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The Faux Left
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Are the "faux left" a useful tool in the Socialist movement or do they make a mockery of the ideals of the Left?
There seems to be a large majority of people who carp on about Imperialism and the Environment when they do not have a full understanding of the topics they are campaigning against or any real solutions. The levels of hypocrisy amongst this group are astounding.
Some, as I'm sure many of you saw this time a few years ago, are genuine trouble makers. Rioting is not the same as organised resistance. Destroying one McDonalds wil lnot cripple them, banging drums and dancing is fun I'm sure, but when they say the issues they deal with are sealing our imminent doom, isn't it better to be more serious about it than treat it as a day off lectures?
My universities Socialist Students society was full of business, accounting and economics students who will abandon all their ideals once they are out of living on the breadline for three/four years and take up their 40k a year posts at multinnationals and maybe even vote Tory when they hit 35.
The head of this club wore a Josef Stalin T-Shirt with "Uncle Joe" caption and boasted about how he was "on MI5's list" to the coos of the uninformed. Let's just say I didn't hang around to listen to someone who obviously had no idea what he was on about. I saw them all walking into a McDonalds a few hours later.
If the Left is treated as a fashion, then it's not suprising it's losing it's credebility. Please tell me there are young people out there who do understand the faliures of the past and have pragmatic ideas for the future?
There seems to be a large majority of people who carp on about Imperialism and the Environment when they do not have a full understanding of the topics they are campaigning against or any real solutions. The levels of hypocrisy amongst this group are astounding.
Some, as I'm sure many of you saw this time a few years ago, are genuine trouble makers. Rioting is not the same as organised resistance. Destroying one McDonalds wil lnot cripple them, banging drums and dancing is fun I'm sure, but when they say the issues they deal with are sealing our imminent doom, isn't it better to be more serious about it than treat it as a day off lectures?
My universities Socialist Students society was full of business, accounting and economics students who will abandon all their ideals once they are out of living on the breadline for three/four years and take up their 40k a year posts at multinnationals and maybe even vote Tory when they hit 35.
The head of this club wore a Josef Stalin T-Shirt with "Uncle Joe" caption and boasted about how he was "on MI5's list" to the coos of the uninformed. Let's just say I didn't hang around to listen to someone who obviously had no idea what he was on about. I saw them all walking into a McDonalds a few hours later.
If the Left is treated as a fashion, then it's not suprising it's losing it's credebility. Please tell me there are young people out there who do understand the faliures of the past and have pragmatic ideas for the future?
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Like it or not, the only incentive people have to do well is financial and social, and earning more money gives more social standing and more power and protection to your family. Egalitarian ideals go quite a way, but only someone in Cloud Cuckoo Land would seriously believe that people would work hard to achieve things if they earned the same as a dustbin-man.
It works in small communities where the survival of the whole relies on people playing to their strengths, but unless we all go back to mud huts and hunter-gathering communism can't and won't work.
People will help others, but they won't flog themselves to death to carry the lazy and the stupid. At the end of the day, people only truly care about themselves and their families.
Cynical but unfortuantly the truth
People are selfish and idealism is chucked out of the window when money is involved
I was one of the "creators" of a student federation in the Valencian region in Spain. I was it's President for seven years. Now it is the third biggest one in the region.
The reason we created it was, in a nutshell, that the biggest Federation, was full of bullshiters. They love criticizing (sp?) but not forwading solutions. They loved making big(ish) demonstrations but never negotiated anything, they saw the government officials as the enemy and used to tell the people in the demonstartions not to give the police an excuse to charge, as the police loved doing it. And they were uncomfortably friendly with the Unificación Comunista de España, a "communist party" that talks about the Stalin issue saying that he made some mistakes.
Being totally honest they are useful. Some loud-mouthed false lefties will atract youngsters, and they might learn something about some real left wingers standing around. Obviously I'm not talking about the ones that turn demonstartions in to riots.
And the left is not losing it's credibility. The Socialist Party won in Spain, the French left won in all regions except one, Schroeder is a left winger after all. The left is in Government in Finland, Sweden, Albania, Slovenia, Belgium, Romania, Hungary, Poland in Europe alone. The biggest country in South America, Brazil has a extreme left wing president, and the mayor of one of the most important cities in the region, Bogotá is a Communist. And lets not say anything about red Ken.
I agree that Lula's election win in Brazil was a major coup but IMO he has his work cut out trying to meet his promises after years of right-wing misrule.
He has a very difficult task and I'm sure he wont be able to carry out all of his promises... but the point is that people voted for him, and trusted him (and the majority still do) wich means he had/has credibility... being a socialist.
I'm worried that too much of this false left will be around me tomorrow at the demonstrations. I don't know how the British false left acts in these rallies...
In Denmark we all become left-minded on May 1st, to drink beer in the park and get attacked by perverts and other drunks
If all false leftists look like you I welcome them at any demonstration... but you'll have to leave your whip at home, the police don't like them.
Know a girl who wanted a tattoo of Che Guevara, yet she didn't know how to pronounce the damn name, and got it all tangled up.
Xico, it is not a compliment that you keep comparing me to that Grim Rita thing
I'll shut up then, the truth is that you're an :angel: ... ( :nervous: )
It's almost as good as the one where Commies try and claim that the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea et al aren't Communist. All Communist states ever created haven't actually been Communist at all, because they show up Marxist theory to be the tripe that it is- I wish I had the capacity to doublethink like that.
1. It's about whether they agree or not, it's about hypocrisy.
2. Communism was evil. I'm not an apologist for some of the most evil regimes the Earth has ever or will ever see but there are people out there, many of them "false left" who just will not acknowledge that it failed either through their "blind faith" in Marx or they don't know the facts.
As times change so should the theory. Unfortunatly that didn't happen and isn't happening because of the conflict between the "Conservatives" and the "Reformists". What if Gorbechev or even Khrushchev had been allowed to carry out their reforms?
I wouldn't worry Kermit, us "Commies" will always be tarred with the same brush and are not any political threat in the West. But remember that revisionists like myself were murdered or deposed throughout the Second world and are equally the victims of Communism as the millions massacred under their regimes although I have absolutley no comprehension of what they went through.
The theory isn't evil. The theory has glaring errors which need to be looked at and revised for the 21st Century.
I understand you f-ng well!
Old Left- what could they offer to Youth but concentration camps, Khmer Rouge and Oscar Niemayer? especially after falling Berlin Wall?
But who New Left, those revolutionaries and rebels
are nowadays? Just a part of the establishment. Hell, I know what guys ( who are FAR away from my opinions!!!… hmmm, ..well, old hippies, my old teachers and gurus… who have turned me into a human being, really… this kind of loony) … they think guys as Al Gore or Hitlerry von Cliongton or Adolf Nader are… well, I don’t know such words. Please don’t force me to repeat their stuff, OK? I’m too shy….
What do they say about your lovely Tony and his Liberation of Middle East?
What do you think?
You know colloquial English much better….
but then again, i wish it would work and i do think socialism, or at least a TRULY free market but where people arent exploited or used for slave labour, and where everybody should be given a good start in life so they can work themselves out of poverty, and with free healthcare etc etc
Communism was evil? What if Gorbachev? Khrushchev? You must be kidding!
Sorry, but us commies are here to be a threat to capitalism. As a Communist my goal is to achieve a just world and the best way to do that is through Marxism. I am a threat to capitalism.
People are too complicated.
Must you use my name in vain??