Much as I personally dislike them, I feel this thread is doing a disservice to circus clowns.
These sorts of arguments boil down to a few big themes:
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Academics horrified that liberal, not conservative, students are screaming at them for hosting / talking about verboten things that were marked as such by the students, not the academics. This is a real apple-cart turnover moment in academia and probably 75% or so of all the impetus for all these debates. Even during the protests of the 60s-70s there was never a sense that the students were going after them, per se.
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The collapse of the higher end of conservative academia. There’s probably a lot of reason for this, including not even entering academia anymore to begin with, but a big part is the changing nature of conservative academia as well, which is mostly obsessed with culture war issues, and mostly is what you might call ‘crypto-religious’, ie, scratch a culture war conservative, and you’ll find a bible underneath, whatever arguments they put forward in public. The decline of the status of educators in culture is also a big part of this as well (smart academia inclined conservatives will probably tend to be more interested in making money, in general, than their opposite progressive counterparts).
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The traditional alignment of liberty-ism / libertarianism / individualism in American political and academic culture is in serious jeopardy in the face of problems that can only be confronted collectively. By and large any attempt to collective problems just faces a stone wall of “No - Communism” by the remaining Conservat-gensia. Much of the kicking and screaming by conservative commentators is trying to Make Sure This Does Not Happen, because for them, they’d rather the world burn than give up some of those individual rights.
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There no theory of capitalism anymore that makes sense, either on the right or left. The ability of complexly traded, “instrument” driven wealth to effectively ‘invent’ wealth in a more or less never ending money-making scheme really breaks all the old theories and can’t be put together again. But, for conservatives, doubting capitalism is effectively not permitted. This isn’t helped that, as i just said, nobody has a great theory of what’s going on, so liberals don’t really have a counter theory either.
I wouldn’t say they do in the immediate term in our country, but it’s certainly happened in other ones.
Marx did account for this, though.
I’ll just come back to the original question:
What justifies this framing?
In recent years, a long-standing global consensus about the value of liberalism as a political and economic order has begun to erode. Where once disagreements concerned differing interpretations of liberalism’s demands or balancing liberalism’s conflicting goals of freedom and equality, now populist movements on both the left and the right are challenging the legitimacy of liberalism itself.
You don’t have to be the Marx police in every single thread, especially when somebody’s discussing “all theories of capitalism on the left and right”.
I liked this part by Deneen, who I think I would generally disagree with:
In my view, democracy is largely a legitimation mechanism for liberalism. If democracy—or, let’s say, the will and view of the demos—can be sufficiently constrained within liberal forms, if it can be backstopped and qualified whenever necessary to achieve liberal ends, then liberalism and democracy can be seen to go together. But largely, the democratic component functions as an ongoing performance of consent. It’s a performance that reenacts the fictional moment of consent when our forebears signed the social contract agreeing to a liberal regime. When that form of consent takes an illiberal turn, then it’s no longer called democracy; it’s called populism. But it’s the same thing. It’s the will of the people being expressed. Within a liberal order, one of those expressions is seen as legitimate, and one is seen as illegitimate.
I think the article itself is showing Deneen’s framing, where any departure from the center is considered illiberal populism. So the article sees movement to the left in younger generations in the US as an example of a rejection of liberalism.
Essentially, this seems a very conservative view of liberalism. On the one hand, I feel sure Deneen would say that e.g. Sweden, its government and policies, are well within the confines of liberalism. On the other, anyone in e.g. the US who wants some of those same policies is rejecting liberalism.
We aren’t talking about the US alone here, are we?
I think within mainstream US politics, the threat certainly comes from the right. But globally, I think we’ve definitely seen actual implemented attacks waged from the left.
Well, the world is a big place, and ‘attacks’ can be broadly defined. But I feel pretty confident they’re talking about the part of the world where something like liberalism has held sway, not the part where it really hasn’t. You’ve can’t really talk about challenging the legitimacy of liberalism in places with no history or tradition of liberalism. So I’m struggling to see the examples within that world. Maybe you can point them out, since you see them?
Given the timeframe in which he was working and the tools which he had available to him, Marx’s insights into the nature and workings of capitalism are nothing short of astonishing, certainly vastly closer to reality than most of the useful idiots who have come after him.
Anyone who says differently is a circus clown.
I think you can find historical challenges from the Far Left both violent (Rote Armee, Brigate Rosse) and political, But all of the violent one are almost half a century old at this point and thoroughly discredited. And the political ones have either come to their senses (i.e., have moderated) or are thoroughly discredited (especially after the Ukraine war started). Also not sure any of these have ever been more than marginal movements - but even if there were in the past, I can’t think of any that could be classified as such today.
2017 Labour + SNP probably fits that criterion in terms of threatening to gain power. But I would agree the illberal left is still extremely weak in actual electoral politics - I’m not aware of any other parallels to Corbyn’s partial success, so that is looking more like a blip than a trend - they are more visibile in media and social media.
Sure, as long as we accept that social democracy is still liberal market based capitalism, however much right wing american commentators would call it socialism and imply its communism.
You see plenty of rejection of capitalism in its entireity as well.
I don’t think they are circus clowns. There are many movements and academics and charities which are now extremely illiberal in outlook - they just haven’t accumulated direct power over electoral politics (while they do wield some indirect influence)
That’s kind of the point. Using this definition of liberalism, I would say that the “quite far left” are rapidly becoming less liberal. (As distinct from what has happened on the right in the US, which seems to be more the political center of gravity moving into crazy-town territory and all that implies, including abandoning liberalism). The “quite far left” have not become more extreme in general policy but have become much less “liberal” in worldview.
Marx is a circus clown whose colon is a clown car, and each of the colons of the clowns unloading from Marx’s colon is also a clown car, and so on, in the endless cloacal fractal recursion that some call “socialism” but I call CLOWN ASSPOCALYPSE.
Also, socialists are just middle-class kids tryin’ to come on like homosexual junkies or Black Panthers. They may be master debaters, and they certainly do a lot of master debating, but I got their liberal order RIGHT HERE! And they ain’t gonna regulate MY market. Woo!
As someone who has read quite a lot of Marx, I’m definitely in the circus clown car there.
I remember their first Peel session.
Congratulations. I just re-read this in Ric Flair mode and it was even funnier.
Corbyn was still within what i would cinsider the liberal concensus. A twat but not authoritarian revolutionary.
That’s interesting, never made it to Book 3. But skimming the chapter and some adjacent ones, it’s clear he doesn’t really understand instruments becoming in and of themselves “capital” - his project of course is to undo the link of labor and capital, so he sees the accumulation of wealth through arbitrage of instruments both a kind of money-lending that’s well known and a kind of useful fiction by industrialists the make ‘capital’ more portable (in effect) and liquid, to use our terms. His whole framing it as ‘fictitious’ is a moral judgement against financial instruments in general. It might be a bit of a window why when a country turns communist it almost immediately runs into a liquidity problem, since he doesn’t have a clear idea what to do about money.
I think he might enjoy trying to deconstruct the modern post-industrial economy - he might well fail at doing so. Taking loans out on rising stock values (converting paper wealth to real wealth) doesn’t seem to have occurred to him - he specifically states that stock in industrial firms is only a portion of future profits, not instantly convertible to portable ‘capital’. Of course, he’s writing in the 1850s.
He never imagined that i could create a VC firm, instantly be worth billions, get investors from other VC firms (also worth billions) from all over the world (whose actual value is much less regulated), the invest that capital in complex financial instruments, which as also driven by private wealth off the books, which also invests in other instruments, and other instruments, into other VC firms, ect, and then when i sell out for, say, 10 billion, and then the firm collapses, that money in effect was ‘imagined into existence’ with very, very tenuous relationships to capital - or labor, or anything real (and which equals or exceeds the value of massive things - like all the production of corn in Kansas, for ex., extremely easily). Now do this a thousand times a year, or more, globally. This has absolutely massive warping effects on the global economic system.
I think the idea that Labour + SNP were anti- small-l-liberal in 2017, or really at any time, is kind of weird.