this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Libertarian in the OG sense, more commonly called libertarian socialism or anarchism. Didn't realize I left the socialism bit out. I hesitate to call the federation anarchist because there's still plenty of hierarchy but it seems to be modeled after a vaguely left-libertarian ideology of some sort
The original Liberals were actually a bunch of mill owners in 19th Century Manchester (at the time the most technologically advanced city in the world) who got together to ask challenging questions like “why should we have to pay taxes?” and “what if we basically owned our employees? And their children”.
Marx and Engels lived there for a time and witnessed the conditions the working people lived in first-hand.
Libertarians aren't liberals
Libertarianism is explicitly based on the ideas of Manchester School Liberalism. The British Liberal Party of the 19th Century was all about free market ideology, in contrast to the (theoretically) more centrist modern party. In Victorian Britain, Liberal own you.
Broader socialism has its roots in the French revolution and liberalism too. But you don't see anyone making a case that Marxists are liberals due to their common ideological heritage. Because it's silly. It's almost like divergent ideologies have to originate from somewhere and within a particular historical context. It's unproductive and pointless to say "z came from y and y from x so z is the same as x"
Libertarian socialism sounds like a contradiction to me.
If your only exposure to the word libertarian is from tech bros and "don't tread on me" bootlickers, then sure. But libertarianism goes all the way back to the French revolution and was one of the earliest forms of socialism. The right wingers co-opted it a while back and it's been commonly associated with that ever since. Anarchism is the more familiar term nowadays despite only being a subset of left-libertarian thought