I keep seeing posts from this instance referring to capitalists as liberals. Since when are capitalism and liberalism related? As far as I’ve always known, liberalism is a social ideology, while capitalism is an economic system.

Why do y’all refer to all capitalists as liberals when at least half (probably more, at least in my experience) are conservatives?

I, for example, consider myself a liberal, but I’m most certainly not a capitalist. I’m stuck in a capitalist society in which I have to play by the rules if I want to feed my family, but that’s as far as my support for the system goes. I’m pretty sure a lot of Americans feel this way.

Looking it up, the definition of liberalism specifies a belief in maximum personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government. Considering that 90% of governments in the world are endlessly corrupt, capitalist or not, I’d much prefer one that guarantees its citizens rights as a matter of course rather than begrudgingly grants them privileges that can be taken away without public oversight.

Do y’all really trust your governments to look after your best interests? As a U.S. American, I know I wouldn’t trust my government or politicians to do anything but enrich themselves at my expense, but I don’t have to; my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

Now if we could just get them to stop funding and committing genocide…

EDIT: So many incredibly well thought-out and researched responses! I have a lot of reading and thinking to do, so thank you all for your input. I’ll likely be referring back to this post for a while as I learn more about the world outside my U.S.-centric bubble. My biggest takeaways from all this after a quick perusal of the replies are that liberalism has a very different meaning outside the U.S. and has a lot more to do with private property, especially land ownership, than I’d thought.

My time is limited and there are so many responses that I likely won’t be replying to (m)any any time soon, but know that I appreciate all the knowledge bombs y’all have dropped.

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    59·
    9 months ago

    Looking it up, the definition of liberalism specifies a belief in maximum personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government.

    From a certain perspective, this is true, though I do not consider it the most useful framing. What liberalism is oriented around is freedom of a person to own many different things as property and to have personal sovereignty over that property (to an extent). Everything else, the freedom that can be interpreted as extending beyond that, is functionally for the most part freedom to use property as you like. To communists, the most notorious example is freedom of speech as practiced in liberal states, which is the freedom of the owners of media empires to saturate the public sphere with whatever messaging they like. What a private citizen says doesn’t matter in this context, but by couching it in personal expression rather than the publishing ability of capitalists, you can protect the latter with a legal common cause with the former.

    Considering that 90% of governments in the world are endlessly corrupt, capitalist or not,

    I’m not invested in telling you what you should conclude here, but speaking broadly of “corruption” without investigating the political-economic systems is worse than useless. You can’t get anywhere opposing something when you don’t know how it works.

    It’s even more of a weaselword when you look at how “corruption” as a legal distinction obfuscates the legal methods of controlling the government that are nonetheless completely monstrous, like the notorious state of “lobbying” (legalized bribery) in the US.

    I’d much prefer one that guarantees its citizens rights as a matter of course rather than begrudgingly grants them privileges that can be taken away without public oversight.

    And here we have already run into a practical consequence of the failure of the “corruption” analysis, because these two are not as-given at all different. In a country like the US, you still just have rights until you don’t, see the Patriot Act, Qualified Immunity, Expedited Removal, etc. See how Austria has recently announced that professing to value Palestinian lives is a terrorist act or look up all the people arrested in the UK for protesting the monarchy. Here you can hear about the Minneapolis police having committed documented hate crimes in a systemic fashion and to this day facing no repercussions.

    I can keep listing examples, but the high-order point I mean to convey is that you have built your castle of rights on open air and you are as a sinner in the hands of an angry God, where in this metaphor the Capitalists are God and Fascism is the drop into Hell. They need merely choose it and you will have no recourse but to fall.

    Do y’all really trust your governments to look after your best interests?

    This is “socialism is when the government does stuff” thinking. No, socialists aren’t interested in merely trusting the government more, they want a system of power in which the state is wielded by the people to suppress the capitalists so that actual democracy can run things.

    As a U.S. American, I know I wouldn’t trust my government or politicians to do anything but enrich themselves at my expense, but I don’t have to; my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

    As I said, they are guaranteed until they aren’t. I don’t understand how someone can look at the last quarter-century of comically flagrant constitutional violations with no recourse for the people to take and say “It’s not a matter of trust, my rights are guaranteed”. It’s not even a matter of trust, it’s a matter of denial.