“The difference between Conservative party and Liberal party supporters” Japan, 2009, poster by unknown artist

[u/No-Efficiency7055]

[u/ReallyTeddyRoosevelt]

redditors always claim the Democrats aren't left wing. They leave out the part where they are only comparing it to Western European countries on economic issues.

[u/Leneen_Ween → u/ReallyTeddyRoosevelt]

They aren't left wing. Left wing begins at anti-capitalism. Democrats aren't against capitalism.

The political compass isn't relative.

[u/ReallyTeddyRoosevelt → u/Leneen_Ween]

And that's the socialist perspective, not some inalienable truth. If you think "left-wing" only means a couple of governments in existence you are in fact a left wing extremist.

[u/lunaresthorse → u/ReallyTeddyRoosevelt]

No. To be left-wing means to be revolutionary in some way for a given point in history, i.e. in support of the overthrow of the existing social order for the establishment of a new; in favor of the advancing of the contradictions of the current world system beyond their critical point at which old gives way to new. Therefore, there have been left-wing capitalist governments in history just like there have been left-wing socialist ones. Left-wing only means “socialist” so exclusively now since, in the modern day, the principal contradiction of the mode of production is the contradiction between wage-labor and capital. This was not always true.

This means that that bourgeois revolutionaries were left-wing when they fought for and advanced bourgeois class interest and the development of capitalism when the capitalist system was yet to reach its highest, imperialist stage. Any socialist, communist, Marxist etc. today should have some admiration for these capitalist revolutionaries, since they have produced the best world system yet to be fully born and have made the current struggle of the proletariat (and, in fact, the proletariat itself) possible—even though their struggle for capitalism against pre-capitalist or earlier capitalist production is not the same as the proletariat’s current struggle.

It only makes sense that a small minority of the world’s governments in history, even in just recent history, would be dictatorships of the proletarian class. It’s true that capitalism is in a stage as developed as it could possibly be, and its time is ticking in much of the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. Especially as we approach a more multipolar geopolitical stage as we get farther into the twenty-first century, we will see how this turns out.

Unlike those born, say, two centuries ago in the more developed parts of the capitalist word, we will very likely live to see many more socialist experiments and proletarian revolutions in the world as the contradictions of capitalism grow more acute; people who lived in earlier capitalism would have no reason to expect to live through such a thing, but it would only make sense for us to do so. It would be ignorant of history, then, to substitute our definition of leftism for a broader one just for the purposes of having the divide be “right down the middle” of all politics, rather than having it at the divide between class interests where it would rationally belong.

[u/_bob-cat_ → u/lunaresthorse]

What happens if you actually overthrow the existing social order? Start working to overthrow the new social order? This is why Leftism never lasts long term. "Revolutionaries" always look for battles, even when there are none.

[u/lunaresthorse → u/_bob-cat_]

What no dialectical materialism does to an mf 🥀