this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Calling liberal when you're really just for the freedom to exploit and economically subjugate so nobody can stop you is also a slight hijack.
I believe in freedom or liberty as a word for a specific value. A vast majority of all normal human beings believe in this value. Not all are sane enough to understand that as a society you have to make compromises.
I feel like socialists and libertarians / neoliberals are trying to gaslight us into thinking freedom means something different, something materialistic. Well not gaslight exactly, but stealing or hijacking a word like you say. Like trying to redefine what feminism means.
The flagship liberals were mostly slavers who wanted to go from being merely the richest people in the colonies to the deified ruling class of a country. Liberalism is the leveling of political powers so that uneven economic power dominates. It was this way with slave plantations, with laissez faire, with the "progressive" era of finishing up slaughtering the natives but keeping more of the trees this time, with Jim Crow, redlining, the red scares and with neoliberalism. That's all of American history besides the (you got me) illiberal World War I - II period.
Or we can just go and look at the social context of authors like Locke, who were advocating for the sacredness of personal property because he was among the wealthy and saw how rowdy the masses were getting.
And it is . . .
Still no clue, but now we are declaring that a "vast majority" of all "normal" human beings believe in it! Are we to believe that some highfalutin theoretical value is just independent of culture? Must be something
If you remember one thing from my comment, remember the historical context at the start. If you remember two things, let the second one be this: If you were arguing with a libertarian, right there is where you lose. You let them question-beg what freedom is and let them play champion to it exactly like they want to, as even their hijacked name signifies ["libertarianism" used to refer to a strain of anarchism, and not the newage "leftlib" thing either].
You are absolutely right on libertarians, as I described with their very name above. You are incorrect on both neoliberals and socialists.
Neoliberals have already indoctrinated basically everyone in the anglosphere because they have spent decades as the uncontested dominant power. It is the water you swim in that you don't even have a name for, and that's just how they like it. Americans are the best example of this because, while I think your definition of "liberal" is untenable, theirs is overtly pathetic. To them, it is a synonym for "left". They just don't have a word for what, say, Brits call liberal, because that's kind of everything in their reference point! Well, except theocracy, but they're still working on that word.
As for socialists, well, I think you'd need to readdress your objection first, because:
"Freedom" is a political concept.
Political concepts, I am sure we can agree, have no significance outside of reality.
Reality is material.
Freedom's significance depends on its materiality. QED.
Conversely, anyone who told me that they wanted to tell me about their politics but that it had no meaningful relationship to material reality is not someone I would listen to talk for any reason. Now, I'm not saying you're saying that -- I doubt you are -- but your explanation struggles to hold up to that. I used [admittedly crass] deduction for refutation there because it was convenient, but I hope you don't think I have any particular interest in deceiving you. I just don't think that a starving person in a desert is meaningfully free, though we haven't gotten that far yet.
Complete aside, but the discussion about muddling word meanings reminded me of my favorite short text by Lenin:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/11.htm
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I think we believe the same things but disagree on definition of words and on tactics.
Why do they get to redefine the meaning of words and erase concepts? They were wrong or deliberately lying bastards.
joke
You think just because they planted their imperial flag in this piece of conceptual real estate they get to own it? I pick it up and throw it on the ground! I'm not part of your system! :DWhen someone says he believes in liberal values (liberty as a synonym for freedom) it is just a bad tactics to (deliberately) misunderstand them to mean freedom to oppress and attack them for it. Even if your only goal were the pursuit of power (or wealth or influence) it would be bad tactics to insult those you wish to convince.
I believe it is important to wake people up that what capitalists say with freedom is a lie, that people cannot be free if they their socioeconomic situation doesn't allow them to. We need to reclaim the word "freedom" as encompassing the freedom from exploitation, economic servitude, lies, constant imaginary terror, or threats of real violence. That news and social media has become a prison of distorting mirrors and lies.
PS: Obviously freedom cannot be an absolute or principle but a compromise with society. I'd be curious what you would call the concept of both individual and economic liberty. Like what "should" someone say when they want to say they believe in liberal values? Socialism? :)
PPS: Thanks for the short text, it's hilarious
It's just a matter of what "liberalism" is. That's how language works in material reality, that things gain new meanings based on social circumstances. It's like saying "That person isn't black! Their skin and their hair are clearly just dark shades of brown". In some sense you are correct, but you only get there by ignoring the other meaning of the word, which is clearly the one being used. Words don't have any other meaning except that which was socially constructed.
You sound very much like a nascent socialist. I agree with this completely.
Well, without a definition of freedom, it's very difficult to answer this question. Part of the reason is that we can (as even liberals will tell you) frame "freedom" as "freedom from" and "freedom to", and these freedoms typically represent opposite values. As a crude example, consider the freedom to kill versus the freedom from being killed. Thus, there is no such thing as absolute freedom, though socialists certainly had things to say, as you did earlier, about the lack of freedom experienced by someone who is destitute, as well as the lack of freedom in a class system, where the state is necessarily organized by the ruling class to suppress the underclass.
Framed in terms of ideals, as I suggested earlier and the Lenin piece says, socialism is the political and economic equality of the people (economic equality here not meaning the equality of how much money you have, but the masses being able to decide production instead of an elite owning class, though that itself is conducive to everyone getting what they need on the basic principle of organizing production towards serving everyone).
Lenin is an entertaining guy. The letter I shared is his punchiest work in that respect, but I think the book State and Revolution is also entertaining in its own way, as well as dealing with issues a bit larger in scope than liberal-professorial sophistry.
Sure words change meaning but they also have multiple meanings and concepts evolve. Nobody really uses the word liberalism anymore. Like how would you define the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism? That word was specifically created to delineate the "rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law". There are further issues:
Using concepts as defined pre 1960 is problematic at least because we had massive advances in science and understanding of how humans, society and economics and systems of power work. Game theory, mass psychology, sociology, and technology has advanced so that we know these ideas as seen originally do not work, since we have historical evidence of their failure. So to continue to use them is a fallacy - or in the case of reactionaries a bad faith attempt.
Most people don't see ideology as absolutes, they pick and choose. The opposite of someone what believes in liberal values is a fascist, not a socialist. Principles or absolutes in e.g. freedom are just bullshit talking points that politicians and pundits sell us for profit and to polarize us.
In my opinion, any serious socialist or communist today must be in favor of "limited personal free market" where individuals or small groups of individuals have the liberty to produce, innovate and become entrepreneur, because we now know that this is a fundamental expression of human nature. E.g. build some cool keyboards and sell them on etsy or whatever. Or a family that runs their own restaurant in cuba. Only when a corporation grows and becomes too big does it have to become a coop or similar. Like all the big internet companies started small and wholesome, but now should be nationalized and turned into democratically (worker+user) controlled cooperatives.
I do believe you have concepts like that in variations of socialism, so much that I'd argue that 90% of the values defined in liberalism are fully compatible with a hypothetical "neosocialism". And I doubt you'd find serious socialists today that really want to defend the original maxist/leninist or maoist theories of socialism. Unfortunately I've never found a textbook from after say 1990 or 2000 about an improved economic theory for socialism.
But fundamentally I don't believe in any ideology. I believe 90% of all humans share the same values but are reprogrammed through lies and emotional manipulation. And that a small percentage of humans value power/wealth/influence above anything else and will spoil any system we can come up with. And THAT is the problem, one that traditional socialism doesn't address either.
I believe that instead of arguing about the finer points of old ideologies from the barbarous times pre 1950 we should be working on tools to control or negate these corrosive and corrupting influences (Wealth caps? Sortition? AI?). But we're not even talking about that today any more.
But what has changed is that the "right" is now reactionary and heading towards fascism and no longer believes in liberal values. The liberals should be your allies.
PS: Sorry for the long rant lol
I go on plenty of long rants, I have no right to complain. I'll try to address what I find to be the more productive points.
Here and elsewhere you exhibit a serious myopia. Can I imagine that there are some places, especially in the US, where use of the term as anything other than "Democrat" has died out? Of course. Does that mean in the whole world no one is using it? Absolutely not, there are many countries where its use is much more common and political analysts still use it even in America.
Liberalism is a general philosophical movement that I have already defined. Neoliberalism is the dominant strain within the broader movement that is oriented around American imperial hegemony.
I don't care what Wikipedia told you about neoliberalism, that is not the history of the term. Neoliberalism emerged as a reactionary opposition to social democracy (which was popular due to the gains socialism was making in the East) once the Cold War started drawing to a close.
When I read this, I screamed into a pillow, I am so sick of seeing this fucking argument. It's just an excuse for philistinism (i.e. ignorance and refusal to study), and for throwing out ideas hostile to American hegemony (since the apotheosis of neoliberalism was circa 1980). Let's just throw out gravity, nitrogen fixing, democracy, representative government, and all the rest of it because now we have smartphones! But I'm being uncharitable, you give a more specific condition in a moment:
When a new system emerges and is smashed by the old powers, that does not establish that the idea "doesn't work" but that the historical circumstances of its emergence then and there was unable to resist reactionary forces, which is a useful datapoint, but not for the argument "gommulism doesn't work".
If we're using "liberal" like most people in the world use liberal, this is completely incorrect and that fact is well-established by history. Fascism as a historical movement was born as anticommunist resistance aimed at preserving capitalism, which is why the Nazis had immense help from liberal foreign powers who they would later attack. Fascism is not the opposite of liberalism, it is liberalism in decay and fighting viciously for its own preservation.
This is too big a topic, we can get back to it later if you want. My short answer is that you are relying on buzzwords that completely obfuscate what you are talking about.
???? This has the fun quality that you are either saying that trying to be, like, a CEO is fundamental to human nature, which is baseless nonsense, or you are saying something more along the lines of "humans like creating things and changing their environment, perfecting and reinventing tools to streamline production and so on" which is literally basic Marx!
You will find Marxists all over the world, myself included, who will tell you that the basic principles of Marxism are correct and that having an actually successful socialist movement depends on not distorting them. Incidentally, you can read the Lenin I linked you to learn all about people trying to distort Marxism back circa 1914.
Like before, you are demonstrating myopia. I'm sure you don't know any Marxists (evidently) and you probably haven't met very many on the internet, but there are multiple Marxist countries and countless Marxist movements around the world. Maybe they (not necessarily I, but they) have something to teach you that you can't get from pontificating and navel-gazing.
This is elitist nonsense and I will link you to my favorite essay, though it's a little long and circuitous: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
The short version is that people act in their self-interest and it takes a fair amount of education, whether through lived experience or exposition, to understand that their interest is with the common interest. People broadly espouse falsehoods not because they have been cleverly tricked, but because they care about what is "really true" far less than they care about what it does for them to do that espousing.
I believe that instead of arguing about the finer points of old ideologies from the barbarous times pre 1950 we should be working on tools to control or negate these corrosive and corrupting influences (Wealth caps? Sortition? AI?).
AI is garbage techno-rapturism and sortition was literally used in ancient Athens, meaning it should be thrown out if we follow your logic (along with voting generally). Wealth caps are not asset caps, so they are meaningless here.
You have two choices, either start using liberal like the world does or, I guess, conclude that the Democrats are also part of the right, because I can tell you with confidence that Biden has never been and never will be my ally. Either choice is an improvement from current conditions, I suppose.