[wizzwizz4]

It is? The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way"). The radical left-wing response would be an insistence on the validity of other forms of community (notably including relationship anarchy: polycules, queer-platonic relationships, etc), the promotion of community organising (such as unions, food distribution networks, mutual aid networks, communes), and so on – which I can understand might appear to be an opposition to "community", if your understanding of "community" is narrowly-defined (e.g. as referring to the traditional practices of your cultural group), but the radical left-wingers certainly don't think they're opposing community.

If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed. I would certainly call such people "aspiring-radical", and I might even call them tepidly left-wing (especially with respect to the US's Overton window), but I think "left-wing radical" might be a misnomer, since the radicality is unrelated to the left-wing nature. There are strong first-principles reasons to expect that this politics does a significant disservice to members of the groups it's nominally attempting to help (and that's before you factor in the backlash we're currently seeing).

But I've never found the "left-wing" / "right-wing" dichotomy to be helpful for anything other than identifying The Enemy™ (which I consider a generally counterproductive activity), so take what I say here with a pinch of salt.

[aleph_minus_one]

> The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").

The same statement holds for left-wing radicals: they insist that their community should be a certain way (with the radical left-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").

[wizzwizz4]

The same statement holds for left-wing radicals on the internet, who rigidly police the boundaries of their fractious communities. I don't see this behaviour from, for instance, the local anarchists, who mostly seem focused on improving the material conditions of the downtrodden in the community, strengthening local ties, and promoting bottom-up logistics. (And, of course, there are people who seek to accomplish the same goal through right-wing methods: increasing employment, promoting local businesses, and providing grants to those who require them.)

Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)? Or maybe it's just that the people doing the actual boots-on-the-ground work tend to care more about doing the actual work than about fracturing over ideological disagreements. ("Leftist infighting" long predates the internet, after all: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/165.)

[aleph_minus_one]

> Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)?

Both for left-wing and right-wing people, it's about who is in-group vs out-group [1]. The only difference is by which values, psychometric and socioeconomic traits, ... left-wing vs right-wing people decide who belongs to their respective in-group vs out-group.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group

[wolvesechoes]

> The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community

Yet they are unable to build or keep one, due to the need to track all signs of thought heresy.

[zozbot234]

> If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed.

The thing about corporations is that they internally run on politics and a fixed hierarchy of command and control. No different than a resolutely "anti-capitalist" government office! You can think of this as an 'anarchist' observation if you want, but it's just a fact of life. So when we see corporate activism come up with such hamfisted ideas that we wouldn't see in less "activist" corporations, this has to tell us something about the merit of the underlying politics.

Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression. I don't see "polycules" as achieving that in the near term, even though that kind of fluid free association is undeniably the very earliest step towards what I'm thinking about.

A traditional community is not going to just dissolve when the going get tough, or when interpersonal conflicts arise (and such conflicts are inevitable in large-enough groups!): they uniquely encourage people who might otherwise dislike each other to cooperate for collective benefit. There is great value in that, which is not often acknowledged.

[thrance]

> Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression.

I really don't know where you're pulling that from. Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.

A return to this awful social hierarchy is MAGA and the right's ultimate goal, no matter how unrealistic. They're dismantling the Civil Rights act piece by piece, just last week they've been able to gerrymander the black vote away thanks to SCOTUS.

Like it or not, every social progress in this country has come from the left.

[zozbot234]

> Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.

Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c. (Lobotomies came a few decades later, but were ultimately rooted in the exact same ideas about the primacy of 'science!' and trusted institutions over people's lived experience and the deep reality of enduring traditional values.) Studying that history in depth is an excellent way to disabuse oneself of the naïve notion that Progressives are inherently the good guys.

[dragonwriter]

> Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c.

Yeah, the early 20th Century American Progressive movement has no connection to the late 20th-early 21st century American progressive movement, the latter of which adopted “progressive” not in reference to the earlier movement but in reference to "progress” in contrast to what its members perceived to be increasing static defense of a corporate capitalist status quo by other elements of the American liberal movement from which it emerged. It is a essentially a social democratic movement, which is about as far from the early 20th century movement's technocratic elitism as you can get.

[bccdee]

You are parroting criticisms made by antiracists and intersectional feminists who are themselves part of the contemporary progressive movement.

This is like when laypeople say "economics is all hogwash because humans aren't rational actors": They are citing behavioural economics as if it disqualifies the field of economics rather than being part of the field.

[thrance]

These progressives and modern ones share nothing but the name, and you now it perfectly well.

[eigencoder]

The progressives back then may have been wrong, but the progressives today have it all right!