Today i had the misfortune of encountering a western “leftist” on Twitter. He stans Podemos (a spanish demsoc party, very liberal and proNATO, they are now in a coalition government with the socdems and they love Zelenski). We discussed the Ukraine War and Russia. I thought he would do the typical “ok the US and NATO are very bad, but Russia is bad too!” so i brought up the NATO invasions of Yugoslavia and Libya to show how the west is manufacturing consent now with Ukraine just like they did with Yugoslavia and Libya, which i assumed he would say were bad. Well the motherfucker goes and says “akchually those invasions were good, we stopped genocides and evil dictators”. WTF. How are these people “leftists”? They are straight up NATOist warhawks. How is this “the left” now? And this is in Europe, where the left is much stronger than in the US! I cant stand this. HOW IS THIS “LEFTISM”? Im so angry right now, what a piece of shit human being, defending imperialist genocides while calling himself a “leftist”. He even had the gull of saying “you arent a leftist, you defend genocidal regimes like the USSR, Putin or North Korea, youre a fascist!”. Fucking unbelievable. Ok rant over.
Oh and he also defended finnish and baltic nazis of WW2 and said “bolshevism is just like nazism”. Plus he said holodomor was real and when i showed him that expert historians on the subject like Mark Tauger, J Arch Getty and Stephen Wheatcroft think otherwise, he said “youre wrong, the historical consensus doesnt agree with you”.
Exactly, this is part of why i think those people from GZ are nowhere near being ML - the very core of what Marxism Leninism is and why it is so successful is that it always need to pay attention to the material conditions and formulate theory and practice according to it (while staying troe to the marxist principles). They are obviously not doing it.
Liberal idealism tends to formulate policies based on abstract universal principles rather than objective conditions on a case by case basis. The idea being that if something is right in situation X it will always be right in every other situation as well.
I think many self-proclaimed Marxists haven’t yet managed to overcome this anti-materialist way of thinking.
Yeah, that’s why dogmatism is such a problem. Last time we saw that on a huge scale after the war in Ukraine started. Those guys just copied Lenin writing about 1914 without a shred of attempt to analyse the conditions… And ignored me when i asked them how about what he wrote about 1905 Russo-japanese war for example.