Sorry, I know debatebro-ism is the 12th type of liberalism :denguin:
Disappointed by Wolff tbh. He's too moralizing, comes off as a Christian Socialist. He's also long winded, yeah I know it was a live debate but he should've been able to make his points more focused. He also hangs on to dead ends (Socialism's definition isn't amorphous, Mondragon is good, etc.) which he doesn't need to. He basically rolls over to Destiny's weird hostility to using history and class relations to explain modes of production, doesn't put enough emphasis in them as processes instead of things that people just enact one day.
He had a deluge of bad takes, but what got me was how ridiculously smug he was about knowing literally nothing about the historical development of modes of production. Wolff was doing the most basic explanation of how class relations have evolved into the ones under Capitalism and he just accuses him of "talking about random historical facts" :smoothskin:
It was definitely kind of concerning to see how hostile the chat was to any discussion of history, specifically feudalism. Any history except for WW2, the Civil Rights Movement, Gandhi, or the collapse of the USSR is anathema to liberals. They hate it so much it just doesn't even exist for them. But Wolff had to bring this up because Steve kept saying that Mondragon isn't actually socialist because it must exist inside global capitalism and sometimes works with private enterprise; Wolff's retort was simply that capitalism in its beginnings likewise had to exist inside of and alongside feudalism. This infuriates liberals because they are forced to admit that things have not always been the same, that "human nature" depends on material circumstance and vice-versa, and that capitalism itself could even be viewed as an aberration.
Destiny was super snide & disrespectful
It's like yeah, the old guy is gonna talk a lot, but you obviously understand what he's saying or you wouldn't fidget so hard when Wolff brings up the word "history"
A true liberal. Let's talk about platonic ideals and first principals not historical facts.