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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed? I'm not aware of this having ever worked out, but 'well grounded in history' is not a criticism that can be levied at anti-capitalists(which is well established among the activist portion of the labour party) anyways. It seems like 'intentionally leading to a far right government' is a thing which theory would expect lefty activists to occasionally do, and Keir probably doesn't have the party discipline to stop it.

isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed?

This is basically the thesis of Lenin's book What is to be done.

I can also think of a historical example where in a band of revolutionary socialists embedded within a wider workers movement were able to execute Lenin's plan to great effect. Unfortunately for Lenin and his movement, the socialist affinity for back-stabbing reared it's ugly head and the wider left has spent the intervening decades desperately trying to convince both themselves and everyone else that the evil mustache man was never a true leftist to begin with.

All sides have their accelerationists who imagine that just x% more of what they hate will shock the masses out of their false consciousness. What that strategy ignores is that the polity can remain unfavourable longer than you can remain politically relevant.

To "accelerate the contradictions" (or in other popular phrasing "heighten the contradictions" or "sharpen the contradictions") seems to be a Leninist idea originally. And to be fair, Lenin did get the total revolution he wanted rather than the more incremental improvements that occurred (and that leave extremists fuming) elsewhere.

There seems to be a continuous spectrum of these ideas in Marxist (and probably wider leftist) thought, though. The idea that you can bring about The Revolution faster by making things worse shades into the idea that you just shouldn't try to delay The Revolution by trying to make things incrementally better, and both are similar to but distinct from the idea that you can't do much either way because prophecy psychohistory dialectical materialism proves that The Revolution will come when it's destined to regardless.

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