Comments by "Chompy the Beast" (@chompythebeast) on "What Exactly is Liberalism? (no, it's not about being \"woke\")" video.

@heartsofiron4ever Least right-wing HoI fan:
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@heartsofiron4ever "If you use tanks in Hearts of Iron, that makes you a tankie." — Vaush
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@Barklord There is absolutely nothing peaceful about the Liberalism as expressed by United States Empire. It would be a little difficult to have an honest talk about the consequences of Classical and Neoliberalism or the merits of revolution against it with someone who genuinely believes that the US, leader of the liberal world, is up to anything 'peaceful.' We literally have the first and the third most well-funded militaries on the planet, with number three being our police. Yes, our police are more funded than all outward facing armies on earth but for our own and China's, and we have the most incarcerated population on the planet, including billion+ China. And that's all to say nothing of the millions killed in war; or of the millions of Americans who go to bed hungry and cold every night; or of the billions forced into wage slavery and miserable conditions; or even of the (ongoing) genocides that allowed for this country to exist in the first place. And even if one believed all that was 'peaceful', it still doesn't demonstrate any inherent value to having society divided along class lines for the benefit of the very few at massive the expense of literally everyone else who lives. Liberalism is not peaceful, nor freedom-promoting.
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@triplea7536 Er, it's hard to deny. Italy elects Mussolini lite. The Republican Party now has openly fascist talking points driving its base. Meanwhile Bernie Centrist Sanders was considered a 'socialist' and too far left for the Democrats, who are actively trying to purge leftist from their ranks while also blaming leftists for not voting for them. Fascism is on the rise in the realm of electable politics, whereas socialism, while rising, remains a perceived albatross
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False, my grandfather was eating ice cream in his modest flat when he heard a knock at the door: Lo and behold, upon answering it, there stood Comrade Stalin, brandishing a humorously oversized spoon...
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@triplea7536 And Bernie Sanders is a Social Democrat, a center-left position that seeks to reform capitalism, not overthrow it. No socialist seeks to reform the class system as part of their platform, they seek to outmode it. But obviously that distinction means very little to someone who paints socialism's reactionary opposite as somehow identical to socialism itself, even though absolutely no self-described socialist and no self-described fascist would ever make that link, nor indeed would any sober historian. I'll grant you this much, though: Perhaps the sociopolitical paradigm has shifted minimally, and the reality is that the liberal West is merely losing its mask as the promise of working class power looms larger and larger on the horizon
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@nowhereman6019 This is also, of course, where the term "bourgeoisie" comes from: They are the ones living within the fortified walls, the true beneficiaries of society
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@triplea7536 My friend, Benito literally coined the word 'fascism' himself to describe his movement. This tactic of simply rebranding all fascists as 'socialists' as though fascism doesnt even exist or something doesn't work with the guy who literally invented the word and proudly self-described by it
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@Partisanski OK, now you've jumped the shark. The Romans exist in the Italians as much as the Ottomans do in the Turkish. And that doesn't even matter, anyway: This is about the Ottomans laying claim to all foods that came about (or more often, prexisted) in the disparate corners of their Empire. That Empire being gone, the lands those foods came from are no more 'Ottoman' today than the lands of the Romans are 'Roman' today. This is just weird revanchist Ottoman rhetoric
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@shizachan8421 Then you would argue as Marx himself did. So many defensive libs say things like "Look how much capitalism has done for the world!" And, setting aside for a hot second all the exploitation and violence, they are not wrong. But the capitalists, by virtue both of their successes and their cruelties, have made possible the outmoding of their favored mode of production
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@ihl0700677525 Please, if you self-describe as a liberal, do not explain to me my own platform, especially if you're going to get it wrong while also arguing that an explicitly classist society is somehow also a meritocracy. That is, I'm afraid, a patently ridiculous claim. I just wanted to put the response to your classist stance out there for all who may scroll this far down this reply chain. When you speak of success, you speak of surplus value robbery – you argue, essentially, that "Might Makes Right." In truth, friend, it doesn't matter what you or I choose to "believe." What matters is the material reality we are confronted with, and how we act in response to it
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@shizachan8421 Actually, as it happens, social mobility for the average American is growing less likely by the year, and today it is less likely than it was under late feudalism and the burgers in the 1600s. And you've seen of late how 'freedoms' are merely concessions granted by the ruling class that they can strip away at will. As for standards of living, we can imagine worse, here in the Imperial Core. Well, those of us not in the 60% and growing demographic of people living paycheck to paycheck, let alone the 12% of people who go to bed hungry every night, or the hundreds of thousands who sleep on the street in a land where real estate is capital first, a home and shelter second. But for the children working for pennies, the impoverished working extremely dangerous labor, the starving workers of lands they don't own, the billions living lives far shorter and far beneath what they could be, were it not for the extractive forces of capitalism — for them, there is no falling further. As you say, no matter what station we are in as a society, we can always imagine better, and that is a strength to be nurtured, not a threat to be quashed. Socialism is that better, and it is certainly a better better than falling to growing threat of ultra-privatized fascism. Socialism is merely the abolition of class, which essentially means that the >1% are no longer to be allowed to horde obscene wealth and power in a world of poverty. It is merely feeding and housing the working class by the very means that we now grossly overfeed the ruling class, even as many of us starve. Labor is entitled to all that is produces by right, and socialism is merely the fulfillment of that truth
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@Apsoy Pike You're not really dunking on socialists here, you're just kinda revealing that you don't know much about socialism yet you've been taught to hate it without understanding it. You can still have property under socialism. Private Property and Personal Property are two completely different things under Marxism. Personal Property is everything you're thinking of: Your home, your clothes, your TV, your toothbrush, etc. Private Property, on the other hand, refers to the means of production: Factories, mass swathes of real-estate, woods for logging, oil drilling platforms, etc. Under socialism, Private Property, aka the means of production, is to be held in common by the workers who build, maintain, and operate it — capitalist ownership, which does not labor and robs the majority of the capital produced by such means, is to be written out of the picture. You'll still have the stuff in your house, and your house, too. It's just that now it won't be legal for corporations to own millions of unoccupied homes while some 650,000 Americans go roofless. Not only do you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from socialism, but the reality is that you and I and 99% of humanity stand zero chance of every even rising far enough to become a capitalist. And even if you broke the odds, would you really seek to become a robber baron in a world of poverty, rather than uplifting all the world and stripping away the rat race thar forces workers into competition with each other instead of with their natural class rivals? In short, you've got it backwards. Labor is entitled to all it creates, and that is only upheld under socialism. Socialism is the worker finally being able to control the economy, let alone participate in it. Economic democracy is the explicit goal, and it will never happen under the petty dictatorships of CEOs, who live and loot like lords over serfs
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@ihl0700677525 Every cost is paid for by the labor of laborers. Workers do not owe a debt to a superior class for their "freedom", which in fact they will never have so long as that superior class exists. No system which pretends they are free before then and which demands their fealty to a master class is worth propping up or praising. Labor is entitled to all that it creates, and always has been. Freedom is not robbed: Freedom robbed is but extortion
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Are you saying even the Cuban, Russian, and Burkina Fason revolutions were all liberal? That Marx and Engels and Lenin and Fidel and Che and Sankara were all liberals? Moreover, are you suggesting the French Revolution wasn't liberal?
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@wertywerrtyson5529 Theory isn't sacred, sanctimony be damned, Great Man Theory be damned. But reading liberal histories hostile to socialists while refusing to read the explicit and not obfuscated goals of socialists from their own mouths is blatantly dogmatic: It is you who is cleaving to ideology over data if you can't even be bothered to try to understand the motivations of people you claim to hate without even engaging with them
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You could read history off of YouTube. Hakim has a solid book/citation list. Your choice is the same as always: Take what you've been told for granted, or research it well in historical and contemporary, primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Classical Liberalism was the fuel or the product of the so-called Enlightenment, whereas Neoliberalism is is usually called Reaganomics or Trickle-down economics in the USA. So even if we go by those commonly known facts, it is clear the two forms of Liberalism are understood to be distinct
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@Partisanski This is like insisting on calling Italian wine Roman. Many of the staples of Arab cuisine are not nationally bounded, and many even predate the modern states that exist today or even the Ottoman Empire. As a Hellenophile I am all too familiar with these "it's actually Ottoman" arguments, they're even less tenable than "it's actually Turkish"
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@skyisreallyhigh3333 Jake is just trolling this vid's comments, nobody makes lazy contradictory statements with no support whatsoever but emoji spam who isn't trying to rustle jimmies
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@sekarmaltum1695 What are the forms of socialism, and in what way do each separate working class people from self-determination in ways reminiscent of liberalism? I ask because I genuinely don't know any 'form' of socialism which disenfranchises working people in ways that exceed their disenfranchisement under liberalism — your comment sounds to me like a common 'no u' rather than a genuine attempt to discuss democracy outside of liberalism
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That sounds like insisting Europe and North America be called "The West" rather than Europe and North America, and that is a rather big no-no. These are ideologically loaded terms compared to the more neutral and even more spatially descriptive geographic names
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@chesswithivan8346 Why would home ownership not be important in some countries more than others? Why would it be better to organize production like a bunch of decentralized oligarchies whose workers have no democratic rights and whose owners rob the vast majority of the capital produced from those who produce it? Why wouldn't workplace democracies and economic planning by central democratic leadership be more efficient, less wasteful, and more equitable?
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@Apsoy Pike I feel like I have done a bit of what you're saying I haven’t done, frankly. If that's your reaction to my reply, if your understanding of these topics is at that level, then you need more than me typing you comments on YouTube to help you better understand. There are millions of pages written about this stuff, and I'm not capable of condensing the entire 101 pitch for socialism and against capitalism into brief YouTube replies, nor would it be reasonable to think I could. I'd recommend to you first the very Manifesto, since it's only 30 some pages and you seem like you'd learn from reading it. That text exists to make that pitch as briefly as it can to a working class audience circa 1850, which is to say it's a brief survey that's written to be understandable. An even better, more contemporary and even easier to read text would be Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti. That text is amazing, one I'd recommended to anyone, especially if you want to understand the conflict between capitalist and communist forces in the 20th century and thus see their systems, deeds, and motivations contrasted. But this argument you're making, that the failures I describe under capitalist societies might not be due to capitalism, but that the failures under socialist societies were somehow clearly because of socialism, is, frankly, mere dogma without a single example, and that in the face of my examples. You think capitalist police in the core of empire nearly matching the spending of the world's largest socialist army has somehow nothing to do with how socialist and capitalist societies allocate their funds? What could possibly be your explanation for America, the richest empire in history, having the highest incarcerated population on earth? What is your imagined reason beyond capitalism that explains how the wealthiest nation allows more than 12% of its people to go to bed hungry every single night, even as 40% of all food brought to market is thrown out and wasted? Saying that how America spends its money and treats is people has nothing to do with the prevailing sociopolitical ideology is quite a strange and monumental claim to make — if socialism explicitly wouldn't tolerate poverty in the land of wealth, how is its absence not a factor in just such a land? How is the presence of an opposing ideology not relevant? How can anyone even think of deflecting these very clear socioeconomic issues away from capitalism's door while they happily pile up every conceivable socioeconomic failure at the threshold of socialism? Again, this is dogmatic, not fact-based. Those who don't know what they're talking about focus on broad claims of success and failure without pointing to defensible examples because that is exactly how they were persuaded to distrust socialism and to implicitly trust capitalism in the first place: with blind faith, not with critical thinking backed by data and the scientific method. It is folly, juvenile even, to take petty jabs at great concepts without first attempting to understand their explicit goals, grievances, and methods. Reducing the debate to mere ideological posturing not supported by material reality is the stuff of sophomores and demagogues, and you and I are much smarter than that
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The NatSocs used leftist terminology and rhetoric because thkse things were so popular, but only a fool hung up on names would ignore the Night of Long Knives or what the man actually wrote in Mein Kampf. The contempt for socialist goals was so great that it was nakedly murderous. And every policy enacted under their reign was for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, absolutely no attempt was made at destroying the class system. Their greatest donors were all capitalists, before and after their ascension
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@Apsoy Pike Did you read my comment? The one you didn't respond to? I think I dispelled the imisconceptions you were evincing about property rights and "ripping people off" there. Did I leave you with any questions, did I fail to properly explain something? I thought if anything I offered too much in the way of rebuttal for a single reply, yet you didn't reply and are now maintaining that nobody has given actual criticism? I spent a couple minutes trying, friend, so let me know what I missed
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@darkgardener9577 Arguing that some people "don't know what to do with freedom" is some seriously disgusting neoliberal rhetoric that borders (unsurprisingly) on outright fαscist thetoric, and frankly, it only reinforces the "freedom for me, but not for thee" argument
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@thefacelessstranger4983 Revolutionaries who use right wing dogwhistles are intellectual cowards tho. If woke means lgbtq+ rights, I've never met a revcom who wasn't sympathetic. If it just means hollow and solely nominal support for such things, then of course, that is contemptible
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@nektariosorfanoudakis2270 12% of Americans go to bed hungry every night, while 40+% of food brought to market is thrown away. At least 600,000 sleep on the streets despite millions of unoccupied homes. Even the richest empire on earth can't feed and house its people under capitalism — not because it is unable, but because that would undermine the hegemony of the rulers of Bourgeoisland. Meanwhile, we are constantly warned that Revolutuon in the Imperial Core is folly
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@jelly.212 This resident user is always going on about how every form of hate and prejudice under the sun is actually "based", and how they believe the only 'real' communists are just massively unhinged bigots and psychopaths
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@SlutForCynthia In the United States they certainly don't. The Democratic Party is actively trying to purge all genuine leftists from their ranks, while at the same time demanding that leftists vote for the guy they're forcing on us, with the full intention of blaming leftists if they fail. They still blame what they call 'Bernie Bros' for Hillary's defeat. They've been doing this for at least a decade now. Their core leadership even explicitly said as much
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Like 'gay', it still retains the old meaning. Of course every time you use it that way it will conjure thoughts of the more contemporary primary definition, but still — if you wanna retake 'woke', I'm not gonna be the comrade spitting right wing nonsense who tries to stop you
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