this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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~~Nice title which suggests you have absolutely no idea what liberal means (in this or any other context) and you thought this was an attack against liberals.~~
Update:
I made a mistake. I didn't notice the actual community name and had a knee-jerk reaction to the subject as an attack on "liberals" as is commonly used when talking about politics in the U.S.
In review, I see that you are having a more intellectual conversation and I should have taken more time to see that in the first place. Apologies.
We do know what “liberal” means. Here is very first sentence from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
By “private property,” what is meant is “the means of production.” Liberalism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the capitalist class.
Private property isn't as supportive of capitalism as it initially seems. Classical laborists (e.g. Proudhon) and their modern intellectual descendants (e.g. David Ellerman) argue that the positive and negative results of production are the private property of the workers in the firm. This argument immediately implies a worker coop structure mandate on all firms and rules out capitalism. Capitalism is so indefensible that even private property requires the abolition of capitalism
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Private property is the very foundation of capitalism. The capitalist class owns the means of production, and the working class must sell the only thing it can—its labor—to survive.
They can argue that all they like, but the facts on the ground are that the capitalists own the private property, and the state enforces that ownership though its monopoly on violence. It’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, usually in the form of bourgeois democracy, and occasionally, in times of crisis, in the form of fascism.
Private property rests on the principle of people getting the fruits of their labor. In other words, private property appropriation has a labor-basis that capitalism denies. Capitalism violates the very principle behind private property by giving workers 0% joint claim on the positive and negative fruits of their labor
"Property is theft!" -- Proudhon
The employment contract is what really enables capitalist appropriation.
I agree with your critique of capitalist liberal democracy
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