I will say that there is a marked and growing distain for mixed liberal ideologies. There is a lot of this idea that every socialist needs to be some kind of pure strain to count or take basically the Marxist definition as the only viable one. It kind of ignores a couple of centuries of Socialist thought. A lot of people basically think “means of production” means nothing less than everyone working in a co-op and discounts a lot of past socialist wins as “not socialism”. It’s an important thing to remember about Marx, the world he lived in was very different. Damn near everything at the time was privatized. Water, sanitation, post, fire service, public health and public health regulatory bodies… None of that existed under the perview of Government auspice. Socialist strains more to the legacy of Robert Owens, Daniel De Leon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and other ethical socialists have had significant wins. Some places took it further than others but the one thing that was allowed to happen in a lot of places was complacency. The 1980’s and 90’s created a liberal fervor that has continued to walk back a lot of significant wins made by the Socialist movements of the early 1900’s and the civil rights movements… But because a lot of the functions of Socialist wins have become the air we breathe people do not associate them with socialism anymore. The issue with peaceful integration is that private gains are always incentivized so complacency cannot be afforded.
It seems weirdly controversial but Non-Marxist socialists exist. Marx was one very popular voice in a sea of people with somewhat related but sometimes contradictory ideas. Some philosophers have been retro-branded as proto-socialists because they existed before Marx who just coined the term. Looking at his contemporaries there’s good reason why he became popular. A lot of what was out there was much drier, committed to peaceful reform. It didn’t tap into people’s anger or emotion in the same way. Right now we deal with a lot of that issue on the left. It is an old struggle. People who are bombastically angry and turning around and biting people for not being “enough” of something. Not fitting a narrow definition. Half my issue with Communist parties I have looked at joining is they aren’t great at being collaborative. Increasingly I have found the argument around “centrism” to stop meaning “people who support the basic status quo” which it seemed to have evolved to being interpretable as for a minute… To a more worrying definition about anyone willing to work across any ideological lines set down by the one guy people bothered to read.
This use of “centrism” as though it’s a plotable point on a map seems to me a worrying fiction. The post moves to create division and self satisfaction where none need exist.