- cross-posted to:
- my_mouldy_memes@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- my_mouldy_memes@kbin.social
Image of tweet by Kim from Kansas @kim_from_kansas:
Capitalists would like you to believe that liberalism is the left-most edge of the economic spectrum, precisely because it is the left-most point on the spectrum that doesn’t threaten their power.
True leftism threatens the power of capitalists. Liberalism is not leftism.
Capitalist bastardisation of liberalism is not liberalism. Capitalism does not create freedom/liberty/rights unlike liberalism. Capitalist is always an antiliberal hierarchy.
Liberalism is anticapitalist by nature. So is leftism. They can overlap or they can be separate.
This is like saying “crony capitalism isn’t capitalism!” Let go of the word, it does not mean what you think it means.
Liberalism is an individualist ideology, stemming from the movement of wealthy professionals to gain independence from the nobility. It the movement had the power it did in the first place because of capitalism.
It is intrinsically tied to imperialism and the exploitation of people with less bargaining power. No number of prefixes or adjectives can change that.
Individualism does not necessarily imply capitalism. One can have an individualist argument against capitalism by appealing to inalienable human rights to workplace democracy. Liberalism refers to a specific political philosophy with certain principles. What @boredtortoise could mean is that those principles properly understood actually support anti-capitalism
The word means what it means. It helped people gain freedom from authoritarianism, and today that authority is held by capitalists. It’s just capitalist apologia to associate them together
And what does it mean? Because that’s a bold fucking thing to say when you haven’t put forth a definition, or anything thing tying it’s use to anti-capitalism.
Wanting the rich to pay a little more in tax, claiming you want to see more women in boardrooms and black-owned businesses, or announcing that you think that queer folks should have basic human rights isn’t anti-capitalism, but even through the myopic American lens of the world it’s the basic extreme of what a liberal is.
What I’m saying is that nobody needs to give value to how American capitalists appropriate the word. We can dismiss that newspeak
Looks like you too might benefit from some light reading:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
https://blacklikemao.medium.com/how-liberalism-helps-fascism-d4dbdcb199d9
https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/
https://nyanarchist.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/scratch-a-liberal-a-fascist-bleeds-how-the-so-called-middle-class-has-enabled-oppression-for-centuries/
You seem to be conflating capitalist “liberalism” with actual liberalism. I was trying to be very clear; there is nothing liberal under capitalism
And you seem to intentionally be missing the point because you’re a liberal who doesn’t like hearing what the word actually represents, so are trying to redefine it (or at best, cling to an outdated and now irrelevant definition).
So again - perhaps you might benefit from some light reading.
First: don’t assume
Second: you can do a test. List the attributes of liberalism and see which are true under capitalism. Add a ✔️ or ❌. For funsies, you can also check the overlap with anticapitalism or leftism or any other ideologies
After all, reality has a leftist-liberal-progressive bias
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Maybe an anarchist instance is the wrong place to laugh at freedom