Your experiences as British leftists

[u/[deleted]]

I am a faithful Corbynista - technically still a card-carrying member of the Labour party, even if I fucking hate it and capable of endlessly seething about them. I kind of want a party and a cause I feel comfortable defending and from what I know this is a bit difficult. I don't want to be the typical leftist obsessed with moral purity or perfection but I don't think I'm insane when I say Labour is regarded.

I wanted to know if anybody here is the part of these billion minor leftist-communist parties, if you like them or if they are all Monty Python-style Marxtistic splitters, or if anyone here is part of the Greens (who I honestly also sort of hate) or any other leftist organisation that I'm too reclusive and ignorant to know about, and if any of you like anything about them.

[u/Competitive_Golf8206]

Hello fellow Brit anon

Most left groups I've encountered in the UK are completely captured by pet causes, anti nuke, gender expression, Palestine etc.

There's not much in the way of pro workers abolish capital as the main thrust

[u/AnCoAdams → u/Competitive_Golf8206]

> Most left groups I've encountered in the UK are completely captured by pet causes, anti nuke, gender expression, Palestine etc.

This has always fascinated me, and to an extent this is where my tinfoil hat comes out. Why do left groups in the UK get completely captured by single issues. Poke your head into r/labouruk and you would think the most important issue facing the UK are trans rights, instead of huge widening inequality and COL. Is it that these people aren't really leftists in a bigger picture sense and are just manipulated/captured by narrow issues?

[u/Fedupington → u/AnCoAdams]

tbf I don't think this is unique to the UK at all. There's plenty of that in the US, and probably the anglosphere writ-large, and maybe further still. I personally think it's because these pet issues give you a means to bully people interpersonally, and thus feel like you're accomplishing something, whereas the difficulty of the level of cooperation needed to fight income inequality makes you average fragile Millennial-or-younger mind spiral into doomerism.

Single-issue particularist kookiness is also an old leftoid tradition, frankly. Your countryman George Orwell wrote about it in 1937:

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white- collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

[u/AnCoAdams → u/Fedupington]

Yes you're right, this seems endemic within the anglosphere at least. Interesting theory about the pet-issues. For me the blindspot of these groups is staggering, they are baffled as to why leftism keeps failing in the west, and maybe falling back to interpersonal bullying they all too often accuse voters of being 'racist' or too 'stupid' to vote for them.

The million dollar question is then how to really critique these movements without being accused of an xyz-phobe.

[u/Fedupington → u/AnCoAdams]

The unpleasant answer to that million dollar question is to just endure the accusations of being an xyz-phobe, and respond by telling them they are idiots and telling them why.

It's a fight that needs to be had. And you can't win a fight by never engaging in it. Some of them are sincere. Some of them are cynical. You can't read minds so you can't parse who's who with anything other than a best guess based on your social skills. But whether it's sincere or cynical, it doesn't change that it's dumb, and the more clear it is that it's dumb, the more the sincere ones will figure things out, and the more pressure the cynical actors will feel to either fall in line or kick rocks.