That’s why I’d rather call myself center left. By US standards I’m still probably “far left”, because I’m for public healthcare, strong regulations and very robust social safety net. But unlike probably most people here on lemmy, if someone runs a business that’s not completely out of control and has unionized employees, I don’t think there’s a problem with that.
I can see why we lost the election considering people like OP.
This is why I usually try not to label myself these days. Invariably there is nuance that I’m not aware of, or that some others interpret differently.
I’m NOT a democrat, republican, conservative, communist, socialist, liberal, maga, or anarchist.
But I lean left on social issues, often hard left, though I say that while also saying I’m firmly anti-authoritarian. And I don’t really put fiscal on a separate axis because there are fiscal impacts to any set of beliefs with regard to how various social issues should be considered. I’m also not at all conversant in the slightest bit of nuance regarding how the economy works.
I’m sure some folks would call me a leftist based on the above. Others would insist I’m a liberal. Am I a progressive? Not sure.
If someone said they were leftist then I would very much hope they were pro EU and pro Ukraine
It’s the far right that is against those
Oh yeah that Ukraine is definitely the last bastion of communism
It’s about a super power trying to exploit a small country
Palestine isn’t leftist either but you will find people campaigning for the protection of their people
Nah dude. A good portion of leftists want Ukraine genocided.
The stated goal of the US State Department is to drag out the conflict for as long as possible. Years ago, Boris Johnson threatened to cut Ukraine out of financial markets if Zelenskyy held peace talks with Russia.
There’s a group that wants as much suffering as possible out of this war. But it’s not the people who recognize that being the proxy in a struggle between the US and Russia is only going to hurt the people of Ukraine.
Russia could foil all those plans by simply ceasing the invasion and going home.
Why would they? That’s like saying the Capitalists in the US could willingly implement Socialism. This isn’t an actual solution, as long as it is in Russia’s interests to continue, they will. Russia gains nothing by packing up and going home, and they have the means and will to continue.
What do they gain by continuing the war?
It’s hardly in Russia’s interest for their sons to die, their equipment to explode, and their economy to crumble. It’s self destructive, which it has in common with capitalism, but worse than that it’s a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Russia’s economy isn’t crumbling, and its industrial capacity is fairly high. What Russia wants, ultimately, is either an assurance of Ukranian neutrality with respect to NATO or full demillitarization of it. Russia went to war to combat NATO encirclement of its borders. If a peace deal isn’t met, Russia can just continue to slowly advance while the US carves out Ukraine for profit.
There’s definitely some BS the west is imposing on Ukraine to drag this conflict out. It feels like it’s to financially ruin Russia. I just don’t understand why Russia doesn’t cut it’s losses and just take what they already have. Ukraine is never going to be a part of NATO so I don’t understand the NATO expansion argument either.
Right, because being willing to accept an end to the war in any other way than Zelensky’s impossibly maximalist goals means wanting Ukrainians to be genocided. Also history began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Hey, I’m actually interested in your personal opinion. Are you pro Russian and if so why? Is there a long game being played out that fits your views with Russian expansion? Or rather the west’s decline.
I don’t think Russia currently has an interest in expansion. I already linked above to the reasons for Russia’s invasion, and they weren’t revanchism or Lebensraum, as Western governments & media claim.
It’s also often said that Russia is imperialist. I think that if Russia could be imperialist it would be, but since it presently can’t, it presently isn’t. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialism club, but the US rejected Russia, because the US wanted (and still wants) Russia Balkanized and re-plundered instead. Russia has figured out that it’s better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.
Are you pro Russian and if so why?
I’ve answered this before: https://lemmy.ml/comment/9498456
Thanks. The nuance is appreciated. If Russia “reclaims” Ukraine through total victory do you think they would allow the Ukraine identity to subsist? Are there more countries Russia would like to revanche? I think Moldova would be an easy grab.
I think Russia knows full well that it can’t “reclaim” western Ukraine: few people there want to be part of Russia, and the Banderite fascists especially don’t. It would be a absolute nightmare to hold. There would be endless insurgencies and bloodshed, and it would be a huge drain on state resources. Russia wants what is says it has wanted since the 1990s: a neutral buffer state.
Keep in mind that when the invasion started, Eastern Ukraine had been in a civil war with Western Ukraine for almost a decade, and some in Eastern Ukraine had for years pleaded Russia to intervene. Eastern Ukraine is a very different situation from Western Ukraine. Russia had almost no issues when it “invaded” Crimea in 2014, because most of the people were glad to no longer be ruled by the Banderite coup government. They were right, too, because they didn’t suffer nine years of fascist paramilitary terrorism like their northern neighbors in Eastern Ukraine did.
Are there more countries Russia would like to revanche? I think Moldova would be an easy grab.
As I said, revanchism isn’t what this was ever about, despite what Western states publicly claim and Western media repeat. Russia would piss off its allies and its enemies if it invaded another country, and its enemies would probably ramp up their war machines against it significantly.
If Ukraine wants to breakup with Russia. The correct response is to not rape and murder them.
Citation needed
Probably not left then
Just want to pretend they are because they aren’t as far right as someone they can point to
I’m trying to avoid certain words on .ml. there are different kinds of “leftists”
But in doing so you’re making your message less clear, because it’s saying that tankies are leftists. (Uh oh you made me say it!)
Pro EU being left leaning is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while
What if I’m neither?
0·2 days agoIf you aren’t one of these, then what are you? I guess there still is reactionary, off to the right of the image.
This framing isn’t particularly helpful for solidarity.
The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.
We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It’s a matter of survival. This isn’t that.
They are imperial murderers and managers of corporate oligarchy. The solidarity we form is against them. They are not left-wing at all, they are hard right wing reactionaries in a nation where the overton window has been shifted and the population is so brainwashed that they can even entertain that they are left-wing. They are barely left of most right wing politicians in the world. As a prosecutor, Kamala Harris has condemned thousands of innocent people to hard labor in slave camps and is an agent of the carceral state. Anyone in the US government is the enemy of free people in the US and around the world.
Do you think it’s realistic to take back any branch of government from like, actual whole ass conservatives by dividing the only coalition we have?
“You can’t trust those leftists because they’re just tankies”
The Tankie they’re referring to:
This makes me sad, I thought we mostly agreed that what FDR did is a good way forward.
All he did was save capitalism which inevitably led to what the US has today. There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family despite their supposed good intentions
He did a lot more than “save capitalism”. Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge’s laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.
There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family
There’s a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.
Oligarchy can’t just be “guy with rich parents” or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR’s New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks’ Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.
FDR’s personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.
You seem to be arguing that FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented. But I think what you are missing is why he implemented those policies. I think the truth is he didn’t really have the public interest at heart. His agenda was to contain a growing threat to capitalism in the form of the Communist Party of the 1930s. His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda. Of course he had to appeal to their interests to do so. But it was a temporary strategy, not a real shift in US policy. There are a few articles on the topic if you are genuinely interested. Here’s one. And here’s a quote from another.
The New Deal reforms Sanders evokes were not the product of a farsighted, enlightened reformer, but responses to tumultuous class struggles in the early and mid-1930s. These reforms sought to contain explosive social struggles and were never truly universal, excluding women and African-Americans, for example. After mass struggle ebbed, Roosevelt shifted back to his original goal of stabilizing US capitalism while moving toward establishing US global domination during World War II. Progressive reforms came to an abrupt halt in the late 1930s, allowing the rollback of many popular gains during the 1940s.
FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented.
Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.
you are missing is why he implemented those policies
The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man’s shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).
His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda.
The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That’s not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR’s outreach to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.
I might argue that Stalin’s “Communism in One Country” and Mao’s failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR’s liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn’t uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.
At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn’t collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.
Both are good, one is better
should i mention that under one of them many coups around the world were orchestrated? no, dems are no better than gops.
dems are no better than gops
Unless you’re gay, lesbian, trans, atheist, Muslim, Jewish, Satanist, black, brown, female, an immigrant, or really anything other than a straight white Christian man.
What an incredibly privileged take. Try having some empathy for other people sometime.
And also, the US bombs all the groups above you just mentioned without distinction. The Obama administration for example dropped an average of 80 bombs every day of his presidency on the middle east and north africa.
For trans people in the U.S., the difference between a GOP win and a Dem win in the house, senate, and presidential elections is the difference between having or not having certain rights.
Federal prisons now will force trans women to be transferred to male prisons and they will be denied gender-affirming care like access to estrogen.
If you are a trans person in the U.S. there is a clear difference between the Dems and the GOP - one is clearly better than the other.
Nothing in response has responded to this, shown it to be false, etc.
It does not require that we overlook that the Dems have far-right policies, especially on immigration and international affairs. It does not require we defend U.S. imperialism to say the Dems are better than the GOP for trans people in the U.S. Both are true.
I understand the moral disgust and the impulse to see how villainous the Dems are, I feel the same way, but if you care about the political outcomes, you can’t ignore that there remain significant and tangible differences between the parties and their policies.
Rights are proclaimed and fought for by the marginalized, not gracefully given by our rulers. If you put so much emphasis on which group of tyrants to vote for, you’ll never think “maybe I should become a Stormé DeLarverie and actually make a difference”
Just because US democrats stopped calling them “detention camps”, and prefer “influx” facilities, doesn’t mean they did anything to dismantle the immigrant prison system that’s currently holding 30,000+ people in camps.
No way you’re unironically pulling out the identity politics when just about every single revolutionary party in the US’ history was led by minorities. We are the first to feel the brunt of capitalism and for that reason we are the ones to lead the charge against it while the privileged sit in their condos waiting for everything to blow over so they can say “Oh I actually supported civil rights this whole time :)”
of course. let’s have some respect for the american minorities while minorities abroad can be tortured in some basement in a third world shithole while being watched over by a cia agent.
and i get to be called privileged by some oversized gringo. oh the imperialist exceptionalism.
Well, except you are wrong. Biden reversed Trump’s decision to pull out of Somalia. You are just being fed right wing propaganda to make one of the groups seem better than the other.
Always relative to the point of view, for an far right wing everybody else is an leftist/communist.
nope, they are objective and discrete categories. The left are anti-capitalist, while the Liberal centrists are not. The rightwingers are just factually wrong and incredibly uneducated and ignorant when they miscategorize liberals as communists
Who are those ninjas?
Zapatistas
Who mean those on the right? They don’t even self identify as leftists, why should some of their followers say that?
Yeah a better title would have been “I’m left wing” or something but I hate the English language and refuse to respect it.
Both can be correct, it’s not a hard black and white split
The leftist revolutionary heroes are resisting the people on the right, it is a hard split. The people on the right are shepherds of the US carceral state and imperial murderers
Last time I checked, that’s not how that works, everyone has a wide range of ideals and views. Not 1 or 2, there can be 1 1/2, 1 1/3, 1 1/10000, whatever
Until we get ranked choice voting, you still need to support them though.
Alternative voting methods have proven useless against capitalist power. Countries like Australia and Japan use them, and it does nothing. It might make candidate stacking a little more expensive, and they have to pay more to advertise their candidates, but that’s it.
Alternative voting methods allow for smaller parties, ones who’s values may align more with the general population, an actual fighting chance. You gotta admit at some point that having only two realistic choices is a bit of a problem, right?
In current Polish sejm there is 17 parties and 42 indpendents (on 460 seats). But every single one of them is procapitalist, proimperialist, pro USA, anticommunist. Alternative voting methods do literally nothing by itself.
It seems like it should help, but in practice, its been useless. You end up having a greater diversity of candidates and parties, but if capital still stands above the political system and controls it, it just means more capitalist puppets, and more advertising money required to get those preferred puppets elected.
Multi-party Bourgeois parliamentarism is not really any different from the ancient roman imperial senate. Its government by oligarchy / the wealthy entrenched class.
Ranked Choice Voting is both too ineffective to make any change, and too difficult to get in the first place. It’s the perfect endless carrot on a string, the eternal “just one more lane and traffic will be gone.”
Even if that’s so, you’d still need to vote for the people on the right, because voting third party in first past the post is objectively just terrible for everyone with similar goals.
The people on the right work with the Republicans. They aren’t resistance. Revolution is a necessity.
Even so, voting third party or not voting is worse than voting for the people on the right.
Which side are you on?
The title says, Leftist.
The left side with the heroes and not the right side with the imperialist murderers. You should read Fanon.
The “left” is way too broad of a grouping today. The classic political compass is 2D with left-right referring to economic and up-down (authoritarian-libertarian) to social policy. And even that is oversimplifying it, many saying it should be 3D. Grouping everyone into either A or B is I guess what humans do when their understanding of a topic is too narrow.
I find this especially funny with Trump’s tariffs. You know, the mechanism with which you control the market… closing it… like leftist economic policy does. Trump is a leftist now? Any more tariffs and he’ll be a complete communist! Dismantle more government and he’ll be an anarchist! It just completely falls apart.
While this is somewhat true, in all of the west there are only 3 groups currently : liberals, fascists and leftists.
Liberals are a diverse group, ranging from socio-democrat and liberal green parties to libertarian who leans on fascism.
Fascists are all the brands of conservatives who leverage racism, authoritarianism and nationalism.
Leftists are basically the groups opposed to both fascism and liberalism.
Those are 3 objective groups. They are the groups that determine how likely they will cooperate or oppose each other, or how elections will turn.
Some parties will be a bit in between, but that’s merely political communication. In practice a group that promote itself as a middle group is actually leaning right. This means that “leftist liberals” (who range from some green parties and movements to the socio-democrats) will always pick liberals if they must choose between them and the left. Likewise, conservatives and libertariens are leaning toward fascism when given the choice.
The political spectrum is radicalised and triparted. You can deny this model and blur the information, but it usually means that you are leaning more to the right than you are pretending.
This is supposed to be a tetrahedron, but I suck at drawing 3D shapes. Just imagine that anarchism is the top of the tetrahedron and that the triangle is the base.I’ll offer an explanation, I think it would be helpful.
First, mapping complex political beliefs on ill-defined and vague lines adds more confusion than it clarifies. What is authoritarianism? What is meritocracy? We have a general idea, but these aren’t useful for measuring ideologies.
Second, making it 3D makes little sense. Why is Liberalism in the “meritocracy” column, when one of the most widely agreed countries to focus on an idea of meritocracy, China, is a Socialist Market Economy? Why is liberalism distinct from conservativism enough to be an entirely separate leg?
All in all, it’s nice to think about how to view ideologies, but we should view them as they are, and not on some map that doesn’t exist. For example, why is a fully publicly owned, democratic society considered more “authoritarian” than society decided by the whims of few Capitalists competing like warlords?
Those are all good points. Thank you.
No problem!
EDIT 2: I have no qualm with down-voting, but I would prefer a comment explaining what parts specifically you did not like, so I know how to not make the same mistake in the future.
Political compasses are silly and pointless brainrot. Yes, this includes trying to make new and better galaxy brain political compasses. It especially includes that. “Meritocracy” lol.
