On 1/1/07, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie wrote, "But the opposite of liberalism is illiberalism not fascism.
Fascism is merely one variant of illiberalism, and so is Marxism. That is
why many Marxists' tacit embrace of liberalism is unconvincing, for
liberalism functions there as an ill-adapted prosthetic."
Or it might is all be insufficiently post-modernistically illiberal. :-)
I'm increasingly persuaded that most of the arguments on these lists come
from using words that mean different things to different people rather than
things. At a certain point, some words have just been so used for so many
different purposes that they no longer have any elasticity. They're all
stretched out and useless.
Communism is one. Marxism is definitely one. Liberal is even more of one.
Conservatism even more meaningless and useless than liberal. Left and Right
probably are, too.
All politically popular and therefore important concepts have
competing definitions, as politically competing factions seek to have
their definitions of them prevail.
That said, liberalism, in theory if not in practice, is essentially a
doctrine about what constitutes legitimate exercise of state power,
favoring limitations of state power in defense of (negative) liberties
(i.e., freedom from the state) of the individual, mainly propertied
individuals. (The theory of liberalism is ditched when the ruling
class get threatened, and the clearest example of ditching liberalism
under capitalism is fascism.)
The Marxist tradition, in contrast, has seldom embraced any
categorical limitation of state power in theory or in practice.
The difference is clear.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
