Good explanation.
Just last night I also found myself explaining the misunderstanding around the term “liberal” to someone else who was talking as though they thought we were using conservative talking points because we were using anti-liberal language. I would bet we’ll be seeing a lot of that now. Here was my attempt to clear up the misconception:
Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.
When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.
Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.
Mostly it was about fooling you into thinking that, as a worker, you have even an iota of power within that company.
You: “The owners deserve all the value that results from owning the company and not the workers because the owners own the company, duh.” Reread what you said and note the ridiculous circular logic.
The company would continue to function perfectly fine without the owner(s), yet would immediately cease to function or even exist without the workers. The only role the owner plays in the company (that the workers operate), is to siphon the value away from the workers who made it and unto themselves.