Practical.

jk though, most people are in that position; in Cuba, Vietnam, China, Russia, etc before the revolution, the masses didn’t read a bunch of books, decide communism sounded like the best way to run things, then overthrow their oppressors.

Though it’s important to understand the effects capitalism has had on society though are inherent to capitalism, not bad individuals doing capitalism wrong. That is the framing fascists use, since they’ve been privileged by the system, they need to invent reasons for its failing that don’t change it structurally. So you get wild conspiracies, foreigners, or whatever else is easy to believe.

If you don’t support capitalism, you aren’t a liberal.

I wouldn’t say that’s entirely wrong, fascism being a failure mode of liberalism. The phrase “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” or Trotsky’s “Not every exasperated petite bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petite bourgeois” come to mind.

Not really, it’s more that liberalism contains contradictions between various freedoms it supports, and even contradictions between how the same “freedom” is practiced by different groups, and when those contradictions become unsustainable, the right to property by the dominant group always takes precedence.

It’s important to understand any political philosophy as not an idea floating in a vacuum but as a social tool used by a group in society; liberalism is the philosophy the bourgeoisie use to justify their power.

I mean kinda since fascism is a tool used to buttress capitalism when it’s own contradictions become unsustainable, but that’s not really in the book.

Here’s a work going through every major liberal philosopher and what liberalism meant to them, and how they dealt with the contradictions. It’s the same definition used in every serious work for the last 200 years or so.

This confuses a lot of Americans whose political understanding is largely dictated by cable news, because since 1980 or so, conservatives started using liberal to mean “far left” as a pejorative due to Reagan calling Carter’s policy too liberal. Later on, the American “left”, social democrats, started using it to mean the same thing, but in a positive context.

Right political ideology says the class that owns and controls your workplace, land, and government, billionaires, should own and control your workplace, house, and government.

Left political ideology says we should control our workplace, land, and government.

What exactly do you think right vs left refers to?

Their name is LeninsOvaries.

They’re a liberal doing a piss-poor satire of a communist.

The democrats didn’t do anything wrong! Who could have known doing nothing to help your constituents and also facilitating genocide is unpopular?

If only there was some historical precedent to tell us whether trying to be the “moderate, reasonable, competent republicans” will get republicans to vote for you or if it just lowers turnout.