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Article from the Guardian: I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone
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[–] 4 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

I prefer to just call them liberals, mostly because the grand majority of right wingers are just libs (specifying right wing is uneeded because all liberals are right wing)

  • "conservatives" = conservative-liberals (economically liberal and socially conservative)
  • "libertarians" = liberals (I mean they're literally just classical liberals)
  • "liberals" = neoliberals (an inherently right wing ideology)
  • "social democrats" = neoliberalism (but with a fancy coat of paint)
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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I say "right-wing libertarian" because the term "libertarian" was coined by a French anarchist in the 19th century, and AFAIK, outside the US the term "libertarian" still has that left-wing connotation and meaning. So it's at least useful to clarify by libertarian I mean conservative liberals and not communists / anarchists.

    In the US, the conservative or right-wing liberals adopted the term "libertarian" around the mid 20th century to distinguish themselves from social liberals, and since then the term has just come to mean conservative liberal as you mention - I don't know many people in the US aware of other meanings of the term "libertarian".

    As an aside, I'm not as willing as you to paint social democrats or social liberals as "an inherently right-wing ideology" because we would get into trouble with the fact that social liberalism represents the majority of what we might call "leftist", particularly on social policies.

    This disagreement isn't really about the fact that social liberalism has right-wing positions, we agree that on the issue of property rights for example social liberals are right-wing, but I'm not sure it's as helpful as it at first seems to portray social liberalism in such a reductivist way, i.e. as being simply just another solidly right-wing movement (esp. historically this would be harder to argue, considering even the very origin of the term "left" refers to liberal revolutionary sympathizers in the French National Assembly who sat to the left of the assembly's chair as compared to the royalists who sat to the right).

    That said, I completely understand the reason this has become such a strongly harped-upon piece of dogma for leftists, because liberalism is so total and dominating particularly in the US, it's hard for people in the US to understand that social liberalism has any right-wing aspect, and we've come to the point now where progressives and social liberals in the US will even call themselves socialists, sort of owning the lies that the Right in America tells about them.

    Also, I think on a psychological level, a lot of leftists at least in the US start as social liberals, and that process of radicalizing to the left is accompanied by feeling betrayed by liberalism, since it might be said that leftist politics is more "pure" and in accord with the values that social liberals hold and espouse. So for these people, there is a stronger desire to identify as a leftist and not a liberal precisely because of the discontent and betrayal they come to associate with liberalism.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    From my point of view leftism inherently means revolutionary and revolutionary is the opposite of reactionary. Supporting capitalism and private property in any capacity is inherently reactionary as is bigotry and class collaborationism. It is therefore impossible for a leftist to also be reactionary or hold significant reactionary positions (if they did they wouldnt be a leftist. Back to my main point it doesnt matter if someone is a "libertarian", "social liberal" or "conservative", the positions many hold on Tea is inherently reactionary and in my opinion thats all I really need to know.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Hmmmm. I mean, Marx himself wrote in favor of reforms and did not advocate this kind of revolution vs reform delineation you are articulating.

    I also don't know how you would think of someone as being left or right in a post-revolutionary world ... would this distinction still be relevant? What about in the USSR 20 - 40 years after the revolution, who was "left" and who was "right" e.g. in the context of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?

    And are all revolutions "left"? The French liberal revolution was liberal, but also a revolution, so was it left or right? If all liberal revolutions are reactionary or not leftist, what about the Haitian liberal revolution, which was driven by liberalism but also anti-colonial & anti-slavery movements?

    Also, the reactionary opinions on Tea don't really seem motivated by class or revolutionary concerns (at least not directly), they are more about the personal frustrations men experience in dating and finding a partner, and the way this opens the door to a kind of "revenge" satisfaction when women they deem as doing something immoral get victimized. Particularly I think these men see women as doing something immoral by talking about them behind their backs with other women, men variously describing this as gossip or even as a privacy breach (since the men's photos and information are collected without their consent and then put together in profiles for other women to rate and comment on). So when women have their information and photos released against their wishes, it feels more like justice to those men than an injustice.

    Either way, I wouldn't say this is a reactionary response in the sense that it resists revolution or supports the ruling classes, except in the most generic ways (i.e. how patriarchy has traditionally been a component and tool of class oppression, racism, etc.; and to whatever extent these men are falling prey to the structural logics of patriarchy, they are participants in it - though I will point out women are no different in this regard).

    From my view left/right has little to do with revolution itself; instead, the left embodies values like egalitarianism and liberty while the right embodies status quo hierarchy and tradition.

    To that end, the Democrats might be "left" on issues like gay rights while being very much "right" on issues like immigration.

    I know it's written by a social liberal, but you might checkout Left and Right by Norberto Bobbio, as I think it has been influential in the literature on how terms like left and right have been used and developed.

    I'm not sure I full agree with Bobbio, as I'm inclined to think liberalism mostly deserves to still be viewed as a right-wing ideology (even if liberalism has evolved and social liberalism has incorporated leftist social movements). It's hard not to see this as the overall situation given the way capital accumulation happened under colonialism and imperialism, and the unwillingness to address those injustices and inequalities by liberals due to "property rights"; as well as the general way that the concept of capital and the way "private property" has been expanded to include far more than personal property, it all strike me as facilitating inherently authoritarian and hierarchical ends.

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