No.406644
I wanted to respond to the post about "communism as conservatism" but the jannies deleted it. I resist!
>>406633
>But in all cases, what it originally meant to be a conservative was to try to conserve the aristocratic order, and the culture it created to survive (religion, etc.). Conservatives were always opposed to democracy, favoring social stability over political/individual liberty. Conservatives were counter-revolutionaries, trying to undo democracy and liberal reform.
Well, the Soviet Union could get into some pretty avant-garde stuff in the 1920s. Look at the art and experimental theatre and films from the time. It was pretty radical. I think starting with Stalin though, things that tended to individualize people began to be discouraged, which led to a kind of conservatism (in a sense), because conservatism was no longer seen as upholding capitalism, but preserving socialism, stably as it was. I can understand this, and I like some of these values. It may have even been necessary at some level. But I think it also became fossilized in place. And it created contradictions. Because if we're supposed to conform to "socialism," and there's corruption within the party with officials taking advantage of their positions for personal reasons, then that is a big political problem. It's like individualism for them, collectivism for us. Capitalist societies don't have this problem because it's your own individual failing if you're not gaming the system to your advantage.
But I suppose it is becoming a problem because we have individualism for us, and they have collectivism for them (in a sense). The rich dress in sleek conformist turtlenecks like Steve Jobs or Elizabeth Holmes (remember her from Theranos?) and rig the system to benefit themselves as a group at the expense of everyone else.
>Maybe the anxieties in the West today stem from too much democracy and freedom, not too little. When individualistic liberty is taken to its logical end, people are left with nothing to believe in but selfishness, greed, sex, and their personal identity. […] Liberty and individual freedom lead a society to nihilism and self-destruction.
I think you're really onto something. I can only speak to the U.S., but I think that the society that produced me was really repressed for a long time. You might say this about "Western civilization" in general for centuries with the role of the Christian religion. English Victorianism. American church culture. My dad grew up in a very strict, very conservative religious household and he rebelled against it. I don't blame him at all because it sounded really stifling.
The counterculture in the 1960s was about expressing yourself and individual freedom. Conservatives and traditionalists are deeply discomfited by the 1960s, but what did they think was going to happen? It was the negation of what came before. You don't get the negation without the repressed conservatism that preceded it, like a kid who grows up in a conservative household and then goes off to college and goes completely crazy with partying and drinking and having sex all the time because he was deprived that in high school. The wider culture turned to its opposite and embraced unbridled liberty and freedom as abstract ideals. Everything in the world turns into its opposite sooner or later.
But "freedom" and "liberty" has now turned into a kind of unfreedom and a loss of liberty. I think this is like the anti-mask people or "I'm not going to get a vaccine because it's my (abstract) 'right'" and blah blah blah. They've taken away the freedom of others because of their selfishness. The countries that handled the pandemic the best were Asian societies – which are not as conformist or as conservative as some people in the West think but they probably don't put individual freedom on a pedestal as extreme as these American boomers do. You notice they're a lot of boomers, right? But they're often on the political right. They turned to their opposite too and became ultra-individualist "conservatives" (in a sense) holding onto a "system" that is just falling apart.
So maybe what's next is the "negation of the negation." Thus the society returns to its positive. But what that looks like might not look like America in the 1950s.
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No.406648
>>406645>THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY STEAL THE ELECTION THE MEDIA’S COVERING IT UPRotfl.
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No.406650
>>406648The collectivist would say "yes we can."
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No.410523
I was the OP on that thread. Went to bed after posting and saw that it was deleted. I made it in good faith btw, not as a troll post.
What got me thinking about the idea of communism as conservatism was some of Adam Curtis's documentaries, especially The Power of Nightmares. In it, he compares neocons with Islamists, and demonstrates that both tried to create collective ideologies that told grand stories to bind society together.
>with Stalin though, things that tended to individualize people began to be discouraged
The USSR in the 1920s was still very unstable. The impulses towards individualism would have likely lead to the breakup of the country (and the Russian Empire's territories) and so they had to be replaced with a more conformist ideology. Russians were very traditional, so keeping traditional social values in place was valuable.
>The counterculture in the 1960s was about expressing yourself and individual freedom
Now the elite have figured out (probably subconsciously) how to turn this individualism into consumerism and divert social movements towards harmless avenues. But in doing so, we have lost any sense of a collective purpose.
>Conservatives and traditionalists are deeply discomfited by the 1960s
Classical conservatives were always>>406644
opposed to the ideas of individualism and liberty. Of course, no conservative today can say this, so they have twisted the origins of these ideas into libertarismism, and mechanisms to preserve capitalism
>So maybe what's next is the "negation of the negation." Thus the society returns to its positive. But what that looks like might not look like America in the 1950s.
It is going to look fundamentally different from either the 1950s America myth or the old socialist ideologies of the early 20th Century. I think the new ideology that will change the world might fuse religion, nationalism, tradition, and socialism to create a new collective vision to unite people.
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No.410538
>>410531
I'm gay so I think that means I want to be the qt trad Chinese wife.
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No.410720
>>410523>Classical conservatives were always opposed to the ideas of individualism and liberty. Of course, no conservative today can say this, so they have twisted the origins of these ideas into liberalism, and mechanisms to preserve capitalism Based and truth-pilled. For example Metternich is an actual Conservative.
Metternich:
>Called himself a conservative socialist >Nationalized the tobacco industry (would have preferred for him to destroy it entirely but w/e)>Ran a police state with a vast network of informants to report on liberals as well as ethno-nationalist scum, so he was basically ANTIFA in one person centuries before the real antifa even existed>Adopted proto-Keynesian economic policy by advocating for governments to invest and to construct public works to provide relief for unemployment Metternich today is not held up as an icon of Conservatism. Instead he's brushed under the carpet as an embarrassing deviation from """true""" Conservative (read: liberal) thought.
Edmund Burke, a blithering moron who literally wrote a pamphlet agitating against labor unions and the minimum wage, has been chosen instead for being the figurehead of Conservative ideology.
Why? Because it's more convenient for Porky to hold up as an icon of the Right a business loving cuck than it is to hold up a traditional Conservative figure who was perfectly happy being "authoritarian" "anti-business" and who self-identified as a socialist. It's not just Left-wing history the elites lie about; Right-wing history has also nuked and erased "traditional" or I guess you could call them "paternalistic" Conservatives out of the minds and consciousness of the average rightoids, the better to mold them into liberals.
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No.410735
>>410720This kind of remember of the creation of the left wing liberalism and its usage against the left
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No.410736
>>410720Nixon apparently read de Sauvigny's biography of Metternich while in the White House. I'm not saying Nixon was good or whatever and he had personal neuroses, but can you imagine a right-wing politician in America doing that today? Nixon and Kissinger and that group were brutal but they also seemed pretty pragmatic in the exercise of power.
Also distrusted by many right-wing ideologues today because they shook hands with Mao. The kind of right-wing populism represented by Trump's clique does seem hyper-individualist to me. I think Corey Robin traced Trumpian stuff to Burke. At least it carries the Burkean "DNA." And even it postures as a break from neoconservatism (in part because some neocons – emphasis on *some* – moved to the Democrats, others stayed like Mike Pompeo), it's similar to neoconservatism for its ideological fanaticism.
>People on the right and the left agree on this stereotype of Smith and Burke: The former was the defender of unregulated markets, the latter was the traditionalist critic of the market; from Smith we get neoliberalism, from Burke we get social conservatism.
>Nothing could be further from the truth.
>Smith was extraordinarily sympathetic not just to the role of workers in creating the capitalist economy but also to their claims against their employers. He was quite sensitive to the power of capital, not only by virtue of its backing from the state, but also — and this is something Smith’s libertarian defenders and leftist critics overlook or deny — by virtue of its accumulation of wealth, its possession of capital, and its greater power in the market. Finally, he had a notion of value apart from the market, outside the bargains people strike, which could be used as a source of critique and leverage — as many labor radicals discovered in the 19th century — against the contract and exchanges of the marketplace.
>Burke is almost the opposite. If you study carefully his economic writings after the French Revolution, you see none of Smith’s celebration of labor. Burke defends employers against employees. He argues against what we now call a living wage, claiming that whatever an employer is willing to pay is what a worker’s work is worth. But most important of all, he sees the man of capital — whether that man is financing government loans or employing labor — as the source and determinant of value. Not just economic value, but also, as I argue in the book, moral and cultural value.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/01/trump-is-a-typical-conservative-that-says-a-lot-about-the-conservative-tradition/ >>
No.410737
>individualism vs collectivism
False dichotomy bullshit.
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No.410738
>>410737Yes. But that doesn't mean the dichotomy doesn't exist. I think we have to find out how to negate it.
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No.410739
>>410738By not reifying it, for starters.
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No.410866
>>410523>I think the new ideology that will change the world might fuse religion, nationalism, tradition, and socialism to create a new collective vision to unite people.This sounds like a complete lobotomy.
I don't see socialism in this combo, though. Once you've got traditional, religious nationalists, you don't need to give them what they want, you make them want what you give them.
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No.410879
>>410720>For example Metternich is an actual Conservative.>>Nationalized the tobacco industry (would have preferred for him to destroy it entirely but w/e)>>Adopted proto-Keynesian economic policy by advocating for governments to invest and to construct public works to provide relief for unemployment Neither of those is conservative.
They don't strengthen existing hierarchies or fight against change just because it's not status quo.
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No.411111
>>410866>This sounds like a complete lobotomyYep. It doesn't matter though, as long as people believe it. Fascist ideologies have been full of contradictions, but they still create a strong national purpose to unite people. Modern China is full of contradictions, but it unites people under the nationalist goal of reversing the Century of Humiliation.
>I don't see socialism in this combo, thoughYou still need to make people's lives better materially or you won't stay in power
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No.411438
>>410879>Conservative is when hierarchy and when more hierarchy it is more conservativeStop using meme anarchist definitions and THINK. People like Metternich were guided by a Victorian sense of noblesse oblige i.e. "ok I'm an aristocrat but I have a duty, Christian or otherwise, to ensure that the people aren't fucking dying in the streets." In foreign relations this meant creating a balance of power so peace could be maintained and no one nation got too strong; in the domestic sphere this meant clamping down on and censoring proto-Fascist ultranationalists who were literally foaming at the mouth to start race wars as well as liberal agitators who were the vanguard of a rising bourgeoisie, and in economic policy trying to aid the poor. The old guard Conservatives rightfully recognized that the new upcoming liberal regime would be dominated by businessmen guided solely by profit and that the liberals themselves would eventually suffer rebellion by a rising proletariat due to their disregard. Sure their "solution" of permanently cementing absolutist monarchies and basically trying to jam a stop sign in History's path was pretty dumb but they were also far sighted in many ways and honestly if I had to live under a rightoid regime I'd rather have it be under a real Conservative like Metternich or Disraeli than a dumbass Fascist or Neoliberal which is all we get out of rightoids these days.
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No.411444
>>411438
>"solution" of permanently cementing absolutist monarchies and basically trying to jam a stop signThat’s the crux of conservatism though; preserving the old order.
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No.411451
im going to pretend I didnt see this and you should to
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No.411459
>>411444Not when you think about modern "Conservatism" which is basically liberalism that has displayed a immense ability to adapt to and progress or mutate in virtually every sphere of life. Like
>>410523 pointed out, the neocons literally tried to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy overnight; this delusional messianic liberalism cannot really be considered Conservative in any sense if that word is to retain any meaning at all.
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No.411468
>>411459Sure it can.
Conservatism is almost always restricted to the metropole.
It’s why they are massive hypocrites and no one should take their contradictory garbage ideology seriously.
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No.411511
>>411468>Using World Systems TheoryBruh moment
Well actually I don't really have a problem with that theory I think it can be useful and give some good analysis. But if you're from Latin America you should already know that Conservative thought has never been restricted to the "metropole" and the history of your peoples and countries show this, whether you meant modern-day liberalism or the old guard.
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No.411514
>>411511Why? Which Latin American country has had opportunity to be imperialist and yet refuses to impose its economy onto the country based on “conservative principles”?
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No.411903
>>411514wat
no seriously wat are you even asking?
>You claimed: Conservative ideology is restricted to the metropole<I claimed: Conservative ideology has existed in countries cultures and peoples outside the metropole both historically and in modern times if you count liberalism to be modern Conservatism >>
No.411906
Individualism = soulless ghouls
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No.411911
>>410879breadtube degree isn't a real degree
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No.411916
>>411903We need to go back further
>You claimed: "the neocons literally tried to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy overnight; this delusional messianic liberalism cannot really be considered Conservative in any sense if that word is to retain any meaning at all."<I said: Conservatism is almost always restricted to the metropole.And now you're talking about Latin American countries as analogous and as if they are also instituting some kind of imperialism that's on the same level.
I'm just as lost as you are.
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No.411926
>>411916Oh ok thank you for the reorientation.
A) Conservatism (at least old-school Conservatism) does not necessarily imply imperialism; like I explained with Metternich he was trying to maintain a balance of power between all nations and I'm pretty sure under his direction Austria had an extended period of peace with no foreign entanglements/wars.
B) I brought up Latin American countries because they are not part of the metropole yet they have historically had Conservative movements directed against liberalism and even today when Conservatives have degenerated into liberalism and neoliberals that influence is still home-grown and we see this with figures like Macri and Bolsonaro.
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No.411967
>>411111I don't think China can be replicated so simply because it did undergo the Century of Humiliation which is a unique historical experience.
I think Chinese nationalism has become intensified but I think that is mostly because of the U.S. attitude toward China, which provokes the nationalist response and gets people unified. But this is why the nationalism in China can often be "left" in form. I don't think the comparison to fascism works. I think the driving force for such a thing, if China did go in that direction, would be the military like what happened in Japan in the 1930s.
Japan in the early 20th century had support from anti-colonial people like W.E.B. Du Bois and was seen as a relatively progressive force by the standards of the time. Then ultranationalist forces in the military starting taking over bit by bit, carrying out assassinations and attempted coups (most of which failed) over and over again with little consequences for their actions. One ultranationalist group (secret societies within the military) would shoot a prime minister and get slapped on the wrist, or carry out a coup attempt and get 20 days house arrest for it.
There were also dueling ultranationalist groups within the military and the one that carried out most of these attacks on the civil government were the more extreme faction that didn't actually take over in the end. The more extreme faction (the Kōdōha) idealized an agrarian, pre-industrial Japan and also wanted to invade the USSR. The faction that would take over (the Tōseiha) were relatively "moderate" right-wing militarists who favored a southward campaign and were also industrialists. So it's kind of interesting how two right-wing factions can be competing, and one faction can be carrying out attacks, but that benefits the other faction.
But that kinda sounds like the United States though. Right-wing extremist elements have gradually become bolder and bolder, and not really getting punished for it worth a damn because people don't want to sack up stop them. And I think why "nationalism" merges with the right wing in America is because the capitalists need to rob people abroad and nationalist sentiments get people to support aggressive wars. But the U.S. military is pretty apolitical at the top ranks, which is not like Japan in the 1930s. And the CPC seems like it keeps the PLA under a tight leash.
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No.412111
>>411926>like I explained with Metternich he was trying to maintain a balance of power between all nations and I'm pretty sure under his direction Austria had an extended period of peace with no foreign entanglements/wars. I'm not saying that conservatism necessitates imperialism, I'm saying imperialism reveals the faults of conservatism as an ideology.
Wasn't Metternich that guy Marx called out by name in the Manifesto because he couldn't stop himself from trying to squash revolutions?
He seemed entangled in a lot of shit, dude.
>I brought up Latin American countries because they are not part of the metropole yet they have historically had Conservative movements…Conservatism is only trying to maintain the status quo of one thing or another within the metropole, and impose it in places where it doesn't exist yet or it's waning.
When neoliberals from the U.S. controlled OAS want to maintain the status-quo against socialism in Latin American states, or the U.S. wants to create a liberal democracy in Iraq, that's conservatism.
This goes for both Bolsonaro and Macri.
Honestly don't know why anyone can't just pragmatically pick and choose what they want to conserve or not without appealing to such an idealist ideology.
It's fine to me as a lifestyle decision but as a political ideology it's a dead horse.
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No.412140
>>410523> I think the new ideology that will change the world might fuse religion, nationalism, tradition, and socialism to create a new collective vision to unite people.Already done. Fourth political theory.
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No.412187
>>410720Metternich was entirely based. I wholly accept the collectivistic nature of traditional conservatism, and the primary placing of value on the community, nation, and culture rather than on an individuals rights. At least I, as a conservative, have never objected to this.