"capitalism can't be defined"
I HATE LIBERALS I HATE LIBERALS AAAAAAAAAA
i have never met a liberal who ACTUALLY want to get everyone's needs met.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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"I refuse to understand the system, which means it is undefinable and unknowable and we must Worship The System lest we anger the God of Capital."
"name one tenant" JFC you don't even know the word "tenet", but fine.
The existence of a capitalist ruling class.
I am a tenant under capitalism :(
name one tenant
David!
From what I can tell, basically every self-conscious liberal, from Karl Popper to Ezra Klein, to the people in my personal life, always say historical-material analysis is overly deterministic. That its focus on class structures is too simplistic, and that “you can’t blame everything on capitalism.”
In my own experience, when I counter those arguments with “okay then, what is your theory of history or human society,” I will hear something that basically boils down to: “ah well it’s just a bunch of people with different ideas acting according to their preferences! It’s much too complex to try to engage with using determinist techniques!” This characterization of human behavior is an abstraction so vague it’s basically useless as a basis for determining action, unless of course it’s through an act of individual choice like voooting.
How convenient. The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it” free-market logic but applied to history and human civilization as a whole. It’s pretty easy to justify the system as it exists if that’s the axiom you start from.
The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it”
Can you imagine if people had this approach to studying the natural world (okay, there are many who of course believe this about science), but if we did, we'd never get the scientific method.
It's really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people. A couple centuries of endless bourgeois propaganda really does a number on people's willingness to even question or understand the political economy.
It's really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people
And that's the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism "unfalsifiable" because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn't tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.
Y'know I quite enjoyed reading Karl Popper. Sure, he thought Marxism was pseudoscience, but he also thought that about climatology (and later recanted). The central Popperian idea that a scientific theory must produce falsifiable predictions is a good one though imo, and can actually be a useful vector of attack against liberal doctrine. They will often fall back on this chaotic, atomized model that you describe because they believe it is 'truer' in the sense that it has a higher resolution, but good science isn't about 'truth' — it's about predictive power, and in practice that means you often have to be 'reductive'. Put another way, they're using quantum physics to describe the flight of a football.
I agree, Popper is one of the primary liberals I've read whose critiques of the socialist project don't feel made in bad faith (probably because he was also a socialist when he was younger). I think the critique of falsifiability is an important one for any analytical framework that claims to be scientific. But even then, falsifiability is itself very difficult in a lot of modern scientific fields (social science, biology, economics) where causality is so complex even having truly testable hypotheses gets very difficult.
Like you said though, the test of the liberal analytical framework vs. the Marxist one ultimately comes down to the ability to predict and more importantly act on those predictions. For instance, American liberals don't seem to understand that the success of their project a la the New Deal was never just "good people" doing "good things," it was because there were organized, populist masses who could leverage their ability to extract concessions from a willing ruling structure. This blindness is what makes them so ineffective in moments like the one we're in now.
Also, I think Popper's theory of the "Paradox of Tolerance" is very useful when it comes to engaging with fascists. It's a shame modern liberals don't seem to have the dawg in them to take that seriously anymore.
"Well I'm smarter than everyone and I don't know the definition so the definition doesn't exist"
People who needed me to expalin the difference between socialism and communism five minutes ago on their way to tell me socialism can't work despite not knowing the difference five minutes ago. (Literally happened to me yesterday)
Leftists: We want everybody's needs met
Liberal: We do too
What actual liberal politician has EVER even TRIED to do this? My brother in christ, I left liberalism EXPLICITLY BECAUSE all the politicians did their best to avoid doing this. 'Oh but they say' Imma stop you right there, I lived through the Obama years. And I can fucking read about many other administrations which did exactly the same.
but conservatives don't let us do things and and and
If your perfect fucking system can be so easily manipulated by some of the stupidest, most rancid people on the planet, then
- It isn't a very good fucking system and/or
- It isn't for us.
What actual liberal politician has EVER even TRIED to do this?
FDR, but dozens of giant American industrialists came together to (fail to) do a fascist coup against him, the Business Plot. But even the New Deal and the welfare state/Keynesian philosophy eventually turned into a tool leveraged by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to put America in the position of global hegemon; the American working class could only benefit from liberalism at the expense of the global south.
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Liberals always like
The Communist Manifesto is a very short read, but I mean come on, page 2 is literally about defining changes from feudalism and capitalism.
Libs make an argument that isn't refuted by a 30 page book challenge IMPOSSIBLE:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
...
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Don't even try, an very basic defintion fo what capitalism is debunks this. "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit", In feudalism the feudal lords just won land not really the tools so peasants are not employed by them they are just landlords sort of. Protocommunism doesn't even have that caveat. Tradesmen also usally owned their own tools. You don't need the communist manifesto to debunk this you need basic logic.
Oh for sure, but it just highlights how this person claiming that communist 'truisms' need to die hasn't even read 4 paragraphs of Marxist theory
Dead ideology though!!
It's all so tiring sometimes...
I love how Marx is dead but Locke is immortal
I don't think they'd really defend any enlightenment political philosopher. They'd say something like "we need to move past what these old dudes were saying 300 years ago, it's not relevant anymore" as if history began when they were born and our society wasn't the result of the ideation of people who were reading those enlightenment thinkers.
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So they think capitalism is a good thing and needs to be defended, but they also can’t define what capitalism is. Or, at the very least, think there’s nothing that makes it distinct from other political economies, so in that case, why do they care?
Because they like the present state of things and will advocate for violence against those who don't and want to act upon it
No shock that libs are choosing vibes over materialism... 
My favorite one is when they're like "people act according to incentives" because they half-remember something they watched about the Freakonomics guy paying his toddler to pee on the toilet.
And it's like, what the fuck do you think socialism is? We're trying to change the incentive structures to pull different behaviors out of people, in part because we recognize that capitalism incentivizes the worst, most anti social behaviors in almost every single interaction.
"Oh but Marx didn't consider human nature" Marx assumes that humans aren't saints and mostly act logically based on what's in front of them. Modern economists assume that humans have perfect information about the costs and consequences of everything they do, make decisions like cold calculating robots, but also never plan more than one quarter into the future and never coordinate across large groups except to make more money. One of these is a closer match to real human behavior than the other.
Saying there's nothing unique about capitalism is wild. I mean, it's literally in the name, in capitalism Capital (and investments as such) are the primary driver of the economy, while in proto-communism it was just so far from that, and under feudalism the land controlled by the nobility was the primary driver, where serfs would pay to use land with portions of their products, nothing like MCM.
They can't possibly believe that all modes of production are actually just the same, there's such a vast difference between the economy of today and the economy of those yesteryears. Surely they've noticed the lack of landed nobility?
If they think capitalism is markets and debt, which have existed basically forever, I could see how they could believe that. But if that's the basis for their understanding of capitalism, they don't understand marxism or leftism enough to critique it.
If they think capitalism is markets and debt, which have existed basically forever
That is exactly what they think. That's why they think we're the fucking idiots. How could any human civilization exist without trade? The progression through modes of production is a completely alien concept to them. They don't even conceive of it as a transition from feudalism to capitalism, or that this transformation is what gave birth to liberalism in the first place. They conceive of it entirely as a cultural / philosophical transition from monarchism to liberalism. And then technology got better at some point. And the economy got bigger. And all of these things just happened on their own, independently.
Human civilization just sat around for thousands of years with its dick in its hand until one day somebody thought, "what if we voted for shit?"
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Name one david tennant of capitalism (...) it was happening under (feudalism and proto communism)
hell yeah i love living in a tribe where all resources are shared and then paying rent to survive while elder Big Dog lives off of owning the hut and renting it to me, and Shaman Blissful Sky owns the businesses of "hunting" and "gathering" while i am employed at "gathering" and get paid one tuber per day
Marx is dead, let his ideas die.
Ideas famously die with their proposers. Nazism was no more in 1945!
From Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton:
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert -himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt-the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.
Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
Obviously we should be skeptical of Chesterton for a variety of reasons but I think there's something pretty resonant here about these kinds of moments where people plug their ears in and convince themselves that the real world is unknowable when it obviously is knowable if you try for a second. Obviously capitalism can be defined!
A version of this is, to me, one of the two worst things about dem-aligned intellectuals (along with "everyone to the left of me is really to the right"): They act like the very idea or attitude of believing that something is true is sophomorism, unless of course it's liberal dogma. It's like, aside from everyone needing to agree with liberalism, political ideology is a game of show-and-tell where you share what your personal lifestylist fashion is with others and they share theirs and you all clap for each other as you profess to values that are barbarously contraposed. Acting like someone could be wrong is gauche and a sign that you're immature.
Do these people realize liberalism is defintionally centrist?
Yes and no. Their model of political action is that of supporting the good technocrats (Democratic Party progressives) against bad authoritarian politicians like Trump or Putin. The good technocrats have to first acquire enough support from the masses to be able to get power. Once they have power, they use it by incrementally improving things (what if the authoritarians win again and somehow reverse the progress that took the good guys 12 years to make in 2 months? we don't think that far ahead here!) for everyone. They don't have a class-based view of politics, at best they only think of some 50% of society as being bad and authoritarian but it's fundamentally a moral divide rather than class conflict. They use ideological struggle and aesthetics as their tactics; liberal Mao would say political power grows out the barrel of a conversation or a post.
They realize that leftists are asking for something very different, but their disagreement with us comes down to their idealism: leftists want to do something impossible, authoritarian, and violent, when they could just vote. In their mind, since all they need is for people to be good instead of bad, it seems quite silly to go through all the trouble of making a revolutionary organization, parallel power structures, a secret army, an unsanctioned media apparatus capable of distributing agitprop to millions of radicalized proletarians, and all the other massive undertakings necessary for revolution. I mean, wtf is the point of doing all of that if at the end of the day, you'll have a "new" society that will still fall into the same pitfalls of populism, authoritarianism, or other vague evils? Fundamental, qualitative change is alien to liberals. They see history as an eternal cycle where people are doomed to keep making the same mistakes, so the best we can hope for is incremental improvement to make those mistakes hurt a little less.
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"Capitalism isn't a thing"
"Ok well it doesn't matter if we end capitalism then"
"No"
Liberals have to bash the left because the left can actually follow through with our promises of rapid improvements in conditions for the working class. Leftists expose liberals just by existing.
the liberal 
impulse leaving their bodies as soon as the topic isn't "defending israel's genocide"
This is why I am a communist
So I can stick it to each and every one of these smarmy fucks at some point
Preferably before I have to implant myself with dangerous cybernetic augmentations to live longer
Talking with those progressives and liberals that like to use the aesthetic of leftist politics can be so annoying, because they're just fundamentally ignorant of theory, and the material/social conditions. If they did understand those things, they'd either be a whole hog communist, or a neo-con.
Not knowing what something is obviously means no one does. This is why there hasn't been electricity since I was born, I don't know how a power plant works.
Capitalism has a kind of “private ownership” that stretches the definitions of the words “private” and “ownership” so far out of shape they aren’t recognizable.
That ownership is the defining trait. That’s why we call it capitalism. Holy shit. This guy managed to understand that world history has discrete stages but not that they are iterative. This is such majestically wasted genius. This is like finding the Mozart of listening to music. The Steven Spielberg of watching movies.
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