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As someone who was raised as a socialist, who imbibed the history of the movement and the legends of Trades Unions struggle, I was appalled by what had become of Leftism in the 1970s in England. The Left (and especially the leadership) was dishonest, grasping, parasitic, short-termist, materialistic, hedonic, lazy... it was, in short, almost the opposite of how it had begun.
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(Because there was much that was good in early socialism, and many good and even superior men were among its leaders - even though the atheism, envy and all-round potential for destruction was always there for those acute enough to perceive it: the Left was, in other words, a slippery-slope.)
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The 1970s parody of Union-based socialism (rooted among the skilled working classes) became discredited; but this only opened the door to elite-led post-sixties New Leftism which was about 'identity politics' - especially sex and race.
The New Left poster victims were not the starving coal miners or agricultural workers; but upper class female professionals who suffered insidious slights and invisible barriers to their career success and status.
And then Britain imported a primary racial concern from the USA (although this had to wait until after the Left had imported sufficient suitable 'races' by de facto open door mass immigration, so that it could then place these groups at the centre of its focus).
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For the original Old Left socialists in Britain, women's and racial issues - and the environment - had been subsumed within the egalitarianism of socialism; and the Labour movement was hostile to this kind of identity politics for the very good reason that they were intelligent and honest enough to perceive that the primacy of sex and race would tend to subvert the proper focus of socialism - which was primarily economic (i.e. concerned with the production and distribution of 'goods').
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However, I do not think there were many on the Left who could ever have imagined a day when the Left would place its priority not with the working class, not with women, and not with race - but with 'gender equality'; yet that issue has emerged (in this late phase of extreme decadence) as the primary one on the Left - top of the pecking-order; such that implementation of the latest phase of the sexual revolution now justifies official, governmental threats of discipline by starvation, attacks on the proletariat, on women, and even (what would certainly have been called) 'racism'.
http://anglicanmainstream.org/confusion-worse-confounded
Even just a decade ago, who could ever have imagined that gender issues would trump racism? And do so so comprehensively that (apparently) nobody even notices? Amazing. This is a measure of the sheer overwhelming power of the sexual revolution in its current manifestation as gender rights - within the utterly Leftist Western political establishment; the issue of sexual equality now trumps race and feminism as well as the working class - all three of them thrown 'under the bus'.
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This ought not to provide us with any comfort however. The orcs of the Left are always squabbling, infighting, and slaughtering each other - but they will unite in a trice to fight Christians and traditionalists.
It is a sign of the strength, the absolute domination of the Left among the power-holders of The West that such extreme foolishness, frivolity, selfishness, decadence and so great an extremity of corruption has now become unmasked and established: that whim, spite, envy, rage and hatred are now officially sanctioned principles; as is consistent with a world dominated by the Mass Media and where the population is addicted to the Mass Media - and will therefore necessarily embrace the trivial grasping fecklessness that is intrinsic to the modern Mass Media.
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