i may or may not expound on this, but i want to try to boil down the problems with leftism down to a few basic statements with as much explanatory power as possible. So here goes.

Problem 1: Leftism isn't really for the oppressed and marginalized - it's for people who aren't oppressed and aren't marginalized to ideate themselves as such. Now don't get me wrong, leftism does attract many people who are legitimately, materially oppressed and marginalized.

But those aren't who leftism is *for*. It's for people who Marx would term "bourgeois" so that they can commodify oppression. This is why you see so few people from oppressed and marginalized groups who have actual power within these movements.

Marx himself married into nobility, and Engels was the son of a factory owner. Does that mean that they can't have legitimately cared for oppressed people? No. But it does mean that one cannot see them as the end all and be all of understanding a struggle they weren't a part of.

The result of this is that leftists are prone to seeing struggle through a sort of commodified gaze, designed for the aggrandizement of the leftist, while the actual victims of the struggle are almost like zoo animals or lab rats, as opposed to people with their own agency.

This brings me to problem 2: Leftism is dogmatic, because it's often a way to work through their personal issues (for example, with parents/religion). What this leads to is the need to cultivate a sense of righteousness, and it is very difficult to be both righteous and flexible.

Because of problem 1, when the actual wants and needs of the marginalized come in conflict with leftist dogma, leftist dogma wins out, because the primary motivation is not uplifting, say, Black and Brown subaltern populations, but through upholding their own sense of right.

In addition, because of problem 1, leftists, especially white leftists, feel little need to work through their internalized biases and bigotries, picked up in a racist, misogynistic, queerphobic society, because they can cover it in a veil of leftist dogma and go on their way.

So what does this lead to in practical terms? It leads to one set of leftists screaming at Black women for not voting for a socialist, and to leftists calling Syrian exiles terrorists, while another set tolerates this, and both sets thinking they're in the moral right for this.

Yeah yall knew I had to loop it back to Sanders and Syria eventually. But I'm not quite done. Because there is a problem 3 which again stems from problem 1 and 2 - namely that leftism operates in a cult-like fashion.

Because leftism is primarily about ego defense for mostly bourgeois people that make up its "leaders", and because it wraps this up in hardline, quasi-religious ideological dogma, it needs to create an atmosphere where attacking or questioning leftism is grounds for ostracism.

Furthermore, it actively seeks to make people socially, financially and mentally dependent on its structures, which has the dual effect of both further suppressing dissent, and incentivizing people not to leave "leftism" entirely.

This is most powerfully salient in online trans communities, which are often explicitly leftist (as in, they ban anyone who is *not* leftist), who are legitimately marginalized and oppressed, and thus targeted for recruitment en masse.

As we all know, cults systematically target people who are vulnerable. What's different here is that the cult structure is decentralized in nature, as opposed to being organized through say, a single charismatic leader. But ultimately, this doesn't change the nature of problem 1.

Marginalized people are simply means to an end for leftism, including those marginalized people that become its adherents. The primary goal is power and self-aggrandizement for leftism as a movement, and very little else.

If the Left were capable of responding to the wants and needs of marginalized people, it would support different things, and organize in different ways (for example, it would seek to augment the preexisting organization of Black people, and back freedom struggles worldwide)

There are some other variables, for example, like the Left's propensity to be used as a tool of foreign policy by authoritarian states, but I believe I've covered most of the problems in this thread.

I will also add that these problems apply in large part to "normal" white liberals and social democrats - they hold liberal beliefs not out of altruism for the marginalized, but for a desire to feel righteous about it.

This by itself would be fine - there's no need to expect perfect altruism from allies - but because of the tendencies towards ego defense, their actual actions will tend to be self-serving and counterproductive to their stated values.

The big question? Is it fixable? In my view, no. Leftism is unfixable, at least in a form we would recognize as leftism. In addition, white liberalism accepts far too many premises of leftism at the moment to be a viable replacement.

Our best hope is, for lack of a better term, Black liberalism (though ideally, we would augment it with a strong sense of radical internationalism - liberation does not stop at the water's edge, sorry Barack) in the same tradition as the Civil Rights Movement.

This, of course does not exclude non-Black people from participation - but it does demand that, at least in the American context, leadership be ceded first to Black people (especially Black women), then to other POC, and then to other marginalized people.

In short, the only way to escape the framework I described is to consciously subordinate your organizing and political action to marginalized people, and act not for the sake of ego and dogma, but in the material interest of those who face oppression.