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Liberalism is a virus. It began to spread across Europe centuries ago and was later carried into other parts of the planet where it evolved and then returned back to Europe even more virulent than before. Liberalism, is, of course, used here in the philosophical sense, not in the sense that it is used in the United States’ electoral and political sense. Liberalism, for the most part, is synonymous with capitalism, and in this Patreon reading and analysis of the classic text, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, we go on a journey with the Egyptian and French Marxist, dependency theorist Samir Amin to explore the rise of liberalism and its implications for people and the planet.
In doing so, we explore the basic tenets of liberalism, how it elevates the economy above all else, how it distorts human relations and infects us with pure economism and an exchange value mindset. We take detours into Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, into postmodernism and how it has been deployed as an ideological weapon against Marxism, into U.S. electoral politics and how identity is utilized by the liberal class, into U.S. imperialism, world systems theory, and much, much more.
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