marcusseldon:

nostalgebraist:

Personally, I never knew “liberal” was as a derogatory term by the left until after college, when I started reading communists online.

(I did hear “neoliberal” a lot, but that’s quite different, and used much more widely)

Very few people in America seem aware of what the “hard left” is actually like.  The mainstream right does worry about communism, but tends to emphasize (real or imagined) coalitions and unities rather than splits (cf. Horowitz’s “Discover The Networks” site) – they mostly tend to claim that the center left is actually a front for communism, or allied with communism, or some other variant on the idea of a “vast left-wing conspiracy,” with “communism” also assumed to be internally united.

Looking at the other side of the picture: I don’t think the American mainstream left is very aware of divisions on the “hard right” either, and tends to lump everything together as well.  But the “hard right” at least has enough of a presence that the typical Democratic voter learns to distinguish (proverbially) between their non-doctrinaire but very racist grandpa, their fundamentalist homeschooling aunt, and their uncle in the Marines who thinks civilians of all stripes are all weak and could use some military discipline.

Many people know that the left has schisms, at least well enough to laugh at the “People’s Front of Judea” joke, but they still tend to think of all hard-leftists as (1) equally marginal and ignorable, (2) distant and indistinguishable but vaguely “cool” allies, or (3) a united coalition of evil.

I’m not sure to what degree this is true, I guess it depends on what you mean by “hard left”. I feel like I have always had some sense of the divisions on the left, perhaps more than the on the right, but on the other hand I’ve lived my whole life in the orbit of a secular college town.

Do most people not know the difference between the 30-something programmer who cares about hardline approaches to civil liberties and global warming but is apathetic on economic issues, an angry protesting socialist college student who cares about fair trade and open borders and expanding welfare, and the single white woman who is passionate about feminism and sexual freedom and social justice? Or do they not qualify as “hard left”?

They don’t qualify as “hard left.”

Largely I’m talking about radicals here – roughly “leftists who think the government should be overthrown,” although that’s neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition.  Say, the Weathermen, or various U. S. communist parties, or the Socialist Labor Party of America (which has/had a somewhat different sense of revolution than the others mentioned).

Also, people who don’t have radical opinions about “what must be done here and now” but are heavily involved in Marxist theory – say, people who argue about “revisionism” in the Marxist sense.  (The people in your examples probably don’t have opinions about revisionism, and it’s likely they’ve never even heard the term.)

Likewise for people heavily into anarcho-syndicalist theory, etc.  (The mainstream left reads Noam Chomsky, but not for his positive proposals.)

(via marcusseldon)