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Loads of people these days use terms like “lefty” and “socialist” as if they’re insults, but in reality it’s good to be on the left, and it’s something to be proud of.
Public ownership
Apologies if you’re already familiar with this distinction between socialism and capitalism, but there are an awful lot of people out there who genuinely don’t seem to understand the difference, because the only definitions of words like socialism that they ever come across in the capitalist media are pejorative and deeply misleading.
The more left-wing a person is the more they believe in public ownership, and the more right-wing a person is, the more they believe that private individuals and corporations should run everything for their own profit.
Thus someone on the hard-left would think that pretty much everything should be run by the state.
A centre-left person would think that essential infrastructure and services like hospitals, schools, public transport, the police, energy infrastructure, water, and core national industries should be run in a democratically accountable not-for-profit manner, with plenty of room left for private industry in other sectors.
A right-wing person would believe in a minimal state where only basic functions like the police, army, schools, and courts should be run by the state.
And hard-right extremists would believe that literally everything (including schools, roads, the police, the army, and the courts) are up for grabs when it comes to private profiteering.
I’m a lefty because I believe that some things (health service, education, the justice system, energy, water, public transport, mail …) are simply too important to be used for profit extraction purposes by privatisation profiteers.
Workers’ rights
Besides public ownership, the other main concern of leftists is workers’ rights.
All of the workers’ rights that people tend to take for granted these days were actually won for us by our socialist forefathers.
Sick pay, holiday pay, parental leave, the eight hour working day, workplace safety, unfair dismissal laws, the two-day weekend …
The Trade Unions and political left who won us these rights in the past, and who seek to protect them in the present are on the side of the workers, while right-wing politicians are on the side of greedy and exploitative bosses.
Politics is a tug of war between right-wing politicians who want to undermine and scrap workers rights (like the right to take industrial action, or the right to take bad bosses to tribunals), while left-wing politics is focused on strengthening workers rights and improving working conditions.
I’m a lefty because I’m on the side of workers, not profiteering capitalist bosses.
Caricatures of the left
One of the most common tactics of the political right is to create absurd caricatures of the left, because it’s just so much easier to attack a straw man misrepresentation of something, than it is to properly explain your position (especially when your position is that you want privatisation profiteers to run pretty much everything, and a bonfire of workers’ rights for the benefit of greedy bosses).
It’s much easier to criticise the left if you pretend that their main concerns are giving handouts to idle layabouts and pushing “woke nonsense”.
If you think about it for a second then you realise that capitalism and landlordism are the ideologies that are predicated on providing passive income to the idle minority anyway.
Capitalism and landlordism benefit people who think that they deserve money for nothing just because they bought up shares in privatised public services at a fraction of their true value, or because they took out mortgages to hoard a load of affordable housing, then bleed other people dry to cover the repayments and bankroll their lifestyles.
If you think back to the vast bailouts that were handed out to the reckless financial sector gamblers who trashed the economy in 2008, the right-wing claim that “socialism is fine until they run out of other people’s money” seems to apply much better to capitalism, right?
The capitalist addiction to other people’s money becomes especially bad when right-wing deregulation allows them to build such powerful monopolies and oligopolies that they can ransom the government for massive bailouts at the first sign of trouble by claiming to be “too big to fail”.
It’s telling that many of the right’s most common criticisms of the left are things that the right are guilty of themselves.
I’m proud to be a leftist because I realise that most of the right’s criticisms of socialism are spurious, and that many of them actually work much better as criticisms of capitalism.
Moderates, centrists, and the fake-left
Much of the confusion over what the left stands for these days is caused by the actions of the fake-left.
When left-wing political parties are captured by the right, they usually describe themselves as “moderate” or “centrist”, but what that usually means in practice is that they adhere to right-wing economic ideas like privatisation profiteering, austerity, financial sector deregulation, public service cutbacks, turning the social security system into a Kafkaesque nightmare …
When people see ostensibly left-wing parties inflicting the same damaging policies as the right, is it any wonder that so many these days tend to dismiss politicians as being “all the same”?
Why would people think that socialist policies like public ownership, better pay, better housing, and improved workers rights would improve their lives, when the fake-left uses the old branding of a socialist party to gain power, then refuses to deliver these things because they’re in hock to millionaire donors who bankroll their operation and shower them in freebies.
I’m a lefty because I can tell the difference between genuine left-wing politicians, and the fake-left interlopers who pretend to be on the side of ordinary people when they want votes, then deliver the policies of the right when they’re in power.
Social liberalism
Leftists and social liberals often end up on the same side of things because they tend to share a lot of common ground.
It’s easy to see why someone who believes in improving worker’s rights would also be into socially liberal causes like reducing child poverty; providing for sick and disabled people; protecting minorities from bigotry and racism; etc.
The classic example of social liberals and the left working together happened when Britain’s social security system was devised by a Liberal politician called William Beveridge, and then implemented under the transformative post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee.
There’s a lot of confusion about liberals and liberalism though, because economic liberalism is very different stuff to social liberalism.
If social liberalism is about improving the rights of ordinary people, economic liberalism is about improving the rights of wealthy capitalists and landlords to ruthlessly exploit ordinary people for profit.
The confusion is compounded by the way Americans tend to use the word “liberal” as a synonym for “socialist”, when in reality liberalism is split between the left-liberalism of improving rights and conditions for ordinary people, and the increasingly dominant right-liberalism of prioritising the rights of capitalists and landlords to exploit the rest of us.
I’m a lefty and proud of it because I support the social liberalism of improving the lot of ordinary people, not the economic liberalism of improving the lot of the already extremely wealthy.
Public opinion
Given how capitalist media keeps telling us how awful the left is, you would have thought that the majority of ordinary people would hate the policies of the left.
The reality is that the general public overwhelmingly agree with the left-wing position that many things are too important to be used for capitalist profiteering purposes.
With the overwhelming public support for the idea of public ownership of things like water, energy, schools, mail, the NHS, and police, you would’ve thought that politicians would find it hard to privatise such things, and keep them under the control of privatisation profiteers.
But the Westminster establishment cabal is a closed ideological echo chamber full of ideological extremists in the right-wing pro-privatisation minority.
The ostensibly left-wing Labour Party refuses to boot the privatisation profiteers out of our water and energy infrastructure, and is content to allow private academy spivs to continue draining resources out of our schools to fund their lavish salaries.
They even signed off an insane deal to allow Royal Mail to fall under the ownership of a Czech billionaire!
The Tory government before them carved the NHS open for the benefit of privatisation profiteers, and even privatised parts of the police (forensic science) and justice system (prisons, court rooms, court translation services …) despite the fact that only a vanishingly small minority of people are fanatical enough to think that the police and justice system should be run as a profit-seeking enterprises.
What’s most remarkable about all of this is that the pro-privatisation ideological fanatics in Westminster consistently portray the left as a bunch of raving ideological extremists.
They push this backwards narrative of left-wing extremism, even though it’s the left that want to give the public the public ownership policies they want, and it’s the right who keep doing insane and deeply unpopular things like privatising the police and justice system; giving away our schools to profiteering spivs; allowing parasitical private profiteers to infest the NHS; giving the French government ownership of our nuclear power plants; and letting a Czech billionaire have our Royal Mail.
According to the establishment cabal, the sensible moderates are the ones doing the insane things that you hate, and the awful ideological extremists are the lefties who want to do the sensible things that you like!
I’m proud to be a lefty because that means I agree with the vast majority of British people that our country would be much better if more things were run as not-for-profit public services, rather than for profit extraction purposes.
Environmentalism
Caring about the environment isn’t an exclusively left-wing thing. It’s easily conceivable that someone could have fairly right-wing views on the economy, migration or whatever, but also oppose greedy private water companies boosting their profits by dumping sewage in our rivers and coastal waters instead of treating it.
But again it does come down to left vs right.
The majority of people believe that some aspects of the environment we live in are too important to be used for capitalist profiteering, while a radical extreme-right minority hate the idea that capitalism should be constrained in any way.
Unfortunately this radical-right minority have a wildly disproportionate level of influence in our political and media classes.
If it’s profitable for capitalists to dump millions of tons of plastic in our oceans; pump raw sewage into our rivers; fill our atmosphere with pollution; and concrete over our natural environment, that’s what they will support.
If thinking that the natural environment is too precious to be ravaged by capitalism makes me a lefty, then so be it. That’s what I believe.
National pride
What’s patriotic about flogging off our publicly owned infrastructure and services at a tiny fraction of their true value (what they’d cost to build from scratch), especially when our privatised national assets keep ending up in the hands of overseas governments and foreign billionaires?
What’s patriotic about letting greedy privatisation profiteers pump billions of litres of raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters, purely because it’s more profitable to do that than invest in and properly maintain sewage treatment facilities?
What’s patriotic about allowing millions of full-time British workers to fall below the poverty line due to the insatiable greed of low-pay employers and exploitative private landlords?
What’s patriotic about making British kids grow up in poverty, with lives blighted by lack of opportunity?
What’s patriotic about defunding our local governments and public services to such an extent that the country looks like a tip, and accessing the services and social support we paid for through our taxes becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare?
I’m proud to be a lefty because I’m appalled at what the right has done to our country since 1979, and because I think Britain deserves better.
Conclusion
I’m proud to be a lefty because actually care about my country, and the people who live in it.
Right-wingers love to mouth off about the left, but most of their criticisms of the left actually apply much better to their own exploitative capitalist ideology.
They love to pretend that the left is unpopular and extreme, but it’s actually their extremist ideology of flogging the country off to privatisation profiteers that’s unpopular and opposed by the majority of British people.
I believe that some things are simply too important to be ravaged by capitalism and used for profit-extraction purposes, and if that makes me, and the majority of British people who agree with me on this, radically left-wing, then so be it.
I’m left-wing and proud of it, and you should be too.
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