Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Valmy]

It's interesting how pointing out stalin was dubiously left wing means i believe every dodgy left wing figure ever cannot possibly be left wing.

Again. I'm not the one with these black and white blinkers here.

Stalin was definitely left wing. He devoted his life to left wing revolutionary activities. I just think he never thought too carefully about his biases his culture inculcated in him, he became quite adept at taking those biases and justifying them using Marxist ideology. Being an imperfect human being (in his case a profoundly fucked up human being) doesn't make one not left wing.

[The Minsky Moment]

He literally formalized Marxism-Leninism, the idea of the permanent revolution, and the structure of Soviet governance, elements of which persisted until its dissolution. No one is saying he was an academic philosopher (neither was Lenin), but the idea he wasn't a major Marxist thinker of the 20th century is insane.

Lenin formalized Marxism-Leninism and the structure of Soviet government.  See State and Revolution and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Permanent revolution was Trotsky's idea

Stalin basically wrote the 1920s and 1930s equivalent of "Leninism for Dummies" - simplified summaries of Leninist ideas. According to Kotkin, significant portions of his Foundations of Leninism were plagiarized; in any event, there is little original in there. I suppose Stalin could be credited with "socialism in one country" - but that was a theory adopted out of pure political necessity when all the revolutions in other European countries failed.  Bukharin fleshed out the theory for that.

Stalin's literary influence derived from his cult of personality inside the Soviet Union and his unquestioned authority as the dominant leader of the Communist world. 

I agree with you on the main point - theoretician or no, he belongs to the political left.

[Josquius]

It's interesting how pointing out stalin was dubiously left wing means i believe every dodgy left wing figure ever cannot possibly be left wing.

Again. I'm not the one with these black and white blinkers here.

Stalin was definitely left wing. He devoted his life to left wing revolutionary activities. I just think he never thought too carefully about his biases his culture inculcated in him, he became quite adept at taking those biases and justifying them using Marxist ideology. Being an imperfect human being (in his case a profoundly fucked up human being) doesn't make one not left wing.

Russification, cult of personality, ethnic genocide, imperial expansion, allying with out and out fascists...
Lots of deviations in there.
Strip off the red paint and hide the context and stalin really doesn't look too dissimilar to a fascist leader.

Yet annoyingly it's always the "was Hitler really right wing?" idiocy you see questioned rather than this far more debatable one.

Argue if you like that Stalin "belongs" to the left, that being where his power was birthed. I really don't give a shit about this political football "my side is better than your side" stuff some insist on.

But to present him as in anyway representative of the views of the left, especially in 2024,is simply  wrong. Incredibly so.

[Barrister]

To answer Jacob's question more seriously, I think the defining difference between the right and the left is that the right defers to the natural order of things, as it would be without extensive social structures, while the left tries to engineer societies to be better.  The natural order tends towards "might makes right", or put a lot of emphasis on "us vs. them", which is probably what all animals default to on an instinctive level.  The left considers the natural order to be undesirable in many ways, and strives to devise ways to right the wrongs introduced by it.  Of course, it doesn't always do good job engineering the solution, you don't need a license to be a social engineer.

There is no right or wrong to the philosophies, except when they go to extremes.  I'm sure most humans don't want to live by the same rules that animals live by in the jungle, because it doesn't seem like a good life.  On the other hand, social engineering isn't always getting us in a better place:  natural order evolved into what it was for a reason, so you have to think twice before you put in place what you think is an improvement.

So for some reason I can remember my grade 10 course on politics - I'm not even sure what the course was called.  I of course loved it.

This sort-of agrees, and sort-of disagrees with your assessment.  He defined right wing versus left wing as what thinkers thought the state of man in nature was.  For the right he quoted Thomas Hobbes, that man in the state of nature led a life that was "Nasty, brutish and short".  In Hobbes view, you needed all of society to improve the human condition - the state, family, the church - all of it.  Only with those external influences could humanity be improved.  This was the traditional right-wing view.

This was contrasted with Rosseau, who felt that the state of man in nature was fundamentally good.  It was only the influence of society - those same factors of the state, the family and the church - that corrupted humans.  This is the traditional left-wing view.

It's a fairly simplistic explanation (as benefitting being taught to 10th graders) but there's a lot there.  You can see the left-wing impulse is to free people from social constraint.  You're free from social constraint - you're free from from financial worry - you're free to be any gender you want to be.

Even when there are left-wing authoritarians (like Stalin, or the French Revolution) the notion at least is you need that authority in the state in order to destroy those social pressures like the family and the church, and only then will humanity be free.

[Barrister]

It's interesting how pointing out stalin was dubiously left wing means i believe every dodgy left wing figure ever cannot possibly be left wing.

Again. I'm not the one with these black and white blinkers here.

There's nothing remotely dubious about it - Stalin was left wing.  Unless you define "left wing=good" and "right wing=bad" - which I think you subconsciously do.

[Josquius]

It's interesting how pointing out stalin was dubiously left wing means i believe every dodgy left wing figure ever cannot possibly be left wing.

Again. I'm not the one with these black and white blinkers here.

There's nothing remotely dubious about it - Stalin was left wing.  Unless you define "left wing=good" and "right wing=bad" - which I think you subconsciously do.

Do you really see the world in such simple basic categories as good and bad?
Where do rather less controversially socialist but nasty figures like mao sit in this view of left good right bad?

[Valmy]

On the other hand, social engineering isn't always getting us in a better place:  natural order evolved into what it was for a reason, so you have to think twice before you put in place what you think is an improvement.

True and I think you do a good job differentiating leftism from conservatives. But not all right wingers are conservatives, they have their own social engineering and that is where it gets a little unclear to differentiate them from left wingers in a global context, even when it is usually obvious what is left and right in a specific country by country context.

[Valmy]

Russification, cult of personality, ethnic genocide, imperial expansion, allying with out and out fascists...
Lots of deviations in there.
Strip off the red paint and hide the context and stalin really doesn't look too dissimilar to a fascist leader.

I mean that is all true and again, speaks to his specific biases and interests. Things that seemed like a good thing for him that needed to be justified using leftwing ideology.

But he also did lots of obviously left wing things as well. I guess if you ignore all the collectivization and his other social and economic socialist programs he would appear a fascist leader. But you cannot do that.

[HVC]

How is a cult of personality not a leftist trait too? Che love boys would be shocked with that idea.

[Valmy]

How is a cult of personality not a leftist trait too? Che love boys would be shocked with that idea.

I think it is a trait leftists can have. I don't think it is a leftist trait. All cults have them 

[HVC]

How is a cult of personality not a leftist trait too? Che love boys would be shocked with that idea.

I think it is a trait leftists can have. I don't think it is a leftist trait. All cults have them 

I wonder what the ratio of shirts sold are for che and, like, Mussolini

[HVC]

On a serious note though, a cult of personality seems to be a huge thing for Latin lefties/commies.

[Valmy]

How is a cult of personality not a leftist trait too? Che love boys would be shocked with that idea.

I think it is a trait leftists can have. I don't think it is a leftist trait. All cults have them 

I wonder what the ratio of shirts sold are for che, and like Mussolini

T-shirts with pictures of your Great Leader^TM just weren't a thing in the 1920s and 1930s.

Though Che has the advantage of being dead, he is more of a pop cultural thing than an actual cult leader. At least at this point.

Though I have a coffee cup with Lenin that says "Workers of the World Unite" in Russian on it. Because I think it is funny, not because I think Communism or Lenin aren't shit.

On a serious note though, a cult of personality seems to be a huge thing for Latin lefties/commies.

On a serious note I think that is because of Stalin and the USSR. They really exported that should be a thing for Communist Revolutionaries.

[HVC]

On a serious note I think that is because of Stalin and the USSR. They really exported that should be a thing for Communist Revolutionaries.

Are you playing the Josq game and saying Latin American lefties aren't true lefties? I mean how many decades of a trend does it take for something to be a trait of a movement?

[DGuller]

On the other hand, social engineering isn't always getting us in a better place:  natural order evolved into what it was for a reason, so you have to think twice before you put in place what you think is an improvement.

True and I think you do a good job differentiating leftism from conservatives. But not all right wingers are conservatives, they have their own social engineering and that is where it gets a little unclear to differentiate them from left wingers in a global context, even when it is usually obvious what is left and right in a specific country by country context.

I think hard right is still conservatism, if you define conservatism in absolute terms as I did, rather than relative terms like "conservative wants society to stay as it is, regardless of where it is".  If you believe that society should be without any social engineering, but some assholes on the left already did a lot of social engineering, you may become very proactive about knocking it down to get back to where you think society should be.