GOOD RIDDANCE TO LIBERAL PIGS!
From left to right: Francisco Ignacio Madero, who is DEAD, and Alexander Kerensky, who is also FUCKING DEAD
Yesterday we woke up to the wonderful news that some blessed son of Anarchy has taken the life of one of the best-known charlatans and apologists for Capital:
herr Alexander Kerensky, who ruled Russia on behalf of Germany ever since the counter-revolution of 1920. Whereas a handful of liberal holdouts will mourn his death, here at Black Star we want to dedicate today's editorial to celebrating the death of one of the last famous purveyors of that most pernicious of bourgeois ideologies: liberalism.
As Mexicans who have sided with the Revolution and taken up the task of undoing the Power of the State (not just in the concrete sense but in every aspect of our lives), we couldn't be happier that the long-term con-job that was liberalism sheds another discredited corpse on its way out. The history of Mexico was beset by liberals for over eighty years, until the Revolution came in and swept all that away. Nowadays their program is completely discredited, but for that to happen our peoples (like the ones in Russia) had to live through the disastrous effects of putting it in practice.
Liberalism has its roots in the bourgeois co-opting of Enlightenment values. Seeing that the French Revolution gave birth to socially-and-politically-dangerous groups and ideologies such as the early socialists or the organized Sans-Culottes, the bourgeoisie quickly moved to mold the Revolution's principles into something more manageable, which could be used to advocate for greater economic freedom (for them) but still crush the oppressed peoples whenever they disobeyed. They needed to be able to advocate for a certain set of humanist values while still defending the capitalist and State order as necessary for those same principles to be fulfilled. Thus liberalism was born. Throughout the past century it would remain the ideology of the urban, technology-and-industry-oriented bourgeoisie, as opposed to the landowning elites who had stronger ties to the religious and aristocratic trappings of the
Ancien Régime.
Here in Mexico, the poor and downtrodden lived through the destructive effects of many civil wars between
liberales and
conservadores. These wars reached a climax when the French Empire got involved in 1862 on behalf of the conservatives, although liberals eventually won out in 1867. Their first and prolonged president was Benito Juárez, our nation's first Indigenous head of state. Despite being a Zapoteco himself (and the Zapotecos having their own history of dispossession and resistance against capitalism and the State), he was an enthusiastic practitioner of the dark arts of liberalism.
At the same time that he advocated values like freedom of worship and republicanism, Juárez expropriated lands that had been kept by or granted to Indigenous communities throughout the land, some of them dating back to before the Spanish Conquest, and he had no qualms about using the State's forces to impose capitalism's inexorable will, like when he sent the army into Sonora in 1868, just one year after defeating the French, to brutally quell a native Yaqui uprising. These policies left large numbers of indigenous peasants suddenly landless and reduced to working as day-laborers in large estates, many of which had recently become much larger thanks to this period of institutionalized theft. Measures such as pay in company scrip and physical violence as a disciplinary method became routine, and would help set the stage for the Revolution.
Indeed, we can never repeat this enough: Zapata and his people first rose up to restore the Indigenous order that was broken only a few decades earlier by liberal reforms. Liberalism thus served the purpose of deepening capitalist exploitation and tried to break the backbone of Indigenous resistance to capitalism's ills. Ironically enough, by leaving the Indigenous peasantry landless they only made them acutely aware of the rotten con-job that the whole thing was.
Even during the Revolution, there was a brief period of time during which Madero, the leader of the original uprising, tried to rule Mexico with a liberal program. He quickly fell, however, as he had lost the support of peasant leaders like Zapata, who demanded he actually take action to redistribute land, and the continued peasant uprisings made the bourgeoisie anxious about liberalism's ability to stop and crush a popular insurrection. Madero was betrayed by his own Chief of Staff, whose dictatorial period was probably the last period of probable liberal government in the former Mexican State. From that point forward, both the higher and the ruling classes came to see liberalism as discredited.
And so we say: good riddance to liberalism! May you and the pigs who stood by you rot alone forever! The peoples of the world are moving on from your siren song, and capitalism itself has fallen back on conservatism and monarchy as its backup, no longer able to keep up the farce that were "liberal values." Even the previously-mocked idea of a "somewhat socialist" bourgeois government is increasingly gaining traction, since the rich are now willing to risk giving the peoples a bare taste of social justice rather than be associated with the thoroughly exhausted liberal model of years past.
Liberalism is over, it belongs to the past century. Good riddance to liberal pigs!
