It should never have been possible for an ideology of this quality to co-opt all these orthogonal communities and organizations and workplaces. This climate of fear, intimidation, and dog-whistle-whistling is unacceptable if we're going to have a decent civilization. I think those of you who disagree with leftist ideology need to be a lot more vocal about it. When your employer, of all things, tries to shove this ideology down your throat, say No. Hard no. Make it clear that you're no more interested in such indoctrination than you would be in a Scientology brown bag or a mandatory prayer break. You need to surface your ethical and substantive disagreement with this political ideology, and to make it crystal clear that it is in fact a partisan political ideology that is being "taught".
This has gone on long enough. It's time to push leftists into the normal cult boundaries that any civilization must have. I think we need to take civilization a bit more seriously than we have – I wouldn't assume that civilization can survive arbitrary ideological assaults. And the stress that leftists are causing everyone, including themselves, is a non-trivial harm and ethically relevant.
Indeed if you try and figure out where the line is between leftism and left wing politics, it rapidly becomes very difficult. Left wing political parties at least in the Anglosphere are all fully on board with this new leftism of racism, hatred of Anglo culture and history, and all that comes with it. To take a stand in e.g. the workplace against leftism by arguing it is an intolerant and hateful ideology is equivalent to arguing that all left wing voters are supporters of intolerant and hateful ideology. But many of them are not fully on board with all that stuff, even though their chosen representatives are, so to make progress here requires a way to distinguish between people who vote left because they want a higher minimum wage or something like that (reasonable, not the enemy), and people who vote left because they want statues to all be abolished, conservatives to be driven underground and white people turned into second class citizens in their own countries.
That in turn would require consensus around a term that describes the former, socially acceptable state of left wing politics: back when it was a sort of pro-big-government, pro-regulation, primarily economic belief system. Debates about economics and the role of government are far less fraught and far more intellectual than debates about the intrinsic worth of people based on gender or race, so splitting the left cleanly into the parts that want such debate and the parts that want ideological attacks and no-platforming seems like a necessary first step.
Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics. Thus the traditional wings get pulled along by the new strains, as they lack the intellectual and linguistic framework to push back or separate themselves from the parasitical takeover of their institutions.
Interestingly, Europe seems to have less of a problem with that. In Europe it's still common to describe the more classical centrist positions as "social democracy". This phrase is is widely understood to mean classical left wing politics focused on economics, welfare, higher taxes etc, but without the overt focus on race and gender.
They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.
> Unfortunately whilst there is an abundance of words to describe the new left wing politics (woke, wokeism, leftism, identity politics, critical theory, neo-Marxism, "anti-racism", third wave feminism etc) there aren't many terms which clearly describe the old left wing politics
Yes, there are. You even used one of them with a “neo-” in front of it to describe new left-wing politics.
Also, many of your “new left wing" labels are inaccurate; “identity politics”, particularly, isn't specifically left-wing; there are progressive identity politics, center-right neoliberal identity politics (the dominant ones in the Democratic Party, which serve as a capitalist distraction from left-wing economic justice issues), and right-wing identity politics (in the US, various strands of White and/or Christian supremacism/nationalism are prominent here.)
Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries. Yes, there were fringe wings that were openly Marxist but most left wing politics was committed to incremental change through the ballot box, not total revolution.
They aren't “very close”, they are exact synonyms.
At least I perceive shades of difference in how they're normally used.
"Leftism" is used to refer to a rather extreme, virulent ideology, typified by the conviction that conservatism of any kind of a sort of evil that needs to be wiped out or suppressed. There are no mainstream parties in the west formally espousing leftism, although in the USA the Democrats are now becoming dangerously close to that with their explicitly racial/gender based appointment of Kamala Harris, and some of their recent demands to take Fox News off air.
Left wing politics is a far more mainstream movement found throughout the democratic world. Its focus is typically on economic issues that affect the working classes, they advocate for nationalisation and/or the general pulling of power to the centre, they recognise the legitimacy of their conservative oppositions and in many European countries often enter into coalitions or power sharing arrangements with them. Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair. Left wing politicians have up until very recently not been overtly promoting "leftism" in the hard-core sense seen today, but that's now changing.
To me the key difference is whether someone recognises disagreement as legitimate. Even when in very strong political positions, throughout most of the 20st century left wing parties have not tried to suppress their opposition. The exceptions are of course the communist countries, but those parties are hardly referred to as left wing, even though technically they were very much so.