Only on the political compass, which uses a definition of left vs right that a lot of leftists disagree with. Really, the entire history of “left wing” politics has been about questioning and dismantling authority. The terms “left wing” and “right wing” come from the French revolution, when the people in favour of simply reforming the monarchy sat on the right side of the room, while the people who wanted to fully dismantling the monarchy sat on the left. A lot of more modern leftist thought is about questioning the power that capitalist businesses have.
Well said. Still; can you not have authoritarian left and libertarian left viewpoints? I just don’t see how questioning the power capitalist businesses have is limited to the libertarian left.
What’s wrong with the definition of left & right on the political compass? I’m not super tuned into political science but this is the first I’ve heard that many leftists have take issue with it. I have seen the authoritarian left referred to as “red fascists”, but do they not also take issue with the power capitalist businesses have?
I suppose I’d consider myself a left libertarian. The power of the state should be limited and what power is granted to the state should be used to improve the life of the people.
can you not have auth left and lib left viewpoints?
Yes, but actually no. The distinction is fundamentally unstable. If the left is constantly questioning power structures, it will inevitably turn to whatever structure the auth left comes up with.
what’s wrong with the definition of left and right on the political compass?
It’s specially economic left/right, which is almost always defined by taxation, government spending, and social welfare. While leftists usually say social welfare is a good thing, it’s not changing the fundamentals of how capitalism works, which is the current dominant power structure that leftists are against.
do auth left not also take issue with the power capitalist businesses have?
Yes, but they usually put something just as bad in its place. You might have heard people saying that the USSR was “state capitalist rather than communist”. This means that the workers and customers had just as little say in how things are run than they would under capitalists, only is was directly with the state rather than individual business owners.
Tankies support systems that have brought about immense increases in life expectancy, worker’s rights, women’s rights, free healthcare, free education, and literally defeated fascism. It’s still baffling to me that in 2026, witnessing the descent to fascism of the west (Trump, Meloni LePen, AfD, Vox…) you’re still so threatened by Chinese socialists who literally don’t have a fascist party or by the Soviet socialists who literally saved Europe from Nazism.
support systems that have brought about immense increases in life expectancy, worker’s rights, women’s rights, free healthcare, free education, and literally defeated fascism
Cool, you can make literally that exact same argument about capitalist neo libs.
You actually can’t make the argument that neoliberal capitalism has defeated fascism at all, you’d have to be completely historically & politically illiterate to even consider it. Life expectancy increase came as a result of medical research conducted around the world, all others were conceded by capitalist governments begrudgingly and only after years of hard work by organizations that were overwhelmingly made up of anti-capitalists, and every single one is currently being rolled back in every capitalist nation on earth.
France got liberated thanks to the Soviets too, we’re talking all of Europe here.
In the rest of places, as I said, replacing it by a system with full free healthcare, worker’s rights, respect of minorities and their languages and cultures, free education to the highest level, anti-imperialism and industrial development and self-reliance. The dismantling of the Eastern Block is the biggest demographic catastrophe in Europe since WW2.
Worthwile to note that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were longstanding allies before Operation Barbarossa and a critical amount of steel and oil that supplied the Nazi war machine after the allied embargo was supplied by the Soviet union.
Which says nothing of the monumental sacrifice given by Soviet civilians, but let’s separate that from Stalin’s policy, perhaps?
Please go through my comment and tell me which part of it is a lie, all information is well-sourced from Wikipedia. You’re just proving you haven’t done even the most cursory reading on the topic beyond reddit comments.
Anti imperialism? How did they become the largest country on earth?
Imperialism is not when big country, believe it or not. Imperialism is about having peripheral colonies from which you extract raw materials and where the citizens have fewer rights, and a core which benefits from the labor of the rest of the periphery. The USSR engaged in the opposite by providing raw materials and energy inputs to the Eastern-Block countries at subsidized prices precisely with the intention of helping them industrialize and develop. As an example, the GDP per capita of Estonia was 20% higher than that of the Russian republic during the USSR.
Respect of minorities?
Yes. Ukraine got its borders and political representation for the first time in history during Soviet rule. You may be surprised to find that Rosa Luxembourg argued against this, there are some fun letters between her and Lenin where the latter argued in favour of supporting the national identity of Ukrainians. This was carried out as soon as the revolution took place, in the Korenizatsiya policy of boosting ethnic minorities once oppressed by the Russian empire. You may be surprised to learn that Stalin was the commissar for nationalities when the Russian Revolution happened. The communists elected a Georgian leader in 1925, unthinkable just 10 years prior.
All republics in the USSR had the right to determine their own languages, and people had a right to an education in these languages up to university level (not always included). The majority of books and newspapers printed in areas with national languages different to Russian were in said languages (Ukrainian, Kazakh, Armenian, Georgian, Estonian…). You can get informed about this in Albert Szymanski’s “human rights in the Soviet Union”. There were big mistakes during a few years due to hysteria against Nazism and Japanese invasion (see deportations of Crimean Tatars and Koreans), but other than that the USSR has a mostly impeccable record in this regard. Compare that to France murdering 1 million Algerians in the 1960s in the Algerian war of independence, or with Occitan language becoming almost extint in the 20th century.
Industrial development? Yes, current Russia
The USSR was at the time the second largest economy in the world, idk why you compare it with modern capitalist Russia, of course capitalism destroyed the progress achieved by socialists.
Yes, muscovites just made friends, that’s not imperialism. Sakha just wanted to give it’s oil and minerals to Moscow. Yakutia just wanted desperately to learn Russian. It’s not imperialism if there are no boats involved!
Estonia? Now their GDP per capita is not 20% higher, it’s 200% higher than Russia. Yes, triple as high. Obviously Russia was robbing them blind, and holding them back. Same as most other republics and Warsaw pact nations. GDP explosions after ditching the red parasite.
Ukraine had borders just fine when Soviets invaded them. If not for the war they lost against Poland in 1920 they would have kept invading and repressing nations. Belorussian language is almost extinct nowadays after all the russification. Same for Ukrainian in Eastern Ukraine.
French killed 1 million Algerians? Rookie numbers, they should have learned from the holodomor.
Sakha just wanted to give it’s oil and minerals to Moscow. Yakutia just wanted desperately to learn Russian
You could ask those questions to the populations themselves. Where did they have better rights: under tsarism, under Bolshevism or under capitalism. If you care, you could listen to Sardana Nikolaeva being interviewed in the Actually Existing Socialism about the topic and commenting on the massive benefits and respect to native populations under socialism compared to now, let alone tsarism.
Obviously Russia was robbing them blind, and holding them back.
Robbing them blind of what? Holding them back how? By not allowing them to participate in the western capitalist plunder of the rest of the world? Now Estonia gets to have a service society that will collapse with the rest of the EU since it dismantled whatever industry it built during the soviet period!
Same as most other republics and Warsaw pact nations. GDP explosions after ditching the red parasite
Absolute fucking bullshit, the three countries to have benefitted after the dissolution of the Eastern Block have been Estonia, Poland and Czech Republic. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgyzstan, Moldova… Essentially every nation has had lower growth rates in capitalism than in socialism, and certainly a fucking horrifying demographic crisis caused by unemployment, drugs, violence, lack of healthcare, suicide… The dissolution of the eastern block has literally been the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century in Europe after WW2.
Ukraine had borders just fine when Soviets invaded them
Ukraine didn’t fucking had borders before 1917, are you fucking kidding me? Great job focusing on Belarus, a country of 10mn inhabitants, because it’s the only possible example you can grasp yourself to lmao, the rest of countries literally show the opposite trend.
As for “holodomor”, great job comparing literal genocide at the hands of French to an unwanted famine consequence of rapid collectivization (which was necessary to industrialize fast, as proven 10 years later by Nazism, of which Ukraine was saved thanks to Socialism).
Oh, cool, tell me what historically successful, relevant and long-lasting leftist movements you support! Wait, you don’t support any actually existing leftism…?
You can answer the question too! Which actually existing current or historical leftist movements do you support? Or is your ideology purely theoretical and you don’t actually care about the results?
Anarchist Catalonia, modern Rojava, more than a few pre-Columbian North American societies, the Paris Commune of 1793… Maybe read some theory instead of making arguments from ignorance.
And you can care about results without having historical results. Anti-monarchism in general had basically zero results post-Industrial Revolution until the liberals won in North America in the late 18th century, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t care about results, just that they hadn’t achieved much yet. The American Revolution was pretty quickly followed by the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, several more French revolutions, Brazilian independence, and eventually the October Revolution, the most recent Chinese civil war, the Cuban Revolution, and so on.
Between 1775 and 1925, the general concept of people voting on matters of statewide policy went from a relic of the Classical Era that had ended more than 1800 years earlier to the norm in North America and Europe. 1800 years of obscurity, then 150 years to ubiquity in the world’s wealthiest states and another 50 to expand to most of the rest.
Sure, anarchism has had a longer period out of the spotlight, not having been the norm since roughly the invention of agriculture ~8000 years ago, but you never know when it might return. Having a concrete, achievable plan to get results is good, but you also want to make sure that the results you’re striving for are just, otherwise you end up with liberalism again. And we all know how that ends up.
Anarchist Catalonia, modern Rojava, more than a few pre-Columbian North American societies, the Paris Commune of 1793
Pre-columbian societies aside (you can’t turn history around), all the rest ended up in fascism/monarchism/failed state in a matter of how many years/months?
And you can care about results without having historical results
Yes, you can do that if your goal is moral purity or intellectual amusement and not the material improvement of the lives of actual people. All other system changes you’ve proposed are just changes of ruling class and production system due to the slow motor of history and development, except for the socialist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba. We literally have the recipe that works, why do you reject it?
Having a concrete, achievable plan to get results is good, but you also want to make sure that the results you’re striving for are just
Agreed. That’s why I praise the immense increases in welfare and quality of life in actually existing socialist countries, both historical and ongoing.
Being better at violence doesn’t make you more left, it makes you better at violence. That can be useful, but it isn’t the same thing. Your argument boils down to “might makes right” and could be expanded to classify social democracy as “more left” (after all, it’s left of the global status quo and its citizens are the happiest on average). In fact, you might even be able to use the argument for liberalism; it’s left of monarchy and fascism. Sure, it frequently decays into fascism, but so did the USSR.
Social democracy in the imperial core is to the right of the global status quo, because it depends on imperialism, neocolonialism, and unequal exchange. The USSR, on the other hand, supported anti-imperialist and decolonial movements materially, and set up a socialist economy. Being able to both establish and maintain socialism is a necessary first step for anything that can be considered left, because it’s the only leftism that’s actually real. No, socialism isn’t fascism, and equating the two is a form of Holocaust trivialization with ties to Double Genocide Theory.
To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.
The global status quo is liberalism. Social democracy is to the left of liberalism.
And I never said that socialism was fascism, I said that the USSR gave way to fascism. Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is fascist. The USSR collapsed, and fascism followed, much like the Weimar Republic collapsed and was replaced by the Nazis. That doesn’t mean that the liberals in the Weimar Republic were fascists.
Liberalism and social democracy in the imperial core are imperialist. This is to the right of liberalism and social democracy in the global south. Erasure of imperialism in the question of whether or not a society is progressive historically or reactionary is a mistake, as the imperialist countries are the ones holding back global progress right now. It’s kinda like saying landlords are progressive and tenants are reactionary.
As for the USSR bit, I misread you. Saying it descended into fascism I took to you meaning that it was progressive in the first few years or so but then turned fascist, not that the RF was that fascism. I disagree with the idea that the RF is fascist, it’s certainly run by nationalists and is an utter tragedy how far they’ve fallen from their soviet roots, but that’s a different discussion.
India is well to the right of e.g. Norway. Brazil only recently moved to the relative left. Argentina is also very right-wing (and also a lot more settler-colonialist than most of the countries not allowed into the White Countries Club). Iran and Afghanistan are about as far-right as they come, despite being very much opposed to the global order as it stands today. I wasn’t discounting the so-called “Global South,” I just also don’t think that an imperialist past (or even present) is the only factor in determining whether a country is right-wing.
In fact, I’d potentially go so far as to say that the majority of poorer countries are farther right than wealthier ones. The exceptions that come to mind are Cuba, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Bolivia, and Mexico, but on the other side you have the ones I’ve already mentioned, plus Qatar, Lebanon, El Salvador, Pakistan, and more. Not doing imperialism is good, and refusing to do it is better (as opposed to simply being unable), but it doesn’t singlehandedly make an extremist theocracy leftist. If your country does not interact with others at all but is still an absolute monarchy with laws that explicitly discriminate against marginalized groups, it’s an isolationist right-wing state, not a leftist one.
The question of being right or left is which role you play, a progressive role or a reactionary one. For all of the ways the nordics may be more progressive internally, it is of a Herrenvolk style, only for them and at the explicit expense of the global south. For all of the social faults of some countries in the global south, their rise is progressive against imperialism, and this rise facilitates social progress internally.
There is no way to be a leftist or progressive dictatorship. There is no leftist or progressive way to have unequal laws for women, or to prevent gay people from marrying, or to deny people medical care. It’s a contradiction in terms. You may believe that Iran or India becoming more powerful is an overall good thing, but it is objectively and definitionally not progressive or leftist.
Being better at violence doesn’t make you more left
Being better at violence against fascism and imperialism definitely makes you more left, though. Actual praxis and results are to me the definition of successful leftism, not the realm of ideas. The lack of proper violence against such regimes leads to a destruction of the left wing.
Your argument boils down to “might makes right” and could be expanded to classify social democracy as “more left”
Social democracy also regularly turns to fascism when it needs to, it’s definitely lacking violence against fascism, amazing that you’d say this in 2026. I fucking wish our mighty social democracies in Europe fought against Israeli fascism and USA fascism, unfortunately they’re buddies!
(after all, it’s left of the global status quo and its citizens are the happiest on average)
By excluding imperialism from the measure of average happiness, you’re committing a sampling error. That would be like polling monarchs of medieval Europe to ask whether monarchy is the system making people happier. Ask the people in India and Sri Lanka and Peru extracting the resources of the goods social democracies consume and sewing the clothes we wear how happy they are with social democracy.
Sure, it frequently decays into fascism, but so did the USSR
So, we have one example of a Marxist-Leninist state decaying to fascism (after saving Europe from Nazism) and several examples of countries not doing this (China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba). How about we engage in honest criticism of the flaws of the Soviet model that led to its dissolution in order to prevent that from happening again?
I don’t consider tankies lefter than me.
Seriously. Tankies are authoritarians who consider themselves leftists.
Authoritarian / libertarian is on a completely different axis from left / right, no?
Only on the political compass, which uses a definition of left vs right that a lot of leftists disagree with. Really, the entire history of “left wing” politics has been about questioning and dismantling authority. The terms “left wing” and “right wing” come from the French revolution, when the people in favour of simply reforming the monarchy sat on the right side of the room, while the people who wanted to fully dismantling the monarchy sat on the left. A lot of more modern leftist thought is about questioning the power that capitalist businesses have.
Well said. Still; can you not have authoritarian left and libertarian left viewpoints? I just don’t see how questioning the power capitalist businesses have is limited to the libertarian left.
What’s wrong with the definition of left & right on the political compass? I’m not super tuned into political science but this is the first I’ve heard that many leftists have take issue with it. I have seen the authoritarian left referred to as “red fascists”, but do they not also take issue with the power capitalist businesses have?
I suppose I’d consider myself a left libertarian. The power of the state should be limited and what power is granted to the state should be used to improve the life of the people.
Yes, but actually no. The distinction is fundamentally unstable. If the left is constantly questioning power structures, it will inevitably turn to whatever structure the auth left comes up with.
It’s specially economic left/right, which is almost always defined by taxation, government spending, and social welfare. While leftists usually say social welfare is a good thing, it’s not changing the fundamentals of how capitalism works, which is the current dominant power structure that leftists are against.
Yes, but they usually put something just as bad in its place. You might have heard people saying that the USSR was “state capitalist rather than communist”. This means that the workers and customers had just as little say in how things are run than they would under capitalists, only is was directly with the state rather than individual business owners.
Thanks, I appreciate your replies.
Worthwile to note here that the left of the French revolution, the Jacobins, did develop authoritarianism.
Which should have been a warning sign for all leftists to come, but alas…
Very well said, thank you.
Tell me which actually existing, relevant, long-lasting leftist projects you support and how they’re further to the left than Cuba.
Tankies support systems that have brought about immense increases in life expectancy, worker’s rights, women’s rights, free healthcare, free education, and literally defeated fascism. It’s still baffling to me that in 2026, witnessing the descent to fascism of the west (Trump, Meloni LePen, AfD, Vox…) you’re still so threatened by Chinese socialists who literally don’t have a fascist party or by the Soviet socialists who literally saved Europe from Nazism.
Cool, you can make literally that exact same argument about capitalist neo libs.
You actually can’t make the argument that neoliberal capitalism has defeated fascism at all, you’d have to be completely historically & politically illiterate to even consider it. Life expectancy increase came as a result of medical research conducted around the world, all others were conceded by capitalist governments begrudgingly and only after years of hard work by organizations that were overwhelmingly made up of anti-capitalists, and every single one is currently being rolled back in every capitalist nation on earth.
Just completely factually incorrect.
Sure you can, I wouldn’t agree with it, just like I wouldn’t agree that socialism did, but you can make that argument
Yeah that’s kind of my point. The things you mention as successes of “”“socialist”“” countries is just scientific advancement and industrialisation.
Factually entirely correct lol, sorry if reality is inconvenient for your bullshit
Replaced Nazism in Europe*
France got liberated thanks to the Soviets too, we’re talking all of Europe here.
In the rest of places, as I said, replacing it by a system with full free healthcare, worker’s rights, respect of minorities and their languages and cultures, free education to the highest level, anti-imperialism and industrial development and self-reliance. The dismantling of the Eastern Block is the biggest demographic catastrophe in Europe since WW2.
Worthwile to note that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were longstanding allies before Operation Barbarossa and a critical amount of steel and oil that supplied the Nazi war machine after the allied embargo was supplied by the Soviet union.
Which says nothing of the monumental sacrifice given by Soviet civilians, but let’s separate that from Stalin’s policy, perhaps?
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)
Engaging in trade at all =/= an alliance, dumbass, and if it did then you’d still have to explain all the trade the allies did with nazi germany
I’ve replied to the whole “Nazis and Soviets were allies” in another comment in this post, I encourage you to read it and reply. Thank you!
We don’t need to read propaganda and lies thanks.
It’s well known history that Russia and Germany split up Poland and had a peace deal. End of story.
Please go through my comment and tell me which part of it is a lie, all information is well-sourced from Wikipedia. You’re just proving you haven’t done even the most cursory reading on the topic beyond reddit comments.
Anti imperialism? How did they become the largest country on earth?
Respect of minorities? Tell that to the tens of thousands of people executed in forests. Or starved to death. Because of their identity.
Industrial development? Yes, current Russia having an economy the size of Italy is a testament to that.
Plenty of countries have free education and Healthcare.
Imperialism is not when big country, believe it or not. Imperialism is about having peripheral colonies from which you extract raw materials and where the citizens have fewer rights, and a core which benefits from the labor of the rest of the periphery. The USSR engaged in the opposite by providing raw materials and energy inputs to the Eastern-Block countries at subsidized prices precisely with the intention of helping them industrialize and develop. As an example, the GDP per capita of Estonia was 20% higher than that of the Russian republic during the USSR.
Yes. Ukraine got its borders and political representation for the first time in history during Soviet rule. You may be surprised to find that Rosa Luxembourg argued against this, there are some fun letters between her and Lenin where the latter argued in favour of supporting the national identity of Ukrainians. This was carried out as soon as the revolution took place, in the Korenizatsiya policy of boosting ethnic minorities once oppressed by the Russian empire. You may be surprised to learn that Stalin was the commissar for nationalities when the Russian Revolution happened. The communists elected a Georgian leader in 1925, unthinkable just 10 years prior.
All republics in the USSR had the right to determine their own languages, and people had a right to an education in these languages up to university level (not always included). The majority of books and newspapers printed in areas with national languages different to Russian were in said languages (Ukrainian, Kazakh, Armenian, Georgian, Estonian…). You can get informed about this in Albert Szymanski’s “human rights in the Soviet Union”. There were big mistakes during a few years due to hysteria against Nazism and Japanese invasion (see deportations of Crimean Tatars and Koreans), but other than that the USSR has a mostly impeccable record in this regard. Compare that to France murdering 1 million Algerians in the 1960s in the Algerian war of independence, or with Occitan language becoming almost extint in the 20th century.
The USSR was at the time the second largest economy in the world, idk why you compare it with modern capitalist Russia, of course capitalism destroyed the progress achieved by socialists.
Yes, muscovites just made friends, that’s not imperialism. Sakha just wanted to give it’s oil and minerals to Moscow. Yakutia just wanted desperately to learn Russian. It’s not imperialism if there are no boats involved!
Estonia? Now their GDP per capita is not 20% higher, it’s 200% higher than Russia. Yes, triple as high. Obviously Russia was robbing them blind, and holding them back. Same as most other republics and Warsaw pact nations. GDP explosions after ditching the red parasite.
Ukraine had borders just fine when Soviets invaded them. If not for the war they lost against Poland in 1920 they would have kept invading and repressing nations. Belorussian language is almost extinct nowadays after all the russification. Same for Ukrainian in Eastern Ukraine.
French killed 1 million Algerians? Rookie numbers, they should have learned from the holodomor.
You could ask those questions to the populations themselves. Where did they have better rights: under tsarism, under Bolshevism or under capitalism. If you care, you could listen to Sardana Nikolaeva being interviewed in the Actually Existing Socialism about the topic and commenting on the massive benefits and respect to native populations under socialism compared to now, let alone tsarism.
Robbing them blind of what? Holding them back how? By not allowing them to participate in the western capitalist plunder of the rest of the world? Now Estonia gets to have a service society that will collapse with the rest of the EU since it dismantled whatever industry it built during the soviet period!
Absolute fucking bullshit, the three countries to have benefitted after the dissolution of the Eastern Block have been Estonia, Poland and Czech Republic. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgyzstan, Moldova… Essentially every nation has had lower growth rates in capitalism than in socialism, and certainly a fucking horrifying demographic crisis caused by unemployment, drugs, violence, lack of healthcare, suicide… The dissolution of the eastern block has literally been the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century in Europe after WW2.
Ukraine didn’t fucking had borders before 1917, are you fucking kidding me? Great job focusing on Belarus, a country of 10mn inhabitants, because it’s the only possible example you can grasp yourself to lmao, the rest of countries literally show the opposite trend.
As for “holodomor”, great job comparing literal genocide at the hands of French to an unwanted famine consequence of rapid collectivization (which was necessary to industrialize fast, as proven 10 years later by Nazism, of which Ukraine was saved thanks to Socialism).
Honestly, you’re such a bad fucking faith actor.
They’re so left they’ve wrapped around and became fascists
They’re on the Leftest off-ramp that heads back the other way.
Shit, there’s plenty of Non Tankies to my left. Tankies want to use force to control people’s thoughts and actions.
Tankies are drunk on hierarchy and violence.
Oh, cool, tell me what historically successful, relevant and long-lasting leftist movements you support! Wait, you don’t support any actually existing leftism…?
Hey I found the Tankie who thinks they’re on the left!
You can answer the question too! Which actually existing current or historical leftist movements do you support? Or is your ideology purely theoretical and you don’t actually care about the results?
Bruh just out here punching the air in an empty comment section of a shit posting sub
Go back to your echo chamber tankie. Nobody likes you. Nobody wants you. But I’m sure your fans enjoy your circle jerk.
Are you a fucking cop? Get the fuck out of here you loser. I’m sorry everyone hates you. But thats a you issue.
I’m not sorry everyone hates them
Anarchist Catalonia, modern Rojava, more than a few pre-Columbian North American societies, the Paris Commune of 1793… Maybe read some theory instead of making arguments from ignorance.
And you can care about results without having historical results. Anti-monarchism in general had basically zero results post-Industrial Revolution until the liberals won in North America in the late 18th century, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t care about results, just that they hadn’t achieved much yet. The American Revolution was pretty quickly followed by the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, several more French revolutions, Brazilian independence, and eventually the October Revolution, the most recent Chinese civil war, the Cuban Revolution, and so on.
Between 1775 and 1925, the general concept of people voting on matters of statewide policy went from a relic of the Classical Era that had ended more than 1800 years earlier to the norm in North America and Europe. 1800 years of obscurity, then 150 years to ubiquity in the world’s wealthiest states and another 50 to expand to most of the rest.
Sure, anarchism has had a longer period out of the spotlight, not having been the norm since roughly the invention of agriculture ~8000 years ago, but you never know when it might return. Having a concrete, achievable plan to get results is good, but you also want to make sure that the results you’re striving for are just, otherwise you end up with liberalism again. And we all know how that ends up.
Lol way to prove their point dumbass
Pre-columbian societies aside (you can’t turn history around), all the rest ended up in fascism/monarchism/failed state in a matter of how many years/months?
Yes, you can do that if your goal is moral purity or intellectual amusement and not the material improvement of the lives of actual people. All other system changes you’ve proposed are just changes of ruling class and production system due to the slow motor of history and development, except for the socialist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba. We literally have the recipe that works, why do you reject it?
Agreed. That’s why I praise the immense increases in welfare and quality of life in actually existing socialist countries, both historical and ongoing.
Being better at violence doesn’t make you more left, it makes you better at violence. That can be useful, but it isn’t the same thing. Your argument boils down to “might makes right” and could be expanded to classify social democracy as “more left” (after all, it’s left of the global status quo and its citizens are the happiest on average). In fact, you might even be able to use the argument for liberalism; it’s left of monarchy and fascism. Sure, it frequently decays into fascism, but so did the USSR.
Social democracy in the imperial core is to the right of the global status quo, because it depends on imperialism, neocolonialism, and unequal exchange. The USSR, on the other hand, supported anti-imperialist and decolonial movements materially, and set up a socialist economy. Being able to both establish and maintain socialism is a necessary first step for anything that can be considered left, because it’s the only leftism that’s actually real. No, socialism isn’t fascism, and equating the two is a form of Holocaust trivialization with ties to Double Genocide Theory.
The global status quo is liberalism. Social democracy is to the left of liberalism.
And I never said that socialism was fascism, I said that the USSR gave way to fascism. Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is fascist. The USSR collapsed, and fascism followed, much like the Weimar Republic collapsed and was replaced by the Nazis. That doesn’t mean that the liberals in the Weimar Republic were fascists.
Liberalism and social democracy in the imperial core are imperialist. This is to the right of liberalism and social democracy in the global south. Erasure of imperialism in the question of whether or not a society is progressive historically or reactionary is a mistake, as the imperialist countries are the ones holding back global progress right now. It’s kinda like saying landlords are progressive and tenants are reactionary.
As for the USSR bit, I misread you. Saying it descended into fascism I took to you meaning that it was progressive in the first few years or so but then turned fascist, not that the RF was that fascism. I disagree with the idea that the RF is fascist, it’s certainly run by nationalists and is an utter tragedy how far they’ve fallen from their soviet roots, but that’s a different discussion.
India is well to the right of e.g. Norway. Brazil only recently moved to the relative left. Argentina is also very right-wing (and also a lot more settler-colonialist than most of the countries not allowed into the White Countries Club). Iran and Afghanistan are about as far-right as they come, despite being very much opposed to the global order as it stands today. I wasn’t discounting the so-called “Global South,” I just also don’t think that an imperialist past (or even present) is the only factor in determining whether a country is right-wing.
In fact, I’d potentially go so far as to say that the majority of poorer countries are farther right than wealthier ones. The exceptions that come to mind are Cuba, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Bolivia, and Mexico, but on the other side you have the ones I’ve already mentioned, plus Qatar, Lebanon, El Salvador, Pakistan, and more. Not doing imperialism is good, and refusing to do it is better (as opposed to simply being unable), but it doesn’t singlehandedly make an extremist theocracy leftist. If your country does not interact with others at all but is still an absolute monarchy with laws that explicitly discriminate against marginalized groups, it’s an isolationist right-wing state, not a leftist one.
The question of being right or left is which role you play, a progressive role or a reactionary one. For all of the ways the nordics may be more progressive internally, it is of a Herrenvolk style, only for them and at the explicit expense of the global south. For all of the social faults of some countries in the global south, their rise is progressive against imperialism, and this rise facilitates social progress internally.
There is no way to be a leftist or progressive dictatorship. There is no leftist or progressive way to have unequal laws for women, or to prevent gay people from marrying, or to deny people medical care. It’s a contradiction in terms. You may believe that Iran or India becoming more powerful is an overall good thing, but it is objectively and definitionally not progressive or leftist.
Being better at violence against fascism and imperialism definitely makes you more left, though. Actual praxis and results are to me the definition of successful leftism, not the realm of ideas. The lack of proper violence against such regimes leads to a destruction of the left wing.
Social democracy also regularly turns to fascism when it needs to, it’s definitely lacking violence against fascism, amazing that you’d say this in 2026. I fucking wish our mighty social democracies in Europe fought against Israeli fascism and USA fascism, unfortunately they’re buddies!
By excluding imperialism from the measure of average happiness, you’re committing a sampling error. That would be like polling monarchs of medieval Europe to ask whether monarchy is the system making people happier. Ask the people in India and Sri Lanka and Peru extracting the resources of the goods social democracies consume and sewing the clothes we wear how happy they are with social democracy.
So, we have one example of a Marxist-Leninist state decaying to fascism (after saving Europe from Nazism) and several examples of countries not doing this (China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba). How about we engage in honest criticism of the flaws of the Soviet model that led to its dissolution in order to prevent that from happening again?