this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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What do words even mean when they just change every few years? A year ago a Liberal was someone opposed to conservatives. Now it's a bad word? I really don't understand
Nothing changed. I gather this is an Anarchist community and they have higher standards than just being opposed to conservatives
The the rest of the world uses it very differently than the US. In most places a liberal is, at best, very slightly left of center, but would still be considered conservative. And with how instances like hexbear, .ml, and grad consistently trash talk centrists harder than bonafide right wingers, "liberal" has become a dirty word here on Lemmy.
But if you're American, being a liberal is more or less synonymous with being on the left.
Both Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism are pro-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, their is the conflation of the label Liberal and Left in America. But that's not really accurate when looking at the Ideologies of the parties.
While there is Social Democracy, which is like a tamed capitalism where some of the profits are redirected towards social welfare. I'd say it's anti-capitalism, which is inherent to both Socialism and Anarchism, that aligns the different types of leftist ideologies.
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
This is widely misunderstood. Liberalism doesn't start with axiomatic capitalism as a first principle, but rather acknowledges that it's hard to have individual liberty without the concept of individual material ownership. Even most contemporary forms of anti-capitalism have sort of come to terms with the idea that some form of capitalist structure is a near inevitability in the context of material and labor scarcity, and that beyond that you are really just debating different forms of harm reduction. And that's really the important thing - to understand that we are all just talking harm reduction here. The idea of eliminating capitalism entirely is a bit like curing cancer. It's a long term goal which requires technology and conditions which simply do not exist at this time, but there is not like some weird faction in the medical community which is ideologically opposed chemotherapy because it doesn't go far enough, like there is in (outdated) leftist philosophy.
This is a misunderstanding of what socialists mean when they say we need to abolish private property. To socialists, private property and personal property are two very different things. Private property (also sometimes referred to as the means of production and sometimes but not always includes real estate) is specifically used to turn a profit, whereas personal property (stuff like your TV, couch, food, bed, car, etc.) is property that is owned by individuals. Socialists do not believe that personal property should be abolished, but they think that private property should.
That being said, my personal beliefs are that we should have an economic system that guarantees all basic human needs to all humans, which includes housing, food, healthcare, water, sewage, power, internet, heating/cooling (depending on location and climate) while giving the workers ownership over the businesses that they work for (essentially forcing large corporations to become worker-owned co-ops) while incentivizing small businesses to continue to be created and invested in. I'm not sure how to feel about forcing small businesses to be worker-owned co-ops, since I feel like that would decrease incentives to start them and invest time and money into them.
Professor Richard Wolff calls this socialism or Marxism, but it doesn't have the centralization of economic power that previous socialist experiments had, with the USSR being the largest example.
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.
I also strongly disagree about a capitalist structure being an inevitably and impossible to eliminate in the modern age. The alternative, a socialist mode of production, where companies are owned and governed democratically by all the workers, is completely viable. It's a democratization of the workplace. People over profits instead of the current profits over people.
As I understand it, that's some Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson shit.
Back in the 70s liberal/liberalism meant pretty much the same thing in the U.S. as elsewhere. Nixon even called his reelection something along the lines of "a victory for western liberal democracy." Part of liberalism is a focus on rights of the individual, including civil rights. Civil rights and many other liberation movements of the era used the language of that aspect of liberalism.
Enter a bunch of religious assholes of the time. They loved all the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, right to private property, greed, etc. of individual rights but had a big problem with women wearing pants and expecting to be able to go to work without being sexually assaulted, gay people existing openly and breathing, and probably the civil rights movement too but it was going out of style to be open about that. They started using liberal/liberalism in a denigrating way to describe feminists, LGBT people, and any other group that got their puritanical knickers in a twist.
After a couple decades the terms were completely divorced from their original political theory definitions which would, I think, have Republicans considered more liberal than Democrats. But I suppose that could depend on which aspects of liberalism you give more weight to.
I think it's been conflated with neoliberal, which is centrist at best and many blame for allowing the rise of the alt-right.
In reality, historically, liberal ≠ neoliberal but people who may have identified as such a decade or two ago prefer just left - outside of their specific ideologies (democratic socialism, communism, anarchism, etc).