What are some leftist aphorisms that got co-opted and abused by libs?
I noticed people started to use the idea of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” to just be completely irresponsible and just stop trying at all. I don’t think the point of that is to give up completely lol
Libs just use this to mean sympathy without any of the underlying class consciousness that really means "your suffering is mine and this unifies us"
Intersectionality
Libs just use this as a way to play oppression Olympics and rank everyone according to their intersecting identities, rather than using it to try to understand how they intersect.
I saw someone accuse leftists of being "reactionary," as if the term means "one who reacts." Thankfully I don't think they've really picked up on that term yet.
That one is not just libs, it's extremely widespread. I think the process is people use "reactionary" instead of "reactive", because longer word = smarter.
I wouldn't call them middlemen, I would say the banks are just a third-party to the renter-rentee relationship which is direct exploitation. The banks are also exploiting, but in different ways, they're exploiting their low level processor employees and bank tellers and the like in their own employer-employee relationship. If they are charging usurious rates on the mortgage, they are exploiting the lender-lendee relationship with the landlord. These are all separate examples of exploitation, but we believe all the exploitations should be stopped not just 2 of 3.
Also middlemen in exploitative relationships aren't a good thing. "Cut out the middlemen" is still good practice under communism if they aren't contributing anything. A hitman is just a "middleman" in the relationship between the victim and the one buying the hitman service. Doesn't mean hitmen shouldn't be abolished just like purchasing hitmen.
They use "tankie" because they don't like to think that anyone could be to the left of them. The libs who call themselves leftists but support NATO and oppose protests that interrupt their morning commute are the ones that use tankie the MOST
I kinda got pretty fuckin sad when this happened because like
It does pertain to some very specific kinds of leftists, generally the ones who are uneducated and authoritarian. But now it just gets used as a prejorative for any leftist who is willing to match rightwing violence with leftwing violence.
Like, if you just let right wingers do violence because "freeze peach" and you constantly hamper left wingers' actions, you cannot expect any other outcome than the right wing seizing control in an authoritarian manner.
There is only one cure for fascism, and that's armor-penetrating rounds. That being said, you can obviously take action without your little armalite at your side, but at this point it really should be disruptive.
Oh my lord applying individual psychology speak to nations/states drives me crazy. Not a thing leftists do so they haven't co-opted it. If I have to hear the language of domestic abuse or trauma counselling or whatever the fuck applied to countries and geopolitics one more time I will explode.
Ah, not true the post-modernist left did in fact apply psychological terms to entire societies. Specifically, schizophrenia if I remember correctly from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Lacan also loved mixing psychology and sociology.
Not the greatest fan of these works, but at least they are being specific and academic in their usage and have psychological training. Modern libs are bastardizing even that.
Also I think it's much more valid to point towards a society as a whole as a social organism, and attempt to apply similar mental conditions to see if it makes any sense - at least in an academic thought experiment type of way, I don't think it has much explanatory power personally. However, libs instead just say "Trump is a narcissist. Putin is a sociopath. Kim Jong Un is a psychopath." etc. which is much more of an issue as they're just armchair psychologizing other people without any formal training whatsoever in order to smear political opponents. It's chauvinist, it's ableist, it's straight charlatanism
"Grassroots" is one that pisses me off. I got a email from the Biden canvassing fucks that asked me to donate to Biden because he was starting a "grassroots movement to win". I was like y'all know he's the motherfucking state, right?
Oldie, but "a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was effectively talking about a post-socialist revolution where serious reparations were made and society was equalised in meaningful ways that would allow the world to be both fairer and more meritocratic.
Libs say it means addressing historic injustice is evil and that now the most explicit mentions of race are out of written law and addressed nothing else, Dr King would 100% approve of modern America.
“Acknowledgement” that turned from a good faith recognition of unearned power, comfort, or stability but became a rote “land acknowledgement” or “privilege check”
Ya people complaining that being a decent friend and listening to other people vent sometimes is too much “emotional labor” is some kind of expression of some terrible process of neoliberalism and atomization
This one kills me, when I read the original definition and realized that people were studying the forced emotions required of customer service workers it felt good, like, almost relieving, that an academic, someone in a position of authority, recognized and took seriously the toll that that takes.
Now it means like, listening to your friend complain about their boss or something?
I'm not even upset that "the strain of hearing about other people's hardships" has a term to describe it, but why use one that was describing the way servers, baristas, flight attendants, cashiers and call center agents have to maintain a constant appearance of happiness while being degraded by the people speaking to them?
Colonialism, genocide, and imperialism. The savages scraping shit off the boots of NATO with their tongues will look at you with their shit filled mouths and unironically say “we must protect xyz from abc imperialism”
However, there's also another reason that most people probably aren't thinking of. I become unreasonably irritated whenever I see someone post some stupid baby talk shit like "They're doing a genocide" or "they're being genocided" or "stop doing an imperialism." Sometimes their views even align with mine, yet I want to dropkick them to hell for invoking millennial pupper talk for this topic. If you're learning English, that's completely reasonable to write - but if the only language you speak is english then
That Lenin quote about supporting electoralism that libs selectively cited to make him sound as if he would have supported voting for Biden. Of course, they always left out the part where he specified voting for communist parties.
I had to struggle not to laugh when someone cited this one at me in a DSA meeting. he was very disappointed when I told him to read the rest of the page. very glad I left.
Yeah, when I was DSA it seemed like everyone knew capitalism was fucked but the only answer anyone could think of was canvass and vote harder. I moved on to an actively anarchist org and we never talk politics - only how we can better do the work.
ACAB when the definition of cops becomes "anyone who seeks to enforce standards or act in defence".
"Become ungovernable" as a slogan that occasionally gets used to justify wrecker behaviour and self-serving egotistic actions.
I guess these two are interrelated but imagine if you said something blatantly racist in a less-than principled leftist space but you strategically deployed the slogans "ACAB" against the people calling you out and used "become ungovernable" as a justification for your actions; you could easily split a movement by doing something like this.
To a lesser extent, "it is right to rebel" gets used for the same sorts of purposes. It's divorced from its cultural and historical context; China around Mao's era was very hierarchical and society was very strictly centred around "conformity" (using shorthand here, don't come at me). Under these circumstances, it was absolutely right to rebel and exhorting people to rebel was the correct course.
That doesn't mean that it's somehow a tacit endorsement of contemporary western liberal hyper-individualism though. If anything the western left needs a good dose of "Shut the fuck up and learn how to fall in line because your petty bickering and your blind adherence to knee-jerk, cultish individualism is a major roadblock to advancing the cause of socialism".
Happened really fast with enshittification. It describes a particular capitalist process based on specific circumstances and people just use it to mean “when things get worse”
"enshittification" was coined by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow has some very harsh criticisms of capitalism, but it's always capitalism with an adjective, like surveillance capitalism. If you look at what action he actually advocates for, it's pretty clear that he's a liberal.
Not sure if this counts, but you know all the "SJWs" from 2012? Yeah, a lot of them were fascist sleeper agents. IMC, Cadence Owens, the sinfest guy, Lena Dunham, are all four examples of "SJWs" that quickly and conveniently went crying to the right about being 'alienated'.
Labor Theory of Value. I don't know how common it is, but I've seen people using it to justify killing someone who stole something from you, because "you bought it with hours of your work".
In fairness this stems from leftist misinterprtations of the LTV which mix up exchange and use value and fail to nail down "Socially necessary". The genius of marx is that he shows that the folk conception of value is several different things, and that Marginalist interpretations conflate these things to maintain the supremacy of capital.