when this bloc with 30+ of the richest countries in the world will give up or be unable to continually waste money and material in Ukraine. This would be the case if the financial system wasn’t a rigged game and those countries were actually forced to live within their means and bound to the resources they have, like Russia does. Instead, they can just keep printing their endless dollars and euros, dump them across the globe, and force the countries they enslave to hand in their resources.

There is though one self-imposed limitation that might bring their ability to wage war to an end, which is the same neoliberal system they implemented across the globe. While the bad aspects of their economy are simplistically dismissed as “bureaucracy”, they are structural, intentional and an unchangeable dogma, trusted at a religious level. After decades of treating industry and technical professions literally as a burden, Western countries are facing difficulty to scale up their military industry as their army of web programmers and market analysts isn’t quite useful for that.

However, as I don’t know much about weapons, I will use another subject to discuss this, one that I know very well and probably you know too, which is the growing difficulty of me and you affording a roof over their heads in the richest countries of the world. But for Russia to be able to take advantage of this weakness, it needs to not be doing exactly the same.

The entire West is in a deep housing crisis on the verge of threatening the society cohesion. The riots in Ireland, for example, while yes, being racist thuggery, are an explosion caused by discontent over the living costs that could no longer be contained. Some countries more than others, but in every single country of the Western world, even those who experienced mass depopulation such as in Eastern Europe, the new generation can’t afford to buy a house, and the days where rent consumed a fifth or less of your rent are a distant dream. Slowly, but surely, citizens of obscenely wealthy countries who show off their financial districts are getting used to third-world problems, such as spending hours of their day in traffic or public transport as they are forced to live far away. Or living in glorified slums labelled as “co-living”, or having to live with their parents well beyond their 30s (something more and more common in Southern Europe).

Perhaps the fastest way of improving quality of life for the population in general is reducing the costs of housing. Raising salaries to match them end up in a loop of inflation, subsiding other sectors don’t have the same impact as housing is by far the largest of the costs. Of course we know that the “democratic” politicians don’t give the slightest fuck about the living standards of the peasants. But the housing crisis is beginning to affect the indicators they actually care about, such as the ability of the rich to get even richer.

Inequality between regions is growing everywhere in the globe, and more and more the entire economy of the country is concentrated around cities like London, Stockholm, NY/LA etc. At the same time these cities are literally becoming unlivable creating situations that threaten their status as the center of the world, as we see with San Francisco looking like zombie dystopia. When we have an industrial boom at region that suddenly needs an influx of workers, the sacred right of parasiting those who need a roof would still need to be respected and providing what is necessary for this industry to function would come second. This is exactly what is happening, for example, in Northern Sweden where electric battery factories, taking advantage of the cheap electricity, are being installed. Large corporations, which are the only ones the government can listen, are complaining about this, but not even that will move them away from their faith.

Let’s say Western countries did manage to grow their production at Stalin’s USSR levels and spit endless weapons to Ukraine. This would create a situation an order of magnitude worse than what is happening in Northern Sweden, and the neoliberal “democracies” would be hilariously unable of building basic infrastructure for this as the priority will be accommodating the interests of countless private actors. Regardless of the ability of printing money infinitely or being able to use natural resources from someone else.

The issue is this can’t be changed. As I mentioned in the beginning, all shortcomings of this idiocy are written out as “bureaucracy” and as a solution even more oligarch appeasing policies are enacted. The inability of change can be seen as the west’s definition of a housing crisis is the exact opposite: when house prices fall and they become more affordable.

According to our press, it is actually China who is in a housing crisis. They built too many houses. And they are becoming too cheap. And instead of rescuing the “investors”, the Chinese government is coming out, saying with more polite and sophisticated wording that they should go to hell. This is a nightmare we should avoid at any costs.

There is a caricature of Hong Kong going for decades in the West, where people live in cages and shit where they sleep. While grossed exaggerated by West’s inability of saying anything good about a non-white country, this issue does exist. The queue for social housing in Hong Kong is 5,6 years, which is considered unnaceptable by the goverment. The government has targets of making 60% of all newly built housing stock publicly owned and therefore affordable. Merely acknowledging the issue and trying to act puts them a step further than Western cities. Second, this would be a wet dream in London where queues go beyond 10 years. We are not on the way to become like those unlivable overcrowded cities we used to watch with shock and mockery. We are already there or beyond.

Whenever our masters do acknowledge the plebs are kind of struggling, the type of policies they enact as typically fiddling around with rent rates, or giving tax discounts to the companies who generated this situation in first place. Completely unable of doing anything that actually involves lifting a finger or pouring some concrete. Building crucial infrastructure today as well is only done as an excuse for privatization, such as “public-private partnerships” (a.k.a legalized corruption). The vice is widespread and it will be hard to make the ruling class to see the problem even when their own survival is at stake.

It sounds like I am advocating for communism and of course, this is something that could solve it. But we don’t even need to go as far as that. Singapore, a very right-wing dictatorship, went from being slum infested to overcoming overcrowding at the most hostile conditions by simply making the housing market, well, not a market. 79% of the Singaporeans live in a house owned by the government. Apartments are leased for a lifetime, meaning you essentially have the advantages of living in your own house but speculation is curbed. Even Western countries like Sweden, Austria or the UK itself had strong social housing and rent control policies in a time where capitalism didn’t mean automatic idiocy. Back then, actually, many European countries had strong, government-controlled or watched, industrial sectors in areas that could be quickly converted to military use such as aviation, machinery and others. This is all gone or is in the hands of private companies who are effectively stronger than the state.

Neoliberalism is a virus. It has no conscience, life on its own, it will just go own destroying its host until it dies, even if it means the virus is dying with it. It will be extremely hard for well intended, competent people regardless of ideology to change this course, it is a slow motion car crash, and essentially the final frontier of how much they can wage war against the entire rest of the world.

Russia, China and many of the Western opponents are “dictatorships”. They don’t have a ritual where every four years people choose the colour of the logo of the neoliberal party who will take the blame for the policies decided by the market. Or they do, but the ritual is not up to the standards the West likes. Funnily enough though, change is more likely to come in those places, as since they are not part of the hegemonic alliance ruling the world, they are more insecure about the direction they might be taking. Most of them are still fiercely neoliberal, but those managing to lift large chunks of its population out of poverty (such as China, Vietnam, Bolivia, etc) have a level of “interference on the markets” the West deems unacceptable. When more of those “see the light”, the “rules-based world order” will be doomed.

Russia is one of the places where this internal struggle is taking place, encouraged by the stupid sanctions which are yet another proof our enemy is very prone to shooting its own foot. While still not as much as we would like to see, the rebuilding of Mariupol and some other ravaged areas is going well beyond what the West and their bullshit would be capable of doing. Some people complain online that a similar process of speculation is taking place there: Russia is undoubtedly building fast and with quality (already something the West can’t do), but many of those are market apartments for sale that locals cannot afford and we don’t see a housing policy or social housing measures emerging. Unfortunately, I can’t check this by myself and there is very little material discussing this in detail.

In another example, this time more concrete, Moscow builds new metro lines and renews homes at a galloping speed, but unfortunately the same cannot be said about other parts of the country. Russia has its issues but there are clear sign it has the ability of thinking outside the dogma. There are encouraging signs of Russia trying to escape the downward spiral where the entire country becomes one city, and the government acknowledge disparity is an issue. However, we didn’t get the results we want yet.

Russia needs to drop what didn’t work and brought desperation and suffering in the 90s, which is copying the crap Western countries do, and double down in what has worked and is working, which is prioritizing common interest and sovereignity. The same pattern can be seen in industry in general, including weaponry. There is a process, that hopefully will intensify, of curbing the greedy middlemen and those with ability of blackmailing the society, and bringing strategic sectors, when not under public ownership, subject to common interest. This will win the war for Russia and the entire “third world” that needs to defeat the West to be free.