Dieser Bereich kann Inhalte enthalten, die nicht für alle Nutzer geeignet sind. Dazu können unter anderem Texte, Medien oder Diskussionen gehören, die als beleidigend, extremistisch, gewaltbezogen oder anderweitig belastend empfunden werden. Wenn du solche Inhalte nicht sehen möchtest, nutze bitte die jeweiligen Filter- und Meldeoptionen der Plattform oder meide entsprechende Threads/Communities.
Liberalism is a political philosophy that emerged as feudal political structure started to strain with the growth of mercantilism. Merchants wanted the wealth they were hoarding to translate into power, but they couldn’t buy power because power was tied to land and land was tied to nobility which was entirely determined by the unitary sovereign which was entirely determined by heredity.
Merchants wanted their wealth to translate to power, so they developed a new political theory for where power should come from - private property. Private property was to be the basis for all political power and political power was not to impinge on the power of wealth unnecessarily. Liberalism was focused foundationally on ending the power of the sovereign to that merchants could buy and sell land, build privately-run cities, own and breed slaves for sale…
… and then they realized that they needed a way to do it to brown people who were too numerous to just kidnap. So they started to invent abstract concepts to disconnect power from reality so they could reassign power. They invented the concept of abstract rights, and they put a right to private property into a list of things like the right to print whatever they wanted in newspapers that they owned and the right to buy and sell anything.
Liberalism invents this concept of private property and then invents a rule that states that if you apply labor to land then you get private property rights to it. This was great because they could claim that indigenous people weren’t working the land and all the European merchants had to do was chop down some trees and put up a fence and now they had an “inalienable right” of private property.
And then they needed a solution to every merchant raising a military to become warlords and destroy the wealth of others, so they landed on the democratic republic form as a mechanism to resolve conflicts between the wealthy in a way that didn’t require war.
Liberalism is the political philosophy of merchants and land owners that gives them political power on the basis of their effectiveness at accumulating wealth and makes the bare minimum concessions to the laboring masses required to get them to fight against the kings on behalf of the merchants.
It is the political philosophy of settler colonialism, of privatization, of chattel slavery, of Thomas Jefferson’s breeding plantations, of Coca Cola hiring death squads, of the Opium Wars, of killing all the buffalo so that land could be taken from the Lakota, of getting people addicted to drugs in order to get them into debt.
Liberalism is the political movement that destroyed the social safety net that feudal societies maintained through nobilesse oblige and impoverished the masses everywhere until it forced the emergence of a labor movement and the creation of labor unions to give the masses a vehicle to fight the liberals, which the liberals crushed with military and paramilitary violence.
A faction of Liberals developed a theory of progressivism that they thought could appease the labor movement and maintain liberalism. But traditional Liberals chafed at the idea of the government doing anything to help the masses, because they believed if people wanted a better life they should just work harder for the Liberals with money and land. So factions within Liberalism fought and continue to fight in the best way to express Liberalism.
You’re talking about the ends of Liberalism but never from the basis of the philosophers and minds who came up with the concept. This is the same disconnect people have with socialism. They view how it was played out, not what the core philosophies are.
I wouldn’t say it is wrong, but it is definitely a perspective of how one can view a political theory, through theory or in practice. Do you view all governing philosophies with this lens?
I’d also argue a lot of what you said has more to do with religion but it is pretty hard to separate religion and governing styles when they intentionally intertwine themselves with beliefs like “god given rights” and what not.
No, I’m not. I explicitly started with the beginnings of Liberalism, not its ends. Liberalsim is not defined as “all the good stuff”. It’s a distinct real historical process and private property is its foundation, not an accident.
Yes, I view all political philosophies through a historical concrete lens and not through an abstract idealist one.
The foundation of liberalism is natural rights, the rule of law and personal autonomy. The US was the first country founded on those principles and a lot of what you said came from how the US managed to do that, with the financial backing of rich southern slave-owning states and the concept of manifest destiny which is directly tied to religion and the concept of owning land to embrace liberalism.
But liberal concepts first played out in Europe in opposition of monarchies, not really on the basis of land owning but more private property in the face of a king which you could argue are the same but a lot of private property wasn’t specifically just land. Which is what I mean, you’re talking about the American liberalism evolution, not the like two hundred years before that where it existed as a political theory used to wrestle power from the ultra rich of that time.
No, I am talking the 200 years prior. You don’t get to separate the USA from the French, Dutch, English, and Spanish. You don’t get to separate the emergence of mercantilism as a mechanism of wealth accumulation from the struggle against monarchy. Peasants were not inventing abstract concepts of natural rights in letter writing campaigns to each other. Liberalism was not a grassroots movement. It was a position developed, as you said, to fight the monarchy, but the people looking to fight the monarchy were the non-noble wealthy merchants. That’s it’s history.
The USA was not the first country to imagine what manifest destiny was all about. The concept of divine right of expansion and dominion emerged from European monarchists and monarchists relied on the merchant class to go forth and spread that dominion. The Pope decreed to all the Europeans that they could rape, enslave, and murder to save the souls of non-Europeans.
The fact that the European colonists who broke away from the crown chose Liberalism and were also wealthy merchants is not an accident.
The fact that liberalism in the US led to mass poverty doesn’t discount all the subsequent liberal revolutions that also led to mass poverty.
And the reason this is obvious is because private property being an abstract human right is so obviously contradictory that no one focused on universal human rights would be able to reconcile. It was Liberalism that said the state should not have any obligations to the laborers, it was liberalism that said private property should allow a single man (and only a European man) to deprive literally the entire society and indeed the entire world from the benefits of that land and that it was the state’s job to use violent force on enforcing that deprivation.
The foundation of Liberalism, like every political philosophy, is a theory of power on the basis of some beliefs about outcomes. The abstract idea of moral good is a post hoc rationalization.
I’m literally not separating them. You are. Everything you’ve said about Liberalism in your comments above is specifically about a time period that isn’t where Liberalism started. You keep saying things that make no sense, you’ve learned how to argue online but not how to argue a point. You’re just repeating phrases you have heard others say.
Never did
Never did.
Because history isn’t a vacuum. But yes they did.
Most revolutions do. When you dismantle a system’s infrastructure, it causes pain.
I think you just seem to believe history sprouted up randomly, independently. You don’t accept ideas lead into other ideas.
I’m finally able to sit down and give you the play by play for why I critique your position as I do. I’ll do it on this thread and then I’ll move to the other thread.
After I gave my understanding of liberalism, you said these things:
So let’s look at this position of yours. First off, regardless of anything else, the idea that Liberalism is constrained exclusively to the intentions of the “philosophers and minds” of the people who came up with the concept is ridiculous. Liberalism is a real political phenomenon, not a fixed naive ideal minted once and then complete.
Second, who do you think are the “philosophers and minds” in question here? Are you talking about Locke or are you going back to the Levellers movement or the disjointed precursors to Locke like Milton or Grotius? As far as I’m concerned, Locke is the starting point for Liberal philosophy. Locke is not writing 200 years prior to the founding of the USA, so I have to assume you’re talking about the proto-Liberals.
And all of them, Locke included, were themselves elite wealth owners or agents thereof. The masses weren’t engaged in this philosophical process, and the people who were engaged in this process weren’t trying to solve the problems of the masses. They were thinking about their social strata.
And you’re right private property wasn’t specifically just land. Locke was a major investor in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on England’s transatlantic slave trade. So when Locke was writing about private property he was talking about his human trafficking portfolio as well as land.
Now, let’s talk about your retreat to innocence.
And I said you cannot separate a bunch of things and you said you weren’t. So let’s get into that.
In the above you are separating on the one hand “how the US managed to be [the first country founded on natural rights, the rule of law and personal autonomy]” and on the other “the like two hundred years before that where it existed as a political theory used to wrestle power from the ultra rich of that time”.
The US is not a birthed-whole-from-the-forehead-of-Zeus kind of entity. It is an entity with a continuous history. That history involves the political, economic, financial, and philosophical works of the English, the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish, at a minimum. To claim that talking about how a bunch of wealthy European men built a country for wealthy European men on the basis of philosophies developed by wealthy European men is somehow not addressing the origins of liberalism is just ridiculous.
And the idea that Liberalism was a political theory to wrestle power from the ultra rich of that time is also just a completely revisionist perspective. The merchants of that time were often far richer in liquid money than the aristocracy and even richer in liquid money than some kingdoms. They were literally loaning money to the crown and in some case buying charters for their own cities so they could free from the obligations of taxation and raising an army. These wealthy elite were the ones that produced liberalism. When Locke was writing about the rule of law, he was taking the rules from merchant chartered cities and philosophically scaling them up to the size of entire kingdoms.
It was always a white male elite European project. It’s never been anything but that. It was as much invented by slavers as it was by bankers and its purpose was to allow the individual merchant or banker or slaver to keep the profit they “earned” and accumulate wealth without having to give it to a king or face prison.
And the reason they wanted peasants freed from their lords was because they needed wage laborers to work for them.
And yet, you have presented nothing about the starting point of Liberalism except that it happened 200 years before 1776 and it happened in Europe. That’s all I have to go on. So explain your understanding of the history of liberalism please, so we can actually have a discussion.
Oh the irony.
I think I sufficiently showed how you did above, but I’ll do it again.
I explained my understanding of Liberalism. You said that I was ONLY explaining the US (which I was not) and that I was ignoring the 200 years of the development of Liberalism in Europe. Do you see that separation? You are separating the US development of Liberalism from the European development of Liberalism. If we can’t agree on the simple fact that you literally separated them, then there’s no point in arguing that the separation is specious.
Ex: It was the English, not the “Americans” that invented the plantation system and they tried it out in Ireland in the early 1600s.
Let’s do this one know. I said that the history of liberalism is the history of the struggle between the wealth accumulation of the non-nobles and the power of the nobility. You said that it was actually a philosophy and mental thing all about natural rights and the rule of law and that the struggle was between the people who wanted these things and the ultra wealthy monarchies. Again, you are creating a separation by saying that this thing (the struggle against the monarchy with a particular set of demands about abstract categories like natural rights and rule of law) is separate from the thing I said liberalism is actually founded in. Again, if we can’t agree that you’re separating concepts and claiming one side of the separation is legitimate liberal history and the other is not, then I have to ask you to please consider whether you are even capable of arguing in good faith.
Which brings us to this nugget:
This is a great example of you either not arguing in good faith or being so blinded by ideology you have no ability to learn anything about history.
Manifest Destiny was a term coined by a journalist in the 1800s to describe this - a specific nation or empire is divinely ordained, racially superior, and historically chosen to aggressively conquer land and absorb others.
To wit I present you: the Reconquista, the Requerimiento, the papal Doctrine of Discovery, the concept of British “civilization”, Romanus Pontifex, Dum Diversas.
Locke incorporated these actual real historical things that expressed the literal same thing as the US’s Manifest Destiny in his Two Treatises of Government.
So if you want to say that the US invented Manifest Destiny, I don’t know that I can actually trust you to argue in good faith.
Yeah, except that’s just not historically true. The duration of deep mass poverty in post-revolutionary liberal societies lasted at least a century in most cases, often several decades more.
The duration of mass poverty in post-revolutionary communist societies lasted between 10 - 30 years historically. Yes, the USSR and China both had acute large-scale famine conditions as they reorganized their economy after the revolution, but that lasted 20 years tops. The entire point of the revolution was to meet the material needs of the masses, and poverty alleviation after these revolutions was fast and massive.
And at this point, I just don’t know what to say to you. You are clearly living in a completely different universe than I am. I am CLEARLY discussing how ideas lead into other ideas AND I am clearly discussing how material conditions produce, filter, amplify, and shape those ideas across history. You seem to think that there’s a thing called “revolutions” and they all behave the same, disconnected from all history. You seem to think that Liberalism as a political movement somehow meaningfully has a “foundation” in just a handful of concepts from the “philosophers and minds” and doesn’t have a foundation in the actual history of it.
I don’t understand how you can even write the things you’ve written and feel like you’re operating in the real world.
Look at this mental disconnect you have.
Completely avoids talking how it played out.
???
You’re a hypocrite. Every argument you form is literally a strawman, you literally start everything you say with setting up what someone’s opinion is, then attacking it. Then you try to do t he complete opposite with your arguments.
You contradict yourself.
This is all called equivocating, it is one of the first things you learn when taught how to argue your point and discuss this sort of stuff.
You do not know what the hell you are talking about.
Stopped reading there. See
Again for the millionth time.
I did not say that. Learn to read. Jesus kid.
GOOD comment
I’m done with this Doom person. They’re only capable of some of the weakest forms of meta-debate I’ve had the displeasure of seeing in recent months. Constantly complaining about a lack of historical context but unable to provide any historical context, constantly telling me that he didn’t say stuff he explicitly said. I’ve spent enough time on this.
Personal property is the foundation. Because before liberalism, everything belonged to the king.
Please read a book before posting this sort of embarrassingly ignorant shit
thank you for the laugh i needed that
Sorry, I wasn’t issued a copy of the FSB guide to shitposting.
Liberal chauvinism is so fascinating. Everyone who disagrees with you is either not a person (a bot) or a dastardly foreigner (which in practicality means they’re not a person in your eyes)
I mean, yeah. You’re wrong, so’s the other guy. Of course I consider my knowledge superior.
For someone with superior knowledge you really suck at addressing the point the other person is making.
And I’m not wrong about you needing to believe someone isn’t human when they disagree with you, since thats what you just did. So the “superior knowledge” (lol go back to reddit) is off too.