Change my mind.

[TheDifferenceEngine]

Just lately I've been drifting toward the political center and looking into democratic libertarianism.

I'm sure that it's just a syndrome of being a little too laid back in political thinking of late.

Soooo

I need Re-leftifying.

[Enragé]

freedom in capitalism will always be about what freedom was in ancient greece; freedom for slave owners.

(excuse me for paraphrasing lenin but
1. im lazy
2. he was right)

^^

[An archist]

Leftists have more fun :lol:
seriously, how could you be drifting more towards the centre?
When institutions move to the right (as they are doing now), conscious people need to move to the left to form a counterweight, to stop the world from getting horribly fucked.
Due to globalisation, jobs are disappearing from the west, and mostly going to China (and third world countries in genral) where the workers are being paid shite wages and living in horrible conditions. That means workers all over the world are being screwed over by capitalism.

[Rawthentic]

Look at Oaxaca and the Zapatistas and see how they are fighting against the capitalist system that has kept them asunder. Those are real life struggles to show how we are not in-the-clouds with our beliefs.

[Phalanx]

Originally posted by [email protected] 03, 2006 08:31 pm
Just lately I've been drifting toward the political center and looking into democratic libertarianism.

I'm sure that it's just a syndrome of being a little too laid back in political thinking of late.

Soooo

I need Re-leftifying.
If you want a better future for your children, you'll walk with the leftists.

[Tatarin]

The problem with liberalism is that it opens up a way for dictatorship. We have capitalist states, yes, but the same states keep corporations from destroying and owning all of earth - in short, giving us a breathing time.

Now, imagine if those states lost all their power - all instiutions that had to do with environmental safety, human right, workers rights and so on. The corporations would rave completely freely on the world until one of them owned everything - thus we have a dictatorship again.

The only way for humans to survive and live together is in a society where no person can command another. Power must be owned by all, and that means the elimination of all instiutions as well as all the means to control people - one is money, for example.

[RNK]

The way things are going with the capitalist system, in 50 years you may end up being sold at an auction for $5 in return for 20 years of labour in a coal mine 3 miles underground.

[( R )evolution]

Capitalism is horrible. And if you move toward the center you will be apporving of capitlaism and essteinal approving the exploation and opperison of the workers. We need all the support we can get and we dont need no democratic libertarianism. Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains! There will be no freedom under capitalism, you must fight it, not join it.

[LSD]

Just lately I've been drifting toward the political center and looking into democratic libertarianism.

Libertarianism, eh?

I get that, I really do. Libertarianism's kinda the "Leninism" of the right; socially progressive, radical in its way, and with an incredibly simple paradigm for change.

The only problem is that that paradigm just doesn't work.

For all the failures of 20th century socialism (and there are a lot of them), the free market's got an even worse record.

But just like the collapse of the CPC didn't put an end to Maoism, the disasters that have invariably followed unregulated capitalism have not detered libertarians.

And just like the Oriental exoticism of Maoism has a perverse romantic appeal to alienated western radicals, the seeming novelty and modernity of libertarianism has a sort of pseudofuturistic appeal to those disillusioned with traditional "radicalism".

'Cause despite its firm roots in the political right, Libertarianism just doesn't read as "rightist". After all, libertarians are anti-God, pro-gay, anti-war, pro-drug; hell, they're practically hippies aren't they!

...except, no, they're not.

'Cause they don't want to replace the bourgeois state with something better, they don't want to replace it at all. Anarchists are generally cast as wild-haired bomb throwing agents of disorder, but in reality it's the clean-cut suit-wearing libertarians who propose a system of institutionalized chaos.

Anarchists want a world of self-governing workers; libertarians want a world of informal "markets" where anyone with money can quite literally buy absolutely anything they please.

So while, superficially, that looks like supporting progressive social agenda, what it really means is opposing reactionary ones; and if those two seem like the same thing, you're not thinking hard enough.

Libertarians only oppose reactionary social policies because they oppose all social policies. They deny the right of society as a body to do anything, reactionary or progressive

In effect, they want to deconstruct organized society. No consensus, no governance, no community; just lots and lots of individuals "exchanging value" and making money.

Libertarianism is a kind of half-hearted primativism, an attempt to undo 7000 years of civilization without actually giving up all the stuff we've gotten out of it. It's a hypocritical and deeply confused ideology and one with absolutely no shot of ever manifesting in a real sense ...but it does read well.

And, in the end, that's what libertarianism's really got going for it, brilliant marketing. Its theoretical vapidity is masked by the emotional chord that it so carefully strikes.

Rightists are "religious gaybashing warmongers", leftists are "big government treehuggers", libertarians are ...neither.

We've all gotten so used to thinking in caricatures that any model which defies them, even superficially, comes across as iconoclastic. But libertarianism doesn't smash any idols, it just lines them up differently so you don't notice nothing's changed.

Being "new" isn't enough, you also have to be effective, and in the end, that's what damns libertarianism; when it comes right down to it, it has absolutely nothing practical to offer.

So you can become a "democratic libertarian" if you want, but if you do, understand that you're buying into an image, not a paradigm. There is no libertarian endgame, only a public relations campaign and a political label.

If that's enough for you, so be it; but if you want to actually make a difference, you'll have to choose something a little more real.

[Wanted Man]

This sums it up pretty well:

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Libertarian

[TheDifferenceEngine]

Thanks.

[Wanted Man]

Or, more seriously, a good article on libertarianism can be found here:

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/libertarian.html