I keep seeing posts from this instance referring to capitalists as liberals. Since when are capitalism and liberalism related? As far as I’ve always known, liberalism is a social ideology, while capitalism is an economic system.

Liberalism and capitalism were always related because liberalism is one of the ideologies of capitalism (the other being fascism), You don’t have to be a capitalist to be a liberal.

Liberalism is an economical ideology before all. All the rest is aesthetics and rhetoric that liberals adopt and discard willy-nilly depending on what is politically convenient at the time.

Why do y’all refer to all capitalists as liberals when at least half (probably more, at least in my experience) are conservatives?

Because conservatives are liberals. The dichotomy commonly accepted by both sides in the US that conservatives and liberal are of different ideologies is a false one, with the exception of the minority ones who are out right fascists, conservatives and right libertarians are liberals, they just have a socially anti-progressive stance because their voter base is socially anti-progressive, refer to my point from above:

Liberalism is an economical ideology before all. All the rest is aesthetics and rhetoric that liberals adopt and discard willy-nilly depending on what is politically convenient at the time.

I, for example, consider myself a liberal, but I’m most certainly not a capitalist. I’m stuck in a capitalist society in which I have to play by the rules if I want to feed my family, but that’s as far as my support for the system goes. I’m pretty sure a lot of Americans feel this way.

So are the vast majority of conservatives. That doesn’t make them any less pro-capitalism.

Looking it up, the definition of liberalism specifies a belief in maximum personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government. Considering that 90% of governments in the world are endlessly corrupt, capitalist or not, I’d much prefer one that guarantees its citizens rights as a matter of course rather than begrudgingly grants them privileges that can be taken away without public oversight.

This definition is almost good but the implications of omitting the things it omit make it effectively a lie.

What freedoms are we talking about exactly? Not every freedom is desirable or even possible, the right to fly by flapping your arms is technically a freedom but no matter how hard I sign fancy papers saying that any human in my backyard has that right, that won’t magically grant peoples in my backyard the ability to fly by flapping their arms, the right to murder and dismember humans is also technically a freedom and it is possible to grant it, but I don’t need to explain why we shouldn’t.

“Freedom” as liberal conceive it is, to put it bluntly, gaslighting. It almost never go beyond “technically, the fancy legal document signed by some politician say you can do this thing” but can you really though?

Here is an example: in the US you, as a worker, on paper have the right to quit your job whenever you want, but can you really though, if you are to poor or too indebted, then no, you can’t, you have to stay until you find a new job willing to take you and that is no worst than the current one if possible, and only then, at the cost of many hours of job scouting on top of your working hours, can you maybe afford to quit. And that’s just one example of many instances of that kind of things, not only in the US but in all existing liberal “democracies”.

The only freedom liberal states consistently grant, let alone enforce, is the right (for the capitalists) to own private property and extract surplus from other people’s work.

Many of the supposedly unconditional freedoms you can’t actually enjoy if you are not wealthy enough.

Similarly, your take on governments, while somewhat grounded on reality and your personal experience, is ignoring such important things to consider that it makes it plain wrong.

In particular, the government’s class character.

States are not some kind of magical monoliths completely cut of from the societies they rules. They are tools of class warfare and a necessary product of class struggle, they are the way the ruling class of a class society guaranty their privileges and supress oppositions to the ruling class by the exploited class. This is the true reason why your supposed “democracy” won’t pass free healthcare, crackdown on big corporations or make lobbying and corruption illegal etc despite these and many others being widely popular even among conservatives despite what the most vocals of them says: under capitalism, the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, they are the one who hold the economic power and therefore the political power (the 2 are irremediably linked in various ways) and as such, they always have the last word (this is what we call a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), and they will continue to have it for as long as they are not expropriated and overthrown.

Once the bourgeoisie is overthrown, have enough of their private property seized to guaranty that they won’t be able to use economic coercion against the revolution, and once a proletarian state in which the bourgeois are not allowed to participate (a dictatorship of the proletariat) is created, all of the problems you listed could, at last, be progressively done away with.

Emphasis on the progressively, that will be a possess that will obviously not be instant nor linear and will demand lots time and resources to do.

For more details, read Marx, Engel, Lenin, etc… Feel free to ask for recommendations.

Do y’all really trust your governments to look after your best interests? As a U.S. American, I know I wouldn’t trust my government or politicians to do anything but enrich themselves at my expense, but I don’t have to; my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

Now if we could just get them to stop funding and committing genocide…

See section just above.

Those things happen because the current American state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The goal of the bourgeoisie is to keep enriching themselves more and more every day, and as such, the state under their control act accordingly.

if you support private property you’re a lib

Hey, this is more of a linguistic history answer.

In the US, some writers like Mill or Painewere more popular, who truly saw liberalism as an emancipatory force that could uplift minorities into respectable culture. You can still see this in the left liberal running joke “more black girlbosses”, wherein emancipation is a small number of a minority becomes business owners. This concept of “liberalism” became more popular with Lincoln and FDR and is now what Americans imagine “liberals” are. Their opposite, conservatives, evolved from monarchists to supporters of a nascent aristocracy, to local business interests (which means oil interests, agribusiness, etc). Conserving current power, as it were.

In Europe, however, other writers were popular, and liberalism remained more of an umbrella term for the property rights parties.

Liberals think their philosophy is about republicanism, democracy, individual rights eyc. but the socialist critique would argue that it has always been about a universalisation of property rights, specifically under the hegemony of Western European pedigree. Even other concepts of property rights are there to be brutally swept aside if they cannot be linked in to the hegemony, and liberal democracies are very comfortable with non-democracies without civil rights, and are comfortable violating the sovereignty of republics that don’t hook into their markets.

Before liberalism, there were a lot of different kinds of property that could be taken or used in different ways or by different people. A lot of property was considered “rented” from the monarch, but there was also the church lands and the commons. An idea of an individual peasant owning a specific section of grass didn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t remotely be enforced. The encroachment of exclusive inviolable property advanced over centuries, to the point where the main form of aristocracy with power was ones that made the jump to becoming capitalists. The emancipation of slaves was in part justified with giving them access to the ability to own property.

Slaves were an interesting case as a big part of the expansion of liberalism was arguments over slavery, as they were a special type of property. A capitalist may believe that he is entitled to the produce of his property, but the church argued that the slaves souls were God’s domain, and thus holy acts (like marriage, baptism, birth) were outside the purview of the capitalist, could not be prevented or exploited. This squabble and others like it was a big part of the secularisation of liberalism and squashing out the power of the church, argues Losurdo in “Liberalism: A Counter-history”, rather than “Enlightenment values” as Whig history would claim.

Of course now, liberals would argue, we don’t have slaves and so long as sweatshop workers in Indonesia have the right to own property, regardless of their actual access or ability, they are not slaves. Indeed, one could argue that many liberals think of slavery as being barred from property relations. This can be seen every time a business owner is barred from a property relationship. Something something freedom rar rar.

Obviously, not every liberal is a capitalist.

“True” idealised liberalism hasn’t ever existed, but every time it has gotten close it has resulted in so much human misery and squalor that capitalists as a class have released the reigns a bit (great depression, postwar welfare etc).

The Post is highly educational.

Liberalism is the political system of capitalism. Its beliefs are: Free markets and competition, protection of property rights and opening new markets.

Nothing else in liberalism is inherently left or right wing. The political system of America during slavery was liberalism. America during segregation was liberalism. Abortion has been rolled backwards under liberalism. The Japanese far right inheritor of the fascists party is called the liberal party.

You have been confused and politically mis-educated about what liberalism is by the american landscape of culture war politics.

Liberalism is an economic political ideology, like socialism, socialism holds nearly polar opposite economic political beliefs to it.

Looking it up, the definition of liberalism specifies a belief in maximum personal freedom, especially as guaranteed by a government.

Personal freedom FOR WHOM ?

If you are a worker you have no freedom. You are forced to work, trapped in a system where if you do not work you go homeless and die. You are barely different to a slave, the chains are just more abstract now and you get to swap who your owner is every now and then.

The personal freedom liberals want is for the people that hold property, not for the workers. It is the belief in the freedom of capital to exploit and do whatever it wants. Liberal “freedom” is not personal freedom it is the financial freedom of the ruling class to utilise their capital to exploit the workers to maximum effect.

I, for example, consider myself a liberal, but I’m most certainly not a capitalist.

Stop calling yourself a liberal then and start immersing yourself in socialist spaces where you’ll actually learn what alternatives exist to capitalism.

my rights are guaranteed by our constitution.

The state will leave you alone as long as you are not a threat to it. The very moment you pose any sort of threat to it your rights vanish. The US has a history of murdering socialists, Assange is certainly not being given any rights, the cop city protestors are certainly not being given any rights, in fact wasn’t one summarily executed not long ago? Self described liberals are entirely oblivious.