A philosophy cannot ruin your life, it is a set of idea, benign on their own; if your life was ruined, it was probably through your own doing and you should own up to that.
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What have you achieved from left wing politics?
Just curious, what have been your biggest accomplishments? My impression of the left is that the left is always sitting around talking about ideas, while other groups of people go out and just serve people, build houses, serve food to people, the left tends to sit around and talk about ideas and how they can be more powerful.
I know their are some groups like Food not Bombs that do serve people. I was wondering, what have you all actually accomplished as radicals. How much furthur along are you.
Also, I realize that I am a huge dick when I post on this forum. I am not trolling, I am trying to get people to think about what they believe. My life was ruined because of leftwing philosophy, sometimes it takes being an asshole to get through to people.
I am not really an asshole in real life, honestly.I care about all of you. I lost a lot of years of my life to radical pursuits.
The Bible says "rebuke a wise man and he will love you".
What are the good stories? What are the good things you've seen? I am saying this because I sincerely believe the accomplishments of radicals tend to be very small (e.g. the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam - some of the worst places on earth to live). There are some things that radicals do that I respect (e.g. union organizing). What have you accomplished personally?
Where has your knowledge of societies enabled you?
A philosophy cannot ruin your life, it is a set of idea, benign on their own; if your life was ruined, it was probably through your own doing and you should own up to that.
This exactly.
@jstrodel You can't keep blaming leftism for your former problems. I have none of those problems you had, so the cause is not leftism.
The more you spew that these places were socialist the less people will take you seriously. Actions speak louder than words. The words of those nations were socialist, their actions were not.
Your life can be ruined because you follow a certain philosophy though, mccarthyism being a good example of that.
So I would say it can ruin your life, to some extent.
Is this resistance or a costume party?
Either way I think black with bandanas is a boring theme.
fka Creep
Well this has some truth to it, but I can`t say that it was the philosophy which did it. A philosophy or set of ideas can exist completely in a vacuum, if one so chooses. I`m hardly attempting to peddle the personal responsibility line here, its just the OP`s claims are quite ridiculous.
Care to share with us your definition of "left"? If you visit Seattle I would happily take you out to the municipally owned dam that provides the bulk of our power. Further away are the massive Bonneville Power dams that power this region. Public power is emphatically a "left" accomplishment. (Just ask the folks at the Koch owned Reason magazine who are constantly agitating to privatize it.)
A personal "left accomplishment" is the vacant apartment building that I and others occupied that is now affordable housing for formerly homeless veterans.
No thinks you had any involvement with left wing politics cuz you don't know shit about left wing politics.
Or its philosophies, for that matter.
Right now personally I'm doing some community organizing with the huge Burmese refugee population in the area I live in. I also do some union organizing. What exactly counts as an accomplishment? Every time I convert someone to communism or anarchism I take it as a major accomplishment. Class consciousness, and putting power in the hands of the people is always an accomplishment regardless of the scale.
If you think the left consists of people sitting around arguing on the internet, you are simply talking to the wrong people.
Edit: I didn't realize he was banned already when I posted this. Oh well.
Last edited by nativeabuse; 11th February 2013 at 03:13.
I agitate on every workplace I work at, and outside it, too, both online and IRL.
Me and a couple of friends started and now we have a group of almost 40 people spreading ideas of revolutionary democratic socialism, agitating, doing social insertion in unions, civil rights, anti-discrimination and social-walfare organisations.
Not IDK how big of an achievement, but you have to start somewhere.
How about the weekend? Child labor laws? Radical leftists were instrumental in instituting these and other once unpopular policies such as abolition or women's suffrage.
Served food, built houses, got free LSD.
<3 My life.
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
"it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is To have sympathy with thought."
-Oscar Wilde
My biggest accomplishments I feel have mainly been during strikes and organizing strikes effectively to ensure that our demands will and have been met. Most recently I and several others went on strike because we hadn't been paid in over 2 months, tons of bullshit involved and all of us were about to or were losing just about everything until we went on strike and we're paid all back wages plus a little compensation in the end. I consider my day-to-day struggles to be my biggest accomplishments. Others I will not mention on the open forum.
Come little children, I'll take thee away, into a land of enchantment, come little children, the times come to play, here in my garden of magic.
"I'm tired of this "isn't humanity neat," bullshit. We're a virus with shoes."-Bill Hicks.
I feel the Bern and I need penicillin
understanding the world and understanding myself better
"whatever they might make would never be the same as that world of dark streets and bright dreams"
http://youtu.be/g-PwIDYbDqI
Biggest achievement? Not getting banned on revleft, lol.
Actually leftism has helped me in perhaps one of the ways that would make a bourgeois moralist most proud. Ever since I started posting on this site (my junior year in high school) my quality of writing improved significantly to the point where I got a perfect score on my SAT essay. So thank you leftism for making me more desirable to the bosses, and thank you jstrodel for allowing me to tell everyone.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski, Factotum
"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped." MLK
-fka Redbrother
There was a cop in my head - I killed him.
"It is slaves, struggling to throw off their chains, who unleash the movement whereby history abolishes masters." - Raoul Vaneigem
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." - Karl Marx
"What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is violent, but that it links insurrection and communisation." - Gilles Dauvé
In all seriousness, "the left" has allowed me to spend the better part of my adult life engaged in a combination of collective creative pursuits (music, art, gardening, etc.) and radical projects that have had either directly positive impacts (tent cities, antidumping blockades, serving food), or served to strategically strengthen longer-term movements to destroy capitalism and save the planet from total catastrophe (buildin' the party!). Often the distinction between all of those things has blurred - even during the last three years during which I've been sober.
Oh, yeah, and probably if I weren't on the left, I'd still be drinking my life away, or abusing antipsychotic tranquilizers. Feeling like there is an alternative to waiting passively for the apocalypse has been a key factor in resisting the temptation to melt my brain and die in a gutter.
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
The first company that I worked for in my early twenties was a non-union workplace when I began there. Along with a handful of other "leftists" we waged a year long battle with the company (and unenlightened workers) to bring a union into the location. 132 workers gained healthcare benefits, paid vacation, uniform allowance, paid sick time, and an incremental pay raise to be paid out over 3 years; unsafe conditions were identified and corrected.
I have been directly involved with unionizing 9 other locations in the New York metropolitan area, which provided hundreds of families with health benefits and other protections.
What have you accomplished personally?
Si tuviera mucho dinero......
