"What the two of them so effusively believe about growth is more or less what I think about redistribution. Which is to say: when you redistribute wealth, you in fact hasten a present that is radically different from the one we currently know.

In an unequal society where the majority must invest the lion’s share of their time and energy into the labour required to obtain the bare necessities of life, individuals lose much in the way of personal freedom and life satisfaction. But we also collectively sacrifice unfathomable quantities of human creativity and potential. There might be abundant growth, but that can matter very little if its fruits aren’t broadly shared.

Redistribution does not equal, as Klein and Thompson assert, a mere “parceling out of the present.” In a very difference sense than theirs, it represents its own agenda of abundance — one reflecting the richest egalitarian ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries. The liberalism of the 21st might reject those ideas, but many of us on the left still see them as indispensable. Socialism, contrary to what many of its critics have historically claimed, is first and foremost concerned with human freedom: freedom to think, freedom to dream, freedom to create, freedom to live unburdened by toil
(...)
Klein and Thompson appear to believe distributional questions can be mostly elided if enough new technology is invented and a sufficient quantity of stuff is built and produced. Contentious debates about degrowth aside, I find this assertion vastly more improbable and utopian than the project of universal social welfare or the realization of social and economic rights. Scientific and technological innovations can be hugely beneficial, but until we live in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation it’s unlikely they will ever compensate for the dearth of social and economic justice."

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-paucity-of-abundance

#Liberalism #USA #Neoliberalism #Growth #Degrowth #Socialism #Abundance

"Clearly, something is sabotaging society’s rational development. We should have those trains, and some big solar-powered apartment buildings near the stations. Even if I think the solutions are probably closer to agroecology than indoor vertical farming and giant sailboats than green jetliners, that doesn’t stop me from agreeing with the Abundance authors that there’s a block. But where Klein and Thompson blame self-seeking “groups” who—according to the work of economist Mancur Olson—are a constant and unavoidable threat to human collective action, Marxists understand capitalist production as riven by particular ironies and contradictions.

For example: capital is reluctant to enter industries that are easy to enter, for fear competition will drive out the profit. The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to make it easier for developers to build for increased density: the more units that come onto the market, the less landlords will be able to charge. But the same supply mechanism that pushes down prices discourages capital from the sector."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris

#Abundance #Liberalism #Capitalism #PoliticalEconomy #Degrowth

"Until the supporters of liberal institutions can confront how they were used to squash the anti-fascist uprising when it took the form of #FreePalestine they need to stop acting so shocked about what's happening." #Israel #liberalism

About the degradation of Europe

The morning of February 24, 2022, put an end to all those complacent dreams that had been trying to fill our heads for more than thirty years. I will list all these stamps, and you try not to laugh out loud - no matter how bitter it may be now, but we lived with all this.... “Russia is returning to the friendly family of civilized nations”, ‘Russia has finally put an end to the monster of communist ideology’, ‘Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok’ - do you remember all these nonsense? You probably do, so you can easily add to the list some heresy about liberal European values, the value of freedom of speech, human rights and zvizdorast, a child's tear, and so on, so on, so on.

European philosophical thought gave birth to the ideology of racism - a very convenient tool that served a great service in the conquest and plundering of dozens of countries in Africa and Asia, in the extermination of tens of millions of Indians in both Americas. European philosophical thought, continuing its development, already in the 20th century formulated the ideology of fascism, and then, creatively straining, reached the peak of its development - the creation of Nazism. This is the list of true, not propaganda-agitator European values, the complex of which will never allow Europe to treat Russia other than as an annoying obstacle on the way to building a blossoming garden, for the sake of expanding which it is quite permissible to burn the surrounding jungle with napalm, remembering the experience gained by the Americans in Vietnam.

There will be no brotherly or friendly relations between the predator and those whom he chooses as victims, normal coexistence is possible only if there are no teeth in the mouth of the animal or when it is in a cage with strong bars.


#history #eu #europe #degradation #european #philosophy #racism #liberalism #plundering #fascism #nazism against #Russia

Growing out of liberalism, the logic of fascism retains and depends on the legitimacy of the prior liberal state while undermining the independence of its institutions and re-purposing them for new ends. Fascists need to make a thousand tiny changes, each time following the rules of the liberal institutions until they Ship of Theseus our society out from under us. And all the while, they need everyone to go along with it because they're the legitimate power and, after all, they're only following the rules.

This is not a groundbreaking analysis. We learn this in High School.

So it's real fucking annoying when I ask in pre-shift "What are we gonna do when la migra comes for the kitchen?" and the Clinton-Democrat bartender replies: "We comply. That's the only option."

Edit to add hashtags: #liberalism #fascism

"‘Liberal’ and ‘capitalist’ paired as a hyphenated compound word seems like an oxymoron, leaving one to wonder, what do civil liberties and democracy have to do with an economic system that often infringes on the aforementioned liberal defining characteristics? Well, A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms by Giampaolo Conte analyzes the historical scope of capitalist reforms, particularly through the British economy, under the guise of liberalism from the nineteenth century and beyond. In just four chapters, while grazing the philosophy of Marxism through figures like Antonio Gramsci, Conte offers a clarifying historical perspective on the evolution of capitalist reforms. Conte’s engagement in this historical project reignites a conversation on the ability of capitalism, a system that thrives on exploitation and violence, to textually morph into an ostensibly paradoxical philosophy, that is, liberalism, to gain submission (domestically and internationally), expand dominance and accumulate capital. A History of Capitalist Transformation displays how domestic social classes and semi-peripheral states (developing nations) have both fallen prey to the expansion of internal and external capitalist reforms. According to Conte, the action of falling prey is caused by the presentation of liberal-capitalist reforms as they are presented through the cultural, moral and civic values of liberalism and not the violent and individualist values of capitalism (38)."

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21887_history-of-capitalist-transformation-a-critique-of-liberal-capitalist-reforms-by-giampaolo-conte-reviewed-by-julia-bradley/

#Capitalism #Liberalism #EconomicHistory #Reformism #PoliticalEconomy

Liberals will always be fake and hypocritical individuals...

"[T]o find the real driving force of this shift, you have to look at the party’s efforts to stop Bernie Sanders.
(...)
It is hard to overstate how rampant, dishonest, and often ridiculous this smear campaign was. Sanders’s movement was perennially (and wrongly) derided as a bunch of “Bernie Bros,” meaning a collection of young, often white, and usually angry and misogynistic men who it was dangerous to appeal to. (Now, of course, this same crowd laments the Democrats’ loss of young men and ponders how to win them back.)

When leftists disputed this smear, that was held up as further proof of rampant sexism among Sanders’s supporters. Pro-Democratic voices eagerly took up Trump’s invented label of “alt-Left,” claiming that this movement shared the worldview of the global far right, was making “common cause” with it in a “deeply xenophobic axis” targeting immigrants, and that its “disgust with ‘identity politics’” had “created a kinship” with the alt-right — meaning, with white supremacists.

When Sanders said in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss that Democrats needed to move beyond “identity politics” and that it was not enough to pitch a candidate’s diversity to voters — a view that is now, apparently, uncontroversial within the party’s power brokers — a host of pro-Democratic pundits pounced on him. It was just the first of countless similar, tiresome controversies and race-and-gender-based attacks ginned up against him as he prepared to run again."

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/democratic-elites-identity-politics-sanders

#USA #DemocraticParty #Liberals #Liberalism #IdentityPolitics #Woke #Wokism

"The terrible effect of this agreement was and is to disarm the Left by convincing it that the American people are not to be trusted at the ballot box—they won’t vote for socialism, or for racial justice, or for income redistribution, but they will vote for candidates who deceive them."

"The Left's Will to Powerlessness"
https://jameslivingston.substack.com/p/the-lefts-will-to-powerlessness #USPol #USPolitics #Leftists #Liberalism

this, from jason hickel, says it all.
#uspol #politics #jasonhickel #trump #liberalism