“capitalism can’t be defined”
I HATE LIBERALS I HATE LIBERALS AAAAAAAAAA
i have never met a liberal who ACTUALLY want to get everyone’s needs met.
And here we’ve found the contradiction
saying is the same as doing, apparently.
“I refuse to understand the system, which means it is undefinable and unknowable and we must Worship The System lest we anger the God of Capital.”
“name one tenant” JFC you don’t even know the word “tenet”, but fine.
The existence of a capitalist ruling class.
I am a tenant under capitalism :(
name one tenant
David!
From what I can tell, basically every self-conscious liberal, from Karl Popper to Ezra Klein, to the people in my personal life, always say historical-material analysis is overly deterministic. That its focus on class structures is too simplistic, and that “you can’t blame everything on capitalism.”
In my own experience, when I counter those arguments with “okay then, what is your theory of history or human society,” I will hear something that basically boils down to: “ah well it’s just a bunch of people with different ideas acting according to their preferences! It’s much too complex to try to engage with using determinist techniques!” This characterization of human behavior is an abstraction so vague it’s basically useless as a basis for determining action, unless of course it’s through an act of individual choice like voooting.
How convenient. The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it” free-market logic but applied to history and human civilization as a whole. It’s pretty easy to justify the system as it exists if that’s the axiom you start from.
The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it”
Can you imagine if people had this approach to studying the natural world (okay, there are many who of course believe this about science), but if we did, we’d never get the scientific method.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people. A couple centuries of endless bourgeois propaganda really does a number on people’s willingness to even question or understand the political economy.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people
And that’s the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism “unfalsifiable” because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn’t tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.
Y’know I quite enjoyed reading Karl Popper. Sure, he thought Marxism was pseudoscience, but he also thought that about climatology (and later recanted). The central Popperian idea that a scientific theory must produce falsifiable predictions is a good one though imo, and can actually be a useful vector of attack against liberal doctrine. They will often fall back on this chaotic, atomized model that you describe because they believe it is ‘truer’ in the sense that it has a higher resolution, but good science isn’t about ‘truth’ — it’s about predictive power, and in practice that means you often have to be ‘reductive’. Put another way, they’re using quantum physics to describe the flight of a football.
I agree, Popper is one of the primary liberals I’ve read whose critiques of the socialist project don’t feel made in bad faith (probably because he was also a socialist when he was younger). I think the critique of falsifiability is an important one for any analytical framework that claims to be scientific. But even then, falsifiability is itself very difficult in a lot of modern scientific fields (social science, biology, economics) where causality is so complex even having truly testable hypotheses gets very difficult.
Like you said though, the test of the liberal analytical framework vs. the Marxist one ultimately comes down to the ability to predict and more importantly act on those predictions. For instance, American liberals don’t seem to understand that the success of their project a la the New Deal was never just “good people” doing “good things,” it was because there were organized, populist masses who could leverage their ability to extract concessions from a willing ruling structure. This blindness is what makes them so ineffective in moments like the one we’re in now.
Also, I think Popper’s theory of the “Paradox of Tolerance” is very useful when it comes to engaging with fascists. It’s a shame modern liberals don’t seem to have the dawg in them to take that seriously anymore.
“Well I’m smarter than everyone and I don’t know the definition so the definition doesn’t exist”
People who needed me to expalin the difference between socialism and communism five minutes ago on their way to tell me socialism can’t work despite not knowing the difference five minutes ago. (Literally happened to me yesterday)
Leftists: We want everybody’s needs met
Liberal: We do too
What actual liberal politician has EVER even TRIED to do this? My brother in christ, I left liberalism EXPLICITLY BECAUSE all the politicians did their best to avoid doing this. ‘Oh but they say’ Imma stop you right there, I lived through the Obama years. And I can fucking read about many other administrations which did exactly the same.
but conservatives don’t let us do things and and and
If your perfect fucking system can be so easily manipulated by some of the stupidest, most rancid people on the planet, then
- It isn’t a very good fucking system and/or
- It isn’t for us.
What actual liberal politician has EVER even TRIED to do this?
FDR, but dozens of giant American industrialists came together to (fail to) do a fascist coup against him, the Business Plot. But even the New Deal and the welfare state/Keynesian philosophy eventually turned into a tool leveraged by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to put America in the position of global hegemon; the American working class could only benefit from liberalism at the expense of the global south.
and even then, the new deal only happened because the ruling class felt genuinely threatened. liberals didnt suddenly decide to implement it because they were liberals.
Anti-intellectualism is strong with liberals, funny enough
But it’s worse than regular anti-intellectualism, these guys believe that they are the intellectuals for refusing to ever think.
They think they’re intellectuals for listening to MSNBC instead of Fox, and for using 2 neurons instead of 1
Liberals always like
The Communist Manifesto is a very short read, but I mean come on, page 2 is literally about defining changes from feudalism and capitalism.
Libs make an argument that isn’t refuted by a 30 page book challenge IMPOSSIBLE:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
…
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Don’t even try, an very basic defintion fo what capitalism is debunks this. “Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit”, In feudalism the feudal lords just won land not really the tools so peasants are not employed by them they are just landlords sort of. Protocommunism doesn’t even have that caveat. Tradesmen also usally owned their own tools. You don’t need the communist manifesto to debunk this you need basic logic.
Oh for sure, but it just highlights how this person claiming that communist ‘truisms’ need to die hasn’t even read 4 paragraphs of Marxist theory
Dead ideology though!!
It’s all so tiring sometimes…
I love how Marx is dead but Locke is immortal
I don’t think they’d really defend any enlightenment political philosopher. They’d say something like “we need to move past what these old dudes were saying 300 years ago, it’s not relevant anymore” as if history began when they were born and our society wasn’t the result of the ideation of people who were reading those enlightenment thinkers.
“we need to move past what these old dudes were saying 300 years ago, it’s not relevant anymore”
but when I suggest throwing the constitution in the trash where it belongs, suddenly I’M the bad guy
I think a lot of radlibs agree with that too, performatively at least. Would they agree with the steps necessary to instate a new government that is willing to do that, though? Obviously not.
And trying to play their game by moving your citations to currently-living Marxists making very relevant modern observations and critiques will just be waved off. Their position is anti-intellectualism dressed up as practicality.
I mean, they can say that, but none of them are going to discard Locke or, say, Hamilton’s actual positions such as they have survived to the modern day, so I don’t think it really matters.
So they think capitalism is a good thing and needs to be defended, but they also can’t define what capitalism is. Or, at the very least, think there’s nothing that makes it distinct from other political economies, so in that case, why do they care?
Because they like the present state of things and will advocate for violence against those who don’t and want to act upon it
No shock that libs are choosing vibes over materialism…
name one tenant
uh oh, we’re dealing with a big reader here guys
Even the tenets of capitalism have to pay rent now
I thought the movie “Tenant” was gonna be like a sequel to Rent or something and all I got was some Christopher Nolan nonsense about a spinning top.
Freudian slip there
Saying there’s nothing unique about capitalism is wild. I mean, it’s literally in the name, in capitalism Capital (and investments as such) are the primary driver of the economy, while in proto-communism it was just so far from that, and under feudalism the land controlled by the nobility was the primary driver, where serfs would pay to use land with portions of their products, nothing like MCM.
They can’t possibly believe that all modes of production are actually just the same, there’s such a vast difference between the economy of today and the economy of those yesteryears. Surely they’ve noticed the lack of landed nobility?
If they think capitalism is markets and debt, which have existed basically forever, I could see how they could believe that. But if that’s the basis for their understanding of capitalism, they don’t understand marxism or leftism enough to critique it.
If they think capitalism is markets and debt, which have existed basically forever
That is exactly what they think. That’s why they think we’re the fucking idiots. How could any human civilization exist without trade? The progression through modes of production is a completely alien concept to them. They don’t even conceive of it as a transition from feudalism to capitalism, or that this transformation is what gave birth to liberalism in the first place. They conceive of it entirely as a cultural / philosophical transition from monarchism to liberalism. And then technology got better at some point. And the economy got bigger. And all of these things just happened on their own, independently.
Human civilization just sat around for thousands of years with its dick in its hand until one day somebody thought, “what if we voted for shit?”
Liberals have to convince themselves we live in an eternal recurrence because anything else implies we have the capacity, therefore the obligation, to cause change away from this monstrous system.
Name one david tennant of capitalism (…) it was happening under (feudalism and proto communism)
hell yeah i love living in a tribe where all resources are shared and then paying rent to survive while elder Big Dog lives off of owning the hut and renting it to me, and Shaman Blissful Sky owns the businesses of “hunting” and “gathering” while i am employed at “gathering” and get paid one tuber per day
My favorite one is when they’re like “people act according to incentives” because they half-remember something they watched about the Freakonomics guy paying his toddler to pee on the toilet.
And it’s like, what the fuck do you think socialism is? We’re trying to change the incentive structures to pull different behaviors out of people, in part because we recognize that capitalism incentivizes the worst, most anti social behaviors in almost every single interaction.
“Oh but Marx didn’t consider human nature” Marx assumes that humans aren’t saints and mostly act logically based on what’s in front of them. Modern economists assume that humans have perfect information about the costs and consequences of everything they do, make decisions like cold calculating robots, but also never plan more than one quarter into the future and never coordinate across large groups except to make more money. One of these is a closer match to real human behavior than the other.
