Yep. We should fight for a future where it’s understood that being a “leftist” automatically means you don’t support authoritarian regimes, but we’re not there yet. In the meantime we have to “own the problem”, at least to the extent of acknowledging the presence of these ideas.
Obviously there are some exceptions to this; for example I think it’s pretty meaningless to talk about Galloway as being in any sense “on the left” now, despite the “Marxist-Leninist” copilots of his new vehicle.
But on the whole the “these people aren’t really leftists” line is just a bit too easy. We can say that, but... Jacobin/Tribune still publishes them, the Morning Star still receives thousands of pounds from our unions and enjoys the patronage of left-Labour MPs, so...
...there’s no real shortcut around this. We have to acknowledge that these ideas are present on the left, and in many ways continue to shape what’re understood as “leftist” ideas. The only solution is to confront the ideas head on.
TL/DR: We can only redraw the ideological boundaries of the left via a sustained effort of political-educational campaigning, not by simply declaring them to have been redrawn.
