Leftists that argue against the State should be made to go live in western European country in the 20 and 30s when the State was much smaller and then brought forward.

Obviously the mileage varies by country but the broad point stands.

All the great victories of the Left are embodied in the State.

Universal Health Care.
Social welfare programs.
Workers protections, which are numerous.
Free education for all.

This list can go on and on.

Of course capitalism is pushing back on this and since the 70s has won numerous victories in this regard.

Also of course capitalism is a colonising force, it arranges and orders life, if the State exists capitalism will to some degree operate through it.

Also of course capitalist propaganda is far reaching and invasive, it likes to reveal its intrusions into the State to some sections of the population and say hay guys here we are, nasty wasty State, am I right?

Unfortunately on the gullible this is an effective tactic.

The battle is for control of the State, not its abolition.

Lets be clear that is not the perfect battle, but its the best battle there is.

When you abolish the state and it’s military you will get invaded and destroyed by another state that has a larger military.

You can hire people, but the other state will just murder them and their families while they sleep

A lot of the talk in this thread about whether a particular group is part of the "left" or not is a little silly absent agreement on the definitions or the parameters.

There is broad consensus about which note is "Middle C" on a piano only because there is broad consensus about the 88 keys on a piano.

For example, I could state the following: " Erdogan's government is not right-wing. A government must be authoritarian in order to be properly called "right-wing." A government is not authoritarian unless it surveils and controls every aspect of every citizen's life -- that is, every bite of food that is consumed, every word that is spoken, and every word that is read. Erdogan's government isn't capable of, and doesn't aspire to, that level of control and surveillance."

In the statement above, the conclusion depends on an a highly idiosyncratic and very extreme definition of "authoritarian."

Its not as clear cut as that.

You have to have some mechanism whereby you can usefully compare right and left within a given polity and then across polities.

The point is different polities actually do have different pianos. The middle C key can be in different positions.

I believe the idea of a universal piano is false.

I would never argue that capitalism is inconsistent with colonialism or imperialism. But it's worth remembering that behavior that we would now describe as colonialism or imperialism has been around for at least 2000 years. Put another way, capitalism is by no means a necessary condition for colonialism or imperialism.

I suspect that Marx and Lenin would agree.

I agree, and I am not arguing to the contrary. I am suggesting that, regardless of whether there is a universal piano or not, we have to agree (at least at a general level) on the range of keys in the piano in order to have a meaningful discussion about which note is middle C. Otherwise, we are really just debating the range of keys on the piano.

Ok.

I guess the most common way I encounter this issue is with the description of much of US and European media as left wing, when it is only left when contrasted against extreme right wing media such as fox and when looked at universally it is indeed most commonly centre right.

So it is to the left of fox et al but to right of the C key.

I thought the results here were interesting.

To state the obvious, the people who follow this guy are not exactly a representative sample.

Well sure, which is sort of exactly why I thought the answer should be more on the "they were never legit" side.

Sure, but even your statement requires agreement about the keys on the piano.

My point is that relative political terms such as left and right require agreement on context, almost like statements about the weather. A high of 45 degrees in January is going to seem chilly to someone who lives in Miami and downright balmy to someone who lives in Minneapolis.

To be clear, I obviously agree that "left wing" Parisians would not describe AOC (much less the NYT) as "left wing." I would never describe American progressives as radicals relative to the citizens of Western democracies as a whole. Far from it.

Ah. Got it.

Why?


I do not mean this is an insult, truly but you often seem so unquestioning of methodology and unquestioning of who might be most eager to reply to such a poll in the Twitter world.


I find that interesting as I think you think of yourself generally as a skeptic and one more typically who questions and looks thru situations as presented to see underlying motivations and players who are pulling the strings or subverting the information in the background.

But then you post something like this???

So when it comes to the polarized Twitter world where we have extreme numbers who, for sake of arguments we will describe as, 'support everything progressive' and another side who 'hates everything progressive', you felt one side, more than the other should dominate the submissions???

It's just a Twitter poll.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I called it "interesting". One is free to interpret my comment or the poll however one wants, but whatever you're getting at you're going off the rails a bit.

He acknowledged that the poll was not representative. He just meant that he would have expected this non-representative group to be more likely to describe the Squad as frauds than sell-outs. If you look at this guy's Twitter account, I can see why he might have expected that.

it is that you find it 'interesting' is what i am assessing and the assessment i made is accurate.

There would be nothing 'interesting' there to, I am betting 99.9999% of people who are aware Twitter is a hyper partisan place and thus if a polarizing poll like this gets retweets or traction in one or both spheres, it will get a high response rate from that segment or both.

Most would call that 'normal' or 'expected', and not put any weight on the actual results.

If a person worked at a polling analytics firm and cited this as Poll as 'interesting' at a group meeting the universal reply would almost certainly be 'wtf? as everyone wondered how that person got the job there.

I just think that if anyone follows your posts they will see a pattern of you being taken in by what is to others, very obvious and bad information of little or no value and i have mentioned it before in other instances. I think you are so eager to be a contrarian and show you skills to pick out things, that you stumble in this way often.

Do you think it's possible that what one person thinks is normal another person might find interesting?

IYO are the poll results exactly as you would have expected them to be?

Sure one person might find it interesting.

The poll would have been more interesting/valid if it had just focused on AOC. Some members of the squad were loosely affiliated through an organization called the Justice Democrats cofounded by Cenk Uygur, a guy who is obviously a compromised paper chaser. Despite that and their seemingly coordinated political actions it's confusing to lump them all together on the depth of betrayal question which is a tough thing to figure out and highly individualistic. None of them are standing tall but some of their failure could be a result of group dynamics. But AOC is the most visible, most elevated and somewhat the leader of them, so the question is more interesting regarding her individually.

She was corrupt from the beginning. She tied to get in the traditional way, sucking up to the powerful, networking, doing the right internships etc. The establishment just rejected her because they didn't think she had talent. We can see why they thought that now- the word salads, lashing out etc. Dejected and rejected, she ran in opposition to the establishment just to get close to them again and get in that way. It's either that or she was sheep dipped but no way is that a thing in electoral politics. In any event the mere volume of press coverage she garnered suggested she was never deemed a threat. When the establishment really fears you or hates you it will ignore you and block media access like it did to Bernie (inasmuch as it could) or Trump post presidency (early on it didn't take Trump seriously and lavished him with coverage to set him up as the chump). Making AOC a household name was the first indication she was not there to disrupt anything.

Other squad members...who knows? Norm Finkelstein says 99% of people are corruptible. If he's right then I'm not sure how much it matters whether they were secret neoliberals before being elected.

Sure.

But if person finds claims of 'jewish space lasers', 'interesting', such that they bring it to the forum for discussion that still has certain inferences it will trigger in others as to why one would find such nonsense 'interesting' and post it thinking others would too. Especially if that person refuses to state what they find 'interesting' and thus keeping it deliberately cryptic thus requiring speculation.



I would have no expectation for such a poll.

if the a person on the far left was to 'retweet' it and got tracton there i know it could get thousands of submissions.

If a person on the far right did same, then same.

If one or both do neither it could die on the vine in either or both spheres.



Loaded political questions just need the right traction to take off or they die due to no one caring.

As someone who has only seen limited clips about Cenk and people on his network, I am curious what you think makes him a 'compromised paper chaser'?

I have seen him in clips describe his evolution and changes as a person (religious, Muslim, right wing to atheist, Progressive) seemingly to defend himself from attacks so I am curious??

Huh ?
I don’t see the correlation at all .
The personal debt have no influence on the corporation profits where the wages comes from .
We speak about wages and the disparity between the top 10% that have benefited an immense increases from the direct profit of the corporations profits where the bottom 90% didn’t .


Fwiw , prices of houses went dramatically up because of the greatest demographic increase in human history called the baby-boomer generation .
Doesn’t mean they were « overleverage » with debt .
the economy did grow with the increase of many baby-boomer coming into the economy as well .
Clearly showing in the graphs.

People aren't calling for income equality for income inequality's sake. It's the real or perceived erosion of their labor's purchasing power that people want reversed. Whether we define that as low income or high prices, doesn't matter because what's going on with one may or may not affect the other.

So prices are reflected by VoM, where V * M = T * P. We can treat Velocity and T (output) as constants and see how an increase in consumer credit (M) will increase Price. Where that would end up without modeling it is hard to say. But if consumers are only spending what they're paid, there won't be enough money out there sans credit to allow for prices to rise much beyond pay. So yeah, "less than half" isn't at all out of line over a 50 year time frame.