Liberalism essentially attempts to prioritize human freedom 'libre'.
This conception of freedom is around the extension of old aristocratic privileges to the masses, essentially, the freedom to buy and sell that privilege and thus the extension of private property rights. Liberalism is 'every man is equal under the law, and a lord of his own property' as the maximization of human freedom. However, this conception of freedom clearly contains flaws, as while it contains a revolutionary framework that over throws the aristocratic, it does not seek a redistributive framework that overthrows existing bourgeoisie property or social relations, merely to put them on auction.
This is where Marx comes in, because he recognizes that the enrichment of the bourgeoisie to purchase these privileges requires the immiseration of the working classes. To say that privilege has been popularized and put on auction is, in practice, to privatize the commons and place morality enforcement on the public. This causes a myriad of problems, as bourgeoisie values that are given credence by the market, such as 'austerity' cannot be universal values as someone has to consume the products they produce in order for them to profit. And even more so, it causes economic problems as those who produce they goods cannot accumulate enough nessecery capital to buy them in order for the rate of profit to grow.
Essentially, leftists recognize liberalism as an incomplete social and economic revolution, that instead of recognizing the irrationality of it's systems and conceptions, clings to outdated ideas of freedom that are ultimately grounded in aristocratic privileges that were gained during times of barbarism.
Great response... Something I've been wondering about, how do leftists feel about immigration? For example the so called immigration crisis in the USA or in Europe? Or for example the concept of borders, like the southern border in the USA or the Mediterranean borders in Europe? How does the fact that the USA and Europe have in place borders to keep out the people who contribute in some ways, the most- to society?
For 'liberal' states, such as the U,S, and Europe (and modern Russia and China btw, but they are different political systems and structures), borders serve a two-fold strategy. First, it demarcates the areas where geopolitical imperialism is and is not acceptable. Now, this first one has been proven to be mostly theoretical, as both the U.S. and Europe practice low-level to mid-level imperial violence on their own subjects, killing and jailing dissidents, cracking down on protestors. However, high tier levels of genocide and total warfare are not considered acceptable within those borders, thus creating a 'core' as opposed to a 'periphery' of empire. This is why liberals will not blink at the killing of over a million Iraqis on false pretenses, but wring their hands because Marxists-Leninists commit a political purge within their own state (even though historically the nature and subjects of these purges are misunderstood, but that is another topic for another day). For them to call Russia an evil empire, but have no real substentive claims as to crimes outside of their own population is the greatest hypocrisy, but ultimately is completely understandable within the liberal framework. Because I live within these arbitrary borders soaked in blood, I have rights, you do not.
Second, it creates an easily controlled cheap 'illegal' workforce within the country that does not have the same rights as citizens. For example, the U.S. is in a labor shortage which means that we don't have an immigration problem, we have a lack of immigration problem. Now, TreadOnMe, you may ask, isn't it then within capital's interest to open up immigration further? Well, the issue within the U.S. is that because of price increases that have been caused due to the labor crisis, inflation, capital strike, and other compounding issues, it's just not worth it for immigrants to make the journey into the U.S. unless their situation is really desperate, and even then, most of these illegal immigrants are not the skilled laborers that are needed to solve the labor crisis because of a lack of investment in education. Once again, the 'market morality' of public austerity is actually what is stifling it's growth, and we will see if the market 'self-corrects' (hint: it won't, that is why they are trying to fund community college degrees in the U.S. but not 4-year colleges). But otherwise, for cheap illegal labor, this serves to undercut worker power at the core and serves as a method to cut wages and bust unions. China, for example, has a very strict immigration policy specifically in order to prevent this from happening, but also uses a wide-spread short term work visa system in order to supplement unskilld labor where it is needed within the system. Hence why it is more complex that a traditional liberal state, but still ultimately something of a liberal state.
I am not certain of the immigration and labor issue in Europe, but I would assume it is similar, if not the same.
However, there is also a third thing that does not have to do with the 'liberal state' but with the structure and nature of international capital itself. International capital has the ability to translate fairly fluidly between capitalist states, while labor is restricted in it's movements by both the state and lack of access to capital itself (remember what I was talking about that liberalism is an incomplete social and economic revolution, this is another major facet that has been built off of those exact same historical processes). However, what that means in practice is that capital is able to stay one step ahead of labor, moving freely from state to state. It is this failure to recognize the material inevitability of the international capitalist system within liberal unions of the U.S. that doomed them from the moment they compromised.
As western leftists, it is generally in our interests to oppose national borders and believe in universal immigration policies. While there may be a short term lowering of wages, without the threat of deportation over their heads the act of worker organization becomes an easier thing to push for nation-wide. It is reactionary to cut your nose off to spite your face, seek short term wage gains at the expense of long term values and goals.
That being said, believing that we can peacefully negotiate such a framework with capital is a fools game, as the entire liberal conception of their imperial project relies on these demarcations of state and culture, of writ large 'bodies and spaces'. Even 'liberal' liberals will always negotiate themselves away from free borders. Even free-market libertarians and Ayn Rand egoists want to enforce the frontier.
As western leftists, it is generally in our interests to oppose national borders and believe in universal immigration policies. While there may be a short term lowering of wages, without the threat of deportation over their heads the act of worker organization becomes an easier thing to push for nation-wide.
my personal belief is that all borders world wide should be abolished. I feel even more strongly about this when it comes to the Western Hemisphere (where I was born, have spent all my life). There is literally no sound argument for keeping our borders in place, unless citizens consider wasteful spending in support of paranoia and sentimentalismo to be "sound" thinking. I think you would mostly agree with this statement perhaps with some caveats? ie, it is a bit of a fool's errand.
While those are good sentiments to have, there is a good third-worldist argument for borders, in that they provide a legal framework that can protect state sovereignty and socialist projects from attack within the liberal global system. For instance, I think the dissolution of the U.S.-Mexico border would prove to be disastrous for the Mexican state because it would allow the U.S. military to cross over unimpeded into Mexican territory and threaten Mexican towns for no other reason than 'we think drugs are coming from there'. This is why they help fund border security with the U.S, it's basically a payoff to the U.S. military.
Now, is this a sustainable long-term view for a leftist to have? No, in my opinion. Is it even based in historical analysis? Not really, as the U.S. government historically funds whatever destabilizing groups it wants to within countries borders. Does that mean it is necessarily incorrect? Also no. There are good reasons to believe that disposing of the current liberal states framework without ALSO disposing of the model of imperium would lead to even more belligerent imperial conquest. HOWEVER, to paraphrase Brace Belden and quote Mao, political power comes from the barrel of a gun, if you can't protect it, it's already not yours. If your socialist project is completely dependent on the beneficence of the liberal global system, you are already fucked. That being said, be kind to your comrades who make these arguments, especially if they come from those countries, it is the most pragmatic stance they can take and thus completely understandable.
Ultimately we live in a word of historical development, not utopian idealism. The development of free borders will hopefully arise naturally from the natural conditions, and contradictions emerge between international capital, international labor and liberal states. Will it lead to a borderless future? We can only hope so.
RE the need to keep potentially, yes. We need to be sure that any change is done in a way that benefits the players as they need. Too often in the past, the USA has somehow managed to find a way to screw the developing countries over in ways that honestly I cannot even imagine how they do it. The partnerships end up seeming more like Faustian bargains than anything else, deals with the devil.
Correct. However, much like with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, sometimes a deal with the devil is what ultimately saves you, but you should never mistake the devil for your friend or an honest bargainer. And If the difference is bargain or destruction, it is better to bargain.
Again, ultimately it is unclear how these border changes will be made or progress, but thinking they will happen within the current economic framework is foolhardy at best. Perhaps it will occur within a non-capitalist framework after the revolution. Tough to say.
You're asking really great questions comrade. Proud of you.
Borders are an interesting one where it's not exactly a settled matter within leftist movements. Anarchists, or at least anyone deserving of being called one, are going to be against the concept of borders entirely. Governments or other oppressive bodies would be necessary for constructing/"defending" borders, so that's right out under anarchist ideologies. Different flavors of Marxists on the other hand have different ideas, but "workers of the world unite!" wasn't written by Marx in the Manifesto for nothing. National borders and national identity more broadly is seen as a reactionary concept that promotes an idealist conception of people over a class conception. Workers in different countries have far more in common with each other than the bourgeoisie from their own countries. A communist ideal society is stateless, classless, and moneyless (meaning money representating financial capital is not a standard of exchange). I'd say that leftists in general agree with that as a goal, but anarchists would not support using a "state" as a vehicle for reaching it. "Marxists" on the other hand (using Marxist loosely here, there are anarchist Marxists) would probably be okay with a socialist state existing to build towards that goal, and with a state tends to come state like things such as borders. That doesn't mean they'd enforce them or even draw them the same way as we do today, but it doesn't rule them out ideologically speaking. One of the central ideas of Marxist-Leninism is that workers must seize the power of the state in order to oppress the bourgeoisie (as opposed to the current arrangement where the bourgeois state oppresses the working class of course). Once their institutions have been thoroughly deconstructed Marxist-Leninists believe the state both can and should be phased out over time. Anarchists are either skeptical of this transition actually taking place or ideologically opposed to even a temporary state.
Liberalism essentially attempts to prioritize human freedom 'libre'.
This conception of freedom is around the extension of old aristocratic privileges to the masses, essentially, the freedom to buy and sell that privilege and thus the extension of private property rights. Liberalism is 'every man is equal under the law, and a lord of his own property' as the maximization of human freedom. However, this conception of freedom clearly contains flaws, as while it contains a revolutionary framework that over throws the aristocratic, it does not seek a redistributive framework that overthrows existing bourgeoisie property or social relations, merely to put them on auction.
This is where Marx comes in, because he recognizes that the enrichment of the bourgeoisie to purchase these privileges requires the immiseration of the working classes. To say that privilege has been popularized and put on auction is, in practice, to privatize the commons and place morality enforcement on the public. This causes a myriad of problems, as bourgeoisie values that are given credence by the market, such as 'austerity' cannot be universal values as someone has to consume the products they produce in order for them to profit. And even more so, it causes economic problems as those who produce they goods cannot accumulate enough nessecery capital to buy them in order for the rate of profit to grow.
Essentially, leftists recognize liberalism as an incomplete social and economic revolution, that instead of recognizing the irrationality of it's systems and conceptions, clings to outdated ideas of freedom that are ultimately grounded in aristocratic privileges that were gained during times of barbarism.
Great response... Something I've been wondering about, how do leftists feel about immigration? For example the so called immigration crisis in the USA or in Europe? Or for example the concept of borders, like the southern border in the USA or the Mediterranean borders in Europe? How does the fact that the USA and Europe have in place borders to keep out the people who contribute in some ways, the most- to society?
For 'liberal' states, such as the U,S, and Europe (and modern Russia and China btw, but they are different political systems and structures), borders serve a two-fold strategy. First, it demarcates the areas where geopolitical imperialism is and is not acceptable. Now, this first one has been proven to be mostly theoretical, as both the U.S. and Europe practice low-level to mid-level imperial violence on their own subjects, killing and jailing dissidents, cracking down on protestors. However, high tier levels of genocide and total warfare are not considered acceptable within those borders, thus creating a 'core' as opposed to a 'periphery' of empire. This is why liberals will not blink at the killing of over a million Iraqis on false pretenses, but wring their hands because Marxists-Leninists commit a political purge within their own state (even though historically the nature and subjects of these purges are misunderstood, but that is another topic for another day). For them to call Russia an evil empire, but have no real substentive claims as to crimes outside of their own population is the greatest hypocrisy, but ultimately is completely understandable within the liberal framework. Because I live within these arbitrary borders soaked in blood, I have rights, you do not.
Second, it creates an easily controlled cheap 'illegal' workforce within the country that does not have the same rights as citizens. For example, the U.S. is in a labor shortage which means that we don't have an immigration problem, we have a lack of immigration problem. Now, TreadOnMe, you may ask, isn't it then within capital's interest to open up immigration further? Well, the issue within the U.S. is that because of price increases that have been caused due to the labor crisis, inflation, capital strike, and other compounding issues, it's just not worth it for immigrants to make the journey into the U.S. unless their situation is really desperate, and even then, most of these illegal immigrants are not the skilled laborers that are needed to solve the labor crisis because of a lack of investment in education. Once again, the 'market morality' of public austerity is actually what is stifling it's growth, and we will see if the market 'self-corrects' (hint: it won't, that is why they are trying to fund community college degrees in the U.S. but not 4-year colleges). But otherwise, for cheap illegal labor, this serves to undercut worker power at the core and serves as a method to cut wages and bust unions. China, for example, has a very strict immigration policy specifically in order to prevent this from happening, but also uses a wide-spread short term work visa system in order to supplement unskilld labor where it is needed within the system. Hence why it is more complex that a traditional liberal state, but still ultimately something of a liberal state.
I am not certain of the immigration and labor issue in Europe, but I would assume it is similar, if not the same.
However, there is also a third thing that does not have to do with the 'liberal state' but with the structure and nature of international capital itself. International capital has the ability to translate fairly fluidly between capitalist states, while labor is restricted in it's movements by both the state and lack of access to capital itself (remember what I was talking about that liberalism is an incomplete social and economic revolution, this is another major facet that has been built off of those exact same historical processes). However, what that means in practice is that capital is able to stay one step ahead of labor, moving freely from state to state. It is this failure to recognize the material inevitability of the international capitalist system within liberal unions of the U.S. that doomed them from the moment they compromised.
As western leftists, it is generally in our interests to oppose national borders and believe in universal immigration policies. While there may be a short term lowering of wages, without the threat of deportation over their heads the act of worker organization becomes an easier thing to push for nation-wide. It is reactionary to cut your nose off to spite your face, seek short term wage gains at the expense of long term values and goals. That being said, believing that we can peacefully negotiate such a framework with capital is a fools game, as the entire liberal conception of their imperial project relies on these demarcations of state and culture, of writ large 'bodies and spaces'. Even 'liberal' liberals will always negotiate themselves away from free borders. Even free-market libertarians and Ayn Rand egoists want to enforce the frontier.
my personal belief is that all borders world wide should be abolished. I feel even more strongly about this when it comes to the Western Hemisphere (where I was born, have spent all my life). There is literally no sound argument for keeping our borders in place, unless citizens consider wasteful spending in support of paranoia and sentimentalismo to be "sound" thinking. I think you would mostly agree with this statement perhaps with some caveats? ie, it is a bit of a fool's errand.
While those are good sentiments to have, there is a good third-worldist argument for borders, in that they provide a legal framework that can protect state sovereignty and socialist projects from attack within the liberal global system. For instance, I think the dissolution of the U.S.-Mexico border would prove to be disastrous for the Mexican state because it would allow the U.S. military to cross over unimpeded into Mexican territory and threaten Mexican towns for no other reason than 'we think drugs are coming from there'. This is why they help fund border security with the U.S, it's basically a payoff to the U.S. military.
Now, is this a sustainable long-term view for a leftist to have? No, in my opinion. Is it even based in historical analysis? Not really, as the U.S. government historically funds whatever destabilizing groups it wants to within countries borders. Does that mean it is necessarily incorrect? Also no. There are good reasons to believe that disposing of the current liberal states framework without ALSO disposing of the model of imperium would lead to even more belligerent imperial conquest. HOWEVER, to paraphrase Brace Belden and quote Mao, political power comes from the barrel of a gun, if you can't protect it, it's already not yours. If your socialist project is completely dependent on the beneficence of the liberal global system, you are already fucked. That being said, be kind to your comrades who make these arguments, especially if they come from those countries, it is the most pragmatic stance they can take and thus completely understandable.
Ultimately we live in a word of historical development, not utopian idealism. The development of free borders will hopefully arise naturally from the natural conditions, and contradictions emerge between international capital, international labor and liberal states. Will it lead to a borderless future? We can only hope so.
RE the need to keep potentially, yes. We need to be sure that any change is done in a way that benefits the players as they need. Too often in the past, the USA has somehow managed to find a way to screw the developing countries over in ways that honestly I cannot even imagine how they do it. The partnerships end up seeming more like Faustian bargains than anything else, deals with the devil.
Correct. However, much like with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, sometimes a deal with the devil is what ultimately saves you, but you should never mistake the devil for your friend or an honest bargainer. And If the difference is bargain or destruction, it is better to bargain.
Again, ultimately it is unclear how these border changes will be made or progress, but thinking they will happen within the current economic framework is foolhardy at best. Perhaps it will occur within a non-capitalist framework after the revolution. Tough to say.
You're asking really great questions comrade. Proud of you.
Borders are an interesting one where it's not exactly a settled matter within leftist movements. Anarchists, or at least anyone deserving of being called one, are going to be against the concept of borders entirely. Governments or other oppressive bodies would be necessary for constructing/"defending" borders, so that's right out under anarchist ideologies. Different flavors of Marxists on the other hand have different ideas, but "workers of the world unite!" wasn't written by Marx in the Manifesto for nothing. National borders and national identity more broadly is seen as a reactionary concept that promotes an idealist conception of people over a class conception. Workers in different countries have far more in common with each other than the bourgeoisie from their own countries. A communist ideal society is stateless, classless, and moneyless (meaning money representating financial capital is not a standard of exchange). I'd say that leftists in general agree with that as a goal, but anarchists would not support using a "state" as a vehicle for reaching it. "Marxists" on the other hand (using Marxist loosely here, there are anarchist Marxists) would probably be okay with a socialist state existing to build towards that goal, and with a state tends to come state like things such as borders. That doesn't mean they'd enforce them or even draw them the same way as we do today, but it doesn't rule them out ideologically speaking. One of the central ideas of Marxist-Leninism is that workers must seize the power of the state in order to oppress the bourgeoisie (as opposed to the current arrangement where the bourgeois state oppresses the working class of course). Once their institutions have been thoroughly deconstructed Marxist-Leninists believe the state both can and should be phased out over time. Anarchists are either skeptical of this transition actually taking place or ideologically opposed to even a temporary state.
depends if "just leftist" or marxist