> what's a leftist? who's a leftist? what's
> left movement? what is left struggle?
My definition of the left is people who fight on the side of working people, on the side of the socially oppressed. The left dies or declines (or gets into tragic troubles) periodically, but it also revives periodically.
Historically, the term "left" as used in politics comes from the physical layout of the French National Assembly after the revolution in 1789. The side of the Republicans was the left and the side of the Monarchists was the right, as viewed from the presidium.
The radical leftists (Jacobins), sensitive to the interest of the sans-culottes and encouraging direct mass action, sat in the "Mountain": the upper left area of the assembly. The Girondists, Monarchists without the Bourbons, adamantly opposed to mass action, were in the lower left area of the assembly, called Girondists because many of them were representatives of the Gironde, a district in southwest France.
IMO, the practical relation to the actual struggles of working people is the dividing criteria between the left and the non-left. Not ideology. To the extent they fight on the side of workers, the Catholic Worker, the Saul Alinsky type of organizers, the anarchists, the unions, etc. all are on the left. Like everything in practice, implementing any criterion to decide who's in, who's out, and who's in between, is complicated -- and then the line shifts.
The Marxist communists view themselves as a small subset of the left. I'm okay with the broader definition of a Marxist (not Marxist communists, but just Marxists) as, simply, anybody who thinks of herself to be a Marxist, a person sufficiently inspired by Marx's ideas to see herself as a Marxist. Clearly, under this definition, not all Marxists are in the left. The condition to belong to the left is to fight on the side of the oppressed. (And, again, this is not so clear-cut, since there are so many and even contradictory ways to fight on the side of the oppressed. So, the left is a contradictory mixture.)
The Marxist critique of the existing social order results from an effort to appropriate the world mentally from the perspective of the proletarian workers. Proletarians are dispossessed workers, the producers with the least to gain from the status quo, and therefore with the least attachment to it. The Marxist critique of society is necessarily subject to all the flaws and limitations of actual humans with their small or big powers engaging the world in their more or less confined historical contexts.
Communism is not the mere mechanical sum of the various struggles of working people, although it starts there. It's, instead, the practical movement of working people to appropriate the world and place it under their conscious control, to recreate social structures intentionally to meet their needs, etc. In other words, communism is a movement *with a groping direction*, even if the line is far from straight.
The impetus of the communist movement to appropriate and rebuild society flows from the essential nature of labor in production, it's an extension of it, as described in ch. 7, vol 1 of Capital.