[thu2111]

Nobody uses the term identity politics to mean white supremacism. Even the left don't use the term that way.

Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries. Yes, there were fringe wings that were openly Marxist but most left wing politics was committed to incremental change through the ballot box, not total revolution.

They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.

At least I perceive shades of difference in how they're normally used.

"Leftism" is used to refer to a rather extreme, virulent ideology, typified by the conviction that conservatism of any kind of a sort of evil that needs to be wiped out or suppressed. There are no mainstream parties in the west formally espousing leftism, although in the USA the Democrats are now becoming dangerously close to that with their explicitly racial/gender based appointment of Kamala Harris, and some of their recent demands to take Fox News off air.

Left wing politics is a far more mainstream movement found throughout the democratic world. Its focus is typically on economic issues that affect the working classes, they advocate for nationalisation and/or the general pulling of power to the centre, they recognise the legitimacy of their conservative oppositions and in many European countries often enter into coalitions or power sharing arrangements with them. Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair. Left wing politicians have up until very recently not been overtly promoting "leftism" in the hard-core sense seen today, but that's now changing.

To me the key difference is whether someone recognises disagreement as legitimate. Even when in very strong political positions, throughout most of the 20st century left wing parties have not tried to suppress their opposition. The exceptions are of course the communist countries, but those parties are hardly referred to as left wing, even though technically they were very much so.

[dragonwriter]

> Nobody uses the term identity politics to mean white supremacism.

Plenty of people use it for a phenomenon which includes, but is broader than, White supremacy.

https://books.google.com/books/about/White_Identity_Politics...

https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18306125/white-identity-politi...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/who-does-t...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-disturbing-surpri...

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2019/the-...

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-10-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2020/10/14/the-uglin...

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/white-identity-p...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25704860?seq=1

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-trumps-use-of-white-...

https://newrepublic.com/article/138230/rise-white-identity-p...

https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol87/iss4/4/

https://brill.com/view/title/55875

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-identity-polit...

http://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/identity-politics-election-2...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/opinion/trump-race-immigr...

> Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries.

In your original post you said “old left wing politics” not “post-1950s left-wing politics”, but even with the clarification, that probably depends on whether or not you include Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism within Marxism (I don't, but most of both the Right and people who agree with Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism do). If you do include those things, Marxism is, if not covering the left of an absolute majority of countries, at least the single most dominant left-wing movement of the post-1950s and pre-about-1990s period.

If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.

> Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn

Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.

> And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair.

Tony Blair, like Bill Clinton in the US, was part of an 80s/90s center-right reaction against left-wing politics that took over previously left-leaning (overtly Socialist, in the case of the UK Labour Party, more confused in the US Democratic Party case because of the ongoing overlapping post-New Deal and post-Civil Rights Act partisan realignments) parties.

Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.

Though if you are using “leftism” to mean actual leftism and “left-wing" to mean 1980s-1990s center-right neoliberal “Third Way” reaction, then, yeah, they are very different things.

[thu2111]

Hmm, that's an impressive list of links. I picked one at random - the Vox link - and it starts with this paragraph:

"When people talk about identity politics it’s often assumed they’re referring to the politics of marginalized groups like African Americans, LGBTQ people, or any group that is organizing on the basis of a shared experience of injustice — and that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption."

Eh, call it a draw? I'm not wedded to the list of terms people use.

If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.

Yes, I suppose I could have explicitly stated I was writing from a European/American political context. That's usually the default assumption here on HN though.

Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.

According to them they are very much left wing, more left than anyone else in modern politics! Using a strict dictionary definition that would count the Soviet dictatorship as a left wing political party, yes you're right, but people (in the west) use the word communism to describe that, not left-wing or leftism. And my post is about how language is used today, and how it's changing.

Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.

He was left wing of a sort. For example he pretty massively expanded the state, but in obfuscated ways that even today are causing problems and haven't really been tackled, e.g. the growth of "quangos", the level of state funding of the charity sector, the large increase in student and academic funding.

To me the acid test is this: if a politician calls themselves left wing, and hardly anyone disagrees, not their opponents and nor their allies, then that's what the word means. Blair is the most ambiguous case because the hard left of his party did sometimes claim he was in reality not left wing at all, but that was never true of Corbyn or Sanders. Not even the rump communist movement would have been so bold as to claim that Corbyn wasn't genuinely left wing.

However, Corbyn and Sanders did not (to my knowledge) ever advocate for suppression of their political opposition. Thus I wouldn't describe them as engaging in "leftism".

This whole discussion is a giant rabbit hole though. Perhaps the terms "left wing" and "woke" are sufficient to distinguish between what I'm calling "classical post 1950 left wing politics" and "the ideology of leftism".