Against an Alt-Left

as if anything that fuck wants matters

Honestly, if we're getting a new term, may as well make it radically different to any of the current ones.

Alt-left is being pushed by Holla Forumsyps and naive people here. Nothing more.

Chapo isn't the basis for a new socialist movement, but Holla Forums isn't either. The immediate goal of all leftists should be normalization of class in political discourse. The goal is essentially to create a mass that is willing to accept the ideas of socialism, and then you can do your vanguard party or your mass strike or whatever. But you need an audience first.

The point is there is a group of young, left, class-minded individuals. Bernie-bros, corbyn n pals, dirtbag left, brocialists, what have you. The labeling is not what's important, because the labels will be chosen and pushed by the media and thus our opposition. We have to engage with all of this, not form a new special club.

I agree. I just figured if they wanted to sink to that level, the best they could do is at least make a joke. The only interesting thing I get from it is wondering if the answer to getting some sort of real leftist unity does lie in trying to form a weird, loose-knit sociopolitical collective. Like, anarchists and commies clearly don't get along much in public, but what if we all got some stupid banner we could arbitrarily unite under that isn't as dysfunctional as "le proletariat".

Because we have to win the meme war, that's why. That meme is "hot" and we have to subvert it for our ends.

Memes are fucking spooks.
kys

Wasn't it the opposite? Isn't National-Bolshevism an attempt by the Right to find the large common ground between them and Stalinism in order to co-opt people willing to take up the banner of Bolshevism at home? I think you're seeing it as a failure because you're thinking of it as a failed left-wing enterprise instead of successful right-wing one.

I'm pretty sure Zizek would agree with you and I don't see how that argues against the point of robbing Fascists of a monopoly over a particular type of dissent.

And imo, saying we shouldn't pick up a new label for ourselves just because we represent traditional left-wing values is to miss the point. The point is that people don't want traditional anything anymore. We must at least present ourselves as a challenge to established forms of politics, instead of being the same old Left.

They get a new term every week. It's Irony Left, or Twitter Left, Weird Twitter Left, Jacobin Left, etc. Eventually one of those shitty journalists will come up with something good and we can just use that.

No, that's retarded. Who gives a shit if the media uses it as a smear, there's no reason justify it with a response. It would be just as dumb to label ourselves cultural marxist because that's what the right calls us occasionally.

We are THE left, if anything "alt-left" is lefty liberals and they've already won the war over us.

Nah, original NazBols were punks and weirdo anarchist types. Really interesting bunch actually.

also, why should we allow them to try and label us anything other than "left"? There's nothing alternative or more different about us than the older left. It's just liberals that see us as an oddity. We are the true left.

more like Shift-Left, as in "shift to the left"

fair point

Comparing National Bolshevism to the alt-right is a bit of a stretch. For one thing, the alt-right isn't a unified party and they have no theory. That's actually why they've been so successful; it's just a label the "adherents" are using in order to galvanize and achieve change. NazBol was founded with serious guidelines by Limonov, and the split has been roundly recognized as a bizarre failure with regards to the dogmatic strain within the movement. The left could probably benefit from a blanket label that gets them popular support, even if it becomes useless later on, like I reckon the alt-right will be now that Trump is the president.

done.

Fucking screenshot just popped out of nowhere. Anyway:

Let's call ourselves lumpen Left. We're just here to articulate dissent and bitterness until a proper Left emerges.

I am so going to be eaten alive for this.
But the term is, unfortunately, perfectly accurate in this context, so the hell with it.

By a dedicated shill.

Let's please just stop giving the idea legitimacy by considering it seriously, even if just to dismiss it. I fail to see how a suggestion to label ourselves as a counterpart to literal fascist groups can be anything but an orchestrated attempt to harm what we stand for.

That's kind of good, actually.

Also, most people who know the term just think of "poor and aggressive" when they think of lumpenproletariat, so it reflects us well.

Let's not give Glenn Beck or Alex Jones, as well as MSM, another aneurysm. "They call themselves hooligans, I'm not kidding folks!"

But I love watching Alex Jones freakouts.

NEETleft.

Alt-left is just a dumb term. The mainstream is starting to move against the "alt-right" term, why would you want to make up a term that's even superficially similar to it?

I do too, but it's not going to get us anywhere.

Why on Earth would that be a bad thing? Isn't that what liberal media has been doing to the alt-right anyway? Seems like the whole "any press is good press" kinda situation.

stupides concept i ever heard. there is the left and then there is the rest,

That's kind of the point. To come off as a bit vulgar and aggressive, instead of overly careful with words and a bunch of pussies, which is what the Left today is.

Good cop, bad cop user.

I don't think we should concern ourselves with them. But think about it. If we had a socially savvy label to use, where there would be a chance to use humour, facts, and aesthetic to get somewhere in the political sphere, then we should. It's certainly better than circle-jerking each other like a bunch of autists in our sectioned off board. Besides, we've been getting more and more members lately anyway, so it seems like it's practically an inevitability at this point.

Alt-right is a label that the media is pushing to try to label the rising far-right groups on the internet in order for them to be better equipped to attack them.
There is a reason why 8/pol/ refuses the label. Doing the same with left would be a bad idea.

Consider hypothetically that we adopted lumpen left to push ourselves forward. If the right-wing media tried smearing us by saying that we are "far left commies and anarchists", why would you be upset about this? Seems to me that it can only have positive consequences, especially since the main attraction for the alt-right is that they come off as edgy thanks to the liberal media.

hi

Because they are irrelevant, butthurt, and don't know what's happening?

The reaction of 8/pol/ to things shouldn't be used as a metric to judge their success or lack thereof.

The alt-right is far more active outside of Holla Forums and there are far more users on twitter, youtube, TRS, reddit, and halfchan/pol/ than there are on 8/pol/. Holla Forums is like 3000 posters, whereas the alt-right is more like 50,000. Getting on the news for nazi salutes isn't a failure for the alt-right. It's a success.

Holla Forums are basically nazi hipsters which is evident from their desire to portray any nazi from outside 8/pol/ as a faggot or secret Jew. If they are butthurt about some other nazis upstaging them, it's probably a sign that those other nazis are doing something right.

hi

Not really, since its going to alienate regular right-wingers.
If the online far-right movement refused to accept the label (which unfortunately for them didn't happen outside 8/pol/ and some of 4/pol/), then they would have been far more effective. This is because the media would have just called them Nazis or racists, both words which have practically already lost there meaning, as we can see with the media reaction to Trump. But now the entire alt-right is going to be associated with that Richard Spencer video.

Fuck off retard.

Edginess is what makes things attractive to young rebels. I know the bookworms have a lot of scorn for this, but trolling and engaging in harassment campaigns of capitalist figures on twitter would heavily raise any new left's street cred, same as how the alt-right harassed Jews.

We need headlines in huffpo about bankers harassed to the brink of suicide. That's how you make something look cool. Anything that the media and your parents tell you is evil and dark attracts the attention of rebels. That's part of why the alt-right is a noticeable thing at all.

The difference is that we make sense, so that if we use the same tactics as the alt-right but with a different message, then we'll out-compete them easily. There are literally retards here who think looking like hooligans and romantic rebels hurts us. If there's an "alt-left" or whatever you want to call it, it needs its "hackers on steroids" moment. I bet Stalin got tons of pussy when he was robbing banks.

We need to be modern Robin Hoods and shadowy ninjas combined. We need to strike fear into the hearts of conservative parents and the media.

EAT THE RICH
CLASS WAR NOW

It alienates the right wing establishment that exists now, right at this minute, but that's not what's important, what's important is laying the ground for the replacement of that establishment as conditions change, and the conditions for fascism are rising.

We need a symmetrical response to that.

So what? I don't think it's going to hurt them in the long run, because the underlying conditions are going to empower them, but now people know they exist. The mainstream media is giving them coverage and inadvertently helping them.

Spotted the Holla Forumsyp.

This. Chapo Twitter is already doing this to some degree, but they remain pathetically tied to some of the clean progressive's agendas. We need a group that will break with them completely.

"alt left" should be wordfiltered
the Holla Forumsice is trying to troyan horse us with that shit

t. Holla Forumsyp

just wait until you see his video user! then everything will make sense! :DDD

I agree, but we shouldn't label ourselves with something like "alt-left". We can just act under the name of "left-wingers" seeing that, in the US, liberals are treated as left-wingers, therefore it provides a smokescreen and power in numbers.
To attack your enemy, you need to know what it is.
Fair point, however I'm not sure it is going to continue, unless the media really is that naive.

For:

...

Anti-idpol isn't some fancy new idea. All this wank over how we are all different and unique and that this uniqueness is something that is our individual genetic destiny is capitalist ideology. We are all different, hence I deserve to make 40x the amount of money you do. Isn't diversity great. A planned economy can't work, because we have absolutely no idea how much food, wheelchairs, kidney transplants, flats etc some population on average feels like they need. Because decisions like that are all about the feels. Oh, and also, you can't possibly imagine what the life of another person is like, even having a rough idea is impossible. That's why we need diversity quotas, two people from different ethnic groups or sexes are incaple of having the faintest idea what the other one might think. Everybody is super unique and autistic, hence we need quotas in politics and markets in economics.

This and /thread.

Do you guys REALLY believe that alt-right played an important role in electing Trump? That all those "white trash" supporters spent their time browsing Twitter and following alt-right accounts?
Not only does this ignore the material social factors that made people choose Trump against Hillary, it also seems to deliberately overrate alt-right in order to feel less impotent and irrelevant as a lefty imageboard.

Like I always say, we should just call ourselves brosocialists. It will keep out the idpol and won't associate us with the alt-right

Yeah, but we aren't the left according to the media, nor has the mainstream right always been THE right. Cut your losses and learn to play the game, whiner.

Yeah, but brocialists sounds gay. Lumpen left is better.

An original can't be an alternative at the same time.

No way, "lumpen" sounds dirty, or funny. Makes me think of oompa loompas. I don't like "brocialists" either.

I think we should just be blunt and use "socialist". In ten years no one will remeber the "RED MENACE". Those old fucks are dying, thank god.

Using Alt-Left would be a hilariously shitty idea for the reasons already stated. The only time I've heard Alt-Left used is from rhetorical attacks from liberal types who paint us as harassing Goobergaters who are basically the vegan counterpart to the Alt-right.

'Lumpen-Left' similarly has it's share of problems, do you really want to brand yourselves with obscure German terminology when you have so many spergs throwing around "Lugenpresse"? I'll pass.

Brocialists is what we should call ourselves, because the suffix -bro and it's manifold alterations have been thrown around so much to the point of becoming meaningless. Connor Kilpatrick has stepped into this space and answered all of this baseless accusation with actual counter-arguments, so the space is already being made and we can help widen it (assuming that we all aren't a bunch of woman hateric socially repellent freaks).

Alt-right (in the wide, literal sense of non-mainstream internet right-wingers and assorted Holla Forums trolls, not Richard Spencer and his ilk, mind you) played a huge role in electing Trump, yes.

Not by influencing the public, of course. The public does not read Twitter in any meaningful capacity. Journalists and pundits (and Clinton staffers!) do, and their little internet soapboxes and the attention they bring mean a world to them. So when the attention they're getting starts coming from ebil racist trolls, they get defensive and paranoid and lash back and it starts creeping into their work and their worldview, until you have the whole press and media screaming "Nazi!" at everyone.

Then the "white trash", which didn't pay attention so far, reads or watches some snippet of news and rightly decided they're insane, and only mr. Trump is talking sense around here.

Do you have anything against being inclusive, comrade?

I have just one problem with "brocialism", and it's a tactical one.

Going against idpol sensibilities was fine, perhaps necessary, when they were at their haughtiest, but right now, at least some of the people expressing them are lost and dejected. Now is the time to offer an olive branch, not scorn.

Branding is used just as much to define and organize internally as it is to present a unified front externally.

Also even porky companies don't put much stock in branding anymore. All any prole has to do is put your brand name ina search engine to know what your really about

Alt-Left detected. Fuck off back to twitter.

ITT: THE "DIRTBAG LEFT" DISCUSS OTHER POSSIBLE NAMES FOR THEMSELVES, COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF AN AWESOME TITLE THEY ALREADY POSSESS.

W-what? I don't want to use the term Alt-Left, I dont' even really want to call myself a brocialist. The fuck are you babbling about?

But "socialist" already exists in the public consciousness as a more docile strain of communism. Not only that, but that's very often how self-identified socialists themselves see it. That just seems like a clash of context.

Who cares if "lumpen" sounds dirty? It's not meant to be a super serious statement in our case. The internet is pretty good at spreading the necessary info about crap like that, so I'm sure people would figure out the intentional meaning.

I do if it sounds gay.

You're ignoring the efficiency of the internet at finding out information like the meaning of stupid, obscure words. At lumpen left gets the point across without room for alienating peeps like the anarchists and shit. Besides, alliteration is top-tier.

Yeah, the socialist left.