I think it's Fairly obvious to most people how the American left died under Reagan, however why didn't the same happen for the British?
After Reagan the very idea of being a social democrat was considered an extreme and you'd be shunned and possibly even targeted for having social democrat ideas. The IWW, CPUSA, and other leftist orgs got neutered to astonishingly small numbers with others flat out dissolving once Reagan left office, and the New Left movement completely vanished.
Now on the otherhand, the British Left did fairly okay after Thatcher, and weren't forced to go back to square one. Social democrats were still around and, up until Blair, fairly common in politics. So what happened differently between Thatcher and Reagan which had one completely destroy the left while the other just gave the left a bruise or two?
What allowed the British Left to survive under Thatcher while the American Left died with Reagan?
Tbh, because Tony Benn is an unstoppable force of nature that only god could take from us.
Mcarthisym hurt us hard and the drug war was a huge hit. It wasn't till G.W that the left started gaining any movement again. Thanks to the atheist and the dying right wing libertarian movement they left was able to politically menuvere around the politic gestopo and the right wing following the libertarian "we don't need to guberment" bullshit have dismantled/pissed off all institutions that kept capital in check and now are about to crash the economy again. They fucked up by reacting to Obama and hitching their wagon to Trump. The liberal hate machine is in full force and getting radicalized. Tis a good time to be a American commie.
Sooo….more government for the rescue?
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any known marxists in the U.S. were put on trial during the mccarthy era.
some were even prosecuted as accomplices with the Comintern faction which is basically a guarantee for the death penalty.
basically the only thing leftists were allowed to talk about in the 20th century were gay, ethnic, and sexual rights. which is why you have the idpol "cultural marxist" left strawman today.
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Damn, brit police are cucks. JC would have been beaten at the very least in that 2nd pic. Add that to OPs list of reasons.
Fun fact: they had to import Southern police officers for the miners' strikes because they were worried the policemen would side with them.
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That and pretty much all the decent communist parties died out. As bad as the RU was (it later turned into RCPUSA) it was the last mass party that attempted to base itself in the working class.
The reason the reformist left never mounted a challenge to the democrats is they knew European parliamentary tactics wouldn't work in the completely fucked American electoral system. Now, they've begun to discover there is this thing called local elections but whether that can translate into anything is unclear.
Unions got hammered by automation, offshoring, onshoring aka mass migration and government-sponsored union-busting campaigns under Reagan. We can argue over who and what is to blame but the facts are they haven't responded well to new realities. I'm pretty critical of mainstream business unions but this is a problem for us because unions are a huge source of funds for the Left and institutionalized working class power and organization in daily life. I've been thinking about this and it seems to me that vanguard parties only work when there is an organized working class movement that can be tapped into in the first place. So, in a country where only 6% of the workforce are even in reformist yellow unions, it doesn't seem like Marxist parties can do much besides screech or go out and join the establishment like Sawant.
I mean what kind of communist would garner the support of soldiers?
is that an ancom flag that guy to the left is holding?
From what I can see, no; but I don't know what it is.
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FTFY.
Effort.
American left died in the late 1940s lmao reagan was just the last nail in the coffin
That must explain why leftists resemble zombies so much.
Zombies are revolutionary. The uninfected survivors are reactionaries.
isn't this unironically the original plot of I am legend
This is inane. The neoliberal political class has dominated from Margaret Thatcher era up until the Theresa May era of today. That's nearly 40 years where there was no real left in charge of anything in that country.
If anything, the bigger difference is before Reagan and Thatcher, that's when UK had a much stronger left.
Amerikkka had not much of a real left to lose, the american welfare system was always weak shit, their post WW2 foreign policy was always imperialist and exploitative, and there was not much of a nationalized industry to privatize in the first place. US had reached its "peak leftism" with FDR, by the time Truman was president it was already a deep decay into what we have now
The silent military coup in the late 1940s killed any chance the American left had, and Britain had to play along with NATO's generational struggle against communism.
Explain
The National Security Act of 1947
Essentially enshrined the emerging military and intelligence complex into and above the law. The US government never again acted as it had before, with some pretense of civilian control and oversight. It established the Washington consensus of unlimited military spending, ardent anti-communism in the NATO vassal states and eventually around the world. The air force in particular was elevated above the other branches of the military for their willingness to hold the world hostage with nuclear weapons. The most powerful country ever to exist was hijacked by literal psychos.
Look up the Dulles brothers (Allen Welsh and John Foster), they're key figures in the establishment of the anti-communist Cold War consensus.
This. Britain never had McCarthyism and any attempts at red scares were laughed off. The left was never wiped out so ruthlessly anywhere in the world as they were in the USA.
The culture of low level socialism was always there in the UK till the 2008 crash. Then there was attempts in the media to smear it and destroy it much more than even in Thatcher's day, but which never really worked. That campaign ramped up massively since Corbyn became Labour leader, but it's been shockingly yet again.
I guess people who are committed to socialism aren't going to be dissuaded by Rupert Murdoch and the BBC, for some strange reason.
Because Labour is at least nominally a leftist party from the very start, a scant few true believers stubbornly hung on to your seats to the point that the liberals in the party couldn't remove them
Don’t look into Indonesia if you don’t want to be depressed. The Left there has been so thoroughly exterminated that it makes burgerland look like Cultural Revolution China.
Stupid mouthbreathers!
SEIZE THE MEANS OF RESPIRATION!
Do you know who this is, user?
The British left didn't have to contend with the FBI and the CIA, basically.
What about MI5 and Scotland Yard?
Well every country will have security forces, but few have the reputation, the bloated budget and the free-pass from both the government and the public that American forces get. All other forces would try to erase their traces to their victims, but the FBI and other American police forces didn't give a shit who knew they used Black Panthers for target practice.
Thatcher wasnt all that right wing.
Also right wing governments are rarely if ever authoritarian.
what a shitpost
Scotland Yard is not the FBI; they have no power outside of London.
So this:
Blair?
The actor Bob Hoskins, whose father was a communist, said that Blairism did more damage to Britain than Thatcherism
m.youtube.com
if anyone wants to watch crowder get beat up
I understand Blair's murdering with his reformist policies and almost completely killing labour in Britain, but I'm curious still as to how Reagan and Thatcher both seemingly as brutal as the other in their neo-liberal stances only had one come up on top in killing the left. Was it just effort? Resistance? Was the New Left movement doomed once it "grew up" even without Reagan getting elected?
I personally think cointelpro did more damage than we really know.
labor government in the 1970s was already doing monetarist policies akin to Thatcher because they were forced to by the IMF
Bongs are stubborn and sour, cynical and too close to other cultural forces
Burgers are gullible and content and have one cultural neighbour to the south that they utterly demonize