Hacker News Reader

Comment by spencerflem | Hacker News Reader

adding to this:

From the wikipeida: Smith has appeared on the Neoliberal Project's podcast multiple times[21] and was labeled the "Chief Neoliberal Shill" by the group in 201

And to be completely clear, noeliberalism and leftism are NOT one and the same. Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism. "Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism". Calling Noah (Or Biden, Or most mainstream democrat politicians) leftist is totally incorrect and one of my pet peeves that online commenters tend to do.

View on HN

> Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism.

Not necessarily true, see: anarchism. There are certainly anarcho-communists, but not every anarchist is a communist.

"Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism"—but that is just communism. No other ideology seeks communism as a goal, and socialism is just a stepping stone to communism, or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school.

> or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school.

You ever stop and think that the authoritarians may have been lying to you?

Lenin more or less defined "socialism" to mean that

Of course, that is how I knew the communists wrote those books.

> "Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism"—but that is just communism. No other ideology seeks communism as a goal, and socialism is just a stepping stone to communism, or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school.

Outside of communist thought (wherein socialism is a stage on the route to communism—and the only concrete stage to which there is a roadmap in most communist thought, though different schools of communism have different maps), socialism is a thing sought in its own right by socialists who are not communists.

Obviously, its unsurprising that a Soviet high school would only teach the dogma of the particular brand of communism then currently held to be orthodox in the USSR, but that's a rather limited view.

Yeah, imo communism is a subset of leftism, which includes other ideas all of which are defined by a general opposition to global free market capitalism.

I'm sure there's better definitions too, but neoliberals are not a leftist in any of them.

But you defined leftism as a subset of communism. Not the other way around

I've tried to describe it as a general opposition to current laissez-faire capitalism, if it came out differently I'm sorry

It could come from the misunderstanding that Communism is the only alternative to global capitalism, which isn't the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com