I don’t understand the difference and I don’t think I ever will
Leftists are semi-radical progressives.
Progressives are liberals.
Liberals are conservatives.
Conservatives are authoritarians.
Based on what? Do I need a matrix to keep track of this stuff? What’s a label and what’s an adjective here?
About 8 months before the election a bunch of people claiming to be . . Uh . . not . . liberal . . . started posting everywhere about how genocide Joe was going to destroy us all and how liberals were evil scum and apparently they hate trans people too or something.
The whole operation was textbook russian disinfo, but it was also really-young-people-pissed-at-the-lack-of-immediate-change-towards-luxury-gay-space-communism, which, I’m pretty sure most of us went through at some point.
TL;DR: yeah, I dunno.
Just one simple rule i think. After plotting all political ideologies on a line left to right:
Person A claims they’re at X point on line of political spectrum. You can probably safely assume where they actually are is at X+1 (to the right) subconsciously.
So liberals are actually probably more right than they think, is what the meme is saying at least
If you look at the American political spectrum of non-Authoritarians, progressives are the ones pushing for change to fix everything, liberals want to make smaller more conservative changes. Both work together to help America debating on more drastic or more mild tweaks.
Republicans have policies to dominate the population and maximize profits for the rich. They don’t exist on the liberal-conservative spectrum as a party, except incidentally.
I think the best way to put it is that a leftist is someone who believes that workers should own the wealth that they create, while a liberal is someone believes in “socially progressive causes” without examining the underlying systems that bring about the necessity of “socially progressive causes”.
For example, a liberal would want more woman CEOs, while a leftist would want to get rid of CEOs.
That’s a fair question, but there are many different answers. Not all leftist schools of thought fully advocate for removing a management style hierarchy, though some do. Some ideas push for rotating management with either a round robin selection, a raffle system, or democratically elected managers. Not dissimilar to how many countries run their governments.
Alternatively, if it fits the workflow, a flat style structure where no one inherently has a defined role, so teams form naturally to work on what they want or deem necessary. Someone will still often fill the role of “project manager” mind you, but the who and how are determined based on what works best for the situation. Not unlike letting students form their own groups for projects.
If you are genuinely curious, there is no shortage of books, YouTube videos, and websites just waiting to opine about their preferred methodology that would give you a much more authentic and robust understanding. Or I bet if you thought about it, you could even come up with some variations yourself.
The important point to get across for leftists is that the structure of economic production should be such that its aim is to benefit the general populace as evenly or equitably as possible. This is opposed to an “owner class” who uses their power, usually in the form of wealth, to take control the economic means of production, who then sets out to have the workers create more value than they will be given in return, so that the “owner” can take the excess value generated by the workers to increase their own wealth and/or power.
tl;dr
The lynchpin question for leftists isn’t “who runs the factory?”, but “who reaps the rewards?”.
Liberals view the status quo (the underlying mechanisms of the government, economy and society) as sacrosanct, legitimate, that it just needs to and will allow itself to be tweaked a bit, that the rules must be followed lest we collapse into chaos.
Leftists view the status quo as widely illegitimate, that a vast multitude of the rules which society operates by are contemptible and functionally evil, and are willing to break the rules to meaningfully change society, that often the entire point is that breaking rules is the only way to establish newer and more just ones.
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Liberals view Leftists as an extreme part of their fold because they often have similar goals.
Leftists view Liberals as often sharing goals, but as ultimately delusional, magical-thinking self righteous fools, as their methods of achieving these often similar goals are laughably naive, impotent and ineffective, thus functionally making them into conservatives.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics:
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies.
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In modern politics, the term Left typically applies to ideologies and movements to the left of classical liberalism, supporting some degree of democracy in the economic sphere. Today, ideologies such as social liberalism and social democracy are considered to be centre-left, while the Left is typically reserved for movements more critical of capitalism, including the labour movement, socialism, anarchism, communism, Marxism and syndicalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.
(Emphasis added)
Basically, liberals care more about equality of opportunity, while leftists care more about equality of outcome. (And, of course, conservatives actively oppose equality and promote hierarchy.)
On a “political compass,” leftism is the left half (obviously). Liberalism is a fuzzy blob centered somewhere below and right of center, but big enough to extend at least a little ways into the other quadrants because of how many different kinds of “liberalism” there are.
Both Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism are at their core capitalist ideologies. While the Republican party is more conservative in both social and economic issues, both parties still operate within the framework of neoliberalism.
In America we only have the Democrat and Republican Parties which are usually labeled as Liberal and Conservative respectively. Since the Democratic party is relatively left of the Republican party, we see the conflation of the label Liberal and Left in American politics. But that’s not really accurate when looking at the Ideologies of the parties.
There is Social Democracy, which is still a capitalist ideology where some of the profits are redirected towards social welfare. This is more common in Western Europe and will still rachet towards Fascism.
Leftist ideologies, such as Socialism and Anarchism are fundamentally anti-capitalist, unlike liberalism and neoliberalism. Richard Wolff explains socialism and capitalism very well.
On Liberalism:
What is neoliberalism? A political scientist explains the use and evolution of the term
How the Democrats Traded the New Deal for Neoliberalism
On Leftist ideologies:
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Communism and Revolutions
Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism
At its core, liberalism is fairly anti-capitalist. There are many arguments against capitalism from liberal principles such as the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. The workers in the firm are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs, but receive 0% claim on the positive and negative production while the employer solely appropriates 100% of the positive and negative result of production
I Strongly disagree. The capitalist mode of production is axiomatic to Liberalism. Private ownership of the means of production is what is being referenced, not personal property. The alternative, a socialist mode of production, where companies are owned and governed in a democratic structure by all the workers, is completely viable. It’s a democratization of the workplace and economy.
Locke saw individual liberty as defined through private property, contract, and market—in other words, by individual ownership of economic possessions that could not be arbitrarily usurped by the state. Freedom for Locke amounted to more than absence from external restraint; it also meant living in conformity with a nonarbitrary law (to his left critics, a protocapitalist law) to which the individual had consented.
Well if soc dems aren’t left then i guess I’m not left.
I didn’t know we were taking anything left of soc dem seriously yet, as we haven’t proven any sort of successful means of governing people that far left.
Worker cooperatives already exist. I recommend reading or listening to Richard Wolff about what differentiates socialism and capitalism from each other.
Social Democracy is State-regulated Private Capitalism. The same contradictions between the Capital owners and workers still exist, leading to the same problems. This is why we also see a rise in Fascism in Western Europe.
Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (such as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social services and jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private capitalism. The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or social democratic responses to crises.
Richard D. Wolff | Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and Employees
You can pretty much boil it down to Liberalism is capitalist, leftism isn’t (although where the line is depends who you ask and how left they are).
The confusion mostly comes from from conservative neoliberals lumping social liberals in with the left, even though they’re only separated by a philosophical debate on what “individual freedoms” are and if they’re more important than a completely unregulated economy or not.
There are anti-capitalist liberals though
It gets even more confusing when you consider anti-capitalist classical liberals
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Classical-Liberal-JurisprudenceJune2018.pdf
We need to start calling liberals what they are. Conservatives.
And we need to start calling the conservatives what they are. Authoritarian elites.
The entire population except for fringe groups of terminally online leftists: Yes.
Left-wing can be relative to the nation. The most meaningful faction of American “left” is the Democratic Party. The global definition is based on socialist vs capitalist ideological splits, in which all forms of ideological liberalism are right wing or, in the case of social democracy, arguably what centrist actually means.
The Democratic Party is therefore left-wing internally and right-wing globally, thus people saying “America does not have a left wing.”
Leftists are socialists. It is not relative. Democrats are not leftists. Bernie Sanders is, as a democratic socialist. You are not “An American leftist” because you like billionaires existing but don’t want to genocide brown and gay people. That’s just liberalism as it is supposed to be.
This is also why a leftist would deny that “liberalism” is left wing. Liberalism is a broad ideological judgement and can be assumed to be using the global standards as a result, America does not have sole claim to defining it. So American liberals are the American left, but liberalism itself is right-wing.
This really isn’t that complicated if you know the basic meanings of the words in question, which is why liberals find it so confusing. Liberalism is the status quo position of the American electorate and moving beyond it requires education while going along with the binary party politics does not.
Edit: this was supposed to be a response to the first comment instead of me telling OP things they already know
