This is not to say that I think they are equally bad or that there should be a “united front” or some non-sense like that!
It just seems like the traditional left / right distinction, even when extended by the authoritarian / libertarian axis doesn’t seem to reflect political opinions a very well anymore (and maybe never did).
As a shower-thought I recently considered “rooted” Vs. “mobile” as less ideologically loaded and more descriptive terms of the actually different mind-sets people seem to have. This seems to fit to many aspects of the ideological divide found in today’s world.
Any other suggestions?
P.S.: of course just inventing new terms & definitions doesn’t change anything (and NewSpeak is certainly a danger), but keep using outdated and overloaded terms is also not the solution.
Left and right never really meant anything, and the “political compass” is even more of a distortion of it.
“Rooted” vs. “mobile” does not mean anything, either.
The only distinctions in political opinions that matter on a fundamental basis are:
- Economic system and class interests you support
- Revolutionary/reformist/reactionary
- Idealist/materialist or to an extent, progressive/conservative, which end up being related.
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Class interests you support, not those you objectively have. :D
The economic and class interest are very much related to how “rooted” both in the physical and the mental sense you are. See also “social mobility” as a commonly used term.
Same for the other distinctions you mention. They can be well described in how flexible your way of life and mind-set is, and how far per-existing conditions root you down and give incentives to perpetuate the status-quo.
Sure they’re related, but that doesn’t mean they’re fundamental. I am sure all of these points also relate to how strong your gender roles are, but that doesn’t make gender roles a fundamental axis on a political scale.
What we need to concern ourselves with is not the extents which political opinions form, but the roots: and the roots are, have always been, and will always be, class interests.
Class distinctions are quite hard to do these days… either they are overly mechanistic and thus put people in the “working class” that are ideologically strongly opposed to measures meant to improve the conditions for “working class” people, or they end up subdividing classes to a point where they stop making much sense.
Ideology has nothing to do with class. Someone is ‘mechanistically’, materially, part of the working class if they are not owners of means of production, and thus their class interests are(, with a few exceptions like labour aristocracy,) those of the working class.
There is a difference between perceived interests and objective interests, of course, and that’s why ideology does not necessarily relate to class status.
That’s why I also said in which class interests they are acting. A proletarian can absolutely act in the interest of the bourgeoisie, for example, a fascist worker unknowingly fighting to cement private ownership of the means of production.
There are essentially two mechanics: your actual class, and the class your politics benefit. Of course there are reactionary workers and idealist capitalists who starry-eyedly seemingly support working class interests.
There are only four main classes: Lumpenproletariat, proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, and bourgeoisie. What individuals fall on on a political scale has more to do with their opinions.
That kind of thinking is exactly what I meant with “overly mechanistic”. Sure, you can write a nice book about that and feel smug that you really understood the hidden forces at play. But it doesn’t help with real-world coalition building and also negates human agency, similar to how the “Homo Economicus” simplification does.
What are “means of production” in 2021 exactly? It’s not 1740, it’s not about who owns the waterwheel driven textile looms.
It might be true that socialism/communism merely chose a poor phrase and that there’s a greater underlying truth to it that is poorly explained, or it might be true that instead the phrase is truly descriptive of circumstances that are no longer relevant to modern life. But if the latter is the case, then socialism itself is irrelevant today.
So it behooves you to either come up with a better phrase that is more descriptive or at least be willing to explain what you mean by it. Anyone with a digital device has “the means of production” to produce the sorts of things bought and sold today in the United States, and most of the rest of the developed and developing world.
You’re almost some sort of socialist romantic, pining for the days of when your labels actually held any descriptive or explanatory value whatsoever.
… Are you aware that in 2021 you still need… factories… and land… to produce things? You know,… the means to do that that only a select few can own?
How do you even come to the conclusion that the means of production of all things are no longer existant? Since when have we stopped relying on workshops, factories and agriculture?
to produce things?
Clinton switched us over to the “service economy” before you were born. You’re typing your reply on a machine in which you can learn to create ephemeral programming that even for the minimally competent would earn you $100,000/year, but in some rare cases could see you become a multimillionaire.
So no, I don’t think you need land. Or factories.
Or maybe you guys just have a fetish to be working in some machine shop stamping out sheet metal parts for your East German Trebants. I can’t tell. But it’s clear that you don’t live in the real world like everyone else.
Hell, if that’s your idea of “the means of production” then even Jeff Bezos is as poor as me. He certainly doesn’t own any of the factories in China, nor any of the land they’re buiit on.
Sorry for the long response, TL DR is left is for new model of society that never existed, right is for wanting to keep the system as it is or going back to a real or fantasized past.
I love the way tzi, a french video-maker, puts it. So If you understand french, I really encourage you to check his videos on the subject : https://tube.aquilenet.fr/w/eAKCNAU98Y854wGkkw6y9g https://tube.aquilenet.fr/w/mYKrkYq4KgSguEoWJ9RQ3b
For english-speakers, I will do my best to try and explain what I think :
Historically, in France, Left/Right distinction comes from the french revolution, where the representatives of the bourgeoisie gathered in an semi-circular chamber in front of the king. There was a division between hardcore royalists, faithful to the king symbolically sat to the right of the king, the “reliable side” as in “right-hand man”, and those who wanted to balance power between the king and representatives of the bourgeoisie, to his left. As the debate shifted, there where even people that promoted to overthrow the king, and created a republic. They sat even more to the left, the “far-left”.
And this logic kept on going. As the hardcore royalists lost more and more influence, they got squished to the far left, pushed by the growing number of soft royalist and republican grew. Later socialism began to appear, creating a new far left, pushing the liberals to the right.
So if we what to try to understand why it was such a strong distinction that people brought those words to the global political vocabulary, I think a definition of left and right that can still be useful today would be :
Left : People who think we should try new models of society that never existed before. They are against the current regime and economic structure and do not want to go back to a regime that already existed. In that way, communists or anarchists are to the left, they are “progressive anti-libertarian”.
Right : People who think we should stick to the political regime and economic structure, or go back to an ancient one, that did exist, or that they fantasize. Conservatives are to the right, European royalists are also to the right, and fascists and nazi are obviously to the right, wanting to get back to mythical values of white racist ethostates that only ever existed in their dream.
This definition has the advantage to be relevant through time because it is relative to the point of history we are in. That explain why republicans where once “far left”, and are now clearly to the right of the spectrum. The whole “left and right doesn’t mean anything anymore” is true since the republican went from left to right decades or even centuries ago if we do not account for the society evolution that makes the progressive ideas for yesterday becoming conservative ideas as they won. Yesterday, royalists were the right and the bourgeoisie was the left, today the bourgeoisie is the right and socialists are the left, tomorrow hopefully the socialism will be to the right of the political spectrum, and new critics will emerge to the left of it. The lucrative property will disappear from the political debate as feudalism has before and will be a thing of the past ! We will be able to focus our political energy around other subject that will divide us once again, and hopefully this social progress will keep on going !
I can’t say I fully agree with this evolutionary definition. It kinda implies that things necessarily move towards a more open society, while it is perfectly conceivable that new people with clearly right-wing ideas push the progression in the other direction. Take for example the socialists in the post-soviet eastern European states… by your definition they are already “right-wing”, while the neo-liberal reformists that took over would be the current “left”.
It is also a bit too one dimensional… take for example the ecological parties (“greens”). Objectively they are in every sense of your definition “right” as they strive to preserve the ecology or (mostly) want to go back to an imagined past of a health nature. Yet in praxis they are usually very much against the established right-wing thinking (although a certain co-opting has taken place in recent years).
Ok, I agree with your criticism, but my defense is that I tried to be short (I know it’s not obvious…)
To me, the USSR failed to build the socialism I defend. I don’t want to return to the society as it was during USSR. So to me, absolute defenders of the USSR model are closer to ring-wing than in many people definition. But I assume this view. I think this defense is build around a dreamed and glorified past, that I don’t think really existed as they present it. I defend a socialism that assume the error of the past attempts, and try to create new solutions. But I understand this is a controversial position.
Concerning the ecologist, I think they are a great example ! I think there are two very different way to think ecology. There is a very right-wing ecology, the defend a return to a dreamed past where man and nature lived in harmony, and this is bullshit to me. Survivalists communities are full of that kind of people. They are often against social progress because it is “against nature”, so anti-abortion, often racist because race differences are “natural”, etc. There is another ecology, left winged, that do not dream of a better past, but want to build a viable future. They do not care about retrieve a lost past state of society, and are willing to build a new society because they think that it is needed to save our environment. I agree with them.
About the one-dimensional aspect of it, I don’t deny it. I think left-right distinction are a one-dimensional notion by design, and it would be absurd to try and give a multidimensional meaning to words that literally mean to opposite direction. But I do not think the left-right notion should be the only notion to discuss politics. I think it is a very useful one, so I defend it’s pertinence, but would never be stupid enough to think this is the only useful notion. Anarchy and Communism are both to the far-left of my spectrum, but build very distinct propositions for the future. Left-Right discussion are therefore much less useful when discussing their differences. (On the other and, the proposition to the right is much less diverse, because it mostly limit itself to what exist or has existed. That explain why the left is much more diverse and disagree much more, there are more imaginable future than imaginable presents or past !)
Thanks for reading, sorry for the long answers… Love this discussions, thanks for the post <3
This is an interesting question and discussion.
I do feel that left/right is a useful distinction. It is useful from my perspective in terms of values, even though we don’t focus on this in most discussions.
The point is: are you are ok with a person next to you suffering. Suffering because they did wrong, suffering because they have to for a bigger cause. If you are ok with it, you will, in the end, support some form of right wing or authoritarian policies.
The alternative is “One for all and all for one”.
You quote David Graeber somewhere else. In his spirit, I do believe that this is a decision. We either care or we don’t.
Yes, but this is one of the points where the left/right distinction already fails.
There are plenty of conservatives with “christian values” (or similar for many other religions) that would be deeply offended by your care/don’t care distinction and do actually put a lot of effort into caring for others (although usually on a more local scale).
On the other hand there are plenty of leftists who try to absolve themselves from caring for others by claiming that they already pay taxes for that (or made a donation to some NGO) and thus they have done their part…
I am not saying that one is necessarily worse then the other and you could probably argue to no end about effectiveness and/or ulterior motives etc. but it does show that left/right doesn’t really work as a distinction for that.
“The Bulldozer vs Vetocracy Political Axis” popped up on HN the other day:
I guess you have to split it by economy and social issues. Then, economically conservative, but socially left, you get liberals.
Socialists and communists are (usually) aspiring to be both economically and socially left. The right is both economically, and (to a varying degree) socially conservative…
What you describe is pretty much the idea of the political compass. But while it makes for some fun memes it does not seem to help much with defusing this polarization.
the way i see it, you could just break it down to a simple state where you either think all people are of equal value, or you think only a handful few are of equal value. which makes it pretty one-dimensional. left vs right. all the layers in-between are dramatized excuses and rationalizations of either position.
This might sound a bit like semanics, but David Graeber has been making the argument that in many ways perceived equality rather leads to a conservative mind-set (think: “all equal before god”, or “all have to work for their food”, or “all debts have to be paid”…); while thinking of human beings as so unique that they can not be compared to each other (i.e. not equal in any sense) does not.
It’s a bit counterintuitive at first, but there is some historical evidence for this where societies explicitly striving for equality became very conservative and often quite inhuman as well.
by equal value i did not mean equality. i think it’s important to make the distinction between equality and equity.
edit; i love this meme:
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You are either jumping to absurd conclusions or trolling :-/
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“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” for example does not imply individual equality at all, quite the contrary in fact…
Edit: Thinking of humans in terms of “value” (equal or not) already dehumanizes them IMHO, thus what can be used to compare humans to make them somehow equal?
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Unless we are talking pure survival situations, education and culture (i.e. non natural traits) influence strongly what is perceived as “valuable” contributions though. Just look at the recent discussion about “essential jobs” and how badly they were valued in terms of salary and social recognition before the pandemic (and still are).
I think trying to make generalised classifications is counter productive, particularly in this era of hyper-partisanship.
I’m not from the US, but it seems like politics there have become very tribal. It’s much better to consider and debate specific issues rather than ideological alignments.
Agreed, but I think that is a bit idealistic and people will continue using such overloaded terms. But maybe we can find some less partisan descriptions of the underlying worldviews?
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Left/Right is only useful if you believe in tribalism. Otherwise you must use nuance.
There is no coherent definition of left/right you can come up with that won’t end up being tribal. Dividing all politics into two sides will always be tribal. For more productive conversation just stick to issues rather than monoliths.
Theres a reason the media keeps focusing on the sides of left vs. right. It will always divide us.
I don’t understand your of reasoning. for talking about object around you, up and down are useful notions. But it does not mean that the world is divided into only to notion, up or down, sky and earth, or anything like that. It is a tool to talk about things, that is useful in some situations and not in others.
Likewise, left and right are relative and specific notion that are useful to analyze the political world, but are obviously not a binary and universal sorting tools.
