People should stop excoriating the western left or at least define who it is you mean. Go ahead; name names.
Do you mean the left who’ve been sitting on their asses for the past nearly 30 years chiding others that there is no antiwar movement? The left who refuse unity on life & death questions like war because of doctrinal disputes over the Russian Revolution? The left who claim Russia is still a communist country? The left who can’t believe Stalin ever murdered dissidents or operated gulags? The left who are outraged Russia was removed from the UN Human Rights Council but not Saudi Arabia? The left who don’t object to capitalist inequality if the guy running the show talks a good game? The left who can no longer tell the difference between revolution against dictatorship & counterrevolution?
Maybe you mean the ones who come to antiwar protests to break windows of local banks like they were taking down the Bastille. Or the ones whose political understanding is higher than Trump supporters but lower than the Occupy movement.
Perhaps you mean the tiny little feudal fiefdoms that call themselves socialist parties & are run by a guy with a trust fund who bosses everybody else around, dictates what they’re allowed to think, & speaks for hours to rapt disciples like it was a Tony Robbins Seminar.
There is no western left. Get over it. There is no western left because most veterans haven’t moved off their asses in 30 years (maybe 40); because too many got drained by pointless, internecine, sectarian disputes; because they don’t know how to talk or think like normal people & do that hammer & sickle routine; because they no longer debate politics but rely on celebrity leftists & academics to tell them what to think; because they’ve gotten so damn lazy & ingratiating & prefer to blame theory for all the problems rather than face up to their expiration date.
This is my 50th year as a committed activist. I’ve put up with a lot of crap in that time but I’ve also worked with untold numbers of young & old in several social movements inspired by the ideas of social transformation & who worked tirelessly to be a part of that historic mission. I refuse to give up on the emergence of a new movement. For the record, when it does emerge it will be democratic to the marrow; take my advice & run like hell to get away if it isn’t. I also refuse to identify emaciated corpses as “leftists” when they’re walking around with placards defending Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians as a freedom struggle.