Apple vs the Law

Is this a joke? The EU is the product of large industrialists institutionalising their liberalist, capitalist values as an international bureaucracy.

It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did.

It's also not conservative, hence why that movement has had to bolt on militarisation and stuff like Frontex.

It’s not the eighties anymore. The world has moved on. You have to look at things from the perspective of the present. Forget Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was the perfect economic model. Forgetting it would be doing the world a disservice.

It's funny, as the EU is normally bashed by left people for being too right, and right people for being too left.

Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).

Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).

You would have a hard time understanding the EU today if you knew nothing about Yugoslavia, since the fallout turned into portions of the EU.

If you know of some other institutionally left wing bureaucracy you consider more appropriate to use as an example, name it.

Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?

The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.

Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.

Today is Srebrenica remembrance day so I'll sneak in a OT link to the BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsBTkAXnPZs

It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model

The Soviet Union had large industrialists and so does China. Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of both socialism and capitalism.

> Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?

Yeah, look it could go either way.

> Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion.

I don't really agree with this. For an example of why not, the AI act is a good one. This was a great Act that got a lot of LLM nonsense pumped into it following ChatGPT. While I get why that happened, I would have preferred that they wait, as the original stuff made lots of sense, and the less well thought through AI/LLM stuff significantly weakens the act.

> It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.

Can you give me some examples of people (national governments particularly) pushing for this? I think that lots of governments are pretty happy with inter-governmentalism even though it has lots of problems.

Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of an industrialized society with quick travel and near-instantaneous communication across large distances.

As soon as it's possible to run efficiently a large enterprise (Thanks to the telegraph, and an extensive rail/road + automotive network), economies of scale will favor consolidation.

The Soviet Union and China are/were not and have virtually never been socialist countries - they are/were state capitalist economies.

Socialism means "corporations are owned by the people working in them", as in co-ops. State-owned corporations under brutal dictatorships are in no conceivable way "worker-owned". They all called themselves socialist just as they called themselves democratic - as in, basic propaganda.

This is very relevant in a discussion of left-wing VS right-wing economies. The Soviet Union and China are firmly in the right wing in reality, just as much as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy were. They just had different propaganda.

A small note: state owned companies under actual Democratic societies is a more complex topic on the left-wing VS right-wing debate, that I won't go into here.

Marxists usually apply a discourse regarding political economy because they perceive economy and ideology to be inseparable, and I'd expect Tito to also have done so. Yugoslavia as an entity was tightly coupled with the person of Tito and lacked mechanisms for keeping local governments in cooperation in his absence.

I'm sympathetic to the yugoslavian project and consider it an important source of inspiration and knowledge, but I don't believe fortune had anything to do with what happened afterwards.

I also don't believe fortune did. I believe western capital, threatened by the success of the Yugoslav project, bankrolled nationalist extremists in a successful ploy to destabilize systemic competition.