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Comment by sewercake | Hacker News Reader

The critiques are similar insofar as they are both critiques, but differ vastly in their content.

Mark Fisher, and the 'traditional left's' critique of neoliberal identity politics calls for a centering of class -- that is the power relations inherent in capital modes of production. This, many would argue is not an identity, but a _material position_: a specific stance or relationship to the productive forces in society.

The Alt-Right tends to believe societal conflicts arise from 'culture wars' between ethnicities, nationalities, religions, etcetera. In this way, they share an 'identitarian' analysis of political force with the liberals they aim to critique!

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In total agreement, and I would add that Fisher's position is only acceptable in the left because it is founded in 'class reductionism' - which is sometimes used derogatorily - the idea that capital is the root struggle, because it is in part or in whole the cause of all other struggles.

It is also possible to try to position yourself on the traditional far left while also simply being racist or sexist, but that would be Third-Positionism, which is seeming more and more common in the alt-right. A Third-Positionist would find nothing that they could agree with in EtVC, because they would assert that "comradeship" across a 'cultural boundary' is a communist ideal.

If you look at political history, the jokingly made Fish Hook Theory is more valid than the Horse Shoe.

https://i.redd.it/ipw1tkw2v06z.png

If you look at the history of Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge, and Maoism, the horseshoe theory begins to look appealing again, unless you consider Stalin to be Fascist.

It is quite popular among the hard left to handwave away the crimes of the likes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, by saying they are capitalists!

Really? I've never heard that before and I've spent a not insignificant portion of my life in hard left circles.

People will often say that Stalin's USSR was not communist, but was rather in a pre-communist phase. In the USSR this stage was known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which according to Lenin, would eventually fade allowing a state-less, class-less society to flourish. Obviously they never got to that stage, but honestly even arguing this is semantics. Communism vs precommunism is a real time waster of a political debate, but I've never heard anyone describe any stage of the USSR as "capitalist". Perhaps state capitalism, if you really want to stretch that definition, but that's still a very different thing.

Generally lefties will distance themselves from Stalinism and Maoism by describing those forms as "authoritarian socialism", as opposed to "libertarian socialist" ideologies like what they had in socialist Catalonia, or Anarcho Communism as it's described in The Conquest of Bread.

Please keep this tedious trope off HN. Generic ideological arguments are predictable, therefore boring, therefore off topic here.

On HN, what's interesting are the diffs. Predictable content contains no information.

This is just a dishonest way to say "If you're not with us, you're against us!" and I think we all know where that leads.

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