Cadendee [they/them]

first off if any motherfucker invokes divine providence to justify inequality: gulag

second: liberal theorists love to draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say that their principles and reasoning only apply to one side. The distinction they drew between “civil” and “political” laws, or the “totally good and normal laws that help the rich” vs the “impermissible welfare laws interfering with the divine will of providence that the poor stay in poverty”, the exclusion of labour relations as an inherently non-political question, etc. Often these seeming contradictions and their unconvincing justifications follow from unquestioned beliefs like the inferiority of “other races”, the belief that the poor deserve to be poor, and simple self-centeredness (only considering the freedoms of people like them, typically upper-class, of the dominant racial group, etc. and disregarding the lack of freedoms accorded to other groups)

third: The quote about anti-semites and ridiculous arguments applies. They will in one breath condemn you as backwards and wishing to bring back absolute monarchism by expanding the state, bring back medieval forms like the guild in the form of unions, or take on the pre-modern role of the established church (providing welfare is equated with the church’s organized charity), and in the next breath glorify the past as a simpler time when people (serfs) weren’t so uppity, but also a golden age of individualism (for Great Men, anyhow, entirely disregarding the lack of autonomy of the serfs, and of course disregarding great/influential individuals leading uprisings against them, e.g. Toussaint L’Ouverture.) Much of this is echoed in modern discourse. Using necessary force to implement the will of the people against the formerly powerful, is condemned as authoritarian, while using more distributed power structures to confine the majority of the population in effective servitude is totally fine and normal and Democratic even.

fourth: We should be mindful of those we ally with and their reasonings. The christian abolitionists in the US were on the right side of history when condemning and fighting the chattel slavery practiced in the south, but their reasons for hating it were not necessarily aligned with a purely socialist perspective. They tended to see it more in terms of the sinfulness it enabled on the part of slaveholders(sexual assault was pervasive, among other things), of not allowing slaves to be converted to christianity, and of forcing them to be complicit in the above sin, so when slavery was officially abolished (outside of prisons, anyhow), the christian-fueled radicalism of the abolitionists crumbled, despite the persistence of incredible levels of oppression against the freed slaves in the south, both politically and economically, not to mention the blind spot many had for the oppression of Black people in the north. For many, their conviction against slavery came more from the sin aspect than from a genuine belief in equality, or even in simply improving the lives of the enslaved.

I could probably write more but I don’t have the time. The book is good.