leftists are well aware that male supremacy is the original form of exploitation. that it existed in classless societies, that it existed in societies without private property, and that it will exist in their ideal world, too. that it arose globally and independently of cross-cultural exposure. leftists have to lie about this historical fact, because they need women to participate in leftist organizing if they want to defeat their fascist rivals (not enemies—communists and fascists are mere rivals).
the right can afford to be openly male supremacist and still garner the support of women who comply, such as “trad wives.” the left cannot do this. the left cannot successfully pontificate about freedom and liberation while being honest about the fact that they too want women to remain in a subservient set of chains like their rivals do. only the orientation of the chains differ between the two rivals. so, the left has to obfuscate their male supremacist aims so women will still participate in organizing and building the left’s preferred utopia, a utopia that is bereft of social injury to men.
leftists generally don’t say “men ought to lead and dominate,” “women are inferior,” like their rivals do. leftists prefer to be wolves masked as sheep. instead, they’ll say “abolishing capitalism will put an end to patriarchy,” (translation: solve the problems that oppress men first, ignore misogyny, and we pinky swear we’ll help you after we get what we want at your expense), or “feminism is bourgeois” (translation: feminism is the enemy to working class men who want to keep their porn, wives, surrogates and prostitutes).
leftists are not uneducated. leftists do not need to be convinced of 12,000+ years of female subjugation. leftists simply need YOU 🫵🏿 to comply with their preferred brand of male supremacy, so they’ll placate you with falsehoods and platitudes about how feminism must wait, so you’ll be complacent. the reality is they want feminism to wait, indefinitely. men and their apologists are simply acting in the self interests of men. in our society, the only injury is male injury, which is why they will support every movement that improves men’s social status and reject the one thing that will abolish it.
ideally, men must never ever have their sexual access to women be compromised. this contempt for female sexual boundaries and contempt for female freedom from male supremacy animates our entire concept of morality. left, right, center, diagonal, up, down, no matter the political perspective—every movement is a male grievance movement first. only the aesthetics differ, never the result.
my type of carrying on, radical feminism, emerged when an increasing number of leftist women realized these facts of male supremacy—that the right was not our only enemy as women. this is the ultimate rupture of “left-right” liberalism. leftists resist feminism as much as the right, possibly even more, because our refusal to comply with their misogyny is extremely dangerous to the success of their movement. any sort of popularity or sympathy towards real feminism is extremely dangerous to the status quo. leftist men have no choice but to oppose it if they want to keep their wives, their porn, their prostitutes, and their sexual control. the rise of feminism in leftist movements has consistently, globally, led to defections, enabling us to create movements that dared to acknowledge the injuries committed against women. our ability to opt out of their political project after unraveling their trickery has always made us public enemy number 1. tee hee.
this cycle will continue until we as women remember the political bravery and political risk we once exhibited on a global scale. to stop allowing ourselves to be controlled and suppressed by these various male grievance movements. and they are all male grievance movements. even the ones you like!
what's wrong with the concept of technofeudalism?, honest question 😅
It's based on disregarding capitalism as an antiquated term to refer to the current economic structure of society, it's no longer capitalist (for varoufakis meaning when there is a market with more or less free competition between different agents) but technofeudal (high levels of monopolization of markets and logistics like feudal lords (?) but it's modern instead of medieval, so technofeudal). Jeff Bezos (it's Amazon's board, actually) controls large amounts of global shipping which means Bezos is like a feudal lord but with technology instead of tilled fields, and with employees instead of peasants. It's an extremely liberal point of view, it's positing capitalism as a system based on the free market, and the logical conclusion of this outlook is a "restoration" of "free market capitalism". The defining trait of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of labor-power carried out by a class lacking in that private property, only upheld by the salary they're paid, a fraction of the value they create. This has not changed regardless of the amount of capitalists that make up the capitalist class.
In 2014 Xi explains: The political position of Marxism is primarily a class position, which implements class analysis. Some people say that this idea no longer corresponds to the present era, which is a mistaken point of view. When we say that the class struggle in our country is not the main contradiction, we are not saying that in our country the class struggle within certain limits no longer exists, or that in the international sphere it doesn’t exist either.
The capitalist class [in China] is not a politically well-organized force which can challenge the state power of the proletariat, but the expansion of private property and the accompanying mentality, in the form of norms and values in society—the “bourgeois liberalization”—remains a challenge. When Xi talks about ideological “struggles,” it is not “class struggle” in the traditional sense. Xi warns against “money worship, hedonism, ultra individualism, and historical nihilism.” He states that: “the formation of firm ideals and beliefs is neither achieved overnight nor once and for all but must be constantly tempered and tested in concrete struggle.” He says that:
It will be no easy task like a walk in the park; it will not happen overnight, or through sheer fanfare. We must always keep a long-term perspective, remain mindful of potential risks, maintain strategic focus and determination, and ‘attain to the broad and great while addressing the delicate and minute.
After forty years of “opening up” towards neoliberal globalization it would be a mistake to diminish the role of class struggle in China. Given the expansion of capitalist relations of production in the past decades, it is obvious that class contradictions would intensify.
The problems facing China today are different from the 1970s, when the main contradiction was between the low level of development of the productive forces, and the growing demands of the masses. However, according to Xi, this development was characterized by an unbalanced capitalist growth deepening inequality, rural/urban divisions and creating an unsustainable relationship to the environment. The values and norms of neoliberalism have also left their mark. Individualism, a competition mentality, and greed have made their inroads at the expense of solidarity and community. Xi now redefined the main contradiction as the unbalanced and inadequate development and the growing needs of the people for a better life.
To ease contradictions, Xi emphasizes the policy of “Common Prosperity” instead of Deng’s “some get rich first.” New tax laws to redistribute wealth, a huge campaign to eliminate rural poverty, new laws to regulate the working condition, and rules to reduce speculation in the real estate sector were all introduced. However, at the same time, Xi Jinping stressed the need to promote the unity and struggle of the Chinese people and to promote harmonious class relations. The Governance of China is also the title of the four-volume collection of Xi Jinping speeches and writings.
Xi, as a member of the communist party since his youth, is a schooled Marxist, and knows all about class struggle as the driver for change. He often affirms the party’s adherence to Marxism, but seldom discusses the specific class struggle in China and the future of the national capitalist sector, national and transnational. Xi is also president of the People’s Republic of China, which needs class harmony to continue the economic development to fulfill the needs of the people.
This blend of understanding the transformative role of class struggle, and promoting class harmony, is not schizophrenic or revisionist. It reflects the real dilemma—or balancing exercise—between the need for the development of the productive forces in a transitionary state within a world still dominated by the capitalist mode of production on the one side and on the other side, the need of proletarian class struggle to maintain state power and push towards a socialist mode of production. This takes into account the concrete reality that class struggle in China between labor and capital, and the ideological struggle between bourgeois ideas, norms and values and socialist values is a long-lasting struggle, which will go on as long as capitalist relations of production plays a major role in China.
It is important to understand and differentiate between the phases in the transformation process. We have to distinguish between when we are talking about the development of the productive forces–in a transitionary state–in a world system still dominated by the capitalist mode of production, or when we are talking about the final transformation of the mode of production, from capitalist to socialist.
In the first case we can use capitalist management and the market to move towards socialism. In the second case we have to eliminate residual elements of the capitalist mode of production as they no longer play a progressive role in the development of the productive forces, but are blocking and even destroying human development.
This is the tipping point, when it is time to move from taking advantage of the capitalist mode of production to eliminating it, and to release the socialist mode of production from the constricting residual bind of capitalism. We are approaching the point where the need for another mode of production becomes more and more pressing as the destruction of global ecology and climate accelerates under capitalism.
-Torkil Lauesen, The Long Transition Towards Socialism And The End Of Capitalism Pgs. 309-311
@onceuponabreeze Tagged because this kind of relates to our one talk earlier about China and Vietnam fighting against “peaceful evolution”
Over the last half-century, the “financial explosion”—manifest in the unrestrained expansion of financialization and its tools and instituti
Financialization of the global economy is the most salient feature of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, capitalism has undergone a structural transformation in which its center of gravity shifted from production to finance in response to stagnation in productive activity. This gave rise to what has been described as a “financial explosion”: the unrestrained expansion of new financial institutions, financial instruments, and financial markets, accompanied by escalating indebtedness and the spread of speculative activity. The expansion of the financial system has far exceeded what is required to support productive investment, while an increasing share of profits in the countries of the Global North now derives from finance rather than from production. At the same time, financialization has to a significant extent displaced direct colonial rule and become a crucial mechanism of control and expropriation in contemporary imperialism. Given the subordinate position of the Global South within global production and financial systems, Northern countries continue to extract value from Southern economies, while restricting their autonomous development through mechanisms such as capital account liberalization and the dollarization of sovereign debt.
Among the countries of the Global South, China appears to present a distinctive case. On the one hand, against the backdrop of contemporary capitalist financialization, this vast economy has managed to preserve a significant degree of developmental autonomy while becoming deeply integrated into the world economy. It has sustained long-term productive accumulation and avoided financial subordination, without exhibiting any clear pattern of subordinate financialization. In this respect, China’s rise carries a significance that goes far beyond that of the East Asian developmental states during the so-called golden age of capitalism. At the same time, in the course of market-oriented reform, China has developed a large private sector, attracted foreign investment, and absorbed substantial industrial relocation. With the advance of capital accumulation and the increasingly disorderly expansion of capital, China’s economic and social development has also been confronted with a range of contradictions, including ecological degradation, widening social polarization, and inadequate labor protection. These contradictions were, in effect, a superimposed mirror image, produced through the spatiotemporal compression of China’s rapid development, of the many problems that advanced economies had encountered at different stages of development.
Since the 2010s, the sharp contraction of exports following the international financial crisis has altered the external conditions that formerly sustained China’s high-speed growth. At the same time, China has also shown signs of financialization, manifested in a slowdown in productive accumulation, an expansion of financial activity, and the growing visibility of financial risk. The top leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has recognized the necessity, within the framework of the socialist market economy, of regulating and guiding the behavior of capital under the Party’s leadership. Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping has significantly strengthened the Party’s leadership—especially that of the Party Central Committee—in economic and financial work, reaffirmed the fundamental principle that finance must serve the real economy, and intensified anti-corruption efforts in the financial sector. All this reflects the Party’s determination to address at the root such problems as financialization and the disorderly expansion of capital, and to advance the construction of a socialist economic system with Chinese characteristics.
The Structural Transformation of Contemporary Capitalism and Dependent Financialization in the Global South
The stagflation crisis of the 1970s brought capitalism’s postwar boom to a definitive end. Following a prolonged period of structural adjustment, capitalism entered a new stage, fundamentally different from the postwar golden age, in which monopoly-finance capital became the dominant force. The most salient feature of this stage is the decoupling of financial expansion from the development of the real economy. The surge in financial activity across the whole society—including the financial sector, nonfinancial corporations, and households—helped to alleviate the pressures of economic stagnation and, through wealth effects, transformed asset-price inflation into new sources of demand. But this was only a false prosperity. The disproportionate expansion of financial bubbles left the economy perpetually exposed to the risk of debt deflation, which was also the underlying cause of the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. Even after the crisis, however, capitalist economies did not return to the postwar pattern of accumulation led by industrial capital. Instead, the deeply entrenched tendency toward economic stagnation has compelled capitalism to continue advancing along the path of financialization.
The persistence of financialization in core capitalist countries such as the United States is inseparable from the establishment of the contemporary imperialist order. The essence of this order is that, in order to compensate for insufficient domestic accumulation by monopoly capital, the United States coordinates with advanced capitalist countries, such as those in Europe and Japan, to continuously appropriate surplus value from other countries through global production networks, financialization, and related mechanisms, while reinforcing this process through political and military means of control.
First, multinational corporations based in the United States and other capitalist countries have constructed core–periphery global production networks through modularization and information technology. By fragmenting production processes and relocating many productive activities to peripheral countries in the Global South, they have been able to control these countries through their monopoly over key technologies and branding, while continuously appropriating surplus value by methods such as depressing procurement prices and accelerating the accumulation of intangible assets. The establishment of global production networks has also released substantial funds from fixed-capital investment for U.S. firms, enabling them to engage in mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks, financialized corporate operations, and financial investment.5 These financial activities are, in turn, one of the principal channels through which value is transferred from peripheral to core countries, thereby further intensifying financialization and strengthening the power of monopoly-finance capital.
Second, with the rapid expansion of U.S. monopoly-finance capital, the dollar and an increasingly U.S.-centered international financial market have become the pillars of the international monetary and financial system. This has enabled the United States to carry out global financial expropriation through a variety of mechanisms, including seigniorage, financial innovation, and the expansion of financial capital.
Finally, by exercising control over international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, establishing military bases across the globe, and promoting the Washington Consensus, the United States has compelled debtor countries to implement structural adjustment programs—centered on financial liberalization, privatization, and deregulation—that obstruct autonomous development. Through its combined economic, political, and military power, it has thus maintained this imperialist order.
Most countries in the Global South have not benefited from so-called globalization; instead, they have become trapped in subordinate financialization. Subordinate financialization, or international financial subordination, refers primarily to the unequal relations of control and expropriation within the world system, as manifested through monetary and financial channels.8 From a long-term historical perspective, the financial subordination of many Southern countries can be traced back to the colonial period, when their financial systems were established not to serve the needs of domestic production, but according to external imperatives. Under the contemporary imperialist order, however, the combined operation of global production networks and a dollar-based, market-led financial system has given rise to new forms of subordinate financialization in the Global South.
At the level of production, Southern countries participate in global production networks while remaining locked into the low end of value chains, earning only thin profit margins and bearing the risks generated by fluctuations in market demand and exchange rates. At the same time, workers’ wages have long been held down at low levels, and the resulting weakness of domestic demand has further reinforced these countries’ dependence on international markets. The “prudent” macroeconomic policies advocated by neoliberalism have also further compressed the space for domestic productive investment.
At the level of finance, participation in global production networks requires Southern countries to integrate into a dollar-denominated, market-based financial system. Domestic-currency assets are thereby transformed into tradeable financial assets readily subject to speculation, while domestic firms are continually exposed to the threat of shocks in global liquidity. When global liquidity is abundant, surges of speculative capital inflate asset prices; when monetary policy in core countries tightens, currency depreciation and debt crises soon follow. In addition, in order to stabilize exchange rates, Southern countries are compelled to accumulate large foreign-exchange reserves—effectively issuing high-interest liabilities in domestic currency in exchange for low-yield U.S. Treasury securities—which also constitutes one of the channels through which value is transferred.10
It can be argued that subordinate financialization in the Global South has been jointly shaped by these countries’ subordinate position and the structural transformation of contemporary capitalism. In the course of being forcibly integrated into globalized production and finance, Southern countries have likewise experienced a disproportionate expansion of financial activity relative to production. Yet the financial profits thus generated do not remain within these countries, but are instead transferred to the core capitalist economies. This process has intensified the fragility of Southern countries in both economic development and the financial sphere, while their developmental space and autonomy have been increasingly constrained by the core countries of the capitalist world system.
China’s Integration into the World Economy and the Avoidance of Subordinate Financialization
Among the countries of the Global South, China stands out as a distinctive exception. Although it has become deeply integrated into the world economy, it has not fallen into subordinate financialization. Instead, it has achieved the twin miracles of rapid economic growth and long-term social stability, and has become one of the principal engines of global economic growth. This distinctiveness needs to be understood from both the productive and the financial side.
From the productive side, the completeness of China’s industrial system, the vast scale of domestic market demand, and the monetary funds accumulated internally have been crucial in enabling China, even after its integration into the world economy, to sustain growth through industrial expansion and productivity improvement rather than falling into subordinate financialization.
First, the CPC has consistently recognized the importance of possessing an independent and self-reliant industrial system. As early as the 1950s, China had already established an independent and relatively comprehensive industrial system and national economic system. This provided the material foundation that enabled China, after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), to absorb industrial relocation and rapidly transform foreign investment into productive capacity rather than financial expansion. More importantly, the Chinese state has been able and willing to transcend the profit-seeking logic of private capital by directing and controlling large volumes of social funds into strategic nonprofit sectors requiring long-term investment, such as infrastructure and high technology. These investments have not only directly stimulated growth through multiplier effects, but also created the general conditions of production conducive to productive accumulation.
Second, the Reform and Opening Up initiated in the late 1970s released the suppressed consumer demand of the planned-economy era, activated productive capacity, and stimulated growth. Economic growth was then translated into rising incomes for the people. As Chart 1 shows, between 2000 and 2025, wage growth among employees in urban non-private units broadly kept pace with, and in some years even exceeded, per capita GDP growth. Although the growth of migrant workers’ wages lagged somewhat behind, it still displayed an upward rather than stagnant trend. Rising incomes were further converted into domestic demand, which in turn promoted economic growth. In fact, China’s growth has relied primarily on domestic demand rather than external demand. In terms of contribution rates, between 1978 and 2025—with the sole exception of 2020, due to the pandemic—final consumption consistently contributed more to GDP growth than net exports of goods and services. Even during the period of rapid growth following China’s accession to the WTO, from 2001 to 2007, the contribution of net exports of goods and services to GDP growth was only 1.53 percent, whereas final consumption contributed 48.73 percent.
Chart 1. Index of Wage Rate and GDP per capita
Sources and Notes: Data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC). Wage rate data for migrant workers are from various issues of NBSC, Report on Monitoring and Surveying Migrant Workers (2024), and Lu Feng, “Wage Rate Trends of China’s Migrant Workers, 1979–2010,” Social Sciences in China, no. 7 (2012): 47–67 (in Chinese). Data on wages of employees in urban private-sector units are available only from 2010 onward, but their trend is broadly consistent with that of employees in non-private units.
Finally, one reason many Southern countries fall into subordinate financialization is that economic development becomes reliant on external financing. By contrast, since the Mao era, China has adhered to the basic national strategy of depending “primarily on self-reliance while treating external assistance as supplementary.” Investment in China’s economic construction has come mainly from domestic accumulation rather than from foreign capital or trade surpluses. Since 1983, the share of foreign direct investment in total fixed asset investment has exceeded 10 percent only during 1993–2002; in all other years, the average was merely 3.5 percent. In addition, China only began to record a stable current account surplus from 1994 onward, and even at its peak in 2006–2008, this surplus remained below 10 percent of GDP; in most other years, it has stayed around 1 to 3 percent.
From the financial side, the dominant position of state-owned banks, government intervention in the financial system, and the prudent opening of the capital account have effectively guided funds toward productive sectors while also safeguarding the autonomy and resilience of the financial system.
Let us consider each of these features in turn. First, China’s financial system is bank-centered. Compared with market-based institutions, banks are better able to provide the patient capital required by industrial production. By the end of 2024, banks held 89.7 percent of assets of all financial institutions; and within the banking sector, more than 50 percent of total assets were held by state-owned banks. Compared with privately owned banks, which are more strongly oriented toward profitability, state-owned banks are better able to expand credit countercyclically, a role that proved especially important during both the Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.14 At the same time, because state-owned banks are backed by sovereign credit, the implicit government guarantee has to some extent underpinned the stability of the financial system. The establishment in 1994 of China’s three state-owned policy banks (the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Agricultural Development Bank of China) has also promoted the flow of funds into priority sectors.
Second, government intervention in the financial system mainly manifests in two ways. One is an administrative control and regulatory system that is in some respects more stringent than international standards and is aimed at preserving the stability of the financial system. The other lies within financial institutions themselves, where Party leadership is embedded through Party organization-building. Especially in state-owned financial institutions, the policy objectives of the Party Central Committee can be translated into political responsibility and effectively transmitted and implemented through such mechanisms as cadre evaluation and accountability. It should be noted, however, that under the orientation of market-oriented reform, state-owned banks have also displayed behavioral instability, which in turn highlights the necessity of government intervention. Finally, the policy of the “prudent opening” of the capital account has enabled China to preserve the independent status of the renminbi and to maintain autonomy in both monetary policy and foreign exchange policy.
Although China avoided subordinate financialization, the development of private enterprises and the introduction of foreign capital in the course of market-oriented reform also gave rise to the disorderly expansion of capital within the socialist market economy, though early on this was primarily associated with the sphere of production. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has been integrated into global production networks through large-scale manufacture of standardized modular components and final assembly. This model was characterized by low wages and high energy consumption; particularly in the coastal regions, poor working environments and inadequate labor protection were especially prominent, while the carrying capacity of resources and the environment also approached its limits. At the same time, with the growth of wealth and monetary accumulation, a financial market system—including stocks, bonds, and investment funds—also developed in this process.
However, because of the rapid expansion of the productive sectors and the relative lag in the development of financial markets and financial innovations, most social funds from various sources, including shadow banking, continued to flow into productive investment. In 2005, China’s fixed asset investment grew by as much as 31.3 percent, while the value added of the financial sector as a share of GDP actually declined during 2001–2005, averaging only 4.3 percent. There was therefore no clear separation of finance from production. Conversely, once the accumulation of industrial capital began to encounter obstacles, and as financial markets and financial innovations gradually took shape, surplus capital’s pursuit of higher returns led to the disorderly expansion of capital into the financial sphere. This is precisely what came to characterize the Chinese economy after the 2010s.
Financialization Tendencies and China’s Experience of Regulating Capital Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China
In 2013, President Xi made the judgment that the Chinese economy had entered a “new normal,” that is, a stage characterized by the superimposition of three periods: a shift in the growth rate, the painful process of structural adjustment, and the digestion of the effects of earlier stimulus policies. Coupled with the deep adjustment of the world economy, this created an extremely complex development environment. During the preceding period of high-speed growth, China had accumulated massive productive capacity, and the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package introduced in response to the impact of the global financial crisis further expanded this capacity. On the demand side, the upgrading of domestic consumption patterns and the contraction of international markets generated both a quantitative problem of aggregate supply exceeding demand and a structural mismatch between supply and demand in the productive sphere. A considerable portion of large-scale productive capacity oriented only toward standardized demand had reached its peak; combined with rising social costs of production, this led to a decline in the profit rate of the real economy. As Chart 2 shows, the profit rate of industrial enterprises fell from 9.1 percent in 2011 to 4.1 percent in 2024, with the decline being even more severe for private enterprises than for state-owned enterprises.
Chart 2. Profit Rate on Assets of China’s Industrial Enterprises
Sources: NBSC. Profit rate is calculated as total profits divided by total assets.
Against the backdrop of declining profitability in the real economy and lagging financial regulation, China began to exhibit tendencies toward financialization. Large volumes of capital flowed into fictitious sectors such as finance and real estate, inflating asset price bubbles and gradually exposing financial risks. This phenomenon has often been described as the shift “from the real to the fictitious.” It was manifested most prominently in the growing speculative and debt-driven behavior of nonfinancial enterprises. Since the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plans successively called for the “steady” and “active yet prudent” promotion of pilot programs for mixed financial operations, the number of nonfinancial enterprises investing in the financial sector has steadily increased, giving rise to financial holding companies. These may be broadly divided into five categories: first, large enterprise groups approved by the State Council to support China’s opening-up and economic development; second, comprehensive asset investment and operating companies established with the approval of local governments; third, asset management companies established by the parent companies of central state-owned enterprise groups to manage financial business within the group; fourth, private enterprises and listed companies that gradually came to control multiple financial institutions of different types through investment and mergers and acquisitions; and fifth, certain Internet companies that, after establishing dominant positions in e-commerce, gradually expanded into finance, acquired multiple financial licenses, and built integrated financial platforms.
However, some nonfinancial enterprises—especially those in the fourth and fifth categories—became excessively driven by financial speculation and neglected the development of their core businesses. Some secured windfall profits by acquiring scarce financial licenses and rapidly transferring equity, as in the case of Jiuding Group.16 Others engaged in reckless expansion through leveraged financing, circular capital injections, and fictitious capital contributions. They appropriated massive funds from financial institutions through related-party transactions and other forms of illicit benefit transfer, and evaded domestic financial regulation by concealing their ownership structures, as in the case of the Tomorrow Group.17 Still others, under the name of technology companies, engaged in online lending in order to circumvent regulation, and used asset securitization tools to repackage and sell credit assets layer upon layer, thereby generating extremely high levels of financial leverage, as in the case of Ant Group.18 This process was also accompanied by collusion between business and government officials, as well as corruption. Such reckless expansion pushed up the leverage ratios of nonfinancial enterprises and planted the seeds of debt risk. Overall, since 2009 the leverage ratio of China’s nonfinancial corporate sector has begun to rise markedly, with particularly rapid growth between 2012 and 2016, reaching 168.4 percent by the end of 2024 (see Chart 3).
Chart 3. China’s Macro Leverage Ratio
Notes and Sources: People’s Republic of China Center for National Balance Sheets. The data series are calculated as sectoral debt divided by nominal GDP. Household debt refers to household loans, including both consumer loans and business loans. Nonfinancial corporate debt includes corporate loans, corporate bonds, trust loans, entrusted loans, undiscounted bankers’ acceptances, and foreign debt, as well as part of the debt of local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Central government debt refers to the outstanding balance of government bonds. Local government debt includes local government bonds and other liabilities of local governments. For debt incurred by LGFVs before 2018, which is local governments’ implicit debt, the Center for National Balance Sheets distinguishes between the portion that should be classified as nonfinancial corporate debt and the portion that should be classified as local government debt. After 2018, the central government required local government debt to be made explicit: outstanding implicit debt was swapped into local government bonds, and LGFVs were stripped of their government functions. As a result, any remaining LGFV debt is classified only under the nonfinancial corporate sector.
In addition to nonfinancial enterprises, the hidden debt of local governments also expanded rapidly. Following the implementation of the new Budget Law in 2015, all local government debt was required to be brought under budgetary management, and the issuance of local government bonds became the only legal channel for local borrowing. Nevertheless, local governments continued to raise funds in violation of these rules through local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), government procurement of services, public–private partnerships (PPPs), and various development and guidance funds; in some provinces, the outstanding stock of hidden government debt exceeded explicit debt by as much as 80 percent.20 Most local government debt, however, has been directed toward medium- and long-term infrastructure projects, which are characterized by long cycles and slow returns. Against the backdrop of declining profitability in the real economy, these returns have also become increasingly uncertain. At the same time, the sources of funding are often short-term, interest burdens are heavy, and pressure to roll over existing debt is considerable, creating significant latent risks. In addition, the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package of 2009 and the monetized resettlement policy for shantytown redevelopment introduced in 2015 drove a rapid rise in housing prices in major cities, contributing to an increase in leverage in the household sector (see Chart 3).
Even so, we cannot conclude that China has already undergone a process of financialization comparable to that of the United States. Based on comparable data, although the ratio of value added in the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sectors to that in the goods-producing sectors has risen markedly since 1978, its absolute level remains far below that of the United States (see Chart 4). Moreover, since China’s financial system is still in the process of being established and improved, a relative increase in the share of value added accounted for by the FIRE sectors has its own rationale. At the same time, leverage levels in China’s household sector and central government remain relatively low, leaving room for policy maneuvers (see Chart 3).
Chart 4. Ratio of Value Added in China’s FIRE Sectors to that in the Goods-Producing Sectors
Notes and Sources: NBSC. The “FIRE” sectors are finance, insurance, and real estate. The goods-producing sectors include agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery; industry; construction; transport; and storage.
More importantly, China’s top leadership has developed a profound awareness of the dangers of financialization. As President Xi has emphasized, “Serving the real economy is the duty and mission of finance. If we unthinkingly pursue internal circulation and isolated expansion of the financial sector, it will lose its purpose and ultimately lead to crises. China’s financial sector must perform its primary duty of serving the real economy and facilitating high-quality development. It must never sideline the real economy in favor of the virtual economy.” Since 2015, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee has repeatedly convened meetings that attached great importance to preventing and defusing financial risks and to strengthening financial regulation, while introducing a series of policy measures to intensify the rectification of financial disorder and regulate the disorderly expansion of capital in the financial sphere. In 2023, the National Financial Work Conference was elevated to the Central Financial Work Conference, further underscoring the centralized and unified leadership of the Party Central Committee over financial work.
The CPC’s regulation and guidance of capital behavior have been advanced in a systematic manner on multiple fronts. In the fields of finance and real estate, the first priority has been to uphold serving the real economy and benefiting the broad masses of the people as the fundamental purpose of financial work, while strengthening high-quality financial services for major national strategies, key sectors, and weak links, including technological innovation, ecological development, rural revitalization, small and micro enterprises, and elder care. Beginning in 2025, monetary policy shifted from prudent to moderately loose, with greater support directed toward development of the real economy.
Second, China has consistently maintained its commitment to preventing and controlling financial risks. High-risk business conglomerates such as the Tomorrow Group and HNA Group have been dealt with in an orderly manner; Ant Group’s listing was suspended and the company was subsequently restructured and rectified; and existing hidden local government debt has been swapped into local government bonds. As a result, the scale of hidden debt fell by 60 percent between 2018 and 2024, standing at 10.5 trillion yuan at the end of 2024. At the same time, anti-corruption efforts in the financial sector have continued to intensify, alongside the strengthening of financial regulatory institutions and the improvement of the legal and market-rule framework governing finance.
Third, macroprudential management of cross-border capital flows has been reinforced. After the global financial crisis, large-scale movements of speculative international capital contributed to financial bubbles in China. At present, China places greater emphasis on monitoring and early warning of cross-border capital flows and, when necessary, strengthens macroprudential management in order to safeguard the stable operation of the foreign exchange market.
Fourth, China has adhered to the principle that housing is for living in, not for speculation. It has proactively regulated housing prices, sought to prevent speculative activity, and carried out the liquidation and restructuring of developers such as Evergrande, whose reckless expansion led to debt crises. It is worth noting that China has not fallen into a binary opposition between state and private ownership. Instead, while maintaining the foundational role of large state-owned commercial banks in serving the real economy and preserving financial stability, it has also promoted a financial service system characterized by a division of labor and coordination among large state-owned commercial banks, joint-stock banks, and small- and medium-sized banks.
In the sphere of production, since 2015 the CPC has successively introduced a series of strategic initiatives, including supply-side structural reform, high-quality development, and the development of qualitatively new productive forces. These initiatives are aimed at overcoming bottlenecks in key core technologies, promoting the intelligent, green, and networked transformation of modes of production, and meeting the people’s growing demand for personalized and diversified needs, thereby establishing a domestic economic circulation in which supply and demand are better aligned on the basis of harmony between humanity and nature. At the same time, China’s rural areas still contain enormous room for investment. The rural revitalization strategy, which seeks to build modern spaces of production and life in the countryside, helps absorb excess capacity and achieve a spatial fix for capital. All these measures are conducive to raising people’s incomes, freeing low-income groups from the pressures of international race-to-the-bottom competition, and expanding the size of the middle-income group so as to realize the potential of China’s vast domestic market, rather than relying, as the United States does, on consumer credit to stimulate demand. In addition, in response to such problems as disorderly competition among digital commercial platforms and the compression of profits of small- and medium-sized manufacturing firms by monopoly rents extracted by platform capital, the Chinese government has continuously strengthened anti-monopoly regulation of platforms and worked to improve market regulation, macroeconomic governance, and the policy and legal framework suited to the development of the digital economy, thereby promoting fair competition and coordinated development of capital. At present, China is launching its Fifteenth Five-Year Plan and using the goal-governance function of planning to guide private capital toward serving the country’s broader strategic objectives.
Summary
Capital’s drive for profit means that it has an inherent tendency to detach itself from production and turn toward self-circulation in the financial sphere. In reality, in order to offset the crisis of stagnation in monopoly-capital accumulation, contemporary capitalism has undergone a structural transformation toward financialization, marked by pronounced predatory, short-termist, and speculative characteristics that have obstructed the industrialization of developing countries. China’s practice of resisting financialization, by contrast, shows that it is developing a form of long-termist, production-oriented economy fundamentally different from capitalism. This has been achieved through the CPC’s regulation of capital behavior, guiding industrial capital toward the production of goods that meet the people’s needs, directing financial and commercial capital to serve the real economy and converting economic growth into people’s income rather than satisfying the interests of a few capitalists.
China’s development has also been challenged by the capitalist world. Similar to the Plaza Accord, which weakened Japan in the 1980s, the United States in recent years has launched a trade war, a tariff war, and what has been called the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” attempting to shift its domestic crisis outward and weaken China through such means as high tariffs, dollar depreciation, debt swaps, multilateral monetary negotiations, and security charges. Yet since the period of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the CPC has attached great importance to an independent monetary policy, fully aware that once monetary policy autonomy is lost, internal economic problems cannot be overcome and external economic predation is made easier. As early as 2016, China’s official news agency Xinhua declared that China was not like Japan in the past and had no need for a “new Plaza Accord”; when exchange rate fluctuations exceed the tolerated range, the People’s Bank of China would maintain management of the exchange rate. In the face of the tariff war launched by the United States, China also responded immediately with strong countermeasures. All this shows that China refuses to be subordinately incorporated into the world capitalist system, and will not move onto a neoliberal or capitalist path.
The production-oriented socialist economy with Chinese characteristics constitutes a powerful challenge to the financialization of contemporary capitalism. At present, China is building a dual-circulation development pattern in which the domestic economy is the mainstay while the domestic and international circulations reinforce one another. While maintaining a stable level of dollar foreign exchange reserves, China is also reducing its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, further expanding the use of the renminbi in cross-border trade and investment, and steadily advancing the convertibility of the renminbi under the capital account. Two hundred years ago, Karl Marx sketched for us the communist ideal of a genuine human community. V. I. Lenin also envisaged an equal union based on voluntary association—a “world republic of Soviets.” Today, China’s development is intended to promote common development across the world. In a world where capitalism and socialism coexist as two systems, China is offering a new proposal for building a community with a shared future for humankind, and is seeking to reshape the world economic order through the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative, the Global Governance Initiative, and the Belt and Road Initiative.
my mother is romanian and because she was born in the 1980s I have a difficult time trying to discuss communism seriously with her. She always shuts me down with either an anecdote about how her parents friends or her family were “silenced” or that all their good food went to Russia and they had nothing. Is there anything I can say that you think might change her mind or is it a pointless argument? I don’t think she’s intentionally shutting me down but she gets very emotionally tense about it
I'm not the one you should come to for interpersonal relationship advice, but I can at least set the record straight about historical events.
The idea that your mother growing up in the 80s experienced a period where "all the good food went to Russia" is nonsense. While such a hyperbolic statement could potentially be made regarding the post-WW2 period of Soviet-imposed reparations, that period was already over by the 80s, and it left a lasting wariness among the Romanian leadership towards the USSR, which contributed to their general nationalist sentiment. While Romania did join the Warsaw Pact in 1955, they remained neutral during the Sino-Soviet Split and refused to host Soviet troops in 1958.
Once Ceaușescu took over in 1965, Romania proactively sought closer ties with the West. They established ties with West Germany in 1967, abstained from the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, received Nixon in 1969 (three years before he visited China), established a trade agreement with Israel in 1971 and received Golda Meir in 1972, joined the IMF in 1972, and even maintained diplomatic relations with Chile after Pinochet's coup in 1973.
Throughout the Ceaușescu period, Romania took out multiple loans from the IMF and World Bank as well as loans from various Western private banks, initially boosting their economy but quickly causing debt to pile up. As the global economy took a downturn through the mid-70s onward and as oil prices fell, Romania found themselves unable to keep up with the debt. By 1981 Romania owed Western banks USD$11.4 billion, and the IMF took advantage of Romania's desperation, agreeing to grant Romania further loans to pay off their private debts in exchange for Romania's agreement to raise food and gas prices, to reduce government spending, and to provide the IMF with detailed information about the state of Romania's economy. Furthermore, Romania agreed to redirect government funds away from industrial production and towards agricultural production, in order to promote the export of agricultural goods to the West and use the profits to pay off their Western debt. So far from the food going to Russia, the food was in fact going to the West.
The imposition of new austerity measures and rationing in Romania was not received well by the public, to say the least. The IMF meanwhile cut off funding after only five months as the Romanian economy did not meet the performance targets demanded of them, and in 1982 they agreed to reschedule the debt in exchange for further liberal economic reforms, only worsening the austerity measures. The PCR were keenly aware of the backlash against these measures, and Ceaușescu promised to pay off the debt and get the country out of its crisis. By 1987, Romania stopped providing economic data to the IMF, in 1988, the National Assembly declared further foreign loans illegal, and in 1989, Ceaușescu declared that the government was finally debt-free, although there had yet to be any word about lifting the austerity measures.
This was unfortunately too little, too late for the burgeoning counterrevolutionary movement in Romania. Reactionary elements in the Romanian military and their supporters in the government had begun plotting against Ceaușescu, with the formation of the anti-communist "National Salvation Front" (FSN) being reported in Western media as early as August 1989.
Across the border, Hungary had made similar moves to Romania through the years, joining the IMF in 1982 and increasingly liberalizing their economy and press. However, while Ceaușescu was making moves away from the economic and political liberalization seen in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, Hungary had embraced it. In the process, Hungary had become a safe haven for right-wing Romanian dissidents, especially those of Hungarian descent, who accused the Romanian government of plotting genocide against the Hungarian minority.
It was under these conditions that the first protests erupted on December 16, 1989, in Timisoara near the Hungarian border. The Hungarian and US bourgeois media reported all sorts of fantasies alleging thousands of protestors being murdered and buried in mass graves by the police, fanning the flames of reaction across Romania. The military withdrew from Timisoara on December 20, and by December 21, the protests had spread to Bucharest.
It was at this time that Ceaușescu would hold his infamous final rally, announcing the first policies to lift the austerity measures and condemning the counterrevolutionary forces, only to be interrupted by protestors. By December 25, Ceaușescu would be captured by the FSN and sentenced to death by firing squad, and in the following week, the PCR leadership, local communist officials, and security officers who refused to submit to the FSN were imprisoned or executed. The PCR was banned, and the FSN sought the advice of US legal and economic experts to rework the nation into a neoliberal capitalist nation, legalizing foreign investment, selling off state assets, and restarting negotiations with the IMF, including lifting the ban on foreign loans.
This led to massive increases in poverty and unemployment. The notorious "Caritas" ponzi scheme ran rampant in the country from 1992 to 1994, preying on the masses of workers impoverished by neoliberal reforms. Despite the reactionaries relying on concerns for ethnic minorities as part of their rhetoric, racially motivated attacks spread across the nation, fueled by newly-organized right-wing nationalist organizations free from communist repression.
The bourgeoisie now owned the media in Romania, and they used their control to spread whatever lies they wanted about the socialist period to try and convince the people that the neoliberal counterrevolution was for the best. Nevertheless, the majority of Romanians still hold positive views on the socialist period. In 2010, an IRES poll found that 63% of Romanians said their lives were better under socialism, 68% said that communism was a good idea, and 41% said that they would have voted for Ceaușescu were he still alive. In 2025, an INSCOP poll found that 66% of respondents held positive views of Ceaușescu and either positive or neutral views regarding the socialist period, with only 9% of respondents holding the view that there was less freedom under socialism.
Sources and further reading:
Romania: 30 years removed from socialism, Patricia Gorky, Liberation News, 2019
Reactionary coup in Romania, Sam Marcy, Workers World, 1990
On “Coming Out” and Why I Disagree With Pushing That Onto Jikook
I need to get this off my chest because I keep seeing posts saying “Jikook should just come out already.” And honestly? I couldn’t disagree more.
First of all, I come from a conservative country myself. I see what happens to LGBTQ+ people around me — the daily discrimination, the social rejection, the way families and communities can turn on you in an instant. And I’m not even talking about idols with careers built on public image; I’m talking about ordinary people who lose jobs, respect, safety, and sometimes even their own families after coming out. So if that’s the reality for regular folks, imagine the stakes for two of the most famous idols in South Korea.
South Korea is not some magically progressive bubble where queer love is celebrated. Yes, there’s fandom support, but let’s be real: the general public still leans very conservative. People still get dragged for the smallest things. An idol can lose endorsements just for having the wrong “attitude” on a show. So what do you think would happen if two global K-pop icons came out as gay? It wouldn’t just be personal backlash — it would mean political, financial, and career-ending consequences. Not just for them, but for their families, for their group, for their company, and even for the industry.
I get why fans are frustrated with the endless straight rumors. Trust me, I roll my eyes every time Jimin is “linked” to some random woman because he happened to breathe in the same building as her, or when Jungkook can’t even look at a female colleague without tabloids making it a “secret date.” It’s exhausting, and yes, it must be exhausting for them too. But the answer isn’t “just come out.” That is not a solution in a country that would eat them alive for it.
And this is where empathy comes in. We say we love them, right? Loving them means respecting the reality they live in, not projecting our own Western expectations of what “liberation” should look like. Coming out is not the same everywhere. In some places it’s brave and empowering; in others, it’s dangerous and damaging. For Jimin and Jungkook, it’s not just about whether they want to live openly — it’s about whether they can. And right now, they simply can’t.
So no, I don’t agree with the “they owe it to us” crowd. They don’t owe us their personal truth on a platter. They don’t owe us public declarations to validate what we already see. What they owe themselves is safety, peace, and the ability to live as freely as possible within the circumstances they’re given. If that means staying private, then I’ll take their coded glances, their quiet choices, their Japan trips, their military buddy system, their post-discharge vacations — all the things they do choose to share with each other and indirectly with us. That’s enough.
Because at the end of the day, coming out doesn’t automatically mean freedom. For some people, especially in conservative cultures, it can mean the opposite. And I’d rather see Jimin and Jungkook alive, thriving, and carving their little spaces of happiness — even if they never once say it out loud — than see them destroyed by a public that isn’t ready to accept them.
If you really love them, don’t pressure them into doing something that could ruin their lives. Support them where they are, how they are, in the ways they choose
Coming out is not the only way to live authentically. Sometimes, love survives precisely because it’s protected.
The final decision lies with them. They don't owe us anything.
I will support these two forever for who they are and what they want... 💜💛
From Poland and Hungary to Brazil and the US, journalist Daniel Trilling dives into what we can learn about fighting fascism in his new book
Daniel Trilling at Zeteo:
The ideas of the far right, once confined to the margins of politics, have gone mainstream. A decade ago, it was just about possible to think that the right-wing nationalism sweeping through liberal democracies around the world might subside of its own accord. Whatever discontents it profited from could, perhaps, be dealt with or absorbed back into mainstream politics. Or perhaps its figureheads would show themselves to be so incompetent at governing that voters wouldn’t give them a second chance. That is clearly not the case.
As the political analyst Mark Leonard argues in a recent study, this is a movement that has attuned itself to the times we live in. In the West, each new shock, from the rising costs of energy and food to increasing global conflict, falls on the shoulders of communities whose resilience has been hollowed out by an economic system in which inequality has been allowed to soar and the public good disdained. Incumbent elites are forced into defending the existing, crumbling order, even though many of them privately admit it isn’t working.
Yet nowhere have right-wing nationalists gained the support of an overwhelming majority – or in many cases, even a majority at all. So where does that leave us?
The good news is that people all over the world have been grappling with this question for some years now. Nobody has a complete answer, but there are several lessons to draw from what’s been tried, what worked, and what didn’t:
The good news is that people all over the world have been grappling with this question for some years now. Nobody has a complete answer, but there are several lessons to draw from what’s been tried, what worked, and what didn’t:
Turn The Far Right’s Strengths Into Its Weaknesses
Years of writing about this subject have taught me that there is no carefully worked-out master plan behind the rise of far-right politics. Its movements are riven with contradictions – for instance, between the economic aspirations of many of their supporters and the financial interests of party backers. Populist demagogues are adept at colonizing our attention in an algorithmically distorted media landscape, but they are often just making it up as they go along. What’s more, in the way they define the ‘people’ and the ‘elites,’ it is clear there are millions of us who fall outside either category.
In each of these cases, the far right’s strong points can be turned back against it. The story I always turn to when I’m thinking about this comes from Poland. In October 2020, the constitutional court – which the far-right Law and Justice government had stuffed with friendly judges – tightened already strict abortion laws. In effect, it made abortion illegal even when the fetus had a severe and permanent disability or an incurable and life-threatening disease.
For years, Law and Justice’s opponents had criticized its purging of independent minds in Poland’s judiciary, but the government had always been able to brush this off as an elite concern. Law and Justice thought its Catholic conservatism was what ‘the people’ wanted. Only in this case, it turned out they didn’t. Hundreds of thousands of protesters, led by the women whose bodily freedoms were affected by the new law, came out into the streets to protest against the government. The protests, which united under the name ‘women’s strike,’ demanded abortion rights, the restoration of independent courts, and an end to the Church’s influence on politics and education.
The government tried to ignore the protests, then it tried to suppress them. The organizers were threatened with prosecution, while far-right militias supportive of the government attacked protesters and dragged women who held sit-ins in churches out onto the street. But the protests kept going, and it became harder to deny they were a mass movement, rooted in people’s everyday concerns as well as moral principle: a woman’s right to choose is both.
This message was carried further by protest slogans that expressed both anger at this attempt to restrict women’s rights, and mockery of the politicians who claimed to speak for Polish women: “My body is not a coffin”; “The government is not a pregnancy, it can be removed”; “The cat can stay” – a reference to the Law and Justice leader’s pet cat – “the government get the fuck out.” The energy mobilized by these protests fed into a record high turnout, particularly among young people, at the general election of 2023 that saw Law and Justice kicked out of office.
This isn’t a template to copy: rather, it’s a striking example of where people linked a whole set of abstract issues to one of immediate, material concern. An issue, in fact, that goes right to the heart of right-wing nationalism itself: women’s bodies, which it treats as vessels for national renewal. What other issues are out there that allow us to call the far right’s bluff, and break its monopoly of attention?
The far right fills a vacuum: an absence of challenge to racist and divisive arguments; the holes in the social fabric left by years of failed economic policies; a sense that there’s no better option. It is adept at summoning the emotions and making its arguments sound like common sense. Its opponents need to do that too.
Beware of Victories, and Shake Off Defeats
A few years ago, for his book If We Burn, the journalist Vincent Bevins traveled the world to talk to people who had taken part in the mass protest movements of the 2010s. Speaking to people in Brazil, Chile, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Hong Kong, and South Korea, he wanted to find out why, in so many places where people had taken to the streets in support of more freedom, or a fairer distribution of wealth, the ultimate outcome had been forms of authoritarian and right-wing reaction. Was there anything, he asked former activists, you’d say to a young person fighting for change in the world right now?
Daniel Trilling wrote in Zeteo on how other countries can learn from Hungary to beat the far-right and keep them from getting entrenched again.
In The Quiet Between Us - Ju Ji-Hoon X Reader X Choo Young-Woo
CHAPTERS: ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | SEVEN
Main Characters:
Ju Ji-hoon (CEO) - 45, enigmatic, poised, dominant. Public image: calm, refined, untouchable. Private self? Caged chaos, precision, hunger. Has a strict no-dating policy… until her.
You (Reader!Employee) - 25, a corporate strategist at an enterntainment company. Vanilla, career-obsessed, cautious. Never knew submission could feel like liberation. Until him.
Choo Young-Woo (Employee) - 32, empathetic, poised, comforting, Public image: Career focused, sweet, shy, ambivert. Private self? Soft, yearns in silent, patient. Wants nothing but to care for her, protect her.
Themes:
Age gap (20 years and 7 years)
Power imbalance (celebrity x corporate staff)
Forbidden workplace romance
BDSM x vanilla dynamic
Soft to intense smut
Emotional unraveling
Public facade vs private surrender
ANGST ANGST ANGST
SLOW BURN
YEARNINGGGG
So much miscommunication
Red flag Ji-Hoon (I know he's far from it I am sorry yall)
A/N: This story is completely fictional with absolutely no relevance to the characters' real life persona or personal lives. It is meant for enterntainment purposes only and is not to be taken literally. Thank you.
You were warned.
"Don't stare."
"Don't engage unless spoken to."
"And never—never—flirt with Mr. Ju."
Which was fine, really. You had better things to do than pine over your new boss, even if he was obscenely sculpted in a black turtleneck, his bone structure seeming engineered in a lab. You were there to finalize the budget approval for a global campaign shoot, not drool over his fingers as they leisurely swirled his espresso.
But he noticed.
He noticed everything.
"You work in finance?" His voice was velvet over marble, smooth but cold.
You nodded, startled that he’d spoken to you at all. "Strategy team. I'm here for the contract review."
“Hmm.” His eyes didn’t waver. “And yet you look like someone who’d rather control people than numbers.”
Your pulse stuttered.
"I'm sorry?"
“Apologies,” he said smoothly. “You just… hold yourself like someone who’s never been told what to do.”
