Hi Holla Forums, just dropping by for a chance to learn and get some feedback. I suppose by modern standards today I'm on the right. My politics right now comes from radical individualism, because I believe that I have the right to maximize my mental, physical, and financial potential with as little external interference as possible. I am also reading, "The Ego and His Own" by Max Stirner, which doesn't seem to interfere with this yet.
This election I voted for Trump (Campaign Trump was better than President Trump imo) and it seems somehow the right took the proletariot vote from the left. Now, I am a person who is open to changing his mind based on new evidence. When and why did the American left stop caring about class and start about race? I think identity politics is a sham in a place like the USA, where even "white people" come from many different countries that all kind of hate each other. From a strategic point of view, can and will the American left ever return to its core principles? Or are they hedging their bets on deeply triggering and problematic supremacy in anticipation of changing demographics, and will then use their "brown investment" to institute Marxist leftism? I apologize if I've gotten terminology wrong, I'm just trying to make sense of this.
I think a lot has to do with the New Left and Eurocommunism, which (contrary to Marxist belief) put Cultural issues over economic ones. However, since this doesn't change the relations which divide our societies today, it allowed liberal movements and Corporations to capitalize on Civil Rights movements to make more money.
If I had to give an actual time? Probably around the late 70s-early 80s
Oliver King
There really isn't one. CPUSA is basically FBI since the 50s and there simply are no other traditional leftist organisations in the USA besides some Trotskyst splinter groups and, if you will, the new, small Social Democratic faction within the Democratic Party under Sanders.
We call this identity politics and we have all the reason to believe that this is also the result of a COINTELPRO strategy. See what happened to Occupy Wallstreet. That being said, what you are referring to would be mostly considered liberals, not leftists, at least not anymore.
Democratic Socialists of America are a movement which gained traction recently in the wake of the presidential election. They are still heavily invested in identity politics, due to their campus culture origin, but are still a vast improvement from what you'd get in the Democratic Party. They just have to cuck themselves a little bit and don't openly call for socialism/Marxism because it's still being seen as the most evil thing in the world in the US.
This is the perspective of a non-American btw.
Brody Long
I got a book for you fam.
Grayson Miller
What you call the left, isn't left at all. Truth is the Democrats and the Republicans are very close in the political spectrum, both are neoliberals with different flavors of idpol.
A leftist party (or collective if you're an anarkiddie but w/e) has a clearly stated end-game goal of overthrowing capitalism, and it's only focus (on which all analysis is based) is materialist analysis of class struggle. So unless a party directly critiques capitalism and explicitly states its purpose as overthrowing it, they aren't leftist. Like the user above stated, there are no major organizations in the us atm that are leftists. What the democrats are doing atm is what we call revisionism, they distort leftist politics to identify with the emancipatory spirit of the left, while in reality being right wing. Imagine it as a wolf calling his organization "United Party of Sheep safety".
Sorry if i come on populist or patronizing, but most americans i've spoken to are really uneducated when it comes to politics so i can't be sure what you might or might not know
Camden Thompson
Which is?
Brandon Thompson
Max Stirner's 'The Ego and His Own' which is essentially individualist anarchism.
Jackson Wilson
Excpet for that whole anti-capitalist thing.
Daniel Mitchell
Ah, yes, I mentioned that I was reading that in my last paragraph. Not done yet, gothic horror from the centuries past is distracting me
Joseph Ross
You'd be surprised into how individualist you can be, right to the point of anti-capitalism and beyond.
Dominic Ward
The last frame makes a lot of sense. My friends are largely all part of different modes of thought, but there is one thing I've always said that triggers all of them. If we all (as a nation) stopped paying taxes, we would both have more money and the governmental system would not be able to enforce institutionalized theft (taxation) against us. Without a welfare state and health care, man returns to a darwinian state where the weak die again and the genepool is slowly improved over time, thereby securing our path of evolution and improvement as a species. Plants, animals, and even us have been guided by the slow hand of evolution, why have we stopped that?
Levi Torres
But not as long as there is private property and wage labor around. With private property (means of production being privately owned) you have a class of exploiters (bourgeoisie) extortion value from the workers without actually doing any of the labor themselves. They are the true welfare queens.
Easton Miller
10/10 logic
Aiden Barnes
bud we're going to fuse with tech anyways so whatever.
sounds like you'd like anarcho-prim stuff i guess though
Nolan Baker
This sounds retarded af
Jaxon Perez
This might just be overly optimistic, but in my opinion the left is well on its way to returning to its core principle. Which is to say returning to a universalizing class based vision which aims to unite rather then divide. Liberal idpol and theanti-white/male overtones that come with it are proving themselves to be both a dead end and morally bankrupt.
There have recently been a large number of articles in the left's most respected magazines and blogs which increasingly recognize that liberal idpol is a toxic, divisive distraction which is empowering the far-right and distracting us from the class struggle.
Even the alt-right has noticed this, they call the new emerging formation the anti-anti-white left. amren.com/commentary/2016/12/anti-anti-white-left/ I think this new trend is a reaction to two things: 1) The realization that liberals can also use idpol against us not just the right. During the Sanders campaign liberals effectively bludgeoned the left with the whole Bernie bro's cliche which really woke people up to how easily abused and shallow concepts like muh privilege theory and standpoint epistemology are. someone on /leftpol/ wrote a much better explanation of this, I'm sure someone has the screencap if they want to share 2) The recognition that in many ways the more extreme types of liberal idpol are just the mirror image of the alt-right and both mutually re-enforce each other.
Some examples of respected thinkers on the left beginning to recognize the problems with idpol.
We will have direct control soon enough. All the "mistakes" of civilization will be undone. Why bother with the brutal and extremely slow process of true natural selection then? It has been virtually non-existant since industrialization anyway, making it effective requires going way back. It's not just that true natural selection would require making our lives hell, but it would take thousands of years. You say the genepool would recover "slowly", but I don't think you appreciate just how slowly it would be.
You're just handicapping yourself while the top earners laugh at all the trouble you are going through. You can do that if you want, but I'm not happy to make myself miserable for some imaginary competition. I would rather join together with people in the same situation as myself and actually work for my own interests.
Brayden Evans
If I start a business where I perform a service, wouldn't I literally be the means of production? If I theoretically become a millionaire and many of my fellow countrymen were impoverished, wouldn't I be considered bougiouse? (Wrong spelling) Even if every transition was entirely voluntary, wouldn't I theoretically be an enemy of the left? Or would I only be bad the minute I employ somebody and pay them less than I make, even though they didn't put in all of the hours and effort that I had? I fundamentally think every man is entitled to the sweat of his brow, and I don't know how the left treats entrepreneurship and changing social classes.
Thomas Harris
...
Tyler Robinson
Theoretically speaking, if these advancements were made in a non commie society, wouldn't it be more extreme slavery, with our techno overlords using us as slave labor?
Zachary Collins
>DUDE what if, like, nobody paid taxes next year? hahahahahahaha that would be so tight mannnn
Read Dawkins. Evolution doesn't have anything to do with the interests of the organism or the species. Evolution just treats you as a vehicle to replicate genes.
if you make millions by yourself, without hiring wage labor, or owning means of production, then go ahead. its not possible buy by all means go ahead.
Hudson Peterson
Does something have to be a machine to be considered the means of production?
Jonathan Morales
Aww, it's retarded.
Parker White
Stirner represents the self interest of the working class
Tyler Garcia
Pick up a biology textbook or stop using words you don't understand, I recommend Campbell & Reece. You can't just "stop" natural selection, ever, even temporarily. Living with technology or social programs like in the modern age is just another environment humans are adapting to through natural selection. Your idea of humans being outside the natural order because we act a certain way is simply moronic and quite frankly embarrassing.
Joshua Butler
IMO some level of IdPol is both unavoidable and needed in any modern worker's movement. Simply put, the people of today are, in mass, under the sway of ideologies both religious and political. Feminism, post-colonialism and critical theory broadly could function as an excellent extension of humanist thought to combat the ideological biases against women, minorities and LGBT people present within the working class. Sure lib fems are retarded but discarding the genuinely Marxist roots of critical theory is pretty retarded too, especially when racism is only getting worse in the modern era.
Kayden Bell
maximize potential Your spooks are so infantile they are buzzwords.
Charles Kelly
Are you familiar with the difference between positive and negative freedom? The difference between liberals (not in the american sense) and leftists is (very broadly) that leftists value positive freedoms more, liberals prefer negative freedoms. It could also be phrased that liberals value property rights over human rights. The sort of class society you implicitly want can never be truly meritocratic, as the mediocre spawn of the wealthy will be favoured to succeed over the exceptional poor.
read
Your idea of evolution is pokemon-tier. Evolution is a completely non-normative process. It doesn't produce 'better' or 'worse' effects, the only thing that matters is survival and replication.
Jayden Gray
lel
Xavier Gomez
Gotta love it when someone's social mammal brain rules their politics and their arguments boil down to the connotations of words because the subconscious can't into grammar or logic.
Charles Wilson
Disappointed, but not surprised.
Jack Thompson
DSA and Jacobin aren't nearly as bad as dems on idpol
Cooper Parker
What obligation do we have towards "natural" evolution? The survival of the fittest isn't something that just stops in modern society, it's only that who the fittest are is shaped by social situations.
Read Rousseau, he deals quite deftly with this fantasy of going back to pre-civilization.
