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ChristianKl comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - LessWrong
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None of the major political ideologies are particularly consequentialist in the way they approach policy. Progressives by and large see the world through the following lens: There are some people who are oppressed and others who oppress them. Government policy ought to focus on emancipating the oppressed and punishing/overthrowing the oppressors. Criminal Justice: white people oppressing brown people. Abortion: Christian men oppressing women. Foreign policy: America oppressing the rest of the world (unless it's America saving some oppressed foreigners from an oppressor). Housing policy: landlords oppressing tenants. Labor: captital oppressing unions. Taxes: the one percent oppressing the 99%. Marriage equality: straight Christians oppressing LGBT people. Progressives aren't generally concerned about utility: they're concerned about justice. Even the Animal Rights movement, essentially founded by arch-Utilitarian Peter Singer is focused on the class relations between animals and the humans who oppress them.
In this case, the oppressors are wealthy business owners who are exploiting the labor of the poor and helpless AND exploiting the rest of us by placing the burden for care on taxpayers.
I know this summary of liberal thought probably sounds strawman-like. I don't mean it to be taken as a summary of progressive arguments on these issues. There are good arguments for progressive positions, many of which I agree with. Rather, this oppressed-oppressor lens is just the initial conceptual frame most progressives have in response to any political issue.
I'm not saying there can't be real instances of oppression or that ending oppression doesn't increase utility. But when all you have is a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail etc. Conservatives and libertarians have similar non-consequentialist frames through which they view every issue. See "The Three Languages of Politics.
The extent to which any ideology can be "true" is mostly just the extent to which their central heuristic is useful and actually describes the world. There is a minority of libertarians and an even smaller minority of progressives that actually appear to mainly care about the consequentialist effects of policy. They happen to over-represented here, but they're pretty unusual in the rest of the world.
BIG + no other welfare state and no minimum wage is probably preferable to what America has now. I sort of worry about how hard it would be to hire someone if the BIG got too large but it probably couldn't be worse than trying to hire someone in an environment where they could lose their house, health coverage and disability check if they begin making too much.
I don"t think it"s a complete strawman. Marx basically says that every social conflict is about the struggle between oppressor and oppressed.
Not everyone who's political left subscribes to that ideology but it's certainly something that real people believe. It deeply buried in the core assumptions of socialist thought.
Marx was a liberal?!
"Liberal" is a funny word, it had quite different meanings through the history and even now tends to mean different things on different sides of the Atlantic ocean.
Quite true, but can you identify any reasonable interpretation of "liberal" that fits Marx nicely? As far as I can see, none of the usual meanings of liberalism I can think of (classical liberalism; neoliberalism; squishy, mainstream, contemporary welfare state left-liberalism) sum up his ideology well.
It shouldn't be particularly difficult to establish a path from Marx to "contemporary welfare state left-liberalism". It would focus on hostility to capital and the need to help the oppressed.
Marx, of course, would barf at contemporary welfare state, but he's dead so we can conveniently ignore all that :-/
Sure. But the path from Marx to contemporary welfare state left-liberalism is sufficiently long (and with enough branches!) that using one as a representative of the other is dubious at best. As you say, Marx himself would probably take a dim view of CWSLL, if he were around to witness it.
Yeah, I agree. People calling contemporary progressives "Marxists" are usually just looking for a derogatory adjective.
However there are certain similarities and the connection between Marx and CWSLL can be made -- it will be twisting and turning, and will require a fair amount of bending and averting eyes -- but it will probably pass the laugh test. I don't think that this connection is important or that pointing it out is useful, still, it's not quite the young-earth theory.
You could probably do it cladistically too. Sorel blasts Jaures as a social democrat (which AFAICT he was) in Reflections on Violence, but Jaures read and was influenced by Marx.
On the other hand, Social Security was explicitly inspired by Bismarck's successful attempt to buy off the socialists... but on the other other hand, many political figures at the time, including some in high places in FDR's administration were, well, not entirely unsympathetic to the Soviets.
Marx certainly wasn't a liberal, but many liberals have been influenced by people and movements far to the left of them; it could be argued (though I'm not good enough at history to argue it well) that the oppressor/oppressed mindset is one such influence.
American often equate liberal as being left. If I read someone on the internet writing liberal, than I usually don't think they mean the word in it's traditional meaning.
Just think of "The Communist Manifesto" as being a horrible warning, like Orwell's 1984, rather than a how-to guide. ;)
Marx made no bones with categories of "oppressor" or "oppressed" whatsoever. He dealt in economic classes defined by their relation to the means of production: worker and capitalist. He actually despised the criminal lumpenproletariat.
According to Marx capitalists do oppress their workers.
That may be. Mainly, I just didn't want to argue with any progressives that might be offended.