Comment on Anon judges Karl
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 1 week agoannas-archive.is/books/289061-289061-liberalism
Heres a book going through all the major liberal philosophers and how they dealt with the conflicts inherent to liberalism.
Tldr, core, overriding freedom of liberalism is and has always been for the dominant class to economically exploit the working class.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
One author with a clear spin isn’t exactly a comprehensive literature review. You can probably find a book that says anything about anything.
If you pay attention to historical context you can see how liberalism was an improvement over the systems that had been in place prior, i.e. feudalism and monarchy.
The course of human society doesn’t magically jump from “terrible” to “great.” That never happens. More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail. There are cycles of backsliding of course, and all progress is a battle where victory is never guaranteed, but that’s the gist of it, and it’s always incremental.
Without liberalism, there could never have been a civil rights movement, or suffragettes, or gay marriage. All these things built upon the foundation that was set for them by liberalism so long prior that people had already taken it for granted and forgotten about its origins.
Just because it wasn’t perfect from its outset doesn’t mean it wasn’t an improvement over what existed prior, or that it couldn’t be improved on further. And the course of history throughout the twentieth century is a story of liberalism prevailing. So much was achieved in those grueling years and decades that the world of the 1901 is practically unrecognizable to the world of 2001. That progress wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. It was achieved within a liberal system, in which ideas of human rights had already been formulated and enshrined in constitutional law, albeit imperfectly.
People were able to fight to expand the protections and rights of those laws precisely because they already existed. There were imperfect laws and systems in place that those activists were able to fight to improve and expand. Without liberalism, there wouldn’t have been even that.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 1 week ago
You’re so close to stepping beyond idealism.
History has never been a struggle of ideas, where everyone gets together and the best idea wins, its always been a class struggle resulting from material reality.
Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution because somebody thought up humanism and everyone agreed it was a really good idea, but because the bourgeois were ascendant and liberalism reinforced their power so it was promoted. The same model explains why religion reinforced the power structures of the Roman empire/catholic church, why divine right reigned when the relation with means of production favored feudalism.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
What I said wasn’t idealism, it was dialectical materialism.
You’re talking about class struggle but that doesn’t contradict what I said, because class struggle was a part of what I said. And you had to cherrypick my comment to find a part of it that you could portray as otherwise.
When did I ever say “everyone gets together and the best idea wins”? I said it’s a grueling struggle and victory isn’t guaranteed.
But, as the course of history shows, although humanity takes a couple steps backwards for every few steps it takes forwards, overall it moves on a positive trajectory. Or else we wouldn’t have made the progress that we have.
History has always been about ideas, and you have to be very ignorant of the history of ideas to fail to see how they underpin everything that happens in an era. Whether we talk about Cartesian Skepticism quite literally defining the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Early Modern era (and giving rise to the scientific Enlightenment itself), or about the how the threads of existentialism underlie the countercultural movements from the beatniks to the hippies to the punks and beyond. It’s all about ideas. What humans do is informed by the ideas that they hold.
By and large, the ideas underpinning monarchical forms of government did not survive the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the ideas of liberalism prevailed over them. Prevailed first in people’s hearts and minds, and then in their decisions and their actions, and finally in political and military victories. Without the ideas, none of that later stuff would have occurred.
Nowadays we’re seeing other ideas compete: in this context specifically, the ideas of neoliberalism versus the ideas of democratic socialism. Clearly the latter are gaining the edge, but they’re doing so because first the ideas exist, second enough people are convinced that they could work that someone who will implement those ideas wins office, third they implement them and prove they work, fourth the ideas gain traction as people see that they work and the momentum begins to snowball.
It takes years or even decades. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been working at this for a long time, and if you can’t see how the ideas they subscribe to inform their policy decisions, then I don’t know what else to tell you. Do you seriously think they’re just winging it without a clue what they’re doing?
There absolutely was an intellectualist movement which underpinned the French Revolution, without which it would have been disjointed riots with no shared conviction or cohesive structure, easily quelled and doomed to fail. All successful revolutions have been underpinned by intellectuals. That includes communist revolutions.
The ideas that we’re discussing now, both mine and yours, are exactly that: ideas. You think the twentieth century would have seen the Soviet Union if the nineteenth hadn’t had Marx and Engels?
Ideas inform decisions, and decisions inform actions. Actions without solid ideas behind them are lunacy. Actions require decisions, and decisions require ideas. It’s not that hard to figure out.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Lol no