What is the left?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
21

It isn’t about change, slow or radical or prevented. It’s about social justice on the left and people-over-impulses on the right. Unfortunately, they both overcorrect or fail to generalize. Social justice should extend to all people regardless our impulses, which we should take ownership of to prevent treating others or their resources as expendable. For THE EXACT SAME REASON, people-over-impulses should keep the resource hoarding in check. So many issues would be resolved if we listened to and learned from each other.

Edit after seeing your edit:

That back-and-forth reciprocal communication^ is the egalitarian principle in action.

“Equitable freedom/opportunity to do what?” is the question. Like… if Someone wants to slave for someone else, is it encroaching on their liberty to hold their slaver responsible? No. They are equivocating on liberty by calling slavery liberty. Until someone working full time can pay their essential bills without government assistance, slavery merely rebranded. The solution is not merely higher wages, but regulating the price gouging of artificially scarce essentials.

22

Was forcing people to take the covid shots leftwing?
If you’re an unconventional lefty like Jimmy Dore, you say it was rightwing, because big pharma, MSM, regulatory agencies like the CDC, FDA and NIH were demonstrably in bed together and corrupt, if you’re a conventional lefty, you say it was leftwing, because we were trying to protect the vulnerable.
One man’s social justice and equality is another’s injustice and inequality.
If greater black poverty is solely the result of them being victims of ‘systemic racism’, reparations could be seen as equality, if not, it could be seen as discrimination against whites and inequality.

I think defining right and left as tradition and untraditional is easier because tradition is a less value laden and subjective word.
For example left and right can’t agree over whether to call it life affirming gender reassignment surgery, or sexual mutilation, but what left and right can both agree on is, mass acceptance of trans would be something new, a place our culture has never been before, a bold new change, for good or bad, and so I think we should take more value laden words like justice and equality out of the terms left and right and keep the more neutral conventional/traditional/orthodox and unconventional/untraditional/heterodox.

What defines the right, conservatism, is that it’s slow to change, not that it’s necessarily hierarchical, or libertarian, sometimes the right is more authoritarian, like criminalizing drug use and homelessness, and sometimes the left is for hierarchy, like when they ask us to trust the experts instead of going with our gut, or common sense, or doing our own research.
Those covid lockdowns led to the largest transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the upper in history.

23

Edited my last reply after I saw your edit. The muckity mucks who made bank/power off covid are playing the left & right against each other & will take sides only for appearances, and only if it keeps them in the muckity mucks group (lol). It’s a funny dance they do… acting like passion/ambition are an embarrassing discharge… virtue signaling/posturing for the constituency via their political pr puppets… It’s all just like chess to them.

(Not beyond redemption.)

P.s. It went from “You don’t need masks” to “Everyone must wear masks” in a hot jiffy, without so much as a single blink. The mad cows are in the china shop. Over.

24

Back to this…

25

I hope I didn’t turn people off from this thread by attacking the left in those two earlier posts.
I am a lefty in many ways, I watch Jimmy Dore and agree with most of what he says.
Just not happy with where the left is headed these days, it should get back to: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, to civil liberties, colorblindness, pacifism and protectionism, that’s when the left was good.
Of course the mainstream left and right always sucked because they mostly serve the big donors, but the mainstream left has gone batshit in recent times, but then that’s what the mainstream left says about the mainstream right, that they’ve gone batshit recently, anyway that’s not what this thread is really about, just wanted to say I’m not anti-left.

26

It was always the populist left that I liked, never the mainstream left.
It seems like the populist left is more marginalized today than ever.

27

_
Hey Gloom… nice to see you’re back.

What is ‘populist’ Left, as opposed to your common garden-variety Left?

Should it matter if anyone did hate the Left -or Right- for that matter? I have friends and family on all sides of the political spectrum, but we are all mature enough to deal with that and happily coexist agapely.

28

Anyway, the point I really wanted to make was that conservatism/the right is basically what a culture actually is, its norms, traditions, values, also its demography, and geography, whereas the left is just what’s alien, exotic, foreign and new to a culture.
The left by definition is countercultural.
They are trying to change the culture, government and economy.
The right represents all that America, or Canada, or Britain is, what’s been accepted by the overwhelming majority many generations, by contrast the left is novel, new social, political and economic experiments.

Take the new deal for example, it was new, and so leftwing.
A large portion of the population never fully accepted.
So when Reagan and the neolibs or Mulroney or Thatcher for Canadians and Brits rallied against it, they were merely trying to restore things to how they were when they were growing up, they weren’t positing something new, but something old.
However neolibs unlike classical libs never wanted to fully dismantle the new deal welfare state, just significantly reduce it, minimize it.
This shows the welfare state has been accepted by an overwhelming majority of the culture, just the details of that welfare state are what’s under question.

29

Hey mags, nice to see you too.
Great question, the populist left is the working and lower middle class left.
it represents their values and objectives.
Working class people are typically slow to change, yet the left is all about change, yet historically over the last several generations, the left has tried to represent these people, creating a conundrum.

Basically the populist left is most open to change on the economy, because they’re poor, but on other things, they shun dramatic change.
Even on the economy the populist left wants gradual and moderate change, they are skeptical of proposals by radical socialists, and communists.
So the populist left is an economically oriented and egalitarian left, traditionally it’s social democracy.
On cultural, and environmental concerns, they’re usually moderate and open to compromising with conservatives on these issues.

However the new left wants little to do with addressing working class concerns, the new left is far more bourgeois than the old one.
For the last decade or two increasingly the left has been moving in a more upperclass and college educated direction, away from the working class, while the right is doing just the opposite, becoming more working class oriented, more populist.

30

This indicates that increasingly it’s the upper (middle) class, especially if college educated that’s now most open to dramatic change, increasingly the working class is more hostile to change, especially the sorts of changes the left is now proposing.

31

I think we should get back to the reality that left/right is a social construct all can transcend. There are good values on both sides that need to merge and be allowed to criticize the harmful lack of generalizing them in application and dismissing values that don’t mesh. We should have integrity to allow self=other to correct our false assumptions about the other (including self) we’ve labeled right or left.

It should not be the case that a lefty says, “I did something righty” today, or vice versa (whether it is good or bad—revisit how I present their presented distinctions above)…what is good about each of them is good… it isn’t left good or right good.

What we’re doing with this left/right crap is what Nazis did to Jews before the crap hit the fan. Yeah. I “played” that Nazi card. We need to stop & back up.

32

I agree people oughta be more politically nonbinary.

Unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be where we’re headed, for now we’re heading for more polarization, unless we snap out of it.

33

Yes.

34

I have been defining the left as merely departure from convention, norms, traditions, but you could also define it is as equality, of outcome, or opportunity.
Conversely you could define the right as hierarchy.
Of course we don’t always agree on what equality of outcome or opportunity is contextually.
Nonetheless if we define it this way, economically speaking communism would be the furthest left one could be on the left/right spectrum.
Communism is the idea that there’s no private property.
Private property is distinct from personal property.
Private property is land, infrastructure and buildings.
Personal property is items that aren’t built into the land, like a phone or clothing.
So in communism everyone would have the right to use any space at any time for any reason, perhaps as long as they’re not vandalizing it.
Communism has been implemented locally with mixed results but never on a large scale.

And you could go down the line, communism is economic equality, then there’s racial, sexual and so on, racial and sexual equality could be defined in all sorts of ways, it could be defined economically, politically, socially or all of the above, everyone having a roughly equal amount of whatever we consider of vital importance, an equal amount of equal access.
So is this a better definition than defining the left as countercultural?

35

Here’s another definition perhaps worth considering.
The left is just academia, as opposed to the right’s religion.
It’s whatever academia collectively says is fair, just, right and true.
If you think about it, most creators of leftwing thought were academics or at least college or uni educated.
Karl Marx took most of his ideas from academics.
LGBT acceptance doesn’t appear to be a grassroots phenomenon, these ideas came from academics and later medical professionals who declared LGBT to not be a mental disorder.

You could say the left is the values and norms of the educated class, of social theorists, professional philosophers, medical and psychiatric professors, the consensus among this class of people about what’s healthy, sane and just is whatever the left is.
Or in other words, it’s technocracy, the idea that these people should be running society, not kings, popes or ordinary people, or people without the blessing of social, medical and environmental experts.

36

A global monopoly on the means of production (human/AI capital) is the end game of the ones I mentioned above who pit the right & left against each other. So I don’t think right/left distinctions are helpful, and think we need to see the good in both and marry them & burn away the dross.

37

Keep in mind everyone has a worldview… religion is just another word for worldview… what we can take from early Marx is the end/life must be lived and describe your character. Same thing we take from Kierkegaard. And Hegel. And early Nietzsche.

Cut each other the same slack we cut ourselves, and vice versa…because not a single one of us always is and does the end/life… except the One who is.

38

The left and right do exist, like say Christians, Buddhists and Muslims exist.
They are people who believe certain things, got educated at certain schools, get their news and analysis from certain sources and support certain causes and political parties.
Some are activists, organizers and influencers.

That being said, just as there’s many denominations within say Christianity, there’s many factions within the left and right, as well as some overlap between left and right, nonetheless commonalities between these factions are real.
The various factions within what we tend to think of as the left arguably tend to have more in common with each other than they do with the various factions within the right, tho I don’t think this’s always the case.
So whether they should exist or not, the fact is they do, and if you want to understand politics and the way the world works, you have to understand them.

I agree it would probably be better if there was less groupthink and polarization in the world, like I said I don’t identify as left or right, altho I tend to listen to more rightwingers, some of them very critical of the left, as well as very critical of the neocons on the right, I also listen to some leftwingers like Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Kim Iversen, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal and Tulsi Gabbard, and I agree with a ton of what they have to say.
I’ve voted for the Green Party, the NDP as well as Max Bernier’s People’s Party, a Canadian nationalist and classical liberal party.
So I’m not left or right but independent, nonetheless I find the dichotomy and the various factions within them a fascinating subject.

I’m also a labeler, it’s something I’ve always done, even tho I believe I can think well outside labels, I still like assigning labels to things and people, but always with the idea in mind that no thing and no person perfectly fits into one label, especially in politics.
People and organizations are always more complex than labels, nonetheless labels are useful and, for me, interesting, they give us a bird’s eye view, help connect dots and understand the overall picture.

I also agree that political parties, perhaps especially mainstream ones, are all very corrupt, more loyal to oligarchs than to the people or principles.
I’ve always encouraged people to support grass roots politics, 3rd parties and independents, whether they’re on the left, right, center or think of themselves as outside the left-right spectrum, rather than the duopoly which’s beholden to the bigs (big business, big pharma, big brother and the military).

39

Well I think there’s something different between academia on the one hand and religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam on the other, nonetheless there are more commonalities between academia and religion in practice than someone like say Richard Dawkins would care to admit.
So I don’t fully agree or disagree with you, I think the truth is more complex than academia and religion are essentially the same, or academia and religion are essentially different.

40

As for political parties, perhaps all political parties, but definitely the big two in Canada and the US, are far more loyal to the oligarchs than to the people.
Nonetheless I think there’s still differences between them.
One might be worse than the other, as well as just different than the other, because the oligarchs aren’t entirely monolithic, they sometimes disagree on what course to take and have competing interests, and because their control over political parties isn’t absolute and uniform.

I agree that there’s a new world order in the making, that many of our oligarchs are organizing to create a one world authoritarian government.
I don’t know if they’ll get there way, and while they may use the left, or the right to manipulate, ultimately it’s about power for them.
Today the left seems to be their favorite, there was a time when the left was sort of the underdog perhaps, the one they had less control of.
Today this generation of oligarchs doesn’t seem to want much to do with the right.
The upper (middle) class college and uni educated no longer identify much with traditional religion and values, if at all, and so they’re pouring more of their resources, and corruption into the left.

I believe the globalists will use the left far more than the right, in the same way the Roman empire say ditched the Gods of their forefathers, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and so on, for Jesus.
Their worship of Jesus probably wasn’t very sincere, nonetheless they used him and his followers.
In the same way the globalists are tailoring the mainstream left to suit their interests rather than the interests of the people.
They are ditching theism and conservatism for atheism and leftism.

The left isn’t necessarily bad, there’s good in it, it’s just being used, same with the right but the left perhaps more in my view.
Just as we’re able to distinguish say Jesus from the pope, we can distinguish the mainstream left singular from the populist lefts plural.
If the pope or his bishops and cardinals do something abhorrent, it’s not necessarily a reflection on Christianity, likewise if Gates, Schwab or Soros do something abhorrent, it’s not necessarily a reflection on the left as a whole and some of the great leftwing thinkers and activists who were sincere and achieved great things, like ending child slave labor, protections for workers, consumers and struggling families.