| I think you're viewing leftism too much through a proponent's lens. To understand this critique, zoom out a bit and place these tendencies and philosophies on a spectrum. Don't pick a side. > A common misconception I hear about leftism is that it is against treating people as individuals; this is not true, but at the same time denying that black people are oppressed in the US because they have individual identity is a non sequitur at best I'm not sure where you got the "denying" bit from. Again I think you're viewing this as a fight _against_ leftism when that's not what I'm going for. There are plenty of philosophies that decidedly accept the issue of historical discrimination _without_ buying into intersectionality. A good example of this is affirmative action or the Indian concept of Scheduled Classes. Both of these measures came from understanding historic discrimination without thinking about intersectionality at all. Leftism doesn't have a monopoly on the ideas of anti-discrimination. > The leftist ideal is actually that all people are free to pursue their passions and creativity, which is not something an innately collectivist ideology (like fascism for example) would promote. Do you have a source for this? This ideal is older than Marx, Rousseau's Social Contract first posits this idea I think. > I do think that a classless society is extreme compared to our current system, I wasn't denying that - but that doesn't mean that leftists area engaging in "extreme overgeneralising"; I still have no idea what that was supposed to mean. Again I think you're too wrapped up in defending leftism. If you're having a hard time seeing your views as extreme then, I like to point to a thought exercise. An extreme position is one where there's very little more ideologically extreme than it. So in your case, what's _more_ Left than the classless society you're positing? If there's nothing more extreme than your position, then you're probably at the extreme edge of it. |
I know, I'm not disputing that (and appreciate that you point out that affirmative action is a liberal rather than leftist idea, many don't make the distinction).
> Do you have a source for this? This ideal is older than Marx, Rousseau's Social Contract first posits this idea I think.
Yes, the leftist ideal is that of the humanist/liberal (liberty, equality, fraternity): this goes back before Marx to the utopian socialists who established the ideals, where Marx was more interested in historical determinism and developing a science of political economy.
> If you're having a hard time seeing your views as extreme
I'm not, that's what I said.