Is the West Experiencing a Left-Wing Drift? (the international left politics activism, news, and strategy thread)

Mind-blowing scenes in Santiago, where hundreds of thousands have flocked onto the streets to celebrate Gabriel Boric's victory pic.twitter.com/uirvG1mVBg

— John Bartlett (@jwbartlett92) December 20, 2021

🇨🇱 Y bien si votaron los chilenos. Gabriel Boric, nuevo presidente de Chile. #compol pic.twitter.com/EzH3Lkvr39

— Sergio Paz (@sergiopazc) December 19, 2021

The exact moment the German health minister became legendary on philosophy Twitter pic.twitter.com/R4HgWIohMs

— Anthony Ballas (@tonyjballas) January 27, 2022

holy shit

sorry, that just connected a lot of dots for me

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/portugal-general-election-pm-antonio-costa-wins-surprise-outright-majority

it really grates on me to see Starmer congratulating the Portuguese centre-left social democrats of the type who are not welcome anywhere near his fucking Labour party.

Not worth getting angry about calz, the PS are p much melts and Costa a blatant careerist.

Entirely one for the right-wing drift, I'm afraid: Chega (actual fascists) and Iniciativa Liberal (free market fundamentalists) surpassed the BE (Leftist Block) and the communists for the first time, votes that would've gone to the left instead ended up at the PS because of polls suggesting that the centre left and centre right were neck to neck, which turned out to be total bullshit. PS now has no pressure whatsoever to swerve left and the amount of virulent racist scum MPs has moved from one to eleven.

Really wish that anglos (not Tom in this thread, to be clear) would stop shooting off rockets every time a party with "socialist" or "social democrat" in its name triumphs in Europe.

ah right, I thought they were amongst the better class of Euro-melts but now I think I recall you posting before that they aren't any good.

yeah I mean better than Starmer labour of course but that's not the highest ceiling

tbh I was taking a shot in the dark there, I'm not in the least surprised to find out they're not very left.

Yeah, as I said, the main story here really is the fringe right parties surpassing the left for the first time. A party that openly advocates for the forced sterilization of paedophiles now the third largest political power in the country, not great.

Ajamu Baraka on BPM right now, talking Ukraine and domestic matters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLn45wQ2Beo

“Leftism” is when my opinions somehow always coincidentally align with the geo-political agenda of the world’s premier exporter of fascism

.. the us?

Well, sure, since half the politicians in the US are openly in cahoots with Russia. But those aren’t the politicians that guys like the dude in the video ever object to.

Do you check under the bed for the Red Menace before you go to bed?

You bring up a good point. Why would people on the left behave like old-school tankies when Russia isn’t even nominally communist anymore?

lol yeah dude not wanting another US military intervention is def behaving like an old school tankie, good luck with that

Always incredible when Americans on ilx mistake the acts of America in its own interests as neutral and apolitical.

You, an old-school tankie: I don’t think war is in the interests of civilians on either side of the border
Me, a shrewd political commentator: uhhhhhh you know the Soviet Union broke up right, COMЯ ADE?!

lol

also libs who think fascism is just the republican party and not like the entire us imperial project are idiotic

“Leftism” is when my opinions somehow always coincidentally align with the geo-political agenda of the world’s premier exporter of fascism

Gunna go out on a limb and say there’s one country in particular that is funding and arming the Azov Battalion and you’ll never guess who it is!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Gabriel_Boric_Font_%282018%29.jpg/512px-Gabriel_Boric_Font_%282018%29.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Retrato_Oficial_Presidente_Boric_Font.jpg

rowr

I have no idea whether this new government is left or not but it's one less right wing populist wanker in power.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/24/opposition-slovenian-liberal-party-on-course-for-landslide-win-say-exit-polls

One thing that got lost in the (valid) panic over Le Pen is that Melenchon only got 1,5% less votes than her, it could've easily been a Macron vs Melenchon run-off.

My wife was actually dreading a Le Pen vs Melenchon run-off because she thinks that in that scenario Macron voters would go for Le Pen.

Nice chat happening today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpLX8T6phOQ

A significant shift via the @FoxNews national poll:

Around this time in the Obama presidency, voters said by a +10 margin that government was "doing too much"

Today voters say +17 that government "should do more" pic.twitter.com/VLcE89pp8a

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 15, 2022

swifties developing class consciousness bc they couldn’t get tickets is my favorite tiktok trend pic.twitter.com/SVhSSmMoyZ

— reversecowgirl69 (@botticellibimbo) November 17, 2022

China Miéville talking right now for a Haymarket event and covering a lot of Q&A about his book on the Manifesto and organizing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKwxKR5-QKU

I was quite surprised to see this statement from this person. I haven't followed her work but I think she used to work with socialist writers and publishers. I have a Dawn Foster book for which she wrote a foreword. Now she's speaking at the National Conservatism event and talking about the need to 'seek God'? Surprised.

We need to seek God in each other. We're in a spiritual (and a material) crisis. But it's not over! Can't help but agree with Tim Stanley at #NatCon.

— Nina Power (@Nina_Compact) May 16, 2023

If I remember correctly, she said if she was in the US she would have voted for Trump, with him being the antiwar candidate

power used to be on the left, yes, but went fascist around 2018-2019. she did a version of the usual routine - posted a bunch of transphobic shit on facebook (then it was the typical radfem ostensibly-from-the-left sort of stuff) then a year later she was paling around with outright fascists and denouncing feminism, then another year later she'd become a regular columnist for the telegraph churning out anti-woke nonsense.

now she's helping run compact, which basically advocates for fascism with a welfare state - it's staffed by a bunch of tradcaths and reactionary ex-leftists, a lot of the usual suspects.

"power used to be on the left, yes, but went fascist around 2018-2019"

Mark Fisher (11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017)

Some people on ilx are closer than I was but I think in NP's case her L to R journey was complicated by a personal breakdown and significant issues with alcohol etc. I think her recovery was aided by a quasi-fascist edgelord so the personal is v mixed up with the usual stereotypes.

Worthwhile panel talk from Haymarket Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ8LRtdeDZg

tradcaths

Word of the day, I hadn't heard this before.

i "attended" a DSA meeting yesterday. They were nice.

I forget the thread where we were discussing the cis-white-male dominance in re DSA ... but this chapter was pretty diverse in that regard.

There was a debate over endorsing a candidate for state Senate. All of the people "against" endorsing this person all said how much they "loved" her and how they would vote for her, but somehow "endorsement" was tied up with "heavy campaigning" and not having the capacity to organize a campaign of that scale, which didn't make sense to me as a "regular person"... fortunately, they actually did agree to endorse this candidate, which gave me some hope that this wasn't yet another absurdly dysfunctional organization.

Yeah, “endorsement” with DSA chapters is a terrible choice of terms because it’s not just endorsing a candidate(“yeah we say you should vote for this candidate”), it’s folding into the campaign to actively work to get them elected.

An interview from the Liminauts with Matt Christman on more spiritual and metaphysical topics but how that eventually gets turned into something to work on IRL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aczSCRUdHHE

Guatemala: Bernardo Arevalo, son of one of Guatemala's last left-wing presidents, has won the presidential election.

Arevalo shockingly made the run-off and was elected in a landslide, with many expecting him to become the country's most progressive president in decades pic.twitter.com/ecC2Hy3V96

— Populism Updates (@PopulismUpdates) August 21, 2023

taking this at face value and know nothing about Arevalo, seems good.

I want to believe... ya know?

there was an attempt to block him from the run-off after he came second in the first round, this Economist article from last week says there's still a risk of the elite trying to prevent him from being sworn in, or from governing effectively if he is (maybe the margin of victory make the former less likely?)

After Mr Arévalos’s surprise showing in the first round, nine mainstream parties alleged fraud, even though observers had seen no irregularities. The constitutional court ordered the electoral tribunal to review the vote count, delaying certification of the results. When this failed to lead to any change in the outcome, officials tried to suspend Semilla for allegedly forging signatures. (The constitutional court blocked the suspension, but the challenge is ongoing, as no party can be barred during an electoral period.)

Even if Mr Arévalo wins and is sworn in, he may find life very difficult. Semilla could yet be suspended as a party, leaving its 23 lawmakers rudderless. Institutions could refuse to co-operate with Mr Arévalo and stifle his agenda; people will get disillusioned with the lack of results from a candidate who promised change. What lies ahead is an uphill battle, says Ms Chang. But the potential reward justifies it. His win would ensure there are “a few years more of life for democracy”, she says.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2023/08/17/guatemalas-elite-may-try-to-scupper-the-presidential-election

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/poland-parliamentary-election-autocracy-tusk/675656/

If there's one thing Donald Tusk isn't it's left wing.

I don't know what happened to Radical Philsophy but I love this interview with Marcus Rediker, a historian of maritime radical politics who wants to recentre the high seas as a location of struggle, dissent and political organisation - a "mobile workforce" comprising not "the multitude" exactly but what he calls "motley crews" - heterogeneous, diverse cells capable of self-organisation and radical action

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/a-motley-crew-for-our-times

Anyway the closing part of the interview made me think of this thread - he sees a great resurgence of radical left activity but feels that we aren't doing enough to bring all the threads together (perhaps ironically in this age of instant communication)

Rediker is really nice on twitter. Will read this sometime.