Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[rotting bones]

I think you might also be confusing the working class proper with petite bourgeois community leaders like religious spokespersons. In my experience, working class people rarely venture an opinion since the fall of Communism. They have no confidence in their demands. E.g. "This is what I want. It might be selfish of me, but I can't feed my kids..." When they express an opinion, they repeat talking points invented by other classes that have nothing to do with their interests. When they venture an original plan, they are immediately shut down by various centrist and center-left attack dogs as "dumb", "uninformed", "uneducated", etc. This is the opportunity the right siezes upon. It's why majorities or pluralities in so many countries feel like banning educated opinions as such might be a good idea. There is a sense in which they're vaguely correct, but in reality, they're just falling for the other side of the trap laid out by capitalism's false consciousness. There is no way out except through a mass movement that puts equally high importance on science and solidarity.

PS. Is Mamdani really advising illegal immigrants to go quietly with ICE?

[Travis B.]

"Liberals" are a fake category you made up to have someone to be mad at.

Are you mad at Bernie Sanders? AOC? Elizabeth Warren? Zohran Mamdani? Black and Hispanic Democrats? Then say so, and explain why.

Are you mad at Bill Clinton or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer still? They aren't liberals.

As you say, the US is threatened by a fascist takeover. So you decide somehow that leftists rather than Republicans are the enemy. Great strategy, that's worked in precisely 0.00% of political fights.

I don't think the working class is anywhere near as left-wing as you think it is. But then, this feud against working people is mostly your own invention. I'm happy to join you in criticizing (say) Bill Clinton's attempt to take the Democrats toward the center, but it's absolutely not the case that Democrats hate working people. Are you concerned about the working people being disappeared by Trump's thugs, or knocked down by Trump's inflation, or by Trump's war on unions, or Trump's war on health care, or Trump's coddling of AI?

Progressives and socialists both have their failings; I try not to emphasize them because trying to create intra-left conflicts achieves nothing except strengthening the right. Both centrists and the left have a bad habit of blaming each other rather than focusing on the fascist threat.

Exactly. The "Liberals" is a right-wing populist bogeyman, and in claiming to be a left-wing populist jcb has claimed it as his own bogeyman in his effort to attack those he sees as insufficiently left-wing on the center-left rather than the very real right-wing enemy that threatens all working class people.

Of course, this won't result in there being any more socialists, it will only result in in-fighting that will help the right (and it very well may turn off potential socialists). If jcb really was trying to increase the number of socialists in the world, he would be reaching out to people like those who have voted for Sanders, AOC, Warren, Mamdani, etc. and trying to convince them that if they are truly consistent in their beliefs, they ought to take the next step and believe that capitalism is incompatible with freedom and equality.

[Raphael]

I think you might also be confusing the working class proper with petite bourgeois community leaders like religious spokespersons.

"Petite bourgeois" is a very elastic term. Back when Marx and Engels worked out their class model, adult men were usually either rich, or they were small business owners, or they were some kind of manual workers. There wasn't much need to worry about adult men who didn't fit into any of those three categories, because there weren't that many of those around.

However, in the time between then and then, the number of adult men, and, after the first few waves of the Women's Movement, adult women who worked in low- or medium paying office jobs where they still had bosses, or worked freelance for clients, exploded. Faced with that development, Marxist theorists, who were ideologically committed to the idea that the standard Marxist model has to be perfect and in no need of serious adjustments, insisted on throwing all the people who fit that description in with the "petite bourgeois". Which, as far as I'm concerned, was and still is a pretty stupid move. A way of politically shooting yourself in the foot. Probably best explained by the Left's perennial self-destructive tendencies.

PS. Is Mamdani really advising illegal immigrants to go quietly with ICE?

I dunno, but that sounds to me like the kind of rumor professional paid liars might spread if they'd be under instructions to make him look bad to exactly those people who might otherwise support him.

[Travis B.]

To me a simple definition of petite bourgoisie are people who own capital and use that capital to exploit others, but at the same time still have to work to make a living. When seen in this light, it becomes much clearer who is and who is not petite bourgeoisie.

This is in contrast to the proletariat, who are people who must sell their labor to those who own capital to make a living, and to the bourgeoisie, who are people who can live solely off of their ownership of capital which they use to exploit other people. There are some other cases such as "artisans", who are people who own capital and use it to make a living but who do not use that capital to exploit others.

Note that I would not consider people who own relatively limited amounts of stocks in, say, their 401k's which they use to live out their remaining days to be bourgeoisie, as they really do not use their stock ownership to exploit others per se.

[malloc]

Are you mad at Bill Clinton or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer still? They aren't liberals.

That seems quite a remarkable statement considering I have always heard them characterized as liberals par excellence. Whenever people on the left complain about liberals, they seem to mean people like that.

[zompist]

Are you mad at Bill Clinton or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer still? They aren't liberals.

That seems quite a remarkable statement considering I have always heard them characterized as liberals par excellence. Whenever people on the left complain about liberals, they seem to mean people like that.

I've explained this a dozen times, but one more time: the Democratic Party is composed of about 50% liberals, 50% moderates/conservatives. In the 1990s it was worse: 25% liberals, 75% moderates/conservatives.

"Liberal" has just become a swear word for rightists and leftists, but we're stuck with the labels polls and newspapers use.

"Centrist" would be a better description of the non-progressive half of the party.

[Ares Land]

@jcb: I agree that the Democrats can be, um, disappointingly centrist. This may turn out to be less than a problem than you expect, there's something pretty encouraging in seeing socialism popular among Americans, in a way that would've seemed unthinkable 20 years ago.

Be careful what you wish for. We have Real Leftists™ here and a major left-wing populist party. (-This was something I was cautiously optimistic about at first). It turns out, you don't want that. Left-wing populists can't win elections, can't form a government or pass any laws if by chance they do win, and have in fact destroyed all chances of the left for at least a generation. They're also harder and harder to tell apart from their right-wing populist counterpart.
When it comes to left-wing parties, I think 'boring' is the way to go.

[Travis B.]

Are you mad at Bill Clinton or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer still? They aren't liberals.

That seems quite a remarkable statement considering I have always heard them characterized as liberals par excellence. Whenever people on the left complain about liberals, they seem to mean people like that.

I've explained this a dozen times, but one more time: the Democratic Party is composed of about 50% liberals, 50% moderates/conservatives. In the 1990s it was worse: 25% liberals, 75% moderates/conservatives.

"Liberal" has just become a swear word for rightists and leftists, but we're stuck with the labels polls and newspapers use.

"Centrist" would be a better description of the non-progressive half of the party.

Seconded. Clinton, Biden, and Schumer aren't liberals in the first place. Examples of liberals are people like Sanders and AOC. But jcb is not talking about Sanders or AOC either, but some imagined worker-hating "Liberal" with a big L bogeyman.

(I get the impression that jcb is thinking of people like myself, but the idea that people like me hate workers is something he imagines so he has something to be angry at.)

[WeepingElf]

I am skeptical of socialism because I believe that (1) free enterprise is a legitimate way of expressing oneself and (2) entrepreneurship and innovation ought to be honoured (one of the reasons why Communism failed was that it created a world without entrepreneurs and was hostile to innovation). What we need is a system that on one hand honours entrepreneurship and innovation, and on the other hand sets limits to rich people's arbitrariness and prevents poverty. The social democratic welfare state IMHO comes closest to this among all systems trued out so far.

I see social democracy as a forward development of liberalism, and green politics as a forward development of social democracy: it had turned out that liberalism without social justice leads to problems, as does social democracy without environmental sustainability.

(But part of the disagreement in this thread is that Americans and Europeans use different definitions of "liberalism".)

[Travis B.]

I am skeptical of socialism because I believe that (1) free enterprise is a legitimate way of expressing oneself and (2) entrepreneurship and innovation ought to be honoured (one of the reasons why Communism failed was that it created a world without entrepreneurs and was hostile to innovation). What we need is a system that on one hand honours entrepreneurship and innovation, and on the other hand sets limits to rich people's arbitrariness and prevents poverty. The social democratic welfare state IMHO comes closest to this among all systems trued out so far.

I see social democracy as a forward development of liberalism, and green politics as a forward development of social democracy: it had turned out that liberalism without social justice leads to problems, as does social democracy without environmental sustainability.

(But part of the disagreement in this thread is that Americans and Europeans use different definitions of "liberalism".)

To me "free enterprise" and "entrepreneurship" are red herrings, because the sort of socialist system I am for does not negate those. Indeed, any group of people can come together and decide that they want to create something, and lobby organizations that provide funding to new cooperatives for funding for their idea (in the place of selling a portion of their new business to venture capitalists). The primary difference between what I am for and the current system in this regard is my proposal is democratic, involves workers owning their share of their workplaces and managing themselves, and does not involve the exploitation of workers but rather workers receive the full value of their work.

[Raphael]

@WeepingElf: I don't think that something that has as much of an impact on other people as running businesses can be defended on self-expression grounds. If it can be justified, then only on the grounds that it's good for people's economic well-being. And that particular justification is getting shakier by the day these days.

I agree that an economy probably needs to have some space for entrepreneurial impulses to function well. But that doesn't mean that people need to be allowed to legally own businesses and do with them more or less what they want.

[Travis B.]

@WeepingElf: I don't think that something that has as much of an impact on other people as running businesses can be defended on self-expression grounds. If it can be justified, then only on the grounds that it's good for people's economic well-being. And that particular justification is getting shakier by the day these days.

I agree that an economy probably needs to have some space for entrepreneurial impulses to function well. But that doesn't mean that people need to be allowed to legally own businesses and do with them more or less what they want.

I agree that "free enterprise" should not be allowed to oppose the collective good of the people, but at the same time socialism is not incompatible with entrepreneurial impulses. Accommodating entrepreneurial impulses is possible within a decentralized socialist economy, and in and of itself does not require being able to exploit workers or businesses being private authoritarian fiefdoms as is the case under capitalism.

[Raphael]

Accommodating entrepreneurial impulses is possible within a decentralized socialist economy, and in and of itself does not require being able to exploit workers or businesses being private authoritarian fiefdoms as is the case under capitalism.

Completely agreed.

[rotting bones]

Some brief comments:

Regarding class reductionism, self-interest is not a law of nature. Engels was literally a capitalist.

Also, every class hires spokespersons who are not always members of that class. Even workers have labor aristocrats who are sometimes corrupt.

---

Regarding liberals supporting socialism, the phenomenon is rarer than you might think. There are an awful lot of people who support liberalism because they think it supports meritocracy, and they think they themselves are meritorious.

---

Regarding the petite bourgeoisie, Marxist analysis is always totalizing and materially reductive. In the context of classes, it's explicitly about how the assignment of sections the social pie supports the livelihoods of certain classes. Such things can remain constant even as outward forms change. If the capital for office work is conceived of as a social investment, the office worker is an owner of that capital as long as they abide by the terms of their contract.

This is not incompatible with how capitalism thinks of it. In India, office workers had the option to either receive a pension or a higher salary. Once the social investment has occurred, it's up to the owner to decide how to dispose of it.

It is not uncommon for office workers to leverage this ownership of the social pie to transition into becoming actual small business owners at some point.

---

As for Capitalism, it's not arbitrary:

1. Capitalism has precisely identifiable failure modes. Attempts to address them produce perfectly predictable blowback. In other words, the system is not fully random: it is known to fail in specific ways and demonstrates self-preserving behavior despite this.

2. It's not so much that liberal policies generate wealth. It's more like wealthy countries are more likely to adopt a superficial veneer of liberal policy with gaps of about 4-10 years. For example, read The Divide by Jason Hickel. I strongly suggest reading this recommendation before discussing the justice of socialism.

...

It is for these and similar reasons that Green politics as it is currently promoted will not reach stable policy status in "backward" countries in the near future. (This is the case even though such countries do accept environmental protections more generally.) I know liberals feel like it should be able to, but that's a mirage which comes from having put the cart before the horse.

(Apart from topics I have discussed before, another class of reasons is that people with different training find different ideas reasonable. Green politics doesn't appear reasonable to most people.)

If we want environmental and social protections to be universal, the advocates of Green politics ought to hitch their wagon to a system that benefits all classes and promotes a positive vision for the future, not just a system that benefits narcissistic business owners while pushing a positive vision for people obsessed with the environment. The environment is important, but it's a political reality that most people don't care about it as much as environmentalists do. No matter how many people get killed, it's unlikely that they will change their minds about this in our lifetime.

---

My usual rant:

Society has progressed in many ways since the 70's. Unfortunately, it has regressed in so many others that I can't see a way out of this mess unless people reject propaganda en masse and adopt a more scientific outlook.

Everything I know about human nature indicates this is unlikely to happen to say the least. AFAICT most people don't have the energy to remember fine distinctions that weren't drilled into them in childhood, let alone enthusiastically replace their ignorant biases with facts. I will keep trying, and I hope I will be pleasantly surprised. I don't want to live through the consequences of the alternative.

(Recent theorists whose work I partially accept include Paul Cockshott in economic theory, like Classical Econophysics, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita in political theory, like Logic of Political Survival. Both are more right-leaning than Marx himself. Mesquita supports libertarian-leaning economics and an aggressive foreign policy. Cockshott supports the Five Year Plan model and the values of the Communist middle classes. I support none of this. Originally, Marx and Engels rejected all of what passes for conservative and Communist common sense in the 21st century as bourgeois superstructure that has evolved to support its economic base. This is the approach I'm partial to in social theory. E.g. Male homosexuality was regarded as abominable because of how the inheritance of estates was supposed to help a specific form of society to reproduce itself, a form that was unjust to most of its participants.)

[Travis B.]

Regarding liberals supporting socialism, the phenomenon is rarer than you might think. There are an awful lot of people who support liberalism because they think it supports meritocracy, and they think they themselves are meritorious.

Liberalism is seen as supporting meritocracy because it is seen as giving people the freedom to best fulfill their intrinsic potential, through things such as universal education and like.

However, I do not see socialism as being opposed to this. If anything, by being opposed to hierarchies such as that of social class that people are born into I see socialism as being better for giving people the freedom to best fulfill their intrinsic potential than liberalism.

[rotting bones]

Regarding liberals supporting socialism, the phenomenon is rarer than you might think. There are an awful lot of people who support liberalism because they think it supports meritocracy, and they think they themselves are meritorious.

Liberalism is seen as supporting meritocracy because it is seen as giving people the freedom to best fulfill their intrinsic potential, through things such as universal education and like.

However, I do not see socialism as being opposed to this. If anything, by being opposed to hierarchies such as that of social class that people are born into I see socialism as being better for giving people the freedom to best fulfill their intrinsic potential than liberalism.

Many liberals unfortunately think they are more meritorious than poor people. They think socialism is a way for their inferiors to deny them their dues in the sense of: https://youtu.be/5WsZdDDQ8b0?t=74

[Raphael]

Liberalism is seen as supporting meritocracy because it is seen as giving people the freedom to best fulfill their intrinsic potential, through things such as universal education and like.

Depends on what you mean by "liberalism". My own main problem with the word liberalism is that it has meant so many different things in so many different times and places that, by now, at least in a global context, it is effectively a meaningless word.

[WeepingElf]

Liberalism is seen as supporting meritocracy because it is seen as giving people the freedom to best fulfill their intrinsic potential, through things such as universal education and like.

Depends on what you mean by "liberalism". My own main problem with the word liberalism is that it has meant so many different things in so many different times and places that, by now, at least in a global context, it is effectively a meaningless word.

Yes. There are many definitions of "liberalism"; especially Americans and Europeans differ here from each other.

Also, there are "liberties" that are questionable, such as the right to bear arms or the right to travel on motorways without speed limits, or outright illiberal, such as (formerly) the right to own slaves. On the other hand, that a right is often abused does not always mean that it ought to be abolished. There are people who abuse free speech to promulgate hate and lies, and there are people who abuse free enterprise to exploit employees and defraud customers. Such abuses call for regulation, not for abolition of these rights.

And currently, we are facing a major threat to our freedom from reactionary political movements, so we should stand together to stop the reactionaries instead of bickering among ourselves about liberalism and socialism.

[Raphael]

Yes. There are many definitions of "liberalism"; especially Americans and Europeans differ here from each other.

In the beginning, there were times and places when politics, or at least the parts of politics that were treated as important, were about the struggle for power between the old land-owning aristocracy and the newly emergent class of merchants and factory owners. In those days, people who supported the interests of the former were called "conservatives", and people who supported the interests of the latter were called "liberals".

Then, many years, some linguistic shifts, and the occasional firing squad later, in some places, the word "liberal" had ended up meaning "people who support the interests of merchants and factory owners and the like", and in some other places, the same word had ended up meaning "whoever is the main group opposed to the conservatives at any given moment." And so the LORD had confounded their language, that they did not understand one another's speech.

And then there are some of the more wanker-ish types in some parts of the Left, who know very well that they live in times and places where the word has the second meaning, but pretend to know for sure that it always has the first meaning anyway.

And currently, we are facing a major threat to our freedom from reactionary political movements, so we should stand together to stop the reactionaries instead of bickering among ourselves about liberalism and socialism.

Completely agreed. I can't stand it when centrists triangulate themselves to an effectively hard-right or hard-right-adjacent position. And I can't stand it when diehard left-wing, or perhaps I should write "left-wing" with quotation marks, types act as if they're trying to prove horseshoe theory right, either. Keep your eyes on the price, folks. Der Feind steht rechts.

[malloc]

And then there are some of the more wanker-ish types in some parts of the Left, who know very well that they live in times and places where the word has the second meaning, but pretend to know for sure that it always has the first meaning anyway.

Isn't the first definition the one generally used in political science and philosophy? That is, a particular political philosophy or framework distinguished from fascism, monarchism, communism, and so forth rather than merely the left half of parliamentary politics?