It's been an extraordinarily fast takeover and I'd really like to know exactly what happened those 5 or so years ago to precipitate this seismic shift.
It's been an extraordinarily fast takeover and I'd really like to know exactly what happened those 5 or so years ago to precipitate this seismic shift.
Americans have a very weird conception of what "far-left" means. Liberal feel good minority appeasement by billion dollar multinational corporations is as far from "far-left" as you can get.
I use it to describe any political ideology focussed on equality of outcome and legitimacy through elimination of self-judged "oppression", which is IMO as good a definition as any as the communist disasters of the 20th century.
Leftists aren't really bothered about whether the CEO or President is black or white or male or female or transgender, but by the fact that any single person is allowed the wield the power that a CEO or President can yield. Many of them also reject reformist politics.
Black Panther Party member Fred Hampton(As good an example of a "far-left" American figure as you can find) can probably explain it better:
> We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.
> We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.
> We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don't care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html
A good rule of thumb is - Anything done by multi billion dollar corporations is probably not leftist.
And other Americans have a very weird conception of what far-left is outside of America.
There are nations out there that are very, very conservative compared to the US. Republican talking points would be far-left in much of the world outside Western Europe, Canada and Australasia.
- Rejection of capitalism and private property
- Opposition to all forms of social hierarchy
- Rejection of electoral and reformist politics
- Revolutionary, often militant program
- Explicitly communist or anarchist in nature