The Greater Aryan Race wrote:Constantinopolis wrote:No it's not. On the contrary, in many parts of the non-Western world the concept of left and right is far stronger, to the extent that people from the two sides have their own semi-separate cultures and almost never talk to each other.
Communism has been more popular in the non-Western world than in the Western world since at least the 1960s-70s. And today, the socialist movement (broadly defined) is doing much better in the non-Western world than in the Western world. I am talking especially about Latin America, and to a lesser extent South Asia.
Asia? I don't know where you're getting your information from but I can assure you that Asia is not the great hotbed of socialism that you believe it to be. In fact, socialist parties have never done well (save for maybe India's Congress Party) in the Asian region and rightly so, as most voters have opted to trust in the capitalist/corporatist model.
I specifically said South Asia, also broadly known as the Indian subcontinent. Despite recent setbacks, India still has two of the largest and most popular Communist Parties in the world - the CPI (M) and CPI (M-L) - not to mention a Maoist insurgency in the countryside. And Nepal had a leftist revolution that toppled the monarchy less than a decade ago.
Olerand wrote:Constantinopolis wrote:No it's not. On the contrary, in many parts of the non-Western world the concept of left and right is far stronger, to the extent that people from the two sides have their own semi-separate cultures and almost never talk to each other.
Communism has been more popular in the non-Western world than in the Western world since at least the 1960s-70s. And today, the socialist movement (broadly defined) is doing much better in the non-Western world than in the Western world. I am talking especially about Latin America, and to a lesser extent South Asia.
Where? Outside of Latin America, which I consider a descendant of Western culture and thus similar to it -if not outright a part of it-; where is the concept of left and right "strong"? Certainly not in Africa, where politics itself is vague; nor in West Asia -where the left does not concretely exist- or in East Asia -where the left is either weak (S.Korea, Japan) or capitalist/corporatist (the communist countries).
The left-right division broke down in Africa recently, after the end of the Cold War and the rise of the neoliberal consensus, but from the time of independence until the early 1990s it was as strong as anywhere else.
In West Asia, "Arab socialism" used to represent the left (think Nasser), but, like in Africa, this left ceased to exist in recent decades, as Arab socialist states adopted neoliberal reforms and popular support for the original ideology vanished.
In East Asia, there are a lot of rank-and-file members of the official Communist Parties in China and Vietnam who are upset about the capitalist road embraced by the leadership, but there's nothing they can do about it... for now. And outside of the "communist countries", there is a left-wing insurgency in the Philippines, and a strong trade union movement in South Korea (not socialist, but left-wing).
The point is, in all these parts of the world where it doesn't look like a left-right division exists, that's because the left has been pushed aside from mainstream politics in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. But, as the European far-right shows us, "dead" political movements can come back to life decades later. The European far-right "died" in the 1940s, and look at it now!
If they can come back from the dead, so can we.
