this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Sure. Left wing for a president, even the left wing of the ruling capitalist class. Not the left wing of the working class.
But you're absolutely right. He was the guy who did the thing at the time that was needed to do the thing. History isn't made by great men. It is made by workers. My point is he sided with the winners.
But he hadn't adopted the sensibilities and interests of the working class. It just so happened that a large enough section of the ruling class agreed with him at the time, not completely without his presidential influence, but that's the whole problem right? FDR was hardly the first member of the the ruling class who had won over to the side of workers, many great socialists, including Marx, Lenin, were themselves members of the bourgeoisie. But there is a canyon of difference between the guy who led a revolution in Russia, and the guy who stopped one in america.
As far as presidents go, he's not a slave owning mass murder, pedophile, complete nepo-baby, etc., the man wasn't evil as far as presidents go, but he was only evef momentarily and conditionally on the side of workers. Populism isnt necessarily leftism
You're doing literally everything in your power to not recognise this guy as left wing to the point of absurdity. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than: sides with workers, left wing. Sides against workers, right wing. Being left wing isn't some special club that only you and all the people you like can join. It's a broad political stance largely defined by the politics of the time. There are plenty of terrible leftists.
Part of the New Deal was the NLRB, which neutered unions by requiring they distance themselves from communism and socialism if they want to be recognized and protected. Essentially killing off the groups of people that fought for the labor rights won under the New Deal. Democrats, like they always do, co-opted the message of unions and neutralized their threat.
A class analysis is not absurd, it is based on actual conditions, not idealized ones. I said he was the left wing of the ruling class, but he was objectively even for his time, not in the left wing of the working class.
The interests of the capitalist class are in direct conflict with what is in the interests of the workers. Capitalists want to pay workers less to make more profit, workers want to be paid more.
Don't mischaracterize me as saying the left is a club and I'm the gatekeeper. FDR was a gatekeeper. He let some white people through, but as I believe was stated elsewhere in these comments, he locked up a million Japanese farmers in concentration camps so that american farmers could buy up their farms for a song because they couldn't compete with Japanese agricultural practices. He aided the forces that dismantled the american workers movement during ww2, he turned all common lands into federal property, to be given out to railroad tycoons and mineral interests. Blacks and immigrants were mostly excluded from the new deal. Social democracy for one group over all others isn't left wing, it's fascism. Just because you refuse to weigh facts on their actual merit, rather than idealism, treating history as a buffet where you can pick and choose the dishes you prefer, leaving the rest, doesn't make me a left gatekeeper.
He made conciliation with the workers with his left hand but with his right he worked against us, for the benefit of his class. The left isnt a club you join by saying certain things. It isnt a set of beliefs we never act on. It is a practical program for taking power from the rich and delivering to the workers, forever.
What is absurd here is why you're so committed to lionizing any president. I even said he wasn't that bad, but I don't have to be a fan, or believe he was a part of our movements. If you deny that we live in a class society, then that is absurd. There is practically no framework to determine what is real in our society and politics without a class analysis. Without it you believe that it was good and leftist that FDR gave us incomplete rights for few, instead of the workers winning full rights for all