/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2649015
>why do we rarely see any prominent right-wingers turning to the left?
Most people who do "the 'left' the left" thing, are either grifters targeting a lucrative target audience of very stupid right wingers, or were always politically underdeveloped people, who don't read theory or history.

most famously musslini started out as a communist

also people become right wing because they feel the left becomes more left wing and that they didnt leave the left, the left left them.

>>2649015
Leftism has a purity issue where former right wingers are often seen as not really being left wing, wheras the right doesn't give a shit, The Right looks for converts, the Left looks for traitors

Money

>>2649076
>wheras the right doesn't give a shit
That's nonsense. Right wingers purity test all the time. They just say a lot of shit to trick normies into supporting their sociopathic malevolence. Inside right wing circles, it's race to the bottom to who can be the most evil.

>>2649076
Socialists look for architects, thr right looks for pyromaniacs

>>2649015
>former CPUSA members who turned state like Whittaker Chambers, Bella Dodd, and Louis Budenz;
Bella Dodd and Louis Budenz were converted to Catholicism by Fulton Sheen, who participated in a network of Catholics which deliberately sought out to convert former communists to Catholicism and have them snitch on other CPUSA members.

Read this. It's eye-opening.

>>2649108
Wrong file. Here's the full one.

>>2649076
>>2649094
>>2649106
I'd agree that the problem is that what constitutes "leftism" changes every single fucking year. Language and terminology that was acceptable six or seven years ago is now considered "oppressive" by leftists today, for instance. Also, which issues are prioritized change. Very few people cared about autistic idpol 10 years ago and now it's everywhere. 10 years ago queer and trans idpol was everywhere, now those issues are on the backburner. 15 years ago the political climate was all about finding DIY solutions to the capitalist crisis whereby everyone was championing unions, co-ops, credit unions, squatting abandoned buildings to turn into homes, that kind of thing. Now, those strategies are considered liberal and reformist. Five years from now, Palestine might not even be in the top 10 most important issues for a leftist. Who knows what the political climate will be like then?

>>2649015
Leftists are perfectionists who want perfect revolutionaries showing up to the barricades.

Meanwhile, the right looks for imperfect people whom they can lure in. It's why Catholics and Evangelicals convert a lot of people in prison.

>>2649015
I think it's probably some combination of those things yeah.

Following the French Revolution there was a trend of ex-Jacobins who flipped to the Holy Alliance against Napoleon. There were radicals who were so embittered by Napoleon that they joined in with the ancien regimes. That is contradictory but Napoleon ended the revolution and crowned himself emperor and created a new imperial nobility of counts and dukes although he preserved many of revolution's social results so it's complicated. And you're also talking about people who had a very strong attachment to the revolution and to se e it mutate into its opposite (at least in some respects) is horrifying.

The left itself is internally contradictory (like all things) and is also in a process of change (like everything else). It has inner tendencies that can lead it to mutate into a new form of conservatism down the line. Some of these people don't necessarily see what's going on as the left moving further to the left, rather it's seeing the left turn into its opposite, into a reactionary force. Not saying that is really what is happening, but that's how some of them have seen it. Or, like, regarding official communist parties in the 1950s. That played into the Sino-Soviet split. This was written in 1950:

>Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of communism, the heretic goes on to break with communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow. He no longer defends socialism from unscrupulous abuse; he now defends man-kind from the fallacy of socialism. He no longer throws out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster which must be strangled. The heretic becomes a renegade.

>How far he departed from his starting-point, whether, as Silone says, he becomes a fascist or not, depends on his inclinations and tastes – and stupid Stalinist heresy-hunting often drives the ex-communist to extremes. But, whatever the shades of individual attitudes, as a rule the intellectual ex-communist ceases to oppose capitalism. Often he rallies to its defence, and he brings to this job the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard for truth, and the intense hatred with which Stalinism has imbued him. He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed. As a communist he saw no difference between fascists and social democrats. As an anti-communist he sees no difference between nazism and communism. Once, he accepted the party’s claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the ‘greatest illusion’, he is now obsessed by the greatest disillusionment of our time.

>His former illusion at least implied a positive ideal. His disillusionment is utterly negative. His role is therefore intellectually and politically barren. In this, too, he resembles the embittered ex-Jacobin of the Napoleonic era. Wordsworth and Coleridge were fatally obsessed with the ‘Jacobin danger’; their fear dimmed even their poetic genius. It was Coleridge who denounced in the House of Commons a Bill for the prevention of cruelty to animals as the ‘strongest instance of legislative Jacobinism’. The ex-Jacobin became the prompter of the anti-Jacobin reaction in England. Directly or indirectly, his influence was behind the Bills Against Seditious Writings and Traitorous Correspondence, the Treasonable Practices Bill, and Seditious Meetings Bill (1792-4), the defeats of parliamentary reform, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the postponement of the emancipation of England’s religious minorities for the lifetime of a generation. Since the conflict with revolutionary France was ‘not a time to make hazardous experiments’, the slave trade, too, obtained a lease on life – in the name of liberty.

>In quite the same way our ex-communist, for the best of reasons, does the most vicious things. He advances bravely in the front rank of every witch hunt. His blind hatred of his former ideal is leaven to contemporary conservatism. Not rarely he denounces even the mildest brand of the ‘welfare State’ as ‘legislative Bolshevism’.

>He contributes heavily to the moral climate in which a modern counterpart to the English anti-Jacobin reaction is hatched.

>His grotesque performance reflects the impasse in which he finds himself. The impasse is not merely his – it is part of a blind alley in which an entire generation leads an incoherent and absent-minded life.

>The historical parallel drawn here extends to the wider background of two epochs. The world is split between Stalinism and an anti-Stalinist alliance in much the same way as it was split between Napoleonic France and the Holy Alliance. It is a split between a ‘degenerated’ revolution exploited by a despot and a grouping of predominantly, although not exclusively, conservative interests. In terms of practical politics the choice seems to be now, as it was then, confined to these alternatives. Yet the rights and the wrongs of this controversy are so hopelessly confused that whichever the choice, and whatever its practical motives, it is almost certain to be wrong in the long run and in the broadest historical sense.

>An honest and critically minded man could reconcile himself to Napoleon as little as he can now to Stalin. But despite Napoleon’s violence and frauds, the message of the French revolution survived to echo powerfully throughout the nineteenth century. The Holy Alliance freed Europe from Napoleon’s oppression; and for a moment its victory was hailed by most Europeans. Yet what Castlereagh and Metternich and Alexander I had to offer to ‘liberated’ Europe was merely the preservation of an old, decomposing order. Thus the abuses and the aggressiveness of an empire bred by the revolution gave a new lease on life to European feudalism. This was the ex-Jacobin’s most unexpected triumph. But the price he paid for it was that presently he himself, and his anti-Jacobin cause, looked like vicious, ridiculous anachronisms. In the year of Napoleon’s defeat, Shelley wrote to Wordsworth:

<In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
<Songs consecrate to truth and liberty
<Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
<Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

>If our ex-communist had any historical sense, he would ponder this lesson.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1950/ex-communist.htm

>>2649156
>The left itself is internally contradictory (like all things) and is also in a process of change (like everything else). It has inner tendencies that can lead it to mutate into a new form of conservatism down the line. Some of these people don't necessarily see what's going on as the left moving further to the left, rather it's seeing the left turn into its opposite, into a reactionary force.
What are some examples of those "inner tendencies" exactly?

>>2649015
My opinion is that most of these people have conservative brain structures and thus they are easily swayed towards that direction in the right environment.

>>2649162
"Conservative brain structures?"

>>2649173
Sounds like biological essentialism to me.

>>2649174
Good. Spirits or souls dont exist.

You can make alot more money from being a right wing grifter. I think its pretty obvious. Imagine Parenti being rightwing, how much he could have made from donations from either big corporations or other wealthy families.

>>2649176
I don't think that really applies to all of these stories. Plus, I have a hard time believing money alone is what would compel someone to turn their backs on their principles.

>>2649135
More like, the right-wing wants sinners whom they can convert and "show the light" to. Marxists and anarchists seldom do that, possibly because (paradoxically) they want to keep their spaces inclusive and don't want someone who may still hold oppressive-ish views from making PoC, queer, and disabled folks uncomfortable.

>>2649158
I think it's highly situational, historically contingent but a general contradiction might between various left-wing ethics like opposition to all forms of social privilege, non-domination (not being told what to do), and then becoming institutionalized whether that's a communist bureaucracy several decades after winning power or liberal NGOs in capitalist countries that absorb new social movements.

It's like "the reaction within the party." New privileges can grow out of historical development while the left degenerates, and then ideology gets turned around and redeployed to maintain those new privileges. In the communist case that really came to a head in 1968 in Prague, while in China there was a left-wing attack on rightists in the party. A certain core part of what makes the left what it is, as I see it, is a lack of sacred feelings towards any existing historical situation because social relations are flexible and it's possible to change them.

I'm not saying it's simply a case of the left coming to power is what causes this and so any left-wing party that does is bad. That's too simplistic.

>>2649015
The American right is so heavily Christian that it makes sense the Saul-to-Paul myth would be heavily incorporated into their ideology.

>>2649177
>I have a hard time believing money alone is what would compel someone to turn their backs on their principles.
You’re a schmuck

>>2649015
The typical convert path I've seen among contemporary internet leftists is disagreeing with the "consensus" on a particular issue (eg. COVID, Ukraine War, Trump, etc.), making increasingly bad-faith critiques of former comrades and then getting ostracized because of it. They then integrate into the rightoid sphere, either to have their opinions heard or because they need the money and the right will pay to publish them.

>>2649173
Untrustworthy science, just as spooky as any liberal idealism.