/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>490144
>Tony Blair
What if we told you there's nothing about this guy that is "left"? Would you meet us at our level so we can have a productive conversion, or will you do the usual thing where you continue arguing against a straw man?

>>490145
>What if we told you there's nothing about this guy that is "left"?

>Social democracy is a social, economic, and political philosophy within socialism[1] that supports political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achieving social equality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

If belonging to a tradition within socialism makes someone a leftist, then Blair is a leftist. It's like right wingers trying to claim that someone like Angela Merkel wasn't actually right wing because she wasn't literally Hitler reborn.
>okay but it's not REAL socialism, chud!
>okay, but it's not REAL conservatism, leftie!

>>490151
But sure, I'd love to hear about how Blair totally isn't a leftist.

>>490152
>>490151
Blair was a Thatcherite Neoliberal who ran as Labour, retard. His policies were rejections of previous party stances.

>>490153
Right, fair enough, that quote does seem to be legit, so I guess I could've been wrong, but that still doesn't change the fact that multiculturalism and open borders are leftist policies (as in, most people today who would consider themselves socialists, communists, whatever, support those things).

>>489967
>"The Chinese" are not a monolithic hivemind
Nobody said so.
>nor are they an actual democracy whose government policies can be said to be directed by the workers.
Chinese workers have rising wages, that means they must have political power.

>The Chinese state is an electoral oligarchy
No that ain't it, the people in China you consider oligarchs, did try to get political power in the 2000s, a bunch of them got executed as a result. Nominally the Chinese state resembles a ML-type leadership democracy, of note is that decision making in their system is relatively decentralized, which is unusual.

>ultimately governed by the iron law of value
This is true for every system, socialist systems also have a law of value, just not the same as the capitalist one.

> If it make sense for a private capitalist or a government bureaucrat to pursue exploitation abroad because it enhances their profitability, then they will try to make it happen.
It doesn't make sense, look at the dustbin of history that contains all the fallen empires.

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>>489981
>No that ain't it, the people in China you consider oligarchs, did try to get political power in the 2000s, a bunch of them got executed as a result. Nominally the Chinese state resembles a ML-type leadership democracy, of note is that decision making in their system is relatively decentralized, which is unusual.
Anon, you've got to disabuse yourself of liberal propagandistic notions of what the modern republic is. Oligarchy is not "that thing that comes with capitalism or some previous system", it is simply rule by the few. Elections are not democracy. They are fundamentally oligarchic in nature because they always have and always will select from only that stratum of society able to run for office in the first place. Failure to recognize the role of electoral oligarchies in reinforcing class rule will only lead once more to the tragedies of the sabotage and repeal of the soviet experiments.

>a ML-type leadership democracy
This especially is completely Orwellian gibberish. If you want to defend vanguardism as a necessary and useful tool to transition from a revolution to socialism that's fine, but please don't pretend it resembles actual democracy. The point of vanguardism, ostensibly, is to lead the proles to democracy. Not to give up and settle for an obviously oligarchic system where a class of bureaucrats jockey for power and direct the economy.

>>489982
>Anon, you've got to disabuse yourself of liberal propagandistic notions of what the modern republic is. Oligarchy is not "that thing that comes with capitalism or some previous system", it is simply rule by the few. Elections are not democracy. They are fundamentally oligarchic in nature because they always have and always will select from only that stratum of society able to run for office in the first place.
Xi Jinping (China's current head of state) started out as a peasant that did manual labor in the fields.
That's pretty good in terms of social mobility. China's political system requires politicians to rise up through the system, they start out in their local government. That always struck me as somewhat more favorable in terms of regular people having the chance to get into high offices.

I don't know why you think that China is an electoral democracy, it's clearly not and they don't describe their system as such either. They call it deliberative democracy.

>This especially is completely Orwellian gibberish.
Leadership democracy is not a term I've made up to befuddle you with double-speak, I've seen other Marxists use it.

> If you want to defend vanguardism as a necessary and useful tool to transition from a revolution to socialism that's fine, but please don't pretend it resembles actual democracy. The point of vanguardism, ostensibly, is to lead the proles to democracy. Not to give up and settle for an obviously oligarchic system where a class of bureaucrats jockey for power and direct the economy.
The Chinese consider their current system as lowerstage socialism, they have a different name tho, something along the lines of "building towards a moderately prosperous society". That seems to imply that they intent to change their system once a higher stage becomes available, so they kinda agree with you a little bit.

I don't get the impression their economic plans represents the dictatorship of the "bureaucrat-jockeys". THey generally appear to

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>>490008
Social mobility doesn't refute the point about elections selecting from a limited stratum of society. Cicero was a so-called novus homo, a "new man", who came from a plebian family which never had political power but he rose to become the most notorious slum lord of the late Roman Republic as well as senator and consul. Traditionally, access to the senate and consulship was so ossified that only established patrician families remained in power throughout generations, so it was often a sensation when a new family rose to power. Did that make Rome any less of an oligarchy? Of course not.

Despite some pretentious "developments" in the naval-gazing profession of political science, "oligarchy" is not about social mobility or even how much inequality a political system has. Is it simply a form of government where a limited group of people rule. Is it true that oligarchy can reinforce class rule? Very much so, classes that already have advantages over another can utilize that advantage to select for themselves in electoral systems. Then, once they're in government, they can implement policies that further privilege themselves. Not only have we seen this trend throughout history since the Greeks coined the term, but it's also been the clear case in "socialist" countries of the contemporary period. Again and again, oligarchic systems of government have privileged the already-existing power of a bureaucratic "state capitalist" class which eventually used them to undermine and overturn the very system they were supposed to defend. Many of the modern "oligarchs" of post-Soviet countries were in fact former Soviet bureaucrats who took the chance to privatize state infrastructure that the originally administered. "Oligarchs" in this sense is a vulgar distortion of the term's original meaning though. Everyone in office in an electoral system is by original definition an oligarch.

>i think we have a word-contest where you try to say China bad, and i try to say China not bad.
This is an unfortunate way to interpret this exchange and it seems to be biasing you against a more important, more fundamental discussion of forms of government and how they interact with capitalism. We don't need to play out another round of Neocons vs Idolized Foreign Country Defense Force here.

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>>490019
Ok you are using the text-book definition of oligarchy. The most common interpretation these days however is that oligarchs are just the biggest capitalists who have captured the keys to power.

As far as china is concerned, i will say again, Chinese workers have rising wages, rising standards of living, and so on. That means they must have political power/influence.

>This is an unfortunate way to interpret this exchange and it seems to be biasing you against a more important, more fundamental discussion of forms of government and how they interact with capitalism. We don't need to play out another round of Neocons vs Idolized Foreign Country Defense Force here.
As long as there are all those neocons and similar creatures lurking around looking to provoke more wars, everything goes through the filter of avoiding anything that can be used to manufacture consent for wars. Find a way of criticizing our political structures in the west in a way that it can't be co-opted by the neocons. I don't want a repeat of freedom-bombs democracy-bombs and human-rights-bombs.

>I like discussing forms of government because I think it is a critical blind spot that the organized Left has ignored for something like 150 years now. Marx himself grew up in a time when the Orwellian inversion of the meaning of "democracy" had already happened thanks to leaders of the French and American revolutions. Ever since his time the Left has far too often assumed uncritically that the modern electoral republic is an inherently good thing and a natural vehicle for socialism if an ideologically-driven party can simply seize power.
If you want to argue that in the west we should try out a Sortition democracy, that's worth a try, the current political systems don't appear to be working, and there might be material conditions for changing that. But that advocacy has to be tied to the west. There cannot be anything that is usable for undermining foreign governments. What China's government is supposed to be is for the Chinese to decide. Not just for the sake of letting other countries have sovereignty, but also to avoid systemic criticism getting diverted to talking about other countries, instead of our systems.

California officials decry union leader’s arrest amid renewed Ice raids and protests
During Friday’s protests at a federal detention facility in downtown LA, David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union, was arrested amid a police response that included teargas and flash-bangs. Huerta, who was injured and detained, released a statement to the Los Angeles Times from the hospital, saying: “What happened to me is not about me. This is about something much bigger.” “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/07/immigration-raids-los-angeles

Tesla seeks to block city of Austin from releasing records on robotaxi trial
Austin public-information officer Dan Davis told Reuters on April 1 that “third parties” had asked the city to withhold the records to protect their “privacy or property interests.” Austin officials on April 7 requested an opinion on the news agency’s request from the Texas Attorney General’s office, which handles public-records disputes.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-seeks-block-city-austin-releasing-records-robotaxi-trial-2025-06-06/

A US territory’s colonial history emerges in state disputes over voting and citizenship
In what experts describe as an unprecedented case, Alaska prosecutors are pursuing felony charges against 11 residents of Whittier, most of them related to one another, saying they falsely claimed U.S. citizenship when registering or trying to vote. The defendants were all born in American Samoa, an island cluster in the South Pacific roughly halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. It’s the only U.S. territory where residents are not automatically granted citizenship by virtue of having been born on American soil, as the Constitution dictates.
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HOUDINI: Mutual Aid Organizations | Some Thoughts on Hierarchy and the Creation of It Within Our Own Organizations
As some of you may know, I am a big fan of mutual aid as my primary form of organizing. I think going into your community, providing for the people, trying to build intentional communities, trying to give back to the people—going amongst the masses, doing good works—I do believe that is one of the most effective ways to bolster your connections to your community, connections to your neighborhood, connections to other people. Find new people who are allies. It's just a great starting point. And I think it's something that anyone can do, and it's a nonviolent logistical form of resistance that is infrastructure-focused on action. I'm a big fan of it. That said, I've learned many things in my time, whether it has been going and physically handing out meal kits, safety kits, and hygiene kits to people, or actually working at pop-up soup kitchens, or free fridge programs, what have you. I've learned some things, and I think that we're missing some of the points with mutual aid. Maybe I'm going to come off a little bit too ruthless here, but we are creating hierarchies in our own organizations, and we are effectively doing charity, not mutual aid community building.
https://erikhoudini.com/#post?id=629651&title=mutual-aid-organizations-some-thoughts-on-hierarchy-and-the-creation-of-it-within-our-own-organizations

Wall Street To Insurers: Keep Denying Care
A health care industry giant’s Wall Street overlords just admitted that the company’s sky-high health insurance coverage denial rates reaped them enormous profits — and to keep the money flowing, they’re suing to stop the insurer from approving more patient care. UnitedHealth Group has been facing growing discontent from its investors, a battle that — as the corporation faces mounting public scrutiny over its care denials — could shape the future of health insurance for 29 million people. A May 7 lawsuit brought by a small-time investor in UnitedHealth Group is one of the latest chapters in the battle, arguing that the company’s tanking stock performance this spring had cost its investors unfairly. Some corporate media rePost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>489926
>The corporation was one of the first insurers to come under fire for using artificial intelligence tools to deny care.
Does that mean that patients need to use AI tools to request care ? As in have AI brute force millions of requests until it figures out by trial and error how to get care requests approved.

>>489859
Why do people want licensing for everything except for procreation?
Why do people allow incompetent parents to breed?

At this point, "eugenics" is just an indignatory remark.

People have no problem with putting trackers on their kids.

People have no problem with background screening for employment.

>>489863
>Because socialist nations have never, EVER, engaged in nationalism, EVER.
Well, the leaders of these so-called "socialist nations" would constantly shit on council communists, mutualists and anarcho-communists anyway so… I guess it depends on what we mean by the word "socialism" then.
>>489862
>Under the current system, immigration IS forced diversity
Neither did immigrants vote for their country to be empoverished by imperialism but whatever. I don't have a definitive stance on immigration (anti-immigration is peak reformism anyway) and I do understand the grievances of white workers but, like, immigrants are people too. I don't think treating them like literal savages is coolio. I think we should try to build bridges instead and attack the core cause of illegal immigration instead of attacking immigrants themselves.
>Yeah, cause they both operate on fear, which is a fascist tactic.
I'm not scared of LGBT, I just think hating queers is silly, counterproductive and irrational. When it comes to feminazis then sure but LGBT isn't even an ideology, the same way "leftism" isn't. Or are you implying that your ideas are the same as those of radlibs, ancoms and Strasserites?
>You're just retarded.
Not an argument, you're retarded for saying this. Only retards throw insults when they have nothing to add.

>>489871
>Why do people allow incompetent parents to breed?
Conservative propaganda. They think more children = good and less children = bad.

>anarcho-individualist
Oh you're retarded

>>489879
>Oh you're retarded
The picrel is you.

>>489878
>And I realized that leftists have really not addressed this in sufficient capacity.
Read more history
Tsar Nick N°2 send his navy to attack Japan, they got their asses whooped, the Russian navy felt betrayed and switched allegiance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It's called the battle of Tsushima (spelling might be wrong).

>The implication here is that if we're going to be fighting a revolution, the entire might of the US military would be opposing us.
Well the US rulers want to attack China, that could be their battle of Tsushima moment.
Basically get the soldiers to join your side. When a ruling class sends their military into battles they can't win, this all of a sudden becomes very doable.

>I think this is very likely true. And if it's true then it is the single best explanation for why there is no political movement in the US:
If all the workers go on strike, and hide in a hole somewhere, all that military power does nothing.
The real reason why lefty political movements have a hard time in the US, is because imperial super profits enable the imperial bourgoisie to continue extracting profits from their imperial periphery while their domestic workers go on strike. That means they can weather these strikes, they continue to have transnational revenue during strikes which they can use to pay for political repression.

Lenin realized this and basically decided that revolution had to happen in the periphery first in order to break that dynamic. He was mostly correct. During the period of anti-colonial liberation, the British empire lost virtually all of it's colonies and as a result the labor movement in the UK got very strong.

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>>489880
Based and informed reply.

Its just interesting to consider

>>489857
You are right about the double standard, but you are mistaken about global opinions, most of the world indeed thinks the attacks on the bridge are a warcrime.

Maybe consider that the bbc does not reflect the views of most of the world.

">>489857 (You) (OP)
You are right about the double standard, but you are mistaken about global opinions, most of the world indeed thinks the attacks on the bridge are a warcrime.

Maybe consider that the bbc does not reflect the views of most of the world."

Well, true, BBC doesn't reflect most views, since it is a British news anchor, however even if we look at a few of the US or other European countries news (aside from Ukraine and Russia in this case), most of them never really questions it, although I guess you could say its because its main stream news that would never anyways.

Do you know any good independent sources?

>>489873
>Well, true, BBC doesn't reflect most views, since it is a British news anchor,
I wonder if the BBC reflects the views of most Brits at this point.

>however even if we look at a few of the US or other European countries news (aside from Ukraine and Russia in this case), most of them never really questions it,
Maybe not in this particular case, about a Russian bridge that is very far away and doesn't really affect them. But the number of people that distrust this type of media in general is probably very high.

>>483914
>My dogmatism is better than yours!
As dogmatic as orthodox Marxists can be, at least they don't allow opportunists to pervert Marxist teachings and introduce contrafactual concepts and ideas that promote their bourgeois views. Not all revisionism is warranted. The same way not all interpretations of Stirner are valid, some self-proclaimed Stirnerites actually use Stirner to justify their own spooks. Which is very dishonest.

>>489755
Who's Gerald Horne? Are you saying he's based or an ideological tool of the ruling class?

>>489767
The latter. He's a historian who falsifies history in service of divisive idpol.

>>489755
WSWS Covid take was easily the worst among the entire left but they were based as fuck for ruthlessly shitting on 1619 Project. That said Gerald Horne is a true anti imperialist and never falls for the shitlib trap of "criticizing" Russia and China. Sadly he is a Democratic Party tailist and spreads the moronic notion that Trump's election and Jan 6 was a huge step toward fascism. As if we didn't have fascism for decades and decades.

>>489637
I mean building your entire platform around them, to the exclusion of others. I'm a-ok working with someone who goes to church weekly and hates gays. That's different from going around and saying "hey people who go to church and hate gays, here's the party for you!", because it'll turn off everyone who isn't them. If the ACP was smart, they'd bring on leadership with a wide variety of opinions all across the political spectrum, with their belief in socialism being the unifying factor. Instead, you have the same zoomer trying and failing to be Andrew Tate meets Nick Fuentes ten times.

As an aside, it's important to realize that the ACP is very good at making itself look like it's bigger and doing more than it actually is. The actual membership numbers are out there if you look for them, and they're not particularly impressive, with growth falling off the further you get into 2025.

Literally who?

>>486800
Appealing for Climate change action based on Wildfires never going to work. Australia is the most climate change denying country on earth and is getting razed to the ground by wild fires are rapidly increasing frequency, once a several decade event became every decade, now its down to every 3-5 years.
Reality people still don't take it seriously because the mass of propaganda is still Climate Change denialism, and Liberals the world over, only pay lip service to Climate change while functionally engaging in denialism with shit like Greenwashing and Carbon Capture and EVs. So they lose credibility.
Average Conservative sees Wildfires and they think "They happen all the time and it was probably the fault of environmentalists stopping backburning", Average conservative doesn't question why it used to snow 3ft in their childhood, but Winter fells like a stiff Autumn now with not a hint of snow anywhere. They don't think.
There will be no climate change action at all, Trump only matters in that he's an even more active environmental vandal than most and will fuck up the last National Parks with grazing and drilling.

Normally wouldn't give a shit what Mel Gibson thinks, except I've been thinking, for the past year, that perhaps I judged him too harshly in the past and might owe him an apology.

https://x.com/5149jamesli/status/1927456435463504337
$100 million in LA fire relief from "FireAid" was given primarily to executives, and of what was given to Palisades-specific charities, only three organizations were named: Kehillat Israel, Chabad of Pacific Palisades, and Palisades Charter High School.

>>486864
one probably can genetically engineer trees to produce fire-retardant chemicals in their bark, thus curbing fires. Those trees probably wouldn't decompose after they die because microbes haven't yet evolved to digest fire-retardants, but hey look at the bright side, that would make a great carbon sink.

>>489789
It's egregious
Also "FireAid" sounds like an accelerant you spray into a barbecue grill in order to start a fire.

>>489787
We need to remember what happens when the legal system starts being used to go after political rivals. However tepid the changes seem at first, it is a slippery slope. Just like Biden before him, Trump is only a step in the ladder. Other rulers make think they can control Trump's legacy, but the thing to watch out for is not actually his direct legacy. It's opportunists from nascent or marginalized factions. Opportunists with less scruples than the previous example will continue to escalate the erosion of legal norms for as long as they can benefit from it. Eventually the unspoken agreements between rival ruling factions finally collapse and full-blown civil war breaks out.

>>489792
>We need to remember what happens when the legal system starts being used to go after political rivals.
They already are.

Like, consistently.
The point is that Trump & Biden are not real rivals. All this BS about "norms" is made up nonsense which only exists to protect the criminals in power, who are not real "factions" rivalling eachother at this point. Trump was never seriously persecuted, nor were his followers; they were given special treatment which you or any socialist, or even a socdem, would not recieve.

>>489794
I'm well aware of the massive double standard that has always existed. The point is that the ruling elites maintain consent for their rule by an unwritten agreement not to use the legal system against one another. When this oligarchic tradition is breached, it primes the public to accept further breaches. It provides historical precedent for new opportunists to further exploit the legal system for their benefit.

The question becomes what role the armed forces play in enforcing these breaches. In ancient Rome, the Marian reforms established a volunteer military force that answered to warlords abroad. When a warlord abroad was checked by the legal system in the capital, they simply returned to the capital with their army and overthrew the government.

Grayzone did a good stream on the phony aid organization facilitating a holocaust yesterday. Check it out.

>Journalists in the besiged Gaza Strip said hungry and beleagured residents forced to stand outside a facility holding aid rushed inside because of delays conducting detailed security checks on recepients. According to Israeli army sources cited by Israeli media, Americans affiliated with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had to be rescued once they lost control of the facility. The Israeli military denied firing on the crowds but gunfire was heard at the scene, possibly as a result of warning shots fired by American mercenaries securing the facility.
Bring back UNWRA.

Also why do they need a security check for food ?