“Left vs. right” is a good way to refer to things in shorthand, but bad in regards to having a conversation that isn’t surface level.

I never call myself a leftist. I always refer to myself as a communist instead

Why is there a division between Left Socialists/Communists and Left Libertarians?

It boils down to Left Libertarians being unwilling to give up their current position in life. That was acquired through Imperialism.

When I was much younger someone told me: “You know, we really tried to help the Africans, we built apartments for them, but they just leave and go back to their huts!! What can we do?”

And I’m like: “Why the F are we still meddling in Africa’s business? Y’all keep talking about how evil the Soviet Union was for Overstaying their welcome and maybe it was a big blunder, cause they couldn’t sustain themselves against USA and now every single socialist achievement is attributed to Capitalism and every single flaw is attributed to Communism, but at least the very least they did educate people.”

A lot of this just hasn’t been studied, historical events have been almost entirely black holed from our collective consciousness. We are being kept in the dark, including by the left libertarians, who are demonizing currently existing socialist experiments and they’re stealing valor.

They’re also using the 3rd world as hostages and then blaming everyone else for not saving the hostages.

No, I think ideological belief should be judged by some benchmarks.

Foreign policy belief: anti imperialism, a la Lenin, supportive of national liberation and actually existing socialist nations.

Political economy belief: anti capitalism, anti caste, and socialism, revolutionary and class conscious for class struggle.

Political superstructure: progressive, on LGBTQ+, race, colorism, mental health, etc such.

3 axises

If these criteria are met, I think one is well adjacent to, if not an outright Communist,.

The left right divide is Egalitarian vs Supremacist. In revolutionary france the monarchists sat on the right and the radicals sat on the left. The argument they had was who has the right to rule and why.

Its not about economics or authoritarianism or libertarianism. It is about who has the right to rule. Does everyone deserve a say in how society functions or do a small group of inbred psychopathic thieves and murderers get to call the shots?

The words used don’t really matter at the end of the day. Left/Right hasn’t been actually meaningful since like 1700s France when it referred to the liberals on the literal left side of the room and the monarchists on the literal right side. It’s all arbitrary, what matters is the actual meaning of whatever you’re describing with your words. Don’t get too bogged down in the minutiae of what specific words to use.

“Left vs. right” is a good way to refer to things in shorthand, but bad in regards to having a conversation that isn’t surface level.

I never call myself a leftist. I always refer to myself as a communist

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Yes, I really do think the divide has and always will be capitalism vs communism, private property ownership vs equitable distribution. In some parts of the world and for much of history the left/right divide was serviceable and even helpful to the cause. It’s my opinion the active influence of the American government and the American new-left movement have so badly tarnished the concept of a left/right divide that it’s no longer helpful. Left implies too much and paradoxically excludes so many working class people.

I often say “left” (in air quotes) for the reason that it’s so nebulous as to be almost meaningless in the context of the western left. That said, I do think it has utility. There are people, like the patsocs, who call themselves communist in name, but act more like rightists. And criticism of them isn’t necessarily as simple as putting them squarely in the camp of capitalist or communist. We could call them opportunists, but this doesn’t really get at why they are a misleading representation of communism and communist organizing. So being able to say a thing like “right deviationist” can call to mind an idea of being somewhere in the ballpark of espousing communist ideas but then taking it in a direction that mimics rightist worldview and policy.

If we view right and left as USian conservative and USian liberal, the terms are basically useless, but we don’t have to view them that way ourselves. It’s like that line in Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.” We don’t need to shy away from one term or another because some part of the world uses it in a politically illiterate way. Where fear of crackdown is concerned, that’s different, do what you have to in order to survive and build. But in the sense of what is useful in communicating about the subject and educating, I don’t think the terms are entirely out of place, they are just misused a lot.

I think you could abstract it to individualism vs collectivism, even.

That puts the anticommunist anarchists on the appropriate team.

Yeah, just look at all those left-liberals who hold positions that are one rainbow flag emoji removed from neocons

I think we are back to the stage where we can return to speaking of the haves and have nots.

Ugh I had a comment typed out but I exited for a minute and it got deleted.

I might elaborate more later but I have an article here that explains my opinion well enough

https://open.substack.com/pub/journaldemarat/p/stackelburg-the-soviet-union-and-d50?r=2lr83e

crash the hegemony

in my personal analysis, you have two visions of the world:

-the economic (freedoms and restrictions of economic agents)

-and the social (freedoms and restrictions of individuals)

you can have two positions around those visions: a liberal or a conservative position. ending in something like this:

social conservative: restricting individual freedoms (homophobic, transphobic, “pro-life”, mysogynist, culture based on religious ideals or religious fundamentalism)

social liberal (the opposite)

economic liberal: freedom of economic agents (mostly the ruling class), free market, anti-unionism, pro-business, less/no taxes, small government, usually pro-current economic system (right now a capitalist apologist/anticommunist)

economic conservative (the opposite)

in my path, i’ve noticed that right-wing thought usually falls into the pair “social conservative/economic liberal” and the left-wing thought falls into its counterpart “social liberal/economic conservative”.

the “pure conservative” currently would be something like the nazbols or the john birch society, and the “pure liberals” would be libertarians who wants legal weed, some cripto enthusiasts or maybe some kind of anarchists

so…left-right has some materialism in my opinion