this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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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
I agree, but these are not liberals. Don't let the far-right to have the word "liberalism"! They're conservatives or right-libertarians at best, and outright fascists at worst.
> 4chan user
> lib
Pick one.
I do agree that anon's take is bullshit.
The funny thing is that communism is technically an evolution of actual liberalism, and tankies look a lot less down on conservatives because of conservatism's "muh tradishun" lifestyle marketing.
Lemmites just be spouting buzzwords at this point.
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism, the guy in OP is definitionly a lib.
Indeed, its why Australia's main conservative party (middle right) are called The Liberals
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.
Actually jokes on you, none of the words mean anything and they are all word games used to keep the masses in their places.
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.
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.
What I said wasn't idealism, it was dialectical materialism.
You're talking about class struggle but that doesn't contradict what I said, because class struggle was a part of what I said. And you had to cherrypick my comment to find a part of it that you could portray as otherwise.
When did I ever say "everyone gets together and the best idea wins"? I said it's a grueling struggle and victory isn't guaranteed.
But, as the course of history shows, although humanity takes a couple steps backwards for every few steps it takes forwards, overall it moves on a positive trajectory. Or else we wouldn't have made the progress that we have.
History has always been about ideas, and you have to be very ignorant of the history of ideas to fail to see how they underpin everything that happens in an era. Whether we talk about Cartesian Skepticism quite literally defining the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Early Modern era (and giving rise to the scientific Enlightenment itself), or about the how the threads of existentialism underlie the countercultural movements from the beatniks to the hippies to the punks and beyond. It's all about ideas. What humans do is informed by the ideas that they hold.
By and large, the ideas underpinning monarchical forms of government did not survive the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the ideas of liberalism prevailed over them. Prevailed first in people's hearts and minds, and then in their decisions and their actions, and finally in political and military victories. Without the ideas, none of that later stuff would have occurred.
Nowadays we're seeing other ideas compete: in this context specifically, the ideas of neoliberalism versus the ideas of democratic socialism. Clearly the latter are gaining the edge, but they're doing so because first the ideas exist, second enough people are convinced that they could work that someone who will implement those ideas wins office, third they implement them and prove they work, fourth the ideas gain traction as people see that they work and the momentum begins to snowball.
It takes years or even decades. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been working at this for a long time, and if you can't see how the ideas they subscribe to inform their policy decisions, then I don't know what else to tell you. Do you seriously think they're just winging it without a clue what they're doing?
There absolutely was an intellectualist movement which underpinned the French Revolution, without which it would have been disjointed riots with no shared conviction or cohesive structure, easily quelled and doomed to fail. All successful revolutions have been underpinned by intellectuals. That includes communist revolutions.
The ideas that we're discussing now, both mine and yours, are exactly that: ideas. You think the twentieth century would have seen the Soviet Union if the nineteenth hadn't had Marx and Engels?
Ideas inform decisions, and decisions inform actions. Actions without solid ideas behind them are lunacy. Actions require decisions, and decisions require ideas. It's not that hard to figure out.
Lol no
This is more embarrassing than just not responding at this point
Haha! Yes. You lose :(
So very astute of you. I see your head must be full of acorns since ideas apparently are a strange concept to you
Yes, historically that is the case. Semantics drift over time, though. Even though both liberals and conservatives are classical liberals, only one actually still uses the liberal label. When you don't acknowledge semantic drift, you alienate others because they can't follow what you're saying. If you want to destroy capitalism, you need to make the circle of people bigger, not shoulder people out before they begin.
Phrased another way, you want to move the Overton window leftwards, not contribute to it shrinking to the right.
Nah. We don't need to surrender the overton window to liberals and let them dictate that the alternative to capitalism is capitalism, except the workers get more crumbs and minorities get conditional protections. Moving the Overton window left of the current rightwing framing requires people to realize how rightwing the current framing is.
Yes... by teaching people. Meaning you need to reach them. If the way you talk is a barrier to being understood, you're going to reach way less people, my man.
I'm gonna quote scripture, not cause I'm Christian or anything (catholic apostate atheist), but because my sister fell into a Christian cult so this is an example that quickly comes to mind (her "church" had a real goofy interpretation of this that a lot of new American Christian Cults regularly have). 1 Corinthians 14:3-8, where Paul tells the Corinthians, who were holding mass at the time in Hebrew, that they need to speak to be understood. If they hold mass speaking a language that no one outside their church understands, they only lift themselves up. But if they speak to be understood, then they can lift up everyone.
Sorry to say, while using liberal in the way you do is definitely a nice shorthand to be able to identify people who are safe for you to express your views with, it also alienates those who don't know what the historical term means. Speak Latin, dammit (that was how the catholic church misinterpreted Paul's teaching in this letter. And the new Christians use it to promote speaking tongues. Aren't religions great? /s)
I’d also chime in that definition change and can mean very different things in different places. It’s a bit silly how frequently I see other left leaning people, purely online, demonize anyone using liberal as a label.
To me it comes off as a bit manufactured division. It’s far too abundant to see on spaces like Reddit and certain Lemmy instances, yet near complete absent from offline discourse.
Why when both are accurate
nobody cares about facts or details. they only care about marx = communism.
he was a better economist than he was a political theorist. but his economic works are long, boring, and technical, and his political works are far shorter and dramatic, so that's all the average undergraduate cares about.
Why would you say he's a bad political theorist? If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power Marxism is one of the most successful political ideologies in the world. Sure it never "beat" liberal capitalism but it came the closest of any other theory to challenging it.
Or are you doubting it's accuracy more then its success?
The success of a political theory should be measured by its ability to improve quality of life. Taking power may be a prerequisite, but that alone is not success. Seeing the seizure of state power as an end in itself is a mistake that leads to an authoritarian dead end.
By your definition the billionaires and the politicians they back would be unsuccessful political actors as they're making the quality of life worse for most people. I'd say they are very successful political actors, and that is the problem.
In my opinion politics is "war without bloodshed". It is a means by which a group can accomplish certain goals that another group opposes.
One side could have a goal of improving the quality of life for the poor while the other could have a goal of improving it for the rich. Politics is what both sides do to try and accomplish there goals.
Political theory is like military theory in the sense that it lays out strategies to defeat the opposition and accomplish those goals. While a military theory is proven correct by winning a battle, a political theory can be proven correct by winning an election.
Politics is a means, not an end. The end/goal is determined by ideology , class position, self interest, racism etc.
You don't have to adopt the ruling elites' definition of success. You talk about politics being a means and not an end, but you still insist on calling winning an election success. If the end/goal is determined by ideology then so is the criteria for success, and my personal criteria for success is improving quality of life for as many people as possible. Winning an election can be a means to that end, but just seizing power does not by itself merit the political theory that enabled it. Fascism has proven quite capable of seizing power in liberal democracies with capitalist economies, but I would certainly not call that success.
A political theory being popular doesn't mean it's a good or inherently sound theory. For example, fascists have made the "immigrants are ruining our country" theory very common in the mainstream and people have latched on to it to explain their lived experience. Fascism is "challenging" classical liberalism pretty successfully. That doesn't make it logically sound or a viable strategy.
The problem I have with Marx discussions are people cherry picking across his work. Some of it is philosophical, some is economic analysis and some is aspirational politics. Usually along the lines of "his theoretical economic framework is mostly sound in X case, therefore his political prognosis is correct".
Marx was living in a certain time with certain quantifiable constraints and a specific lived perspective, writing on contemporary economic conditions. When I point that out I'm always met with "Well he didn't need to know about [modern human cognitive research / studies on the specific limitations of earth's resources / the scalability of technical surveillance & media distribution] to project its effects".
I vehemently assert that our modern perspective fundamentally outmodes some of his base arguments.
As an example, Marx's theory has important pieces built around his concept of Gattungswesen and it's role in alienation of labor. The friction of that alienation can be traced to forces used to pacify labor. His work views it as something that, while malleable with biological aspects, is fundamental to the human experience.
That makes sense from a perspective of the mid 19th century, where phrenology was still a cutting edge science and opium was a crude panecea for most behavioral illness. But in the 21st century we've mapped the human genome & are delving into gene editing, are gaining an ever deeper biochemical understanding of the human brain, refining models of addiction, and incrementally advancing pharmaceutical treatment of neuroses. Humans are looking more and more like a solvable biological problem.
Marx assumes that one clear reason we cannot reach a stable society under capitalism is the sheer weight of labor discontent. But as of 2026, I'm of the opinion that we're far closer to total pacification than liberation of the working class. If you can prescribe serenity to the ruling class while the masses clamor for biological contentment, your political prognosis wildly changes.
Theorists in Marx's lineage will try to account for this (or similar arguments) by refining his theory to fit reality. But they do so with the prior bias of intending the inevitable victory of the proletariat. That's not a sound foundation for constructing a theoretical framework and it makes these debates pointless and frustrating.
Precisely. He's genius at certain things, but just because of that, doesn't mean the other things he does are good or legitimate.
Communist manifesto was highly accessible, so are many popular texts that espouse simplistic and idealistic theories about the world, politics or not. That doesn't mean they are accurate, useful, or pragmatic today, or even at the time of their conception.
Agreed that the issue with Marxists generally is their limited understanding of Marx and their vast over use and generalization of his theories, but that's not exclusive to Marxists. Lots of followers of theories are complete morons and turn critique and insight into blind belief and rhetoric around which they then justify violence in the name of.
Marx 'positive' theory makes many social and psychological assumptions that are just... obviously untrue esp in regard to modern theorizing. At it's heart he replies on a modification of the 'noble savage' myth, that there is some 'true' or 'natural' state of individual human living that is being 'oppressed' by 'society' and his political system will 'liberate' us from it... which when you start to think about that you see how ridiculous that is. But that conception was deeply popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, because everyone was still queuing off of Hobbes. Modern (post WW2) political theories don't really by so much into any 'state of nature'. Their idealizing is more of a calculus assuming society already must and will forever exist.
I am not too familiar with modern marxists re-workings of his theories to try and fit 'reality' but from what I've seen they still heavily borrow a lot of his assumptions about human nature being one way and 'society/capitalism' 'corrupting' it. They treat his work and their theories more like as if it were religious revelation, rather than taking a more pragmatic approach or one based in the more modern economic and social science understandings we have, maybe of which are only a generation or two old.
because his political theory is basically an outline. it's not substantial. the communist manifesto is an 80 page pamphlet. it's not a 1000 page detailed discourse.
how many people do you know who read Das Kapital? which is primarily an economic critique. you ever notice how communist manifesto doesn't touch much on economic details and sort of hand waves about them idealistically?