Anarchism and enlightenment thought

Totalitarianism is a propaganda term invented by liberals to equate Nazi Germany and the USSR. Call it authoritarianism or whatever else you want.

Without knowing too much about Adorno, this sounds like pure bullshit. Most of the enlightenment philosophers we think of as being the basis of liberal political thinking had Kant's moral philosophy as a major foundation. I'd go so far so as to say the the intellectual enlightenment could not have happened without Kant or someone like Kant. Stuff like eugenics is infamously non-kantian.

I think there are some strong critiques of enlightenment thinking. There are at least three major critiques that I have internalized in my own thinking.
First is the fact that the enlightenment thought that has stuck with us today is largely bourgeois, as a result of the thinkers behind it also being bourgeois thinkers. While socialist principles and socialist critique can be led from enligthenment thought, or seen as a natural extension, most of the enlightenment thinkers didn't actually hold these beliefs. Stuff like property rights and liberal representative democracy were seen as integral moral truths, and not without intellectual backing. This intellectual backing needs to be seen for what it is: bourgeois ideology.
Second is that enlightenment thinking has a tendency to lend itself to idealism, and again this is not without intellectual backing. There's a reason why ideology develops and builds upon/around these enlightenment principles.
This is one of the reason why I don't think it's possible to coherently be an ancom/libsoc without incorporating Marxist thought at least in some sense, because Marx is the one who formulated the most coherent critique of enlightenment idealism, in favor of strong material analysis.
These two critiques are the 'easy' critiques, because you can maintain the core moral thought behind the enlightenment, while incorporating these critiques.
The third strong critique of enlightenment thought is the wholesale dismissal of kantian moralism / moralism in general from thinkers such as Stirner and Nietzsche. The 'post-left koolaid'.
While the first two critiques can be incorporated in such a way that you can maintain the basis of liberal moralism, in this case the critique needs refutation if don't want to let go of liberal values. I don't think it's easy to dismiss this critique as being obviously wrong, but there's definitely some strong arguments behind kantian moralism.

discourse on inequality and the social contract are his two most famous works and they're both really good despite being kinda short.

What are some required Enlightenment reads?

Literally the only good piece of political theory ever produced by a liberal.

Candide by Voltaire if your looking for satire.
Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Common Sense is also good if your more interested in American History.
Slavoj Zizek's collection of Robespierre's speeches is extremely good.
Rousseau is extremely important because he was basically an 18th century socialist

The ideas of socialism are as old as the renaissance and at least as old as Thomas More's Utopia. Craft strikes and guilds were precursory aspects of later socialist ideas. Liberalism wasn't around until a little after the Enlightenment, the ideas that are the constituent parts of liberalism arose from the enlightenment period but they weren't a formulated ideology until later. The end of the enlightenment was when liberalism started to flourish outside of secret free speech safe spaces in French Salons and capitalism only succeeded mercantilism after the enlightenment was mostly over.

Anarchism is about as old as liberalism in that same sense.

Why?

Late feudalism looks pretty good. You have common land, you have free peasants, you don't need to put up with shitty industrialized cities and totalitarian states. You just get to chill, farm crops and praise Jesus. I can fully understand why people at the time would be royalists because even then it was clear that capitalism sucks.

You have to formulate a critique of capitalism from the viewpoint that we can have a better future, not that the past is better. That is how you end up with reactionary feudal anti-capitalism or primitivist bullshit.

Feudalism a shit.

The point I'm making is that capitalism ISN'T better than anything we had before, even if everything that came before was shit capitalism doesn't rank particularly high on that shit-scale. Especially the industrial capitalism that immediately followed bourgeois revolutions, as much as the workers didn't have a real side in those wars (with exceptions like the diggers) it's easy to see how with the benefit of hindsight for how much the 19th century sucked that the reactionaries were the better side.

Utopia is pretty based for anyone that hasn't read it yet.

Capitalism is the only way to get to communism.

How can you unironically believe this? With capitalism came values of democracy, universalism, secularism etc.
you should critique it because capitalism doesn't go far enough in these values, not because those values are bad (that's what anti-capitalist reactionaries do)

The economic views of many "clasical liberals" would be considered left-wing today. The narrative that is sold about classical liberals being continuous with the today's right-wing, particularly the Tories and Republicans, is laughable. They were actually reactionary, because everyone was fucking actually reactionary two centuries ago, this is barely an argument.

For example , if you actually read some of the stuff Thomas Paine wrote, it would make modern centrists cringe in despair.

I wrote s.o.c.ia.l.l.y c.o.n.s.e.r.v.a.t.i.v.e

These filters are getting fucking ridiculous, honestly, I wish we would get rid of them. The joke stops being funny when you're having an actual discussion ot quoting works.

It's not that capitalism doesn't go far enough in these values. It's that capitalism (and liberalism) is inherently incapable of realising these values. This is where the dialectic comes in since there's an internal contradiction between the values expressed by capitalism/liberalism and the realization of those values in practice. That internal tension is part of what drives history. Now, admittedly this is a more hegelian reading than marxian reading, since it tends towards a hegelian idealism. But it illustrates at least the basic point that capitalism doesn't just fall short of enlightenment values, it is incapable of enacting them. The only way to save enlightenment values is to progress past capitalism.

That's what I'm saying famalamadingdong.

You can respect bourgeois revolutions (they bring us closer to a socialist revolution) while acknowledging their contradictions (e.g Jefferson having slaves)