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Attributing the massive loss of union memberships (and the general decline of labour power) to “union corruption” is a particularly dystopic slice of rhetoric... Again, as a general economic process, this was neither inevitable nor “natural”, but symptomatic of a wider post-Fordist malaise that...

How does France fight on? It's not as easy as it seems. IOTL, the war in Algeria was a hugely divisive issue in France, and it tied up a lot of political capital (not to mention economic capital), and it was already a war that exhausted France when it ended in 1962. Without a POD before 1945...

Oh boy, the food scene would suck a lot.

Fixed.

Funnily enough, I think large-scale Indian immigration to other parts of the Empire to do the "dirty work" that local elites don't want to do (essentially the exact same thing that happened IOTL in the oil-producing Gulf States) is perhaps the closest thing that we can get to what the OP talks...

To clarify: I neither think that neoliberalism is inevitable nor do I think that globalisation is destined to play out how it did. I will say, though, that if one can view neoliberalisation as a distinctly "financial capitalist" way of fixing the capital blockages being caused by high labour...

Even IOTL Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who literally piss money against the wall with their ludicrous negligible-reward, high-risk public investment schemes vis à vis their sovereign wealth funds haven’t been trying to do that on a large scale. With all due respect, I don’t think the UK in the...

Interesting, and this post makes sense because I had no idea what you were talking about when you said this: But now I do. Cheers. Are you supposing that this model migrates to the West? I'm a little unclear about what you're saying, how that would happen, etc. But some thoughts on that, if...

Ah, fair enough. I don't know as much about the Gulf, so I cannot comment as readily. But I do have an economic question: oil extraction is not a terribly labour-intensive process; relative to your yield, it requires a fraction of the labour power that agriculture, mining, and other colonial...

I'm not really buying the comparison to the New Zealand & Australian cases, for a couple of reasons. To begin with, the economic situation of Australia and New Zealand is completely different from Africa. As agricultural states facing a scarcity of labour that is arguably even more profound than...

How exactly does the British Empire keep the empire? How do they encourage settler colonialism? What's the economic rationale for all of this? There's a running thread of thought on AH.com (that I myself have fallen victim to in the distant past, I must admit) that there was a magic Whitening...

They're hand-in-hand in the same neoliberal ideology. The opening of foreign labour markets in order to circumvent domestic labour markets was on the same ideological parabola as the lowering of taxes, deregulation of the financial system, and the squeezing of the public sector. I don't see one...

No. Neoliberal supply-side economics is a potent ideological tool in the arsenal of the financial elites in their attempts to wrest economic control from labour power, and it neither began nor ended with Reagan. It's somewhat "inevitable" as long as the financialisation of the world economy...

This is by far one of the most novel timeline ideas I've seen recently. Will be following.

Thank you for your kind words! Personally, I view the post-armistice "pygmy wars" to be as consequential (if not more consequential than, hot take, I know...) as the Paris Peace Conference. The politics of Eastern Europe, and by extension, the rest of Europe, was undeniably moulded by these...

That makes sense, and I now can say that I support the movement for a stoner Hitler. I think you could amp up the bizarro-world one notch further and have them be gay lovers, but then you start to get into yaoi territory, and I don't feel like we're properly equipped for that here.

Now this is epic. Though, I have to say that a defining trait of Hitler was a predilection for drugs of all sorts (admittedly, not marijuana), so I think that if we have to imagine them as opposites, Hitler might be rather straight-edge.

They both chill out and live unremarkable lower-middle-class lives within their respective countries. Stalin becomes a priest in rural Georgia. Hitler struggles for a while and then eventually manages makes a respectable living painting and printing postcards. They grow into old age as respected...

While this isn't wrong, it is also true that the West snubbed a newly-independent Russia and many Western financial institutions gleefully participated in the wholesale looting of Russia's newly-accessible public assets. The "shock capitalism" of the 1990s that enabled the formation of the...

It depends. I've always viewed the Hungarian Soviet Republic as sort of doomed from the get-go. Largely, due to its geographic situation, being surrounded by hostile powers, but also because Béla Kun's promises to restore the former borders of the Kingdom of Hungary (which a lot of his popular...