this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. They emerged together and the former was formed to justify the latter. Over the years it has branched out and there are many forms such as classical liberalism, neoliberalism, social liberalism, etc. but they all defend capitalist property rights and the market. Socialism emerged as the working class response to/critique of liberalism. In the US the term only refers to social liberals, who are in reality centrists. Americans call them leftists only because centrists are slightly to the left of right-wing politics.
We're against liberalism as a whole because it's the ideology that justifies capitalism. We're against social liberals because they're seen as fence-sitting cowards and dangerous compromisers.
This is a very introductory overview to liberalism:
The most in-depth delving into it is Losurdo's Liberalism - A counter history, but you'd have to read many more foundational texts before that one.
It should be the other way around that capitalism was created to justify liberalism because you have liberal philosophers writing decades to centuries before the capitalists.
No.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Emerging together does not mean they are dependent on each other.
How many books on this topic have you read? Are you aware of the conflicts between liberals and workers, prisoners, women, and colonized people for over 200 years? Do you know the history of the working class movement and its history of conflicts with liberals since the mid 1800s?
Any one of us can answer these questions. You clearly can't.
You read books but do you read current news? Most of the world is still debating if they should be free of the government which is a binary that very much places liberalism on the left.
Why are you holding such a Eurocentric perspective in face of the fact that most are not having the anticapitalist vs capitalist discussion you seem to think they are having?
Currently the world is condemning the liberals for doing a genocide
😆
Do you even read bro
Yes I read. Like how I read that Wikipedia link and the other supporting links and references I've posted. All saying liberalism is left.
Wow that sounds sooo leftist. I think you're about 150 years late in defining liberalism as "the left"
Can you show me where private property is categorically right leaning and not left
Because that is the status quo. Leftism is about progressing onto the next mode of production, not stagnating or regressing, which is right-wing.
Capitalism is right-wing; socialism is left-wing. Private property is not about your toothbrush or house, it’s about private ownership of the means of production, which is what capitalism is founded on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Partially true but not universally true. This is like saying Jazz is African American music and classical is white music. You're flattening these things into a very binary categorization. These are not binary categories like this. There's so much nuance.
There's so many more options and honestly I'm worried there's a push you radicalize the left against even considering it after seeing many comments here.
An example of the top of my head is cooperatives. We don't need public ownership of factories and production. We can restructure capitalism and how it works so it is more socialized. Worker owned business. Change the laws. Change how corporations are structured when they go public. Change investing laws since faceless stakeholders is a primary cause of a lot of issues we face.
The options are not capitalism or socialism. That seems like it's a toxic pill that's being pushed in the community. I really advise people to consider there's potentially some radicalization occurring in certain corners. Remember they have a lot of power to push ideas and kill others. If we all know Cambridge and Koch brothers and heritage foundations are out there manipulating things online, maybe it's important to be careful of dominant opinions in the niche corners as they grow.
I already explained elsewhere that it isn't a binary, what's important is which is the principle aspect, public or private ownership. There are elements of private property in socialism, and elements of public in capitalism.
Cooperatives do not eliminate the need for eventual full public ownership. Cooperatives are still based on competition and profit, not fulfilling needs. As cooperatives grow and develop, they will form monopolies, long past when coherent planning and public ownership becomes more efficient at fuflilling needs and growth.
Further, we as the workers cannot restructure capitalism. Capitalism is dominated by capital. In order for workers to have genuine power over the system, we need control of the state, large firms, and key industries, without ownership we cannot pivot to a cooperative society to begin with. Political economic systems are not thoughts in your head, recipes to be picked out, but real, material things, and as such what comes next will be what our current system is economically compelled towards. As centralization is a key side-effect of capitalism, common, collective ownership and planning is what will come next, after revolution sped up by capitalism's own drive for disparity.
Ultimately, you have a very idealist, utopian view, and not a materialist, scientific view. That's why you're running into opposition so heavily.