this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Do liberals have a theory for why fascism is sprouting up around the world?
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Fascism
Because Marxists are like
It's tough to be critical of "liberalism" when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify "economic liberalism".
Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Slavery did end under liberalism, but then again liberalism started it.
Almost nobody knows the academic definitions of most political ideologies, they're just all cable news buzzwords now. If you took a sample of the population I'd be surprised if even 5% could give you the correct academic definitions for the vast majority of political ideology terms.
These weren’t egghead concepts back when we had a labor movement large enough to support a labor press.
Almost like they use buzzwords to obfuscate the real meaning of the ideas that threaten their hold on power.
I don't think it is fair to say that there was ever 100% agreement over what some of those terms meant.
Like or hate it, language means what the people think it means, and as GP suggests, choosing terms that disambiguate differences is a far better approach that allows people to find common ground rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to a policy because they associate with one ambiguous label and are told that the policy is associated with another.
Adding more dimensions to the policy spectrum help. One dimension (left/right) covering all manner of social and economic policy leads to confusing outcomes.
A two dimensional view - economic left-right on one axis, and libertarian/authoritarian - is one view that is popular now, so giving four quadrants, left lib, right lib, left auth, right auth - and that is already a lot more granular. With any quadrant view of course, the dispute is always going to be where the centre is... it is something of an Overton window, where extremists try to push in one direction to shift the Overton window and make positions that were firmly in one quadrant seem like the centre.
However, there are other dimensions as well that could make sense to evaluate policy (and political viewpoints) on even within these axes. One is short-term / long-term: at one extreme, does the position discount the future for the benefit of people right now, and at the other extreme, focusing far into the future with minimal concerns for people now. Another could be nationalist / globalist - does the position embody 'think global, act local', or does it aim to serve the local population to the detriment of global populations?
That is already a four-dimensional scheme (there could be more), and I believe that while real-world political parties often correlate some of those axes and extremes on one are often found together with extremes on another, they are actually near-orthogonal and it would be theoretically possible to be at each of the 16 possible points near the edges of that scheme.
That said, even though they are almost orthogonal, an extreme on one might prevent an extreme on another axis in some cases. For example, I'd consider myself fairly economically left, fairly socially libertarian, fairly far towards favouring the long term over the short term, and fairly far towards globalist (think global, act local) thinking. But some would say that an extreme left position requires no private ownership of the means of production. In the modern world, a computer is a means of production. I would not support a world in which there is no private ownership of computers, because that counters my the social libertarian position. So, I draw the line at wanting public ownership of natural monopolies and large-scale production - I would still want to live in a pluralistic society where people can try to create new means of production (providing it doesn't interfere with others or the future, e.g. through pollution, safety risks, not paying a living wage, etc...), rather than one where someone like Trofim Lysenko has the ear of the leader and no one can disagree no matter how stupid their beliefs are. But I'd want to see the ability for the state to take over those new means of production in the public interest eventually if they pan out and become large scale (and for research to happen in parallel by the state).
I think putting one's viewpoint on multiple dimensions makes it far clearer what someone believes, and where there is common ground, compared to picking labels with contested meaning and attacking the other labels.
So that's the change you want to see in the world. Technical linguistic grammar takes precedence over political outreach.
I fully support your desire to spread vocabular competence. My impression from your first post was that you had other priorities.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
All I'm saying is that if you don't take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the "correct" (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn't well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
Yeah you do that.
I'm getting downvotes because I'm telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It's why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
I know exactly why I'm getting downvotes. No head scratches required.
Despite the erasure of the words’ meanings in the public consciousness, the concepts still exist.
If you have new, sexier names for the concepts which will accelerate their reintroduction into the public consciousness, I’m all ears.
It doesn't have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don't drop the word "liberalism" into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use "corporatism" which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it's technically incorrect, but language also isn't static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don't assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
The only people I know of who don't know what the word "liberal" means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don't like most Americans, I'm not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying "liberal" and knows it's a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn't have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don't already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what's being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for "the average person."
"Neoliberalism" rather. Though that's more like mask-off imperialism. And "corporatism" is just capitalism but when you don't want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.
Lol I'm sure Prolewiki is an unbiased source that the majority of people would agree with on the definitions of words. /s
Where did he say that the majority of people agree with this definition?
Well, the majority of workers in the US probably did, until the labor movements were crushed in the 60s and 70s
If the majority of people don't agree on the proposed meaning of a word then that isn't what the words mean. In other words, it is wrong.
It's a materialist/Marxist definition, hence the
All successful labor movements and mass organizations in the past have included teaching others how things work, handing out pamphlets, etc.
Yeah, I'm glad you're slowly starting to comprehend the conversation. I'm informing you that making up definitions for words is wrong and is the source of confusion when you try and fail to converse with others.
I'm sorry you don't understand how languages work
Communists had to pry these concessions from liberalism with organized violence, don't pretend like liberalism did these things.
You quoted me, then immediately misquoted me. I didn't say what you think I said.
Sorry should have phrased it as "people shouldn't pretend..."
Honest question: when did communists use organized violence to abolish slavery? To win LGBT+ rights?
A lot of radical abolitionists were communists
The lgbt liberation movement would wave the flag of the legitimate vietnamese government during the US invasion. Marsha Johnson, Leslie fienberg, communists.
honestly there seems to be some confusion/distinction only in the US.
i think most people elsewhere mean mostly "neoliberal capitalism" when they say "liberal".