Liberalism, or more broadly individualistic ideology is dead as a governing ideology, it just doesn't know it yet. The agonizing over the hegemony of liberalism is pointless, as it will be completely discredited due to economic and environmental reasons within 75 years.
Climate change will force societies to become collectivistic in order to avoid revolutionary upheaval over the casualties resulting from laissez-faire attitudes towards this crisis. This will provide leftist forces with the first genuine opportunity in a century to take power.
Unfortunately, this move towards collectivistic ideologies will also accelerate the growth of fascism, especially if massive migration triggered by climate crises moves people from the global south to the West.
How do we make sure that the abandonment of liberalism leads to socialism, and not fascism?
This is going to sound stupid as shit, but we need memes
Why is the aut-right doing so well? The fucking memes. Hook em young, be cool and edgy, whatever.
Look at the US, voting Republican is essentially a fashion statements of "I don't need no goddam GUBMINT help", I chew dip and have a distinct accent and score low on openness to experience. And voting democrat is either like union-lite or "I need mo BENEFITS", or what you do because all the other mildly intelligent white people living in cities vote for. And just look at the commercials they run, they are very clearly much more an appeal to an abstract vision of what a democrat or republican voter looks like, rather than policy.
At the end of the day, people don't give a shit about politics. It's too complex, not fun or exciting for most, and reading about and having opinions on policy is way too much work for your average voter. To sell politics, you need to sell an image or a unifying concept of what "you are" that transcends policy. In essence you need to cultivate and appeal to your subculture.
Hudson Clark
We can't. The flood of third world refugees will be too great for any first worldist to agree to. We're fucked.
Dylan Turner
Abolish capital
Logan Walker
...
Jordan Wilson
yeah but it needs to not be cringeworthy shit
Like a fucking mass produced shirt with Che on it, or people that smoke an eight of an ounce of weed every day
The left has lost popular appeal to people that aren't self-caricatures, i.e. normal people with normal jobs.The right is doing an excellent job at actually being funny and drawing interest.
Matthew Smith
All philosophy that promotes human freedom (including all forms of socialism) are individualist, because individual freedom is the only freedom there is. After all each person is an individual, and a collective is simply many individuals, who would not be free without their individual freedoms. Socialism is in fact the logical conclusion of classical liberalism, particularly Mill's liberty principle (your freedom ends when it infringes on the freedom of others) as well as a desire to end the domination of man over man. The only truly non-individualist ideologies are those that put other values above human freedom. Fascism for example, puts spooks like the nation above human freedom.
The main difference between left and right individualism is that AnCaps and their ilk have a retarded idea of freedom, bound up entirely in an autistic list of technicalities and negative freedoms. A socialist is concerned with freedom in a utilitarian fashion, they are concerned with what the actions of an individual do to the ability of another individual to exert their will on the physical world. Do these actions hinder or enhance this ability, what actions enhance it most effectively etc. AnCaps meanwhile develop a list of what qualifies as freedom and what doesn't, and as long as nothing violates their autistic little checklist it's a ok. To them it's totally okay that I could say, buy all the water rights in an area and withhold water from the people until they agree to fondle my balls and call me "milord" because it doesn't violate their technicalities, even though it clearly reduces the actual freedoms of everybody who doesn't own the water.
So the conflict between socialism and capitalism/liberalism/etc isn't one of individualism vs collectivism, it's one of views about freedom. The former being entirely focused on negative freedoms, the latter focusing on actually being able to do what you want to do.
Jacob Bell
Wanna know how I know you spend way too much time shitposting on the internet? Protip: if you want to appeal to normalfags, then your goal should not be "raising" their consciousness to whatever meme identity you subscribe to(especially not through fucking image macros), but precisely "downgrading" yourself to the level of having as little actual political "identity" of socialist/communist/anarchist as humanely possible.
Grayson Peterson
I think you misunderstand, I actually agree with that completely
Thomas Martin
Ah, I thought you were
Levi Gutierrez
So in short; people are fucking stupid, and must be corralled like sheep with meme cancer and peer pressure instead of reasoned with or talked to like human beings?
Anthony Mitchell
I'm both. By the first post, I didn't mean to say we need to sit down and educate people on the intricacies of Marxist theory. Just that people on the left need to do a better job of appealing to normies.
You can't expect every person to become invested in policy and theory. Most people (at least in my experience in the US) don't give a shit because they live reasonably comfortable lives and have way more interesting shit going on than independently looking up and reading about fringe political theory
Jaxon Harris
I get what you mean, but for start, try to forget such concepts as "left" or "socialism" exist at all and then think of the praxis, because when you have those big words in mind, you reconfigure yourself to thinking about making a given idea rule supreme and measuring your success in checking how many people self-identify with your brand name of choice.
Cooper Morales
No, what will happen is that the rich countries will tell the Global South to go drown or starve. They are already learning about the uselessness of diversity at the moment, and will have little interest in rescuing the Global South.
Because the radical left is controlled opposition. It's amusing how often you can find billionaire money from the Tides, Open Society, Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller etc. foundations finding its way to radical left groups. See OWS as a prime example. The radical left in Western countries has never been a threat and never will be. The main function of radical leftist groups is to serve as footsoldiers for globalization in the name of anti-racism. Nominally, the radical left advocates for internationalism and a classess, moneyless, diverse society without private property. What actually happens is that the radical left simply settles for internationalism and drops the latter part in the name of solidarity. Ask yourself: Why are Communist professors allowed everywhere in academia if they were any real threat? Don't kid yourself, if people with real power wanted it, the radical left could be destroyed very fucking quickly.
Charles Hall
Marshall McLuhan predicted the downfall of liberalism under the pressures of electronic media over 50 years ago. Concepts like liberalism or even freedom of speech belong to the print era and find themselves loosing meaning in the neotribal electronic era. Trump is not a republican orator but a priest of resentment, a totem, an illusory project of liberation. electric media amplifies vindictiveness and paranoia to hysterical levels. the fulminating speed of the new forms of communication has brought about the meltdown of liberal bourgeois norms. It has reduced the subject to an empty shell that lashes out at any perceived threats to its identity. But we are also faced with a tremendous revolutionary potential. to save humanity while at the same time overcoming it. To realise the unfulfilled promises of the world we have known the world that that is already fading away before our eyes.
Walter Benjamin, demolished the distinction between ethics, aesthetics theology and politics. the social democrats and the communists failed to stop fascism, blinded by an illusory positivistic notion of progress. The socdems shot Rosa, the stalinists shot the anarchists in Spain and signed the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. Benjamin himself, a jew and a communist, died of a morphine overdose after being refused safe passage through the Spanish border. The following text dates from only months before. TLDR: The state of emergency is now. The laws of dialectical materialism aren't going to save us, liberal bourgeois decency isn't going to save us, silicon valley sin't going to save us, only revolution will. We have to take to the road and actively save souls as Saint Paul once did.
Concept for the left in the 21st century: Everyone can be Saved. We should present leftism as something that allows you to build a positive revolutionary identity, as opposed to the purely negative restricted fear/shame based identities of the alt right and radical liberalism. Fascism thrives on the feeling of lacking control.
Jacob Mitchell
I used to think that a constitutional trace of the authoritarian mind was an atrophied sense of humor, but the aut-right proved me wrong these past couple of years.
Parker Garcia
I love how you autists repeat this ad-nauseam but provid no real evidence. Just vauge conspiratorial claims or some ridiculous conflation of Soros funding media matters and BLM with him funding revolutionary communist groups.
Meanwhile there is direct evidence of the CIA and Ruling class directly cultivating far-right groups throughout history.
The claim that we are controlled opposition has got to be some of the most ridiculous projection imaginable.
Jackson Fisher
The radical right is also controlled opposition, don't worry. Well, it is until it becomes absolutely necessary for it to no longer be "controlled". It has its own network of NGO funding sources, centered around the Pentagon nowadays.
George Soros is one of many billionaires whose money finds its way leftist groups through various NGOs and foundations. Again, ask yourself, given that we know how quickly corporate America can effectively unperson someone, as we have seen them do to radical rightists, assuming that Communists are a serious threat, why haven't they un-personed Communists? It would be trivially easy. Yet, we have Communist mayors, open Communists working in major companies, Communist professors everywhere in universities, and so on.
Robert Robinson
To be clear: I mean the radical left/right in a Western context, at the current time. The main function of the radical left at the moment is to fight nationalism and encourage continued third-world immigration, in general alignment with the goals of the liberal elite in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Once the radical left has served its purpose in this regard, it will be disposed of if it starts to become a serious threat.
Julian Hernandez
Leftism is not controlled opposition, SJW idpol leftist groups are.
Bentley Johnson
It's not just SJWs. You just need to control enough leaders in order to get the group to do what you want it to do. The liberal establishment is funding radical leftists as ground troops against nationalism, because open borders and internationalism are in their economic and ideological interest. At the end of the day, leftist groups can mostly be counted on to line up behind the establishment liberal in the name of anti-racism and internationalism. This is not ALWAYS the case, but it happens often enough for it to work.
Justin Edwards
this. reminder that this idpol shit wasn't nearly as prevalent amongst the left before occupy wall street.
Noah Lewis
you act like everyone on this board doesn't want that to change. by fighting us you're empowering the SJWs that outnumber us.
Jack Brown
Is the 1960s just a mental black hole for you? idpol as a serious force more or less started in the 1960s. In the US this coincides with the Civil Rights Movement, which was heavily financially backed by rich white liberals and Jews. I can't speak for Europe here, though.
Chase Butler
imo 'idpol' is less a product of a deliberate conspiracy and more one of communicative capitalism and the changing way in which people deal with their emotions. We are dealing with long running cultural trends, the internet and its guinea pig mechanisms just made everything worse. watch this if you have some time.
Again this is a very vauge claim, I feel you are conflating funding media matter and BLM with funding Communists. If you have hard evidence of Soros funding anti-capitalist groups then lets see it.
You need to be able to justify this kind of heavy handed repression you are talking about on some kind of pretext. Its easy to do this with fascists because they are the boogieman of the urban middle classes and generally get very little sympathy from most people because their views are genuinely abhorrent.
While communist aren't exactly loved by most of the population many people would still see heavy handed oppression of them as violating liberal democratic values. Many just view us as misguided ideologues and not evil like Nazis. If the state and corporate America unpeopled us There would be a backlash from sympathetic journalists, the ACLU, academia, NGOs etc.
This heavy handed approach was taken by corporate America against the anti-capitalist left in the past but a certain amount of institutional power has been built up by the left especially in the taste making sphere. This doesn't prove we are controlled opposition though I do think you are right that corporate america does try to direct leftist energy into the no borders sphere because it is in their interest and generally unthreatening.
