I genuinely cannot understand the reactionary mind. I've browsed Zig Forums...

Liberals hardly use the word reactionary.

I've heard succdems use it before. He's also a political scientist so he's smarter than the average lib.

>

Now I get the reference in this image.

Attached: first as tragedy.png (1060x718, 667.51K)

oh the ironing

Found your first problem there m8

...

a tangent, but I never understood why the alt right made their own disney music songs, when the Tarzan one is pretty much glorifying western culture unironically and belonging with other white people

youtube.com/watch?v=zc3MnoSS5Hw

like… its literally right there

Good point, the OG fascists were a whole lot of faggots too.

Reactionaries view society as competition. Revolutionaries view society as collaboration.

This is where you went wrong most reactionaries aren’t libertarian. Read Leviathan by Hobbs if you want to understand reactionaries.

Corey Robin, the Reactionary Mind

Attached: Df5JAqlXcAAl_yU.jpg (635x601, 48.46K)

social darwinism is pretty easy to get, all races compete for resources and the best (whites) win, and only jews want to try and subvert nature by using capitalism/communism

stop shilling this retarded meme you crypto-lib

Attached: lenin shiggy diggy.jpg (600x450, 29.1K)

I would argue that the word 'reactionary' is used too sloppily in left-wing discussions and that it has basically become the equivalent of 'anything vaguely actually reactionary or a-marxist'. It's possible to hold progressive beliefs without being a marxist and conservatism is qualitatively different from reaction.

A reactionary is just anyone who 'reacts' to something about the society he lives in, and who, instead of wanted to push forward to something new, want to return to something old. Now, this 'something old' can basically be anything of the past. Do you want to be hunter-gatherers because you hate tech? Congratulations, you're a reactionary. Same for wanting an absolute monarchy, theocracy, patriarchy as it existed in earlier times, etc.

Ergo so many people can fall under the label Reactionary that there is no one Reactionary mind, just like people can have heaps of reasons to become a Communist.

Imo we should also distinguish between consistent Reactionaries and the people who only play lip service to some idea of reaction. The nazis, for example, could superficially be called reactionary. But almost all their ideas were derived from modernity, and they used a sort of nazi-progressivism in the sense that they wanted to use the tools and logic of modern society to create a utopia. To back up the point, almost everything the nazis came up with was starkly modern:

1. Creating an autarkic race-state that would try dominate the entire world, completely unheard of in history.
2. Utopian ideology, fitting snugly within modernist utopianism.
3. Complete reliance on technology and innovation to reach goals.
4. Wiping out the jews, which was unprecedented, and doing so for racial reasons, also completely unprecedented in history.
5. Using the modern 'innovation' of scientific racism.
6. Pushing the idea of nationalism (itself a modern ideology) to extremes that had never existed before.
7. Utilizing mass technology like radio and the modern institution of the party.

I'm fine with calling monarchists or islamists reactionaries, with the nazis, well, that's more difficult.

Are you implying we live in a socialist society right now?
There are three types of people
Those who support the status quo
Those who want to revert back to a previous system (reactionaries)
Those who want to progress to the next stage of society (revolutionaries)

after that, it's just a matter of 'trying to fit' in like a loser

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
Liberals typically seek to uphold bourgeois dominance, not return to an earlier stage of development.

i read dostoevsky's underground man a critique and satire of how stupid reactonaries are lol

Check out The Shipwrecked Mind by Mark Lilla. The reactionary mindset is basically just a continuation of Gnosticism.

it's a good novel, but i'm not sure that's a fitting description because Dosto himself was pretty reactionary

Incorrect. There are two types of people, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Those who wish to preserve the status quo are entirely reactionary.

Reaction is not constrained to an active struggle for reversal, in fact this is hardly ever the case given the absolute impossibility of this in most cases. Reaction is precisely the reaction to revolutionary action and thus always in support of the current state of affairs. During the French revolution the aristocracy did not wish to return to the slave empires and republics of antiquity yet they were certainly reactionaries, the archetypal reactionaries in fact, in trying to preserve the feudalistic order of France. In that revolution the liberals were the revolutionaries. However now that Capitalism is the dominant mode of production in base and superstructure liberalism is entirely reactionary as it commits itself to the preservation of capitalism and suppression of the revolution.
Just because Marx (correctly) recognised the bourgeoisie has a revolutionary and progressive role and is not identical to the aristocracy (which too once had a revolutionary and progressive role) doesn't make the bourgeoisie not reactionary, especially in developed capitalism.
Lenin (correctly) described liberals and social democrats as reactionaries as they seek to uphold the status quo and resist revolution.
The revolutionaries today are only the socialists and our opposition, liberal or fascist, stand within the ranks of reaction.

Why wouldn't you just call that conservatism instead of reaction? I mean sure, you can pretty much call a a guy who wants to return to a lost status quo a reactionary; but some guy who actively defends an existing status quo is more accurately called a conservative imo. I don't really see what we gain (in terms of these concepts facilitating discussion and analysis) by mashing the two terms together.