Even if a communist can colloquially describe themselves as being on the left, there’s a distinction between communism and “the left.” This is implied right in the title of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder. Whereas the left, a big tent term for a myriad of incompatible ideologies, aims merely to act as an opposition towards the present order for the sake of it, communists have a coherent vision for how to defeat the system: by advancing history’s development to the next stage. The left, because of its lack of commitment to that central Marxist goal, naturally takes on an opportunistic role. Because when you want only to build a movement as an end in itself, rather than use this movement as a means for defeating the system, you become nothing more than an actor who benefits from discontent without helping solve the problems behind that discontent.
I wonder how many of the “scientific socialists” actually have a scientific education (formally or self taught).
I think mainstream media likes to present science as one megalithic cohesive dogma, rather than simply just a collectivist approach to advancing our knowledge of the sciences based on impiricism, peer review, hypothesis and such
To be clear, I absolutely do consider myself a scientific socialist. I’m just not as knowledgeable about political theory as I am about scientific theory