Image of tweet by Kim from Kansas @kim_from_kansas:
Capitalists would like you to believe that liberalism is the left-most edge of the economic spectrum, precisely because it is the left-most point on the spectrum that doesn’t threaten their power.
True leftism threatens the power of capitalists. Liberalism is not leftism.
This is like saying “crony capitalism isn’t capitalism!” Let go of the word, it does not mean what you think it means.
Liberalism is an individualist ideology, stemming from the movement of wealthy professionals to gain independence from the nobility. It the movement had the power it did in the first place because of capitalism.
It is intrinsically tied to imperialism and the exploitation of people with less bargaining power. No number of prefixes or adjectives can change that.
The word means what it means. It helped people gain freedom from authoritarianism, and today that authority is held by capitalists. It’s just capitalist apologia to associate them together
And what does it mean? Because that’s a bold fucking thing to say when you haven’t put forth a definition, or anything thing tying it’s use to anti-capitalism.
Wanting the rich to pay a little more in tax, claiming you want to see more women in boardrooms and black-owned businesses, or announcing that you think that queer folks should have basic human rights isn’t anti-capitalism, but even through the myopic American lens of the world it’s the basic extreme of what a liberal is.
What I’m saying is that nobody needs to give value to how American capitalists appropriate the word. We can dismiss that newspeak