He analyzed capitalism (and religion), and his model predicted regular worsening crises when the market couldn’t expand further, leading to its eventual abolition.
He was employed as a journalist and published books on history and economics.
I swear libs just make stuff up that sounds right and then believe the shit they fantasized
> 4chan user
> libPick one.
I do agree that anon’s take is bullshit.
Lemmites just be spouting buzzwords at this point.
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism, the guy in OP is definitionly a lib.
No, that’s neoliberalism. Which is a misnomer, because actual liberalism emerged from the humanist tradition and was a political philosophy, not an economic one. It’s where we got ideas like human rights, and rules that restrict governments’ abilities to oppress their citizens.
Neoliberalism misapplies the idea of “freedom” the same way anarcho-capitalists do. But I don’t think anyone here would argue that all anarchists are anarcho-capitalists.
https://annas-archive.is/books/289061-289061-liberalism
Heres a book going through all the major liberal philosophers and how they dealt with the conflicts inherent to liberalism.
Tldr, core, overriding freedom of liberalism is and has always been for the dominant class to economically exploit the working class.
One author with a clear spin isn’t exactly a comprehensive literature review. You can probably find a book that says anything about anything.
If you pay attention to historical context you can see how liberalism was an improvement over the systems that had been in place prior, i.e. feudalism and monarchy.
The course of human society doesn’t magically jump from “terrible” to “great.” That never happens. More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail. There are cycles of backsliding of course, and all progress is a battle where victory is never guaranteed, but that’s the gist of it, and it’s always incremental.
Without liberalism, there could never have been a civil rights movement, or suffragettes, or gay marriage. All these things built upon the foundation that was set for them by liberalism so long prior that people had already taken it for granted and forgotten about its origins.
Just because it wasn’t perfect from its outset doesn’t mean it wasn’t an improvement over what existed prior, or that it couldn’t be improved on further. And the course of history throughout the twentieth century is a story of liberalism prevailing. So much was achieved in those grueling years and decades that the world of the 1901 is practically unrecognizable to the world of 2001. That progress wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. It was achieved within a liberal system, in which ideas of human rights had already been formulated and enshrined in constitutional law, albeit imperfectly.
People were able to fight to expand the protections and rights of those laws precisely because they already existed. There were imperfect laws and systems in place that those activists were able to fight to improve and expand. Without liberalism, there wouldn’t have been even that.
More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail.
You’re so close to stepping beyond idealism.
History has never been a struggle of ideas, where everyone gets together and the best idea wins, its always been a class struggle resulting from material reality.
Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution because somebody thought up humanism and everyone agreed it was a really good idea, but because the bourgeois were ascendant and liberalism reinforced their power so it was promoted. The same model explains why religion reinforced the power structures of the Roman empire/catholic church, why divine right reigned when the relation with means of production favored feudalism.
Russia did though, before the revolution Russia was still mostly agrarian and way less developed then western europe. Under communism they developed faster then any other country up to that point and nearly caught up to the west.
People often compare the soviets to western europe and say they’re poor, but Russia was half a century behind the west before the revolution, and the revolution/ civil war caused even more destruction. A better comparison would be a country like Mexico which also was mostly agrarian and just finished a revolution in 1920. Compared to that the Soviet union did pretty well living standards wise.
Just look at there war performance , WWI Russia lost to Germany whose main focus was on the western front, WWII Russia was able to halt Germanies full force after they had conquered France and drive them back.
Lots of countries have done that. Has nothing to do with communism, so much as a leadership of the nation that was desperate to modernize due to fear of being invaded or falling into international irrelevancy.
Dead wrong as usual lol