Update: they have ascertained that Parabola was Wisconcom lmao. In that light, if correct, it’s more of a wrecker doing what he does than the project failing. We still don’t have a lot of info though. They’ve written about it here: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub
Earlier today, the new rendition of Leftypedia finally imploded. Going off the block list, it’s a real mess.
Leftypedia was brought back from its last incarnation in early 2023. If you remember (or not), it had issues with Wisconcom then who latched onto it. The problem is because they had no active admins and couldn’t find them, they couldn’t ban him indefinitely.
Eventually, they did find new admins who kicked the project back into gear, or at least they tried to.
Earlier today though, it seems there has been a split and one of the admins (Parabola) basically banned all the others as well as several other users. Where it gets weird is that another admin (Aussig) then banned Parabola, but didn’t undo the bans Parabola issued. Aussig also banned me and Forte’s account, which we used back when Wisconcom was on there, for “ideological deviations”, but Aussig calls themselves a Marxist-Leninist on their user page.
From what I understand there was a split between the different tendencies. So anyway that’s how the “left unity” wiki is going lol sorry but this is funny.
I’ve recently had a multitude of examples of reasons why the word “Left” is a completely useless descriptor. Many of the people that fall under its umbrella have zero reason to have anything to do with each other. People tell me that Joe Biden is “left”.
Indeed. For me “left” is just a relative term. It doesn’t make sense using it as an absolute, as in “The Left™”. But certain groups or tendencies can and do have left, center and right wings.
This is the problem. You can walk into a meeting of Hitler’s inner circle and pronounce half of them as “on the left”, meaning it as a “relative term”. Then someone else picks that up and uses it as an absolute term, and plans some unity with these leftists.
A wrecker couldn’t dream up a more useful use of language.
What is the “centre” to you?
Yeah, I’m not big on the term “left unity” unless it is specified exactly what is meant by “left”. It makes absolutely no sense for instance to lump Marxists together with what is considered “the left” in the mainstream of bourgeois democracy. That would be a complete absurdity, we have next to nothing in common.
I guess “center” for me would be that position which at any given time reflects the broadest possible consensus position within a group.
Thanks. It’s something that keeps preying on my mind because I see so many confused discussions due to people not having agreed upon terms. Even in this thread people think it’s sad that this “left unity” didn’t work.
It’s been a while but I think Tariq Ali’s Extreme Centre: A Warning is a useful book. It’s quite short, too. Michael Rosen makes a similar point: the ‘centre’ isn’t so much in the middle of left and right; they are three points of a triangle. I’d add, in agreement with your conversation above, that this triangle is bourgeois.
I’m not sure if it makes sense to map communist politics in the same way. I’m inclined to say it wouldn’t make much sense.
Edit: wiki link – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extreme_Centre
Thanks for this! I really appreciate the recommendation because this particular topic keeps jumping out at me from around every second corner I turn. I know I must be missing something because everyone seems to accept it, even in ML spaces.
You’re welcome. I hope it’s as good as I remember! It was one of the books I read as I was beginning to read Marxist works and it helped me to mentally demolish the overton window that liberalism had built into my brain.
I think ‘centrist’ is used as a kind of shorthand, a lot of the time. Similar to ‘leftist’. And when they are used in this way, they’re practically meaningless. It seems to stem from lazy liberal thinking. Similar to ‘middle class’.
These terms that are bandied about in mainstream liberal discourse aren’t really backed by any kind of analysis. It serves the bourgeois to have us all arguing within this very narrow horizon. And it makes it difficult to have fruitful conversations.
Not just for you, it literally is a relative term. It means nothing without context.