Matt Christman's Softcore History

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## Transcript

Main article: Matt Christman's Softcore History transcript

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> Yes, because what liberalism does is, essentially what it is, is a project of uprooting. Liberalism takes the feudal subject who is embedded in a-- He is not defined by his identity or himself, he is defined by his relationships, he is defined by a web of connections to other people, he is holistic.
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> The liberal subject is an individual a monad, is unconnected to others, has no other definition other his own, has no-- there's no way that connections to others increase any sort of sense of reality for that person, that person is fully defined as an individual being. That is what liberalism says.
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> It power washes-- like imagine a bunch of ball bearings and they're covered in caked dirt and mud. And the mud is our connections to other people and institutions and systems of belief and the things that make us full human. Liberalism is basically a giant hose that says no, those connections don't make you who you are, you are a self-contained being. You are not connected to others in any meaningful sense. And then what liberal political theory is, is at base it is a figuring out how to make these individuals that can no longer relate to one another by context, can only relate to each other as individuals who have no other outside context, how can they relate to one another in a way that doesn't lead to death to everything, a cooperative existence?
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> Liberalism is how to negotiate the distance between people that liberalism created in the first place.
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> *"It's transactions."*
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> Yes, it turns human relationships, all human relationships, into transactions. And that is the difference between that and the feudal subject. And so that is the world that liberalism and conservatism and fascism, all these things, and also communism come from. The demystification of the self created by the uprooting from feudal traditions.
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> *"What I would say is liberalism does not see you stones held together by mud, they see you as individual stones being sprayed with the hose and then put into my bucket, I sell stones. I'm starting a stone business. It doesn't sound like there's a big turnaround but there actually is if you go to the right places where they don't have stones."*
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> Yes, exactly. Because if you don't have human connections, the only way to resolve conflict between total strangers that are alienated from each others existences is through combat and through conflict. And liberalism says well that's not workable, everyone will eventually be destroyed in a ragnarok. You have to negotiate these transactions and the distances and that's what liberalism does, it creates the institutions for that. That is why the one-- the most parasitic and vital petit-bourgeois profession that glommed onto capitalism as it broke from feudalism is the legal trade. It's law, because law is what grew to fill in the spaces left by the erosion of social ties. Because you need law to negotiate these new relationships between strangers that have no understanding of obligation to one another. That transmission, the language of it is law. And so that's why I always find it funny for the people who want to say "Oh Marx' concept of the French Revolution as a class war of the bourgeois is wrong because most of them weren't merchants, most of them were lawyers."
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> Obviously! because that is the most vital profession to the creation of a liberal state because you have to figure out how all of these strangers, all of these people who are implicitly holding guns on each other in a constant Mexican stand-off, how can they lower the guns and deal with one another. That is what the legal system and that's what liberalism created.
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