Comradeship // Freechat

Yeah, radlibs seem to be the main users of this word.

It's just too broad a term to be useful. Also, "left" is relative. Are we talking about the left wing of capitalism, or the left wing of communism? Completely different things.

I prefer terms with a specific and non-relative meaning, like socialist and communist.

Context and the person speaking matter more.

Random chud: instant yikes. Communist arguing against ultra-left stances: go on, I'm listening.

I guess I view it in a more utility kind of way, but I may have had different experiences with the word than you. I'd say whether somebody calls themself a leftist or a [more precisely named tendency] is a little bit like someone saying CCP instead of CPC. It tells you something off the bat about what realm of political literacy or intention they might be lurking in.

i could probably be described as 'intolerable' when it comes to my utter rejection of the word. imo the deconstruction of the left/right dichotomy is the most important cultural issue to tackle in the west before any other decent organizing or education can happen. politics in the west is such that you can never exactly know what someone is referring to when they use these terms so they're devastatingly effective at muddying the waters

I hear two general uses of the term. One is people new to socialism that have not yet decided where they stand. The other is people who have decided but don't want to say where. In either case, choosing a more specific term is called for.

It annoys me because for me “the left”(tm) begins at anticapitalism. And yet…

I have been done with “leftist”/“the left” for a few years now. I still fine myself occasionally saying the latter just as a shorthand for anticapitalist amongst actual comrades. But leftist is totally meaningless considering the people who claim that title.

What the left needs is more shibboleths

It's one of those words that I've learned to disassociate from as I've abandoned liberalism and all "ultra", uncritical or otherwise reactionary politics. I use the term Marxist-Leninist and I don't see how any terms like "leftist" or "right-wing" apply to it, since those words are incredibly dogmatic and pigeonholing. One chooses those labels and adopts all that those labels stand for without much thought. It makes it easy to "shut the brain off" and strictly delegate all choice and action to what rules are detailed under any of these politics.

The foundations of Leninism take concern with capitalism in its imperialist, global form, and, coupled with the dialectical materialist grounding of Marxism, tackles it and gives people the tools necessary to gain an understanding of their realities under its hegemony and rule, so that they learn to think and resolve challenges in overthrowing its many fetters and contradictions.

Ultras love disparaging all existing socialist experiments almost as much as the imperialists and their reactionaries instead of understanding that they share a great, common enemy. They're more concerned with whether a country is following Marxism as a doctrine or "holy scripture" to a tee; if they're not, they throw their hands up and say "they're not worth it, they're revisionists". They're perfectly content abandoning these countries and their people in their struggle against the forces of imperialism and all of the terrors that we know it's capable of.

They don't "think" in a dialectically materialist way, and this has allowed them to be deposed and stuck in their tracks time and time again by agents working on behalf of the bourgeois order. They demonstrate that they're not willing to struggle against, at the very least, the contradictions within their very own organizations and cadres or address issues in a good faith, selfless manner. They're not willing to learn or advance beyond their book reading, which is a critical error. For fear of "betraying" the label of "leftism" and all of the static tenets of whatever flavor of leftism they ascribe to, they abandon reason, prudence, selflessness, science, and the international struggle, at large.

When one becomes more familiar with the dialectical materialist process of scrutinizing, analyzing, understanding the world and its phenomena, these terms like "leftism" become nothing more than set backs and impediments to the necessary development of the individual and their class into revolutionaries capable of challenging the bourgeois order, its many systems and proponents, and destroying them to make way for the dictatorship of the proletarian.

In short, leftism has such rigid, dogmatic "rules". It focuses more on preserving the label and membership in these factions that it serves as nothing more than a set back for people in developing the dialectical materialist Marxist worldview necessary to face struggles, adapt to challenges, learn from losses, and ultimately, achieve wins.

To me "leftism" when used by leftists has generally come to mean "doing politically ineffectual social cliqueishness" - depsite whatever its true origins and history. Fairly useless and socially divisive, playing into the culture wars, may as well just be a form of virtue signaling at this point

It will always mean the project of democratization and uprooting oligarchy, per its origin, as far as I'm concerned. Seems to me a lot of history goes with it if that ground is surrendered.

I grew up in propaganda soup that resulted in me feeling the yuck at the mention of communism, but I got over it when I found out what communism actually is. Now people can abuse the term all day and I will recognize it as ignorance or malice or both. I will continue to recognize that Marxism-Leninism is the most proven means of democratization and uprooting oligarchy.

I don't like it because it feels like it allows people to stop thinking further beyond "I'm not a drab and lame liberal, I'm something a little cooler and more radical" and they don't really think farther than that. They stop examining their beliefs and worldviews and analyzing the world. They were chill with Bernie and want something a little more than the DNC has to offer (what that is, who knows) and that's good enough. Often, they're still a little scared of bandying about the "socialism" s-word.

This isn't to say that I think every person with politics to the left Elizabeth Warren needs to become a scholar of theory and pinpoint their tendency like "oh yes, I'm a MLM-Gonzaloist Thought." I do wish people would be less skittish around the s-word though, and maybe just a super high-level overview of what Marx was laying down, like a brief idea of the labor theory of value. Or even a "socialism isn't just the government doing things" type of understanding.

So yes, I also feel the yuck and do whatever I can to avoid saying "leftism" and identify as a socialist/Marxist/communist to try to be an example of that change I'd like to see.

I don't really pay attention to labels anymore. I don't believe in "leftism", I believe in policies that just so happened to be left leaning.

I think it’s fine. People are diverse and idealistic. IMO it’s equally important as a ML to be able to understand and critique these ideas.

I only want to use it alongside the term communism, although I use the term leftism as a placeholder for communism when I want to convince someone of my beliefs