this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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I don’t understand the difference and I don’t think I ever will
I think the best way to put it is that a leftist is someone who believes that workers should own the wealth that they create, while a liberal is someone believes in "socially progressive causes" without examining the underlying systems that bring about the necessity of "socially progressive causes".
For example, a liberal would want more woman CEOs, while a leftist would want to get rid of CEOs.
Slight addendum: liberals fight against any real progress until it's inevitable and then take credit
Liberals want to throw money at problems forever, Leftist want to tackle the root causes so they end.
Liberals are licking the wounds, leftists are applying antibiotic and bandages
Liberalism stands for individual liberty, equality before the law, political freedom, government limited by a constitution and the sanctity of private property (and capitalism). The last point is the most important when making the distinction.
Who runs the company then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
That's a fair question, but there are many different answers. Not all leftist schools of thought fully advocate for removing a management style hierarchy, though some do. Some ideas push for rotating management with either a round robin selection, a raffle system, or democratically elected managers. Not dissimilar to how many countries run their governments.
Alternatively, if it fits the workflow, a flat style structure where no one inherently has a defined role, so teams form naturally to work on what they want or deem necessary. Someone will still often fill the role of "project manager" mind you, but the who and how are determined based on what works best for the situation. Not unlike letting students form their own groups for projects.
If you are genuinely curious, there is no shortage of books, YouTube videos, and websites just waiting to opine about their preferred methodology that would give you a much more authentic and robust understanding. Or I bet if you thought about it, you could even come up with some variations yourself.
The important point to get across for leftists is that the structure of economic production should be such that its aim is to benefit the general populace as evenly or equitably as possible. This is opposed to an "owner class" who uses their power, usually in the form of wealth, to take control the economic means of production, who then sets out to have the workers create more value than they will be given in return, so that the "owner" can take the excess value generated by the workers to increase their own wealth and/or power.
tl;dr
The lynchpin question for leftists isn't "who runs the factory?", but "who reaps the rewards?".
The workers.
Both Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism are at their core capitalist ideologies. While the Republican party is more conservative in both social and economic issues, both parties still operate within the framework of neoliberalism.
In America we only have the Democrat and Republican Parties which are usually labeled as Liberal and Conservative respectively. Since the Democratic party is relatively left of the Republican party, we see the conflation of the label Liberal and Left in American politics. But that's not really accurate when looking at the Ideologies of the parties.
There is Social Democracy, which is still a capitalist ideology where some of the profits are redirected towards social welfare. This is more common in Western Europe and will still rachet towards Fascism.
Leftist ideologies, such as Socialism and Anarchism are fundamentally anti-capitalist, unlike liberalism and neoliberalism. Richard Wolff explains socialism and capitalism very well.
On Liberalism:
What is neoliberalism? A political scientist explains the use and evolution of the term
Liberalism and Neoliberalism
How the Democrats Traded the New Deal for Neoliberalism
On Leftist ideologies:
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Communism and Revolutions
Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism
Well if soc dems aren't left then i guess I'm not left.
I didn't know we were taking anything left of soc dem seriously yet, as we haven't proven any sort of successful means of governing people that far left.
Worker cooperatives already exist. I recommend reading or listening to Richard Wolff about what differentiates socialism and capitalism from each other.
Social Democracy is State-regulated Private Capitalism. The same contradictions between the Capital owners and workers still exist, leading to the same problems. This is why we also see a rise in Fascism in Western Europe.
Richard D. Wolff | Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and Employees
At its core, liberalism is fairly anti-capitalist. There are many arguments against capitalism from liberal principles such as the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers in the firm are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but receive 0% claim on the positive and negative production while the employer solely appropriates 100% of the positive and negative result of production
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I Strongly disagree. The capitalist mode of production is axiomatic to Liberalism. Private ownership of the means of production is what is being referenced, not personal property. The alternative, a socialist mode of production, where companies are owned and governed in a democratic structure by all the workers, is completely viable. It's a democratization of the workplace and economy.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
(Emphasis added)
Basically, liberals care more about equality of opportunity, while leftists care more about equality of outcome. (And, of course, conservatives actively oppose equality and promote hierarchy.)
On a "political compass," leftism is the left half (obviously). Liberalism is a fuzzy blob centered somewhere below and right of center, but big enough to extend at least a little ways into the other quadrants because of how many different kinds of "liberalism" there are.
Liberals view the status quo (the underlying mechanisms of the government, economy and society) as sacrosanct, legitimate, that it just needs to and will allow itself to be tweaked a bit, that the rules must be followed lest we collapse into chaos.
Leftists view the status quo as widely illegitimate, that a vast multitude of the rules which society operates by are contemptible and functionally evil, and are willing to break the rules to meaningfully change society, that often the entire point is that breaking rules is the only way to establish newer and more just ones.
...
Liberals view Leftists as an extreme part of their fold because they often have similar goals.
Leftists view Liberals as often sharing goals, but as ultimately delusional, magical-thinking self righteous fools, as their methods of achieving these often similar goals are laughably naive, impotent and ineffective, thus functionally making them into conservatives.
You can pretty much boil it down to Liberalism is capitalist, leftism isn’t (although where the line is depends who you ask and how left they are).
The confusion mostly comes from from conservative neoliberals lumping social liberals in with the left, even though they’re only separated by a philosophical debate on what “individual freedoms” are and if they’re more important than a completely unregulated economy or not.
There are anti-capitalist liberals though
@politicalmemes
It gets even more confusing when you consider anti-capitalist classical liberals
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Classical-Liberal-JurisprudenceJune2018.pdf
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that's the biggest difference between the two groups: the leftists are at least vaguely aware that something in our system is not right and the liberals don't care to pay attention because they're too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table.