Look rather than dunk on you, I’m going to recommend Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, because it gives a fair overview of what the liberal revolutions were about, why socialism grew out of that moment, and how there came to be this irreconciliable beef between liberalism and socialism. The whole thing is great, but 1848 is the real crisis point if all you care about is the schism.
Comment on Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much
FozzyOsbourne@lemm.ee 5 months agoOpen-minded, permissive, tolerant
Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one 5 months ago
Ragdoll_X@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Glytch@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A liberal believes capitalism is broken and needs to be fixed.
A socialist believes capitalism is working as intended and needs to be destroyed.
db2@lemmy.world 5 months ago
What’s someone who believes capitalism is broken and needs to be destroyed?
Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one 5 months ago
Liberals are, to quote Phil Ochs: “ten degrees to the left of center in the good times, ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally”
FozzyOsbourne@lemm.ee 5 months ago
OK, but that’s not what the word liberal actually means to most people in my experience. Or perhaps another way of saying it is that a lot of people I see getting angry on Lemmy read the word “liberal” and assume economically liberal, whereas every person I’ve ever encountered IRL would use it to mean socially liberal.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
In the US political media ‘Liberal’ is deliberately used to reference the policies of the Democratic Party, which is demonstrably Neoliberal. This confusion is working as intended.
Thanks Rush Limbaugh and all the hellspawn you’ve enabled.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This confusion is working as intended.
And is exploited by tankies/fascists. By making “liberal” an insult from both the right and the left, using different definitions, they solidify in the mind if low information voters that Democrats are bad. Republicans, by being left out of this insulting, sound better by comparison.
Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one 5 months ago
With respect, if you describe yourself as liberal, vote for an economically liberal party, and refuse even to accept economic policy as part of the question, I think the “authoritarian leftists” have your number tbh
dudinax@programming.dev 5 months ago
The very idea that a liberal can’t be socialist and a socialist can’t be liberal is nonsensical. They are orthogonal concepts.
The division between liberals and socialists is plainly promoted in order to divide people.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Liberalism supports Capitalism, Socialism supports Socialism. They are incompatible.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s because the socially liberal definition is almost exclusively American, and lemmy has a large number of EXTREMELY Eurocentric users. Almost like a weird mirror world of the typical “everything is assumed to be American until proved otherwise” in most social media.
According to lemmy, there’s the American definition, and then there’s the correct definition. And they’re not being tongue in cheek about it, they’re serious.
satansbartender@lemmy.world 5 months ago
First time I’ve heard of that podcast and it sounds interesting. Is there a season that touches on it more than others or is it just an overarching theme throughout the different seasons and revolutions covered?
gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m going to echo everyone else recommending this podcast, it’s absolutely incredible non-fiction story telling and it will really deepen your understanding of how we all got to this point in history.
To answer your question, I actually think season 8 (all about the French Commune in 1871 and how external pressures can end up causing liberals and socialists to go to war with each other) is the best one for explaining it, but it will be really confusing if you don’t listen to season 7 first (which is all about 1848, when France revolted against a liberal monarchy and most of western Europe went “hey, we should do that too, but differently”), which will be really confusing if you don’t listen to season 6 first (all about France 1830, when the people who would be overthrown in 1848 came to power) and all its supplemental episodes (all about different western European leaders who would see rebellions in 1848).
Season 3 (all about the French revolution everyone knows about in the 1790s) will help understand a few things going on in 6 and 7, and is also worth listening to just to understand why and how liberalism got going, but I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to get seasons 6-8, and 3 is ridiculously long season because the French revolution is just an insane series of back and forth plot twists that doesn’t let up.
That all said, if you’re prepared for something ridiculously long, the final season (all about the Russian revolutions, 1905 and 1917) is an incredibly informative and interesting listen too, and kind of completes the series (this is extremely reductive, but season 1-3 are sort of the “liberalism was a big improvement over what came before it” seasons, 6-8 are sort of the “but liberalism had its problems, which socialism tried to answer” seasons, and 10 is the “but socialism has its problems too” season).
Lastly, it doesn’t really touch on the liberalism vs socialism thing, but season 4 (a history of the Haitian revolution that highlights how incredibly destructive racism and colonialism are) is probably the one season I would make everyone in the world listen to if I could.
Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one 5 months ago
Yeah agreed, Haiti really opens your eyes to how race and class intersect imo — and the potted history at the end to bring us up to the present is absolutely heartbreaking.
gastationsushi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I highly recommend this podcast. He does a great job of differentiating what the different authors say and what are his own opinions. And he adds corrections to the episode when listeners point out his mistakes. The French, Haitian, 1848, and Russian revolutions really changed how I see the world. Be warned, they can hit dozens of episodes each.
The American and English civil war are OK, not Duncan’s fault, it’s just the non Anglo revolutions were better material IMO.
Atin@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I recommend Revolutions too. Mike Duncan is an awesome researcher and writer.
daltotron@lemmy.world 5 months ago
added, should I begin at the beginning or are there recommended episodes I should listen to first over others?
Anamana@feddit.de 5 months ago
Pff… you’re way too nice to not be a liberal
Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one 5 months ago
There’s a difference between ideology and affect. I’m sure plenty of Nazis are “nice”
Neon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted.
Liberal literally means free. As in “If it doesn’t harm me, you’re allowed to do it”. So yes, openminded, permissive, tolerant.
Don’t know why a lot of the US-Americans had to twist the meaning of it.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Because in politics, liberal means something else entirely. It’s an ideology defined by support for capitalism.
Amputret@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Free as in markets, not free as in people.
Klear@lemmy.world 5 months ago
In Americans politics, and you guys are completely bonkers.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
No, not just in American politics. Liberal politics is a very specific thing.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s actually specifically not true in American politics.
Liberal in America = left wing, favors greater regulation of markets
Neon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s absolutely not what it means
In the very closest definition, liberal means “if there isn’t a law against it, you’re allowed to do it”
liberal more broadly is just as simple: “if it doesn’t hurt me, you’re free to do it”
I mean, what do you think a “liberal democracy” is? The majority of Europe is made up of liberal democracies while also being social-democratic. France is a liberal democracy despite being heavily unionized and having huge welfare. How does that work?
It works because that’s not what liberal means.
Socially-Liberal, for example, is when you are liberal (freedom-loving / diversity-loving) in social aspects. You support gay marriages, you support freedom of religion, you support cultural diversity. Other Examples include religiously-liberal, culturally-liberal, or even politically liberal (you support the right to different political opinions than yours)
What comes closest to what you think it is is economically-liberal. Which essentially says that “as long as it doesn’t hurt me, you’re free to do what you want economically”. But even that isn’t what you mean. Is Pollution and accelerating Climate change harming me and therefore not protected under liberalism? yes, says the absolute majority of liberals.
Is lobbying harming me by making my Voice less weighted? Yes, say a lot of us.
So not even economically-liberal is a good term to describe what you mean.
I don’t know, what a good term for it is. But it isn’t Liberal. So please, for the love of god, stop misusing it. Words have meaning. Invent a new one if you have to, they all began that way anyways.
sukhmel@programming.dev 5 months ago
The problem here is that in the US it means a very specific thing, while in Europe it means another specific thing. I think it gets mentioned every other time when this holywar reappears in comments
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_Europe …wikipedia.org/…/Liberalism_in_the_United_States …wikipedia.org/…/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_…
Objection@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
“if there isn’t a law against it, you’re allowed to do it”
That’s literally every system.
maxenmajs@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I understand we don’t like capitalism on Lemmy, but I’m curious how liberalism fares versus the other capitalism-supporting ideologies that are more commonly found in the world.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’ve thought about this for most of the day. Social Democracy (think Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc) is probably the best out of all capitalist ideologies, but is still subject to the regressive nature of private capital. Other than that, most of them are complete dogshit. Capitalist monarchies, “anarcho-capitalism” (read neo-feudalism), US libertarianism, capitalist oligarchy, fascism*, etc are awful for regular people and horribly lacking in their analysis of capital and it’s relationship between the capitalists and workers. We’re currently living under neoliberal democracy, so imagine things getting much worse for us. That’s what most of those ideologies are like.
* it should be noted that fascism is mostly just a death cult that loves hierarchies like capitalism.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
In European politics.
American liberals do not support free markets. They’re advocates of greater regulation amd stronger unions.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
yes, they do. Both* US political parties are neoliberal parties. Regulation of markets is still a free market. Unions do not inherently oppose free markets either.
* must go back at least 10 years for this to be true for Republicans
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
The Israeli flag guy would think freedom means the freedom to exploit others.
Neon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The lemmy.ml guy would think freedom means the freedom to roll with tanks over peaceful Protestors demanding Freedom and Democracy.
See? Prejudice isn’t nice, right?
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Freedom to do what exactly? To spend half your income on rent and have no hope of anything better?
America is a democracy for the bourgeoisie, and a dictatorship for us. China is a democracy for the people and a dictatorship for the bourgeoisie.
daltotron@lemmy.world 5 months ago
“free” means nothing though, it’s just a substitute for other values. It’s not just free as in “if it doesn’t harm me, you’re allowed to do it”. As another commenter pointed out, one person, they would espouse the freedom to have and own and use guns for self-defense, right? I could just as easily make the argument that guns, collectively, when this right is enabled, impinge on my freedom not to live in a gun-free, potentially less violent, or at least less lethal, society. The freedom provided by publically subsidized or collective single payer healthcare, vs the freedom to "not have to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. If I just rely on freedom as a value, it indicates nothing. It’s a sock puppet ideology. There’s always another value there which is being substituted for it. Liberalism can’t just equal freedom, or else it’s just totally meaningless. While it does have a broad specific meaning as it refers to a specific school of thought, it’s not totally meaningless as it otherwise would be.
Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy which espouses the merits of the free market as a collective decision making structure, which can allocate resources according to price signals. I.e. take resources in the economy and allocate them to where they best need to go, which is sort of what any idea of the economy has to do. It also generally espouses an idea of a naturally occurring meritocracy and rational actors, which the free market relies upon to be of real merit. At the extreme end you get shit like idiot anarcho-capitalism and the austrian school of economics, which is very resistant to government interventionism and kind of holds a religious adherence to free markets and their freedom from governance or regulation by governments. Guys like adam smith. Maybe in the middle you have more standard forms of liberalism, that still support free markets, but also support a pretty decent government and sort of see the two as being opposed to one another. Probably that would slot in a little more into neoliberalism, on the side of markets, and then classical liberalism leaning more towards government intervention. And then on the far end you get shit like nordic government and social democracy more broadly, which would try to engage in capitalism while still building out large support structures, as generally opposed to democratic socialism which seeks to basically eliminate conventional capitalism altogether. You also maybe get “market socialism” somewhere in there, inasmuch as a kind of inherently contradictory ideology like that can exist.
None of what I said really has any commentary on general social issues. You won’t find it in there, in any of those mostly economic philosophies, you won’t find positions on gay rights or trans rights, generally, civil rights more broadly, or drug use, or crime and punishment. There’s not any position on civil rights more broadly which is specifically intrinsic to any of those philosophies. Nothing on “open-mindedness”. The same could be said of communism, or really any economic philosophy outside of like, normal fascism, which everyone kind of has a hard time defining. Libs, mostly, but I won’t elaborate on that one until you press me on it.
In any case, that’s what liberalism as an economic philosophy all tends to mean, tends to refer to, that’s the larger, broader category. As you might intuit, it’s mostly just kind of, “capitalism”, in it’s many different forms. None of this is meaning-twisting, this is all just shit that’s existing in the academic literature for a long while. I’m not a language prescriptivist, so I’m not going to say that it’s wrongly used, when it’s not strictly conforming to academic definitions, and I will freely admit that most of the reference I see to it in colloquial conversation is kind of just like, to mean “woke”, you know, to refer more to socially progressive outlooks more broadly. But I think it’s important to question kind of why that is, why it’s seen as this thing that’s only kind of half-invisible to the population, why it’s completely divorced, colloquially, from any economic definition, and instead just refers to like, ahh, that guy, that guy’s a lib, that guy thinks black people should have rights, what a lib cuck, kind of a thing.
Tracking the warping of language is a pretty important thing to do, because it tells you all about the intentionality with which it’s used, the broader political strategy, the core philosophies of the people using it, it tells you where they’ve come from and what they’re referring to. More specifically, these kinds of changes of meaning that take place within certain words, they serve to cordon off, or, serve as an evidence of the cordoning off, of certain populations from others. The word is transformed in such a way as to make communication between groups impossible, and is also transformed in such a way as to totally eliminate that to which it previously was in reference to.
I don’t think using liberal to mean “socially progressive” is necessarily the wrong way to do things, but I do think that the academic definition, the academic reference, the idea there, it still has a lot of value. If one serves to obfuscate the other’s shorthand, I would find that to be kind of a tragedy.
Aux@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You should either replace Ukrainian flag with a Russian one or Israeli flag with Palestinian.
joyjoy@lemm.ee 5 months ago
“I apply my butter liberally.”
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
It means you support capitalism, hence why “liberalization of the economy” means selling off public utilities, land, and resources.
FozzyOsbourne@lemm.ee 5 months ago
That seems like one very specific definition specifically for economically-neo-liberal, only mentioned below all the actual definitions
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
It’s also the definition used in any serious literature since the mid 1800s.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 5 months ago
My parents used to called corned beef stew “Pig soup” so my brother and i would eat it. That doesn’t mean it was pork in there.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
300 million Americans call corned beef “pig stew” and it’s in the dictionary. Welcome to living languages. Corned beef is now pig stew.
saltesc@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s not true.
Here a chicken definitely came before an egg. Read up on laissez-faire. There are also entire groups of anti-capitalist liberals and liberal ideologies as moat agree that capitalism breaks the fundamental rule of encroaching on people’s freedoms, which is obviously the main point.
Adam Smith was famously big on this, but also Henry George, the father of Georgism which is a famous liberal economic ideology that is staunchly opposed to capitalism for its many dangers to liberalism. It’s even from the US.
You can’t just take what you learned from the US media and US social media and force that onto everyone else. You’re spreading misinformation about ideologies in the hopes people won’t notice.
Aux@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You cannot be open minded, tolerant and support human rights and freedoms while opposing capitalism. If you oppose capitalism - you’re pretty much an authoritarian shill.
TheTetrapod@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This doesn’t even make sense, you’re very confused.
VARXBLE@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Very bad take. Do better.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Care to elaborate? Why is wanting to democratize production more authoritarian than wanting many competing dictators?
Aux@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Because capitalism is what allows to democratize production.