Just a little thought I wanna discuss.
Unlike the more massive social media or the real world where theres not many leftists and we are gladly more united Lemmy and its left leaning tendencies with the instances providing natural cult grouping tendencies. Add to that the matrix in groups there and we all seem to be making a thing out of how to anger each other. How to troll each other or annoy x or y instance.
I hate this.
Living in an extreme right wing nation I know no other anarchist. A few left wingers. Even the libs here are right wing extremists by the standards of a western nation. I hold dear any solidarity.
I support unions here even when everyone there is a religious fundamentalist who wants sharia law bc they still qantnto improve the conditions of the working class.
Many folks here, who again I don’t have any hate for, I see intending these fights and dramas. Having the goal to be banned from x or y community or instance.
- Why!?!?
- What do you gain?
- What is the desire here??
I’m kind of surprised to not see this answer, so I’ll throw it in: it seems to me that there are a lot of people from various countries who have built-in language for politics that they believe is shared across the world - but it isn’t.
As a dumb American, I’ve always been a liberal because that was the inclusive, progressive, luxury-gay-space-communism option as opposed to the conservative, regressive, racist, ignorant violent option. People from other countries don’t seem to appreciate that at all, because their “liberal” is what we’d call neoliberal or corporate Democrat, and they apparently don’t have a FPTP / Slaver’s College fix on their elections and they just don’t grok the two party thing.
As you can imagine on here there’s a lot of hate from both conservatives and leftists for “liberals”. I think that’s ridiculous but it’s usually easier to try and adopt their definitions than to explain why the other 379,999,999 of us don’t use it that way. (Well - 350M, say. Parts of the PNW use it that way too.). It’s just kind of exhausting in threads about American politics.
If someone calls me a “liberal” (or libtard, libcuck, etc) I naturally assume they’re racist, fascist, AM radio fuckwits. But then they want to jump into some world where H4A, UBI, No Oil is what they’re all about and once again I’m like - well, yeah we agree, again. So.
(Usually the retort is, “well then why are you a liberal?!” Which. Goes back to the exhausting thing.)
Liberalism has an actual definition. Neoliberalism is a subset of liberalism. Either way, neither position is socialist and both are capitalist. That’s the distinction. That’s always been the distinction. Leftist politics is distinctly anti capitalist.
To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism’s contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources. And most of the social stuff was being advocated by leftist groups in the west for years before they became popular enough for the mainstream, liberal parties to embrace.
I’m an American. Conflating liberalism with leftism is a media game that has successfully ensured the Overton window does not shift left. It reveals the mass political ignorance here. Of the policies you’ve listed, only H4A is arguably socialist.
You can understand the two party system and make decisions to support certain candidates/policies in an election without identifying as a liberal.
Well put, and yes I’d agree. Where I seem to draw the ire of leftists is when I point to the clock and say we have one year before we have to vote, and all things being equal we’re going to vote for the Democrats because attacking the central tenet of this country’s dominant ideology is not going to happen in this election cycle.
The 2024 Presidential election threads were a depressing reminder that some leftists can’t get out of their heads, or ivory towers, or whatever to make incremental progress because the glorious revolution is at hand. Or something. So I get to be the evil liberal who wants healthcare for all, student loan forgiveness, and a Green New Deal. And all of those things go down the shitter because republiQans vote as a single juggernaut bloc and we don’t.
To me as a European, posts and comments about US politics can be very confusing. There’s the different interpretation on the word liberal you mentioned. There’s also the fact that the colours are reversed: here red is for the left - socialists and communists - while blue is the liberal right (not so much conservative right, though there are conservative subgroups of the “blues”). And there’s the fact that they often assume familiarity with political events and people unknown to me.
Somewhat related: posts and comments from the far and extreme left are often even more incomprehensible. They seem to have their own language entirely.
Lemmy has been enlightening in teaching me these things but yes - different!
The most important point of unity for the left is the economics. Political identity must be defined by being the proletariat first and foremost.
When you have people who break that, well their place is questioned.
Mmm hmmm. Yeah. Yes.
So an American proletariat is . . . Anyone who is limited by health insurance, student loans, and mortgage rates? Or is it something else?
We don’t really use the word proletariat, uh, at all. Ever.
In a very basic sense (and this may very well be debated but to explain it simply I’ll say): anyone who doesn’t own their own labour, as in you work for someone else.
That’s pretty much every liberal I know, yeah.
Well. I know some house painters I guess. They don’t work for someone else, per se.
Yeah being part of smth and identifying as smth are two separate things.
I’m a man, straight, brown, proletariat etc. The question is what part of that do I see as the most fundamental part of my identity or politics.
Hm. Well, that’s interesting.
This is also where the concept of alienation in the Marxist sense comes in. He took Hegel’s framework, which Feuerbach and Bauer had used to analyse religion and he applied that to law and economics.
So this Marxist alienation which is in the Hegelian tradition is worth reading.
Now alienation can interestingly also be a desired outcome in leftist movements as the French existentialists talked about.
We also have a third brand of alienation in Buddhism etc.
Some want it some hate it.
I’m with Marx on this one.
If you are interested I can find some introductory article for you to take a look at.
I have a little knowledge there, but I’m good, thanks. I’m really more interested in defeating the republiQan hate machine so we can get people healthcare and save the environment.
Not that it’s not interesting - I just have a slightly different take than Marx because Marx didn’t live in 2025.