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”.
I disagree. The left and the right are effectively a struggle and unity of opposing colonial civil religions and the dialectic is held together by identity politics. Being a leftist itself is a fetishized, heavily moralized, and comodified identity (just as being right wing is), this is why people virtue signal how “left” (or right) they are to build legitimacy and manipulate the market of social esteem to either increase/maintain the value of brands or to build a profile. (Which is precisely how finance capital acts.) Class is effectively reduced to just another identity instead of a complex social relationship between humans, land, production, and wealth. People look within themselves for their identity, which they then use to build a politic. Liberalism trains us not to look at the material world or our surroundings in motion with us, but at our essence or at our profile—an essence defined within colonial superstructures. Both major civil religions champion the values of the Working Class ™ while currating the Working Class ™ identity itself.
These moralized and comodified identities have build in triggers that are used to cultivate war mongering and chuavanism. It is so easy to manipulate people into supporting puppets of the empire because bourgeoisie morality has been baked into virtually every available identity via civil religion and its relationship with identity politics.
Yes the erroneous fixation on liberal “democracy” is consequencial, but why was this so effective and attractive? The answer is the liberal desire to cynically include and represent “all” (currated identies) while centering the individual, and to render class either superfluous or gutted of meaning so that bourgeoisie sensibilities can easily saturate everything. Liberalism moves to turn all notions of being into weapons for the ruling class.