I’m the liberal. I love mandated and protected human rights, so long as those rights do not infringe upon others.
The thing is, liberalism, properly defined, generally includes strong protections for private (not just personal) property as a core tenet of the ideology, as formulated in the 17th century, something which it largely retains.
To channel my inner Marxist, this was a necessary development in the destruction of feudalism, but fuels bourgeois (rather than aristocratic) oligarchs in the modern day.
Liberalism has many lessons that should not be tossed aside - but one of its core tenets is pretty damn broken in terms of providing justice to the working man. The hostility towards liberalism, in this sense, is not unwarranted.
What’s the difference between bourgeois oligarchy and aristocratic oligarchy?
Bourgeois oligarchy is much more predicated on a division between state power and private power. Bourgeois oligarchs do need the centralized state, to some degree, for contract enforcement, which makes them more vulnerable to that state power. While they often go through great efforts to (successfully) keep state power on their side, the nature of their power means it’s much less ‘sturdy’ and self-reliant than aristocratic power. Bourgeois oligarchs owe their position to the fact that the centralized enforcement apparatus itself acknowledges and backs their claim to private property. Bourgeois oligarchy is reliant on the generation and accumulation of capital. No capital, they have nothing to offer - or threaten - the central government with.
Aristocratic oligarchy is much less predicated on any division between private property and state power. Aristocratic oligarchs are often hostile to the centralized enforcement apparatus precisely because they don’t need it for their day-to-day functioning; the central state is more like a ‘senior partner’ in an alliance against outsiders, not an essential part of their day-to-day functions. Aristocratic oligarchy resembles more a series of states. Aristocrats, effectively, always have something to threaten the centralized state with - power. Each aristocrat holds some form of power in and of himself - the most blatant way would be through private armies, but webs of social connections and clients are also very possible. Aristocracies also tend to concentrate their power geographically, rather than disperse it, since they need to defend it at all times. Bourgeoisie is free to disperse their power geographically precisely because the state is defending it.
The archetypal example is a medieval feudal regime - kings and lords and peasants - but modern states struggling with local unofficial authorities (like ‘big men’, clan structures, gang leaders, and land magnates) and what we would regard as ‘failed states’ struggling with warlords both also fit this view, albeit less formalized/codified than the ‘classic’ medieval example.
One can bleed into another - it’s a spectrum rather than a boolean - but generally oligarchic power falls into one of those two categories. There are exceptions - apparatchik oligarchy (like Soviet systems) and military juntas sometimes have a strange mix of features and reliances that make them better examined apart from this dichotomy, but generally speaking, modern industrialized states struggle with bourgeois, and pre-modern or pre-industrialized struggle more with aristocrats.
Grotesqueries like company towns can bleed one into the other - when corporation is enforcement, firms are more like aristocrats than bourgeoisie. Likewise, there is nothing stopping a bourgeois oligarchy from accumulating privileges until it becomes aristocratic, or more aristocratic. Conversely, extremely centralized feudal states (or similar) can reduce an aristocracy to a position of dependence on the central power more akin to the bourgeoisie - like late Absolutist France, just before the French Revolution.
I will read this while I poop at work later today, I appreciate the time you took to explain.
Edit: Very well written, easy to understand explanation!
This guy just had a shit. ^
Lol juvenile jokes aside it was nicely written. I too appreciated it. I’m encountering a whole new sector of politics on Lemmy that I had little knowledge of before.
I think that due to the industrialization of modern societies, there needs to be reparations for damage to the environment, and that excessive wealth pose a direct threat to the rights and freedoms of the individual, so for a truely liberal society the rich would need to be taxed out of existence. Aside from that, I don’t really care what they do with their time or property, and would be happy to protect it as well as my own in equality.
I think you probably mean personal vs private property. We all like our houses cars and various toys, and deserve to have them.
And private manufacturing workshops and commercial kitchens and printing presses and farmlands, I have no qualms with any of it under the assumption that taxes remove any possibility of excessive wealth.
Fair enough, I hate being in charge.
I really love being able to make things, personally. I love making liquid and solid soaps and other emulsions, or fixing old computers. If I had the money I’d start a silicon production facility turning raw minerals such as quarts and sand into crushed silicates, weight separate, melt, cast, crush again, separate again, melt, crystalize with a seed and cast for high purity electronics and photovoltaic grade Silicon. I’d spend 12 hours a day in there. I’ve got other ideas, too. My little brother drives CDL, I could keep him busy as well.
Could a state run it better than me? Maybe, maybe not. I think they’re better off focusing on minimizing suffering than worrying about production output. If anything them being involved might give them incentive to place production over safety or workers rights.
You might be interested in the idea of workers’ self-management, like in market socialist Yugoslavia. In that, some small firms are just strictly regulated personal businesses (private business was allowed with up to 5 employees + the owner’s family); but most are controlled by democratic elections rather than a top-down state authority. As it’s a market socialist system, rather than being given quotas by a central power, each firm essentially acts in a recognizable way to our Western eyes, choosing to buy and sell goods - except that workers have more say in it.
There’s a reason socialist Yugoslavia could allow its people to go and visit the rest of the world whenever they liked - they weren’t trapped in a complete dystopian hellhole that the outside world would disillusion them of. It was still a dictatorship (or strongman regime, rather), but people enjoyed some control over their own economic output, and that counts for a lot. Not only that, but it’s much more efficient than the Soviet system - Yugoslavia enjoyed greater growth from a lower starting point, and had higher living standards than Warsaw Pact states with similar GDP.
I don’t think any of us here on tankiejerk would welcome a dictatorship even for a good socialist economy, but I also think it’s fair to regard the economic regime of Yugoslavia as not irreducibly welded to the political regime of Yugoslavia, in the same way that there are market capitalist dictators and market capitalist democracies. It’s definitely, regardless of agreement or disagreement with the economic system, a fascinating topic of study.
Curiously(?), I would regard its eventual economic failure on Marxist terms - it actually had very good ROI, and as long as the world economy was healthy and Western loans were available, they could accumulate the capital to improve their own economy. When those loans dried up, they began to struggle. Had they been a developed nation first, and then transitioned to a socialist state, it might’ve worked out well (at least economically - politically, God knows it’s the Balkans, and Yugoslavia was always a very artificial construction). Marxism, traditionally, posits that a state needs bourgeois capitalism to accumulate capital first, and only THEN seize it when production heightens to the point where capitalism’s internal contradictions begin to destabilize it. At that point, you have all these nice factories built up, workers who are used to fighting The Man and capable of self-organizing, and a general understanding of a modern economy - all necessary things to start building a real socialist state.
MLs, like Soviets and Maoists, believe that you can take the socialist step first, and deal with accumulating capital later - something which, by a Marxist analysis, would lead right back into a feudal regime by not changing the underlying economic relationship of people to the society.
H-ha ha, g-good thing the USSR and PRC didn’t devolve into some clientistic system of personal loyalties of the elites where the workers had no input, th-that would be horrifically bad and prove Marx right all along…
this was a necessary development
Like many things in the past: made sense at the time, did some good, is now outdated and ought to be reconsidered and replaced with something better.
Meh, most Social Democrats believe that too… The difference is they actually enforce and pursue their belief in human rights. Liberals will just take their bag, shake hands with the wealthy and give the finger to the poor.
Liberalism is an Idea not a Party. If we were talking about Liberal Parties then I am none of them and support none of them, nor do they even exist in my country.
Yeah yeah “true Libertarianism/Communism/Me-ism” has never been tried.
…all ideologies are “ideas not parties”. But at some point Liberals in the west have to admit their representatives are regularly coopted by fascism at a much higher rate than progressives and those left of them.
Liberals are part of the wests systemic problems.
It feels like a false equivalence to compare liberal-in-name governments to socialist-in-name governments after the horrors that the USSR and CCP unleashed upon the world.
You are incorrect, the mass famines of the USSR and CCP were mostly caused by a single conman, named Trofim Lysenko, who was lying about agricultural techniques/results in order to keep his job (taking his bag like a true economic opportunist):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko#views
Here’s a whole Behind The Bastards podcast about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05d8MPzfvs
To that point, even the Gulag system whilst being a horrible and targeted system of political persecution, even there the vast majority of victims survived (1 million died in Gulags, 17 million survived). So you’re adopting misinformation because you’re coopted into Capitalism.
…this is the whole point The Frankfurt School “Cultural Marxists” (people like Marcuse and Adorno) were making. Capitalism is full of such pro-Capitalist propaganda, which Liberals believe without researching it.
Meanwhile almost all Colonialism, since the French Revolution, and the Free Market genocides of the Congo and bengal/india (aka The British East India Company) were done by Liberal minded Economic Capitalists… Intentionally killing WAY MORE PEOPLE with the Liberalism of their day (which turned the other cheek due to racism and sexism).
So I hate to break it to you, but Historical and Cultural versions of your Liberal Philosophies massacred and killed WAY MORE PEOPLE, and did so WAY MORE INTENTIONALLY, than the USSRs and CCPs unwanted famines combined.
But like every Liberal, you have to ignore solid facts of history in order to make your fake claims. You were willingly coopted back then, just like you’re being right now. The only question is whether it’s intentional or a product of ignorance.
You are incorrect, the mass famines of the USSR and CCP were mostly caused by a single conman, named Trofim Lysenko, who was lying about agricultural techniques/results in order to keep his job (taking his bag like a true economic opportunist):
Lysenko isn’t even close to the cause of the famines of the USSR and PRC, and the wiki article even notes that his rise to national prominence wasn’t until 1938. That’s not even getting into the intentional genocides of ethnic minorities performed by the USSR and PRC.
Downplaying and denying atrocities of red fascist states is not welcome here. This is your only warning.
Downplaying and denying atrocities of red fascist states is not welcome here. This is your only warning.
Oh look, a Liberal is about to ban dissent from a progressive. Fuckin suprise suprise my guy!
As stated in the other thread correct attribution of causes is not denial or apologia. Did I deny the 1 million dead in the gulag system? Did I deny the famines?
…and on your point. The linked page and others elsewhere confirm Lysenko’s ideas were on the rise before 1938, and were involved in the 1930s causes of Holodomor.
Trofim Lysenko would have been an unknown destitute quack if it wasn’t for Stalin et all. Pinning it all on Lysenko is extremely convenient. And whitewashes the vanguard of all responsibility. Stalin put Lysenko as the head of agriculture for the Soviet Union and their universities because he liked the sound of Lysenko’s quack theories. Despite his theories being unsound. Vavilov being stripped of his titles and positions and being sent to Siberia to die.
RFK Jr. is literally the modern-day analog to Lysenko. And both of them are post turtles. Neither of them got into positions that high on their own.
I don’t give a fuck who was responsible for the millions of deaths, the fact of the matter is it’s very specific to one pervasive strain of government that keeps popping up, like a disease, and causing the same exact problem in the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, soon I fully expect to see it yet again in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.
You shouldn’t be defending them, rather you should be blaming them for tainting and poisoning the words Socialism and Communism and preventing the actual ideology from entering mainstream discussions.
Iran,
Iran is a much more ‘traditional’ clerical-fascist regime. In fact, they hate leftists with a passion that makes the tankies who bootlick them look downright deranged. Or self-destructive.
Syria,
Syria, luckily, has been freed from the Assadist boot at this point! If the new government remains reasonably democratic (not guaranteed, but I’m keeping cautiously optimistic) and they can stave off Israel trying to destabilize them for fucking funsies, they may have a future ahead of them.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.
Afghanistan is downright feudal, honestly, in its power structures, while Pakistan is a military junta and effectively always has been. We (the US) unfortunately, had a… nonzero role in that in the way we empowered the Pakistani ISI and allowed it to play a ‘spookocracy’ role, like the intelligence services in Putin’s Russia.
Africa’s ML period is largely over, honestly. When the Soviets fell, most interest in ML projects in the continent fell as well. Africa remains divided and troubled, but largely not by ML-style systems.
I don’t give a fuck who was responsible
What a beautiful example of how quickly a Liberal becomes Fascist.
Iran
Iran isn’t Socialist. The Ba’ath Party in Syria are largely a product of US meddling in the middle east, a lot of which was done by - you guessed it - democratic Liberals coopted into helping the fascists perpetuating Capitalist greed!
You shouldn’t be defending them [Socialist Authoritarians], rather you should be blaming them for tainting and poisoning the words Socialism and Communism and preventing the actual ideology behind it from entering mainstream discussions.
Oh, I’m arguing wrong am I? Using too many facts.
Poor fool, you’ve assumed I’m a Socialist, merely because I have a grasp on history. Nope, I’m a modern progressive. But yeah keep pushing me left, you Liberal Fascists. Move to Hungry, go be buddies with Orban or Israel. Go hold the door open for right-populism some more. Let in as much Capitalist Fascism as people can stand. It’s what you do best.
Social liberal vs economic liberalism. They’re different often opposed things. That have been forced to be strange bedfellows due to the constant undercurrents of fascism.
While many social liberals are privileged enough, to have never really thought about the negative impacts of the markets and economy on liberty. Plenty are open to alternatives to economic-liberalism. Economic liberals would rather reduce your liberty for the sake of their markets.
I was talking about representatives.
They’re the economic liberals that the social liberals are forced to vote for.
“The Liberals are forcing us to vote with the other Liberals.”
Hey look! It’s the thing everyone is complaining about! So, so easily coopted into Fascism and “free” market inequalities.
Who are you siding with today Liberals?
Liberals: “We are once again going to be voting for the problems to continue, and refusing to look at solutions from outside our particular worldview or economic understandings… essentially being the lynch pins of it all, whilst claiming to be the one force with power enough to protect a marginal amount of compassion and benevolence built into the system (which we claim to have put there when it was largely Socialist protest movements and activists). Things are bad, but without us things would get worse and then very desperate.”
Liberals: Proud of maintaining and further worsening a collapsing system they’ll happily watch others die to defend! ;)
A high minded school of thought for the naive and the wealthy alike! The exact two groups the right wing abuse to justify their views too.
Write them off to your own determent. It’s the thing the authies do.Yeah they absolutely need to kick the econ libs from the party. And take the parties back local.
They have more in common with us than they do the econ libs. Apart of course from that understanding. Hyperbolically lumping them together will keep them from finding the understanding though that’s for sure.
Who are you talking about as “them”?
Technically Libertarian, but yeah the words have been so misused to the point of meaninglessness. Tankies and Magats being heavy abusers for sure.
Yep. The tankers are authoritarian. Everybody knows it, but it’s nice for them to keep reminding people.
