HeavenlyPossumPeople like Peter Thiel are #libertarian in the sense that they want the liberty to do whatever they want to you without censure or consequence.
Once you understand that right libertarians advocate for their own freedom to dominate others, and not for freedom generally, their overlap with outright Nazis makes a lot more sense than their rhetoric about liberty would seem at first glance.
mosttoast@HeavenlyPossum yeah it's easy to spot w/r/t the civil war: "It wasn't about slavery, it was about state's rights!" -> ...the state's right to do what?
Bella Ciao appreciator@mosttoast @HeavenlyPossum so called libertarians justifying a war to own other human beings as property on the grounds of states rights, states being an entity they supposedly want to abolish, really just says it all.
Bob K Mertz 
@HeavenlyPossum
I think it's also important to note that this isn't all libertarians. I think it's highly possible that the right legitimately saw libertarians as a threat and their goal was to muddy the waters in order to create a stigma around the party. They've done just that and it's sad because the fundamentals of the party genuinely do match values of many voters that feel stuck with the lesser of two evils.
I think it's also important to note that this isn't all libertarians. I think it's highly possible that the right legitimately saw libertarians as a threat and their goal was to muddy the waters in order to create a stigma around the party. They've done just that and it's sad because the fundamentals of the party genuinely do match values of many voters that feel stuck with the lesser of two evils.
Phronomix@bobkmertz @HeavenlyPossum Fascists love to co-opt leftist words & symbols. You’re right; they took the name “Libertarian”& perverted it from the socialist meaning. They’re also trying to do it with “anarchist”.
It’s worth asking why the libertarian party was so readily “coopted” by fascists if their fundamentals were so different from those of the fascists.
@HeavenlyPossum
The same can be asked of the Republican and Democrat parties at points in their history as well. Hell, it can be asked of America in general.
We're at a point now where we stereotype everyone based on a party. People are far more unique than 2 or 3 set demographics. The problem is FAR deeper than any single problem. Even the current Republican party isn't the root problem but, rather, a symptom.
The Democratic and Republican parties are simply parties of the capital class. So are the libertarians; they simply pretended they cared about liberty in any substantive way.
Acklam PincemailleIn french we have two separate words wich clarifies a bit:
* "Libertaire" is near the same thing as anarchist. No doubt that it is a revolutionary leftist.
* "Libertarien" is basically the liberal trend of a part of the far-right. No doubt that it is a "raclure de fond de chiottes de l'humanité".
Off course, we also have a few clowns who label themselves as "ancaps" but it realy is right libertarian with a mustach.
Yes, in the US, the ancap Murray Rothbard bragged about having stolen the term “libertarian” from the left and co-opted it for his own purposes.
Chris Real@HeavenlyPossum All tentacles lead to Thiel.
ben chambers 🏴@HeavenlyPossum as it was since the beginning, theirs is the liberty of the slaveholder
sofia ☮️🏴@HeavenlyPossum Peter Thiel isn't a libertarian of any kind, or else he wouldn't work for the government's murder industry… he's also really anti-market, btw. he seem boring and unpleasant so i don't know much else about him…
"everyone is allowed everything" is just meaningless as soon as people don't agree on absolutely anything. and if everyone agreed there would be no difference between authoritarian and libertarian anyway.
grillchen@sofia @HeavenlyPossum peter thiel is an alt-right dude who would love to be seen as a libertarian because he thinks its cool
@grillchen which is super weird… but i well, most people are very confused about freedom, and also i guess there is some extent of "if we say we like freedom" people won't think we are that bad. and i guess it's easy to say for people who think freedom is meaningless, i dunno…
@HeavenlyPossum generally in the authoritarian view, if you what you are allowed to do is determined by your status, in the libertarian view it's determined by bodily autonomy and consent.
Which is why libertarianism—any substantive libertarianism, not just the pretend propertarian kind—is incompatible with capitalism.
redcat@HeavenlyPossum @sofia this. And 'everyone does what they want' without saving minorities nit just tolerates, but even assures that self-organization will create asymmetric relationships where the stronger, more powerful, more wealthy ones dominate others.
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https://chaos.social/@redcat/110823806515651371
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https://chaos.social/@redcat/110823806515651371
redcat (@[email protected])
#Minderheitenschutz braucht Regeln im Umgang miteinander und eine Gemeinschaft, die diese Regeln durchsetzt gegen Ausbeutung und Schlechtbehandlung von Minderheiten durch stärkere oder brutalere, gleichgültige, missgünstige oder boswillige, hass- oder profitgetriebene Gewalttäter. Ist das noch anarchistisch? Ja. Weil Freiheit und #Emanzipation der Gesellschaft benötigt, dass die Gemeinschaft Individuen gegen entstehende asymmetrische Herrschaftsbeziehungen unterstützt. (1/3) #Anarchismus
@HeavenlyPossum the problem is that (anti-)capitalism has different meanings, libertarian and authoritarian one, and modern leftism muddles them.
libertarian "anti-capitalism" (what i like to call anti-bossism) is against centralized control in organisations and highly unequal wealth distributions. in this view, the exploitation of workers is what economists call rent-seeking. bosses basically taxing the value created between worker and consumer.
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@HeavenlyPossum
authoritarian "anti-capitalism" is against economic freedom, is at the core of marxism and other state-socialist ideologies. here exploitation just kinda happens when people are free to engage in wage labour, blaming the victims, while workplace hierarchies are probably just part of making efficient business. inefficiencies are blamed on the "anarchy of the market". because they think power is productive and freedom is not.
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@HeavenlyPossum the first is pretty commonplace in any marxism 101s. what they can't acknowledge is that if workers and consumers were free to choose, and everyone would be able to freely compete with the bosses, than the market would tend towards minimal exploitation.
the second you hear mostly from marxists after they are in power, but i think it's also somewhat implied in their concept of economic development.
@HeavenlyPossum as for ancaps, yeah, they tend to be pretty apologetic about workplace hierarchies, too, for similar reasons as marxists. somehow they seem to assume that despite the massive market distortion by governments, the corporate structure would be close ruthlessly optimized.
but most of them just don't care about corporate structure very much, and just treat business as black boxes.
@HeavenlyPossum basically in marxist ideology, value is exclusively created by labour, not capital or consumers.
and so the only way to not be exploited as a worker, is to demand the "full value", so much that employing you is not worth it. "non-exploitation" in the marxist sense just means bankrupting yourself.
an economic exchange is meant to benefit both parties, but in marxism that's not a thing. it's always zero-sum.
@HeavenlyPossum i think it's a bit like sin in much of christianity: the point isn't actually to see where bad things happen and how to prevent those as much as possible. but to declare it all as tained and in need of salvation from above (or from outside, at least).
i think the Communist Manifesto is also revealing here: cooperatives and unions are described as "experiments", but their party grabbing power is not an experiment, it's destiny.
Look, I’m not a Marxist and don’t have a particular dog in this fight, but this is not at all what Marx argued. He wrote extensively and obsessively about the process of capital extracting surplus value from labor; he worked for years trying to figure out the math. At no point did he argue that “it just happened.”
I don’t feel the need to belabor this. Your very first post just struck me as an odd framework for understanding anti-capitalist critique.
To be clear, Marx argued that specific mechanical processes within capitalism would eventually drive its transformation into communism—not destiny, but internal contradictions within the system. He believed capitalism would eventually immiserate workers to the point that those workers would have no choice but revolution against capital.
I think he was wrong, but he certainly didn’t argue that it was just going to happen like magic someday. It was Lenin, not Marx, who obsessed over the idea of a vanguard party necessary to lead the proletariat in revolution.
@HeavenlyPossum i didn't say there would be, i would hope that's how we get rid of them. i don't think managers do exclusively useless things, but whatever useful things they might do are probably better achieved in a non-hierarchical manner.
maybe the categories of workers and consumers themselves would melt into more dynamic cooperative relationships.
but it's not for me to decide how others organize, i just want the freedom to choose and see what seems to work best…
lain@sofia @HeavenlyPossum @redcat i agree with you 100% but i don't think you're getting to the bottom of rent seeking, which is violence
@HeavenlyPossum https://youtu.be/xZfq9ivpLCY remains the best video I’ve seen on how right wingers hijack libertarianism and freedom from their left wing origins.
*quiet@HeavenlyPossum "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. . . . 'Libertarians' . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists. . . . But now we had taken it over."
Gives me some Rufo "We have decodified the term [critical race theory] and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans" vibes.