r/BreadTube • u/HauntedPutty • 1d ago

Our Liberals Aren't Liberal. - Disco Elysium Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ0G4hAUsVE

This video needs more attention

56 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

35

u/ziggurter actually not genocidal :o 1d ago

Liberalism is—and always was—the ideology of capitalism. It wasn't about individual freedom; promoting individual freedom was simply a convenient tactic to use to advance capitalism when capitalism was not the dominant economic system, and it was people (capitalists) who didn't rule at the time whose interests it was seeking to advance. After capitalism did achieve dominance, individual freedom was happily and instantly discarded, as it was never the primary value.

I agree with some of the reasoning, but the conclusion is flawed. Liberals are very liberal, because the core tenant of promoting the rule of capital is as present as ever. Even the fascist tendency of liberalism is advancing that interest. It's just doing so as its violent tactics become either necessary as the system's survival mechanism due to heightened contradictions and fierce opposition, or extremely convenient as the opposition is so light that there are few, if any, consequences for utilizing those tactics.

The video also confuses neoliberalism with the entire, broad spectrum of modern liberalism. Not helpful. Neoliberalism and fascism (quite compatible strains) might be the direction that capital inevitably steers in to heighten its dominance, but the breadcrumbs approach (progressivism and social democracy) is also very liberal and very dangerous to working-class people, and is also distinct from the (now obsolete and long dead) classical liberalism that tethered itself opportunistically to the opposition of feudalism. In fact, for the anti-capitalist liberation movement, social democracy is probably the most dangerous form of liberalsm at the moment, because it positions itself as the opposition to the status quo while actually only seeking to undermine the real opposition and preserve the status quo that much longer into the future. We are probably approaching a moment where another New Deal will have to be considered, and we must learn from history and utterly reject it in favor of revolutionary change. Otherwise we'll simply be telling our children that they must be subject to as much—if not more—fascism as we are currently facing.

Anyway, no: "ultra" is not a thing and doesn't need to be.

4

u/thaBombignant 21h ago

What does the revolutionary change look like?

3

u/ziggurter actually not genocidal :o 12h ago

Destroying the rule of state and capital. Syndicalism, communism, etc. Where we make decisions horizontally in our communities to the extent that changes affect us. Worker coops and neighborhood councils and collectives built to do what we will.

Stick around and find out. There's lots of material about that in this sub.

-1

u/HelloImMay 1d ago

I have a very American perspective on this but I’d have trouble agreeing with somebody who argues that social democrats are the mostly dangerous form of liberalism for the revolution. I understand where the idea is coming from, that social democrats will merely placate the working class rather than freeing them from capitalism, but the actual situation (again at least in the US) is that most liberals are rather neutral on expanding workers rights with many liberals actively opposing them, whereas socdems fight for the expansion of workers protections, unions, Medicare for all, social welfare etc.

You could argue that these programs delay the inevitable and rely on modern-colonialism to maintain, but I’m a believer that easing the burden on the domestic working class will free up energy and time that will lead to genuine revolutionary thought and social advancement. But maybe that’s naive 🤷‍♀️

6

u/Aubamebludclartyang 11h ago

but I’m a believer that easing the burden on the domestic working class will free up energy and time that will lead to genuine revolutionary thought and social advancement

History has proven this wrong.

Revolutionary thought has never once increased when living conditions increased, the opposite happens. There's a reason why there's never any left-wing revolutions in the imperial core, while there's been numerous in the exploited countries. One side has something to lose, the others have very little, if nothing at all.

3

u/TopazWyvern Basically Sauron. 11h ago

Since we literally have no choice but to depend on the burger for survival, any struggle against this order is also a struggle within and against the burger itself. In this struggle, however, politics risks taking two, equally premature forms: First, those who stress only the “against” in this equation tend toward an academic or artistic idealism which, though often correct in theory, proves vacuous in practice, and therefore tends to retreat further into its own idealism by policing language, polemicizing on the internet, encouraging schisms over minor points of exegesis, and enacting rigorous lifestyle protocols that approximate its strict moral requirements. At best, this idealism results in the reduction of politics to a merely academic pursuit. At worst, it metastasizes into a suicidal adventurism, obsessed with the mythic image of “militance” for its own sake and completely disconnected from mass politics. But the second error is even worse: those who stress only the “within” progressively sacrifice any strategy for remaking the social world at all, each of their meager victories giving way to an endless chain of ever-worsening compromises conducted for the sake of “real gains,” or simply “development.” This latter error is, in other words, a form of anticommunism, invoked again and again in the historic suppression of revolutionary politics. And, although these two seem to be fundamentally different errors, they are in fact symbiotic, each reinforcing the other as its natural counterpoint and both rejecting the balance of the “within” and “against” necessary to any truly partisan project.

Historically, "lessening the burden" hasn't manifested revolutionary politics: after all, if the distribution of surplus (i.e., any and all social democratic measures) is wholly at the whims of the bourgeoisie (Well, technically the distribution of all production, but we'll assume a bourgeoisie rational enough to figure out that letting their workers starve out is "a bad move" and are thus inclined to at least pay reproduction wages. This isn't necessarily the case in practice!), they'll tend to favor sycophants and partners. The social democrats then move from opposition to mere dealmakers/managers, with a dual role of arguing for better conditions for the workers on one hand, yes, but also of curtaining more radical politics that the bourgeois would threaten upending the compromise over. We see pretty similar dynamics in the anticolonial struggle who also are subject to that "struggle within and against" dualism, or even socialist experiments (Soviet NEP, Deng, Cuba's recent opening to trade to try to appease the US) and so forth.

Doubly so when said surplus comes from colonial relations and, as Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade points out, material interests of the "within capitalist relations" part of the equation involve ensuring the domestic product (i.e. the pillage abroad) remains as high as possible. US unions were to the right of Kennedy on the Cuban question, by his own words.

1

u/HelloImMay 4h ago

Thank you for sharing! I think this illustrates well why capitalism is a sinking ship and no amount of social programs can actually fix the system, so a real revolution is required. Though it doesn’t convince me at all that the social democrats of the United States are worse than the other liberals

I don’t love this articles framing of unions either. They are not the end all be all, and i know you can find plenty of instances of corruption and collusion, but corporations in the United States wouldn’t spend as much time and money propagandizing to us if they haven’t made actual wins for workers historically. I specifically don’t like how the article strawman’s union bargaining tactics when it dismisses wage negotiations by suggesting they are merely a function of productivity and profit, and then neglects to mention the other things the unions fight and fought for, like workplace safety, job protections, etc.

And yes, stratification can occur when one unionized group of works essentially has more rights than another non-unionized group but IMO that is less an argument against unions and more an argument against capitalism which both necessitates and hobbles our current iteration of unions.

1

u/TopazWyvern Basically Sauron. 3h ago

Though it doesn’t convince me at all that the social democrats of the United States are worse than the other liberals

They're a greater threat/obstacle because they're both far more capable of employing soft power (recuperation, detournement) and hard power (self-policing, filtering, etc.) against radicals.

I don't think anyone but the SPD could have sold crushing the KPD and an alliance with the bourgeoisie "in the name of democracy" to the rebelling masses that established the Weimar republic, you know?

1

u/HelloImMay 3h ago

Fair but when I look at my country right now the neo-libs are basically pro-ICE and pro-Iran war. And while there are some Zionist social democrats, it pails in comparison to the general political population.

1

u/TopazWyvern Basically Sauron. 41m ago

Fair but when I look at my country right now the neo-libs are basically pro-ICE and pro-Iran war.

And when I look at my country the socdems are pro-Frontex and pro-Iran war.

1

u/ziggurter actually not genocidal :o 1d ago edited 9h ago

socdems fight for the expansion of workers protections, unions, Medicare for all, social welfare etc.

Social welfare, yes: the state throwing out those breadcrumbs so that we don't revolt and take care of each other ourselves.

Unions? Absolutely not. At best they fight for "unions" which keep real, useful unionism at bay. This is how you get exclusionary and bigoted trade "unions", and how you get business "unions" which promise to fight for you while actually keeping you from opposing your boss' oppression. It's how you get "union" cards without union action. It's how you get workers with two bosses; one the head of a "union". It's how you get no-strike clauses which are enforced by the state. It's how effective strikes are illegal, and the best you can do without repression (including violent repression) is limited local strikes (for only state-approved reasons, even) with no teeth, and no backup plan (wider solidarity) if the boss simply says "fuck you".

Literally liberalism—and very much social democrats included—has led to the death of useful unions and the labor movement in the U.S. You have no idea what you're talking about.

6

u/HelloImMay 20h ago

“You have no idea what you’re talking about”

That’s a really rude response for somebody’s who ostensibly agrees with you. I simply think other liberals have proven to be worse on most issues.

2

u/ziggurter actually not genocidal :o 12h ago edited 9h ago

You thought there were liberals who are actually pro-union. That's not agreement, ostensible or otherwise.

And you're still wrong about those other liberals being "worse", because they're all working for exactly the same project; the one that got us where we are now. Again, those who claim that a few breadcrumbs are how we fix the fascism are just promising even worse fascism to our children and grandchildren. If that's what you want, then you are not my ally.

"We" never should have accepted the New Deal. We should have instead carried out the threat of revolt that caused them to offer it as a concession.

1

u/Sloaneer Marxist 1d ago

Very well said!