Thoughts on Liberalism
Tony Blair was right when he talked about how the growth of fundamentalism comes from generations of alienation. At least, he's right on the surface. The good Mr. Blair has acted as deplorably as any member of the pseudo-labour movements of Europe, with the exceptions of perhaps Germany which was against the Iraqi war from the start. I have to give the German Social Democrats something for that. Here in Sweden we've just been tagging along more or less, we've let ourselves listen to liberalism that's echoed from the halls of the White House and we've been lied to, lead around and cooperated with a murderous imperial power, hell-bent on making sure that the rest of the world bow knee to it now that there is no real "legitimate" existance of it's massive armaments (that's to say that the US was generally considered the protector of Freedom and Good and Right in the face of the Evil and Bad and Horrible Soviet Union).
Liberals lack history. They seem to believe that the things that happen time and time again, such as the Enron scandal, the Swedish Scandia affair, the Swedish bonus wages for highly placed directors and similar, the Iraq invasion, the new talk about Iran, are just aberrations. They happened by pure chance. There is no such thing as a system that is causing these problems, oh no.
The fact is though, that I'm really storming the ramparts of what I once believed to be the main stronghold of the liberal worldview - economics. And I'm realizing that the words they envoke, the things they say are the abracadabra of the clerics of old. They're there to make sure that an invisible barrier to who most people can't speak up against is kept intact. They mumble phrases they believe is true, while in reality it doesn't hold fast. Now, I'm not saying that it's all this easy, but I am saying that there are many, many problems with the neoclassical school of economics.
Again, liberals might talk nicely but what they're really saying remains pretty senseless in comparison to their actions. Neoliberalism is perhaps the clearest example of how liberalism has moved more into the light of what it actually is. A protection for those at the top. And that's it. It's moral theories of individualism remain entirely untenable, even more indefensible than the problems that plague the biggest moral schools of today, Kantianism and Utilitarianism. Most liberals, knowingly or not, remain utilitarianists deep down. What's a better theory than one so eminently suited to self-interest and an open market? It's overbuilding, that's what it is.
In this post I've rambled more than I have before, I suppose, but what I'm getting at is perhaps more my own feelings and some loose thoughts about some ideological structures as well as part of my own development into Marxism and my own criticism. What I am not looking to do is to lower myself to the level of smacktalking these kind of things in private and not face up to them in public, like so many people do. I overhear liberals chitchatting here and there, and I'm struck by their sheer ignorance and idiocy. So, what I am going to do is that I am going to examine and I am going to try and provide some criticism of their ideas, from an internal as well as an external perspective. I have a great deal of respect for the originators of liberalism, John Stuart Mill and Voltaire to name two, but I believe it only to be a phase who's bad side is all too apparent.
Liberals lack history. They seem to believe that the things that happen time and time again, such as the Enron scandal, the Swedish Scandia affair, the Swedish bonus wages for highly placed directors and similar, the Iraq invasion, the new talk about Iran, are just aberrations. They happened by pure chance. There is no such thing as a system that is causing these problems, oh no.
The fact is though, that I'm really storming the ramparts of what I once believed to be the main stronghold of the liberal worldview - economics. And I'm realizing that the words they envoke, the things they say are the abracadabra of the clerics of old. They're there to make sure that an invisible barrier to who most people can't speak up against is kept intact. They mumble phrases they believe is true, while in reality it doesn't hold fast. Now, I'm not saying that it's all this easy, but I am saying that there are many, many problems with the neoclassical school of economics.
Again, liberals might talk nicely but what they're really saying remains pretty senseless in comparison to their actions. Neoliberalism is perhaps the clearest example of how liberalism has moved more into the light of what it actually is. A protection for those at the top. And that's it. It's moral theories of individualism remain entirely untenable, even more indefensible than the problems that plague the biggest moral schools of today, Kantianism and Utilitarianism. Most liberals, knowingly or not, remain utilitarianists deep down. What's a better theory than one so eminently suited to self-interest and an open market? It's overbuilding, that's what it is.
In this post I've rambled more than I have before, I suppose, but what I'm getting at is perhaps more my own feelings and some loose thoughts about some ideological structures as well as part of my own development into Marxism and my own criticism. What I am not looking to do is to lower myself to the level of smacktalking these kind of things in private and not face up to them in public, like so many people do. I overhear liberals chitchatting here and there, and I'm struck by their sheer ignorance and idiocy. So, what I am going to do is that I am going to examine and I am going to try and provide some criticism of their ideas, from an internal as well as an external perspective. I have a great deal of respect for the originators of liberalism, John Stuart Mill and Voltaire to name two, but I believe it only to be a phase who's bad side is all too apparent.
posted by Björn at 8:49 PM
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