I hope that it is obvious, even from just a post or two, that we are leftists. What does that mean, though? Below is a list of issues and where we stand on them.
War
As I am writing this, the United States has been at war in the middle east for over five years. We have killed countless civilians (many of them most likely innocent) and lost the lives of thousands of our own soldiers. This war is about resources, and it is our presence in the area that is the problem. The only solution that makes any sense is withdrawal.
There are very few situations in which military force is the proper solution, Darfur, for example. The fact that we are willing to spend over a trillion dollars to wage a war against a country that was not a threat to us, while at the same time we are not willing to lift a finger to save people from genocide in Africa, indicates our inability to act for the good of the global population, and therefore we do not support any war unless convinced otherwise.
Immigration
Right now, the US is facing what many politicians, on both sides of the aisle, are calling an immigration crisis. The fact is that, with the exception of Native Americans and people brought here in bondage from Africa, that the population of the United States consists of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Our country was built and is maintained by immigrants. To deny others what we have helped ourselves to is hypocritical. That being said, if one did want to reduce the flow of immigrants, the way to do it is not with a fence, but rather by improving their economies (abolishing the NAFTA would be a good start to that). After all, who but someone desperate would be willing to attempt the dangerous border crossing?
Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, Classism
This country and this world have far from escaped the horrors of oppression across the spectrum of real and imagined differences between fellow humans. Class, “race,” gender, sexuality/sexual preference, religion, culture, and “nationality” continue to be dividing lines upon which those in power pull apart humanity, discarding what is common in favor of what is superficially different. As leftists and as people we find any division of humans along such artificial lines as gender and race an insult and a dangerous act that must be stopped. To distract people from their commonalities and their possibilities as humans by highlighting superficial and often invented differences is a widespread and effective tool of oppression, and recognizing and fighting this tool of those in power wherever it appears is imperative.
Nationalism
The concept of nation-states and nationalism has dominated the modern era; we, however, find nationalism an outmoded, artificial, and divisive model that serves to cut off any real global interconnection and replace it with artificial competition and manufactured hate. Key to any successful struggle and to any successful reshaping of the world along more egalitarian and liberated lines is the end of the idea of the nation-state and the end of the nationalist model. We firmly believe in an internationalism that is made fully possible by the communications and transport technology of the twenty-first century, as well as an internationalism that recognizes the faulty and regressive division of humanity along geographic lines.
More issues will be added to this list when we get a chance.
