So, I guess a little bit of background. I live in a country with a universal healthcare system, which I'm massively glad about, and always feel bad for my US friends who have to deal with paying ridiculous amounts of money just to be healthy, and feel angry at all the fucking weird people in the US who don't like the idea of it, I don't know why the fuck people want to vote against their own self interests (stuff like taxing millionaries, too - why the fuck wouldn't the 99% of people not want to? You can be fucking sure the millionaires are voting in their own interests)
Over the past year or two I've been reading more and more into shit that the US, UK etc. have done and are currently doing, all the hypocrisy, fucking around in the middle east, fucking around in the colonies, how politicians pay lip service to human rights whilst at the same time selling weapons and warfare technology to countries commiting human rights abuses.
One of the peak breaking points for me recently was John McCain dying, seeing all of these people talk about how great he was, "I don't agree with his politics but I respect him", all that kind of shit - voices on the left seemed to be the only ones calling him out for being a war criminal, and even then getting criticized for not being "civil", it's like everyone else cared more about whitewashing and being nice about this guy than calling him out for what he was, making out like you're the asshole for saying he sucks.
TL;DR I guess I'd describe myself as a leftist but how do I work out where exactly I fit in? I don't know if I'm a communist, anarchist, socialist etc. all I know is that capitalism is kind of shitty especially when people decide that profits matter more than humanity, whether it's not implementing universal healthcare to shit like the impeding climate catastrophy because somehow it's more important to create value for shareholders than to ensure the ocean doesn't turn into a fucking boiling sea full of plastic. Also people who whitewash history and war criminals are shitheads.
Literally the most important thing is if you're an favor of worker control/ownership of the means of production. That or them being owned by a worker's state. If the answer is no to both then you're at best a socialdemocrat, still leftist but not a socialist, so pretty useless either way.
Oliver Stewart
The ideological supermarket, like any supermarket, is fit only for looting. Read broadly and try to figure out which ideas make sense and align with what matters to your life. That way you will have the actual motivation to pursue it fully committed. Note that nobody has the full picture and every theorist makes mistakes. The point is not to have a grab bag of whatever ideas appeal to you the most, but to recognize that you don't have to buy an ideology wholesale. There's a lot of shitty historical baggage or weird associations with most ideologies. People often seem to fall into the trap of "if you're an [ideology] you have to act like one." Figuring out society is one of those things where everyone has different pieces to the puzzle, but there's also multiple puzzles mixed together, and you have to sort out which pieces make the Communism puzzle, which pieces make the Capitalism With A Human Face puzzle, etc.
Here are some short primers on this approach.
Josiah Myers
Lmao did you come up with that one yourself? Mind if I expropriate it for future instances?
Adrian Brown
No, it's a quote from the first PDF I posted.
Elijah Lopez
The reason I became a Leftist is that I'm a scientist and I value falsifiable theories more than anything. I stumbled upon Marxism and realized that modern economics is a fundamentally philosophical, unempirical discipline that peddles pseudoscience masked by elaborate mathematical proofs, while on the other hand here was this model of capitalism made over a hundred years ago that makes predictions about how the system functions; it can be falsified, and it hasn't been. A good theory that was buried by the very class of people it exposed. I think becoming a Leftist has made me a better scientist because I no longer take for granted the idea of Whig history–that academia is necessarily a progressive force, where the world of peer review ensures that bad ideas eventually get dumped and good ideas stand the test of time in the eyes of experts. Academics do not live in a vacuum, disciplines are shaped by who pays the bills and the material conditions of the societies in which they exist.
Jaxson Cook
So far I really only like Cockshott and the OG duo. The others that I looked at seem to be pseudo-intellectual and hacky, good but critically flawed, or just lacking any significance. Not sure what to think of Bookchin though.
Austin Robinson
Nice idpol.
Evan Long
You have determined that there is a problem. What you need now is to study the nature of that problem. Use theory and history to understand how things work. That will lead you to conclusions as to what needs to be done.
See which self-described lefties are the authoritarians, radlib LARPers, fools, or children, and be whatever they hate the most.
Eli Adams
Trump IS a Jew
John Perez
But Trump isn't a leftist
Gabriel Peterson
And a rightist.
Jaxon Hernandez
You know it's coming. Zig Forumstard idiocy has been so thuroughly annihilated by the reality of the Trump administration that it is the only direction left for them to go, as flagrantly bullshit as it is.
Trump is a leftist, it’s indisputable. The chains of Marxism surround his throat
Gabriel Hill
The world would have been better off if people had never fallen for the silver-tongued academics' lies. Just as much as politicians pay lip service to human rights while committing mass murder, academics pay lip service to the scientific method while pushing liberal propaganda, and economics isn't the only field that does this. Psychology, history, and the rest of the humanities are all just as guilty.
Jayden Scott
I remember back in 2016 when we were predicting that Zig Forums would eventually try to call Trump a leftist after the inevitable betrayals. Told'ya, bitches!
It's pretty easy to decide. Ask yourself the question: do I really want to abolish the reign of terror of the commodity form and end privative appropriation once and for all? If you answer yes, you will want to become an anarchist.
Marx did not have an economic theory, Capital is a critique of economic theory. He repeatedly makes it very clear and I wonder what kind of clumsy scientist you must have to be to miss it.
Parker Barnes
Dumb jewnig
Brandon Foster
You should read Stalin instead, he's more up to your level.
Positions, of course! Center-right social democrat. Human. How do you feel about checking a factory out of the library, doing a manufacturing run, and returning it? Do your feelings about providing childcare for preverbal toddlers involve operating horizontally without heirarchy or coercion? ~shrug~ Center-right social democrat puts you to the left of a good chunk of this board. Maybe you'd be interested in more. Maybe not. I don't know.
Hunter Hill
Go fuck yourself.
Angel Garcia
I'm sorry I hurt your McCain-supporting feelings, but I'm never going to agree.
It's really easy. …someone responded to that with "Go fuck yourself." Kind of clear whatr their position is, maybe his family posts here or something. Maybe it would have helped if you clicked the arrow and read the op. Or anything else.
Joseph Bell
M&E Gang obviously. Most of the major Soviet figures before Brezhnev fit in the "good but critically flawed" camp for me.
