Left-Wing Discussion Thread II: Behind 700,000 Bunkers

[Pasong Tirad]

He sort of does.

"We do not want to be part of some internationalist movement that is contrary to our values. We are nationalistic and conservative. We fought leftists when they have tried to take over our governments."

I mean this is a ludicrous thing to say. Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Morales in Bolivia, Allende in Chile, Moreno in Ecuador, Chavez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba and soon to be Obrador in Mexico just to name a few. Latin America has been home to countless popular and successful socialist movements over the past century, and still is.

If anything, Latin American history tells us that the region is quite comfortable with left-wing politics and would have had more and longer left-wing governments over the course of the 20th century if it hadn't been for the United States and its allies among the Latin American elites and militaries being deathly afraid of people voluntarily embracing any political leadership even slightly to the left of Eisenhower.

Also kind of related, there's some precedent to what he says. The Philippines (if you could even call us Hispanic - Hispanic-influenced would be better) has never (to the best of my knowledge) had any left-wing president. The most it's ever gone would be somewhere slightly left of center and Philippine politics have always been dominated by ideas of nationalism, conservatism, rule of law and the dominance of the Catholic Church, as well as the suppression of left-wing movements.

[Trotskylvania]

If anything, Latin American history tells us that the region is quite comfortable with left-wing politics and would have had more and longer left-wing governments over the course of the 20th century if it hadn't been for the United States and its allies among the Latin American elites and militaries being deathly afraid of people voluntarily embracing any political leadership even slightly to the left of Eisenhower.

Sort of related: Is Eisenhower considered a left wing president?

He was a traditional conservative who lived in tumultuous times where mass left movements were defining the political arena.

Eisenhower was a youth in the Progressive Era, lived through the calamity of WW1, the Great Depression and WW2, saw the chaos it unleashed, and wisely believed it was better to bend before breaking

[Northern Davincia]

Sort of related: Is Eisenhower considered a left wing president?

He was a traditional conservative who lived in tumultuous times where mass left movements were defining the political arena.

Eisenhower was a youth in the Progressive Era, lived through the calamity of WW1, the Great Depression and WW2, saw the chaos it unleashed, and wisely believed it was better to bend before breaking

Undoubtedly he was a conservative in nearly every sense of the word, but in a modern perspective, he was a centrist.

[Gages Icelandic Army]

In my sig it says i support capitalism. If you click on it, it takes you to a website that dicusses primarily capitalism. Makes sense. It rarely dicusses civil rights issues.

In my sig under for i have personal autonomy. (If you have a better label be my guest.) Im trying to refer to gay marriage, Euthanasia, etc. Theres no link to it. Do you guys know any websites that argue primarily for civil rights and rarely dicusses economic issues?

[Northern Davincia]

In my sig it says i support capitalism. If you click on it, it takes you to a website that dicusses primarily capitalism. Makes sense. It rarely dicusses civil rights issues.

In my sig under for i have personal autonomy. (If you have a better label be my guest.) Im trying to refer to gay marriage, Euthanasia, etc. Theres no link to it. Do you guys know any websites that argue primarily for civil rights and rarely dicusses economic issues?

None that I can think of.

[Jelmatt]

In my sig it says i support capitalism. If you click on it, it takes you to a website that dicusses primarily capitalism. Makes sense. It rarely dicusses civil rights issues.

In my sig under for i have personal autonomy. (If you have a better label be my guest.) Im trying to refer to gay marriage, Euthanasia, etc. Theres no link to it. Do you guys know any websites that argue primarily for civil rights and rarely dicusses economic issues?

Why not try a human rights group like the ACLU, if you're American, or an equivalent organization in your own country? Those types organizations could have some good links for your signature.

[Noraika]

Added a bunch of leftist YouTube Channels to the list in the OP, if anyone's interested.

I must say that I have enjoyed some of those links.

[Rintamamiestalo]

Yay, like minded people!

[The New Sea Territory]

An article worth discussing.

TL;DR Post-left anarchism and contemporary fascist movements overlap in particularly disturbing ways.

I think there are some details I can nitpick about the history presented here:

• people think Nietzsche was influenced by Stirner, but this is speculation (and, if we go by Landsteicher's "Egoism vs Modernity", we find Nietzsche and Stirner to be at odds in key ways).
  
• Heidegger was not an existentialist; that was a term Sartre liked to throw on other people and is not a term many "existentialist" writers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus or Stirner would have self-identified with. Secondly, Heidegger was unapologetically a Nazi but his participation is exaggerated; he thought of himself as a great Nazi philosopher but there were very few Nazis interested in his ideas to any serious extent.
  
• IIRC, Jünger was satirizing Stirnerite egoism with the "Anarch", although I'm not as familiar with his work
  
• Neofolk is a genre teeming with fascists, like many underground industrial genres, but I lumping black metal in when talking about fascism; fascist black metal is mostly its own scene. I always dislike it when articles reference entire music genres or scenes to readers who might not be familiar with them.
  
• "Derived from Stirnerism and Nietzschean philosophy, egoism can reify the social alienation felt by an individual, leading to an elitist sense of self-empowerment and delusions of grandeur." No, that's just the Nietzsche side of things. The "overman" is a wholly elitist idea. It's where Novatore inherits a lot of his elitism.

All that being said, I think this article was pretty good at addressing a very real but very complicated development.

[Saiwania]

I find that Thomas Sowell is the economist I most agree with. So much of what he says when you read his works with an open mind is "no duh" material. He speaks the truth overall, and people who reject it simply don't like what they hear- but it is how the world is nonetheless.

Poverty is an economic force which doesn't need to be explained because that is the default human condition like it or not, more effort needs to be exerted to sustain a rich lifestyle than to become poor- which someone can simply do by producing nothing. People started out poor as hunter gatherers before agriculture and civilization was established. What needs explaining is what causes and enables higher living standards.

We need to instead be embracing all of the various means of producing financial or material wealth, such as better manufacturing, better productivity, better automation, better technology, better science, better education, and so on- which can only be brought about by trade and various flavors of free market economics- capitalism.

[The New Sea Territory]

I find that Thomas Sowell is the economist I most agree with.

...

Poverty is an economic force which doesn't need to be explained because that is the default human condition like it or not

.

Sounds like more of a pseudohistorian or an ideologue than an economist.

People started out poor as hunter gatherers before agriculture and civilization was established. What needs explaining is what causes and enables higher living standards.

This refutes your earlier statement that being rich requires "more effort". A hallmark of the move to agriculture and civilization was laziness on an evolutionary scale; we stopped gathering food because farming required less effort for more food.

If being a hunter-gatherer is being "poor", then the poor labor way more.

We need to instead be embracing all of the various means of producing financial or material wealth, such as better manufacturing, better productivity, better automation, better technology, better science, better education, and so on.

Agreed, but the only way to do so and maintain that those of us who didn't inherit a company from our parents have food is communism. Automation under capitalism drives unemployment up; less work for more produce means less people benefit in a capitalist society, which makes no sense. Automation under communism means everyone labors less and produces more.

[Bakery Hill]

2017 - Jeremy Corbyn narrowly elected British PM
2018 - Lula returns PT to power in Brazil
2019 - Maduro, having weathered the storm of reactionary protesters, wins a second term in office
2020 - Cybernetically enhanced Bernie Sanders destroys a Donald Trump to become American President
2021 - German voters tired of the CDU-SPD grand coalition deliver landslide victory to Die Linke
2022 - Melenchon smashes Le Pen in the second round, FI
2023 - Corbyn, Lula, Maduro, Sanders, Wagenknecht and Melenchon announce the Fifth Workers' International, the end of bourgeois democracy and private property in their nations and the immediate prosecution of World Revolution against the capitalist world

[Northern Davincia]

2017 - Jeremy Corbyn narrowly elected British PM
2018 - Lula returns PT to power in Brazil
2019 - Maduro, having weathered the storm of reactionary protesters, wins a second term in office
2020 - Cybernetically enhanced Bernie Sanders destroys a Donald Trump to become American President
2021 - German voters tired of the CDU-SPD grand coalition deliver landslide victory to Die Linke
2022 - Melenchon smashes Le Pen in the second round, FI
2023 - Corbyn, Lula, Maduro, Sanders, Wagenknecht and Melenchon announce the Fifth Workers' International, the end of bourgeois democracy and private property in their nations and the immediate prosecution of World Revolution against the capitalist world

Watching the world fall into chaos and disorder, the great Pinochet rises from the ashes like a phoenix to restore humanity to its former glory.

[Dumb Ideologies]

Did anyone ever see the two inexplicably popular and mentally-ill conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Michel Foucault in the same room together?

#justsaying

[Mattopilos II]

Did anyone ever see the two inexplicably popular and mentally-ill conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Michel Foucault in the same room together?

#justsaying

The difference is Foucault had some (good) original fucking ideas that had an impact on the intellectual community.

[The Knockout Gun Gals]

Did anyone ever see the two inexplicably popular and mentally-ill conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Michel Foucault in the same room together?

#justsaying

Alex Jones's more of a conspiracy theorist, though.

[Dumb Ideologies]

Did anyone ever see the two inexplicably popular and mentally-ill conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Michel Foucault in the same room together?

#justsaying

The difference is Foucault had some (good) original fucking ideas that had an impact on the intellectual community.

He contributed to a relativistic discursive move that undermined the idea that the left is anything better than the right, denied the truth value of identity, and founded a school of thought that revels in being deliberately impenetrable to the masses.

Maybe he was "good" if you're a free-market social conservative who doesn't want a effective left wing opposition.

[Mattopilos II]

The difference is Foucault had some (good) original fucking ideas that had an impact on the intellectual community.

He contributed to a relativistic discursive move that undermined the idea that the left is anything better than the right, denied the truth value of identity, and founded a school of thought that revels in being deliberately impenetrable to the masses.

Maybe he was "good" if you're a free-market social conservative who doesn't want a effective left wing opposition.

Note the use of "Some" in my post. I am hardly worshiping him as a deity, nor do I think some of the strategies he claimed would work would, in fact, work in the progression of society. Relative discourse really isn't as harmful as people claim it to be, depending on the angle taken. I certainly think people need to realize the inherent bias in EVERYTHING that is a construct based on social relations. I wouldn't go so far, however, to claim nothing is real or something weird like that. I don't think there is any inherent truth value in the identity past perspectives (I read a lot of Nietzsche, fite me m80).

That is to say, I think SOME (note, SOME, should I underline it too? What the hell, now it is highlighted) of his ideas are good, or at least thought provoking. I have learned to kill my idols, if call anyone my idol anymore at all.

[Dumb Ideologies]

He contributed to a relativistic discursive move that undermined the idea that the left is anything better than the right, denied the truth value of identity, and founded a school of thought that revels in being deliberately impenetrable to the masses.

Maybe he was "good" if you're a free-market social conservative who doesn't want a effective left wing opposition.

Note the use of "Some" in my post. I am hardly worshiping him as a deity, nor do I think some of the strategies he claimed would work would, in fact, work in the progression of society. Relative discourse really isn't as harmful as people claim it to be, depending on the angle taken. I certainly think people need to realize the inherent bias in EVERYTHING that is a construct based on social relations. I wouldn't go so far, however, to claim nothing is real or something weird like that. I don't think there is any inherent truth value in the identity past perspectives (I read a lot of Nietzsche, fite me m80).

That is to say, I think SOME (note, SOME, should I underline it too? What the hell, now it is highlighted) of his ideas are good, or at least thought provoking. I have learned to kill my idols, if call anyone my idol anymore at all.

I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong. I strongly dislike Foucault and think he was an overrated loon whose work damaged and continues to damage the left today, but you're entitled to think otherwise. Relativistic enough for you to wind your neck back in?

[United Muscovite Nations]

Why haven't you all become Blanquists yet? It's the only form of socialist takeover that doesn't ruin the lives of large numbers of people by causing civil war and destroying the economy.

[The New Sea Territory]

Did anyone ever see the two inexplicably popular and mentally-ill conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Michel Foucault in the same room together?

#justsaying

The key difference is that Foucault's genealogies were an interpretation of history influenced by Nietzsche's method, while Alex Jones is a supplement salesman disguised as a rightist reporter.

[Dumb Ideologies]

Did anyone ever see the two inexplicably popular and mentally-ill conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Michel Foucault in the same room together?

#justsaying

The key difference is that Foucault's genealogies were an interpretation of history influenced by Nietzsche's method, while Alex Jones is a supplement salesman disguised as a rightist reporter.

One of them believes most historical events are the result of shadowy cabals trying to nefariously extend their reach and undermine freedom. The other runs infowars.com

[Victoriala II]

Why haven't you all become Blanquists yet? It's the only form of socialist takeover that doesn't ruin the lives of large numbers of people by causing civil war and destroying the economy.

we're edgy by classical standards

[Victoriala II]

The key difference is that Foucault's genealogies were an interpretation of history influenced by Nietzsche's method, while Alex Jones is a supplement salesman disguised as a rightist reporter.

One of them believes most historical events are the result of shadowy cabals trying to nefariously extend their reach and undermine freedom. The other runs infowars.com

isn't foucault's focus simply the study of how power over people is handled by civilizations throughout history? that's all i see in his work, deadass.

[Dumb Ideologies]

One of them believes most historical events are the result of shadowy cabals trying to nefariously extend their reach and undermine freedom. The other runs infowars.com

isn't foucault's focus simply the study of how power over people is handled by civilizations throughout history? that's all i see in his work, deadass.

His answer to pretty much anything seemed to be "staged by the state to increase its power". He loved his false flags.

I suppose I'm being harsh to Alex by comparing him to a violent sexual fetishist and gift giver, mind.