Comment on [deleted]
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 days agoThey were saying that there are more axes than left/right, and that the left/right axis is typically not one of authoritarianism.
See: libertarians and anarchocapitalists are absolutely right wing but are radically anti-authoritarian.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Well, if we’re interested in the ideals of the people, then yes the political compass is a thing that you can use. The problem is that when you drill down into right wing “libertarianism” you find landlords and bosses. They are in fact about the freedom of coporations to own and control human beings. They are pro-slavery and neo-feudalist. That is not actually libertarian, that is pro-slavery. Right-wingers always are. So in practice, it’s just a lie.
Murray Rothbard himself said that “those who call us anarchists are not on sound etymological footing”. That’s a wanker way to say it, said by a wanker, but it’s clear he understood that words mean things.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
That still doesn’t matter.
Sure people misrepresent (by accident or intention) what their actual political beliefs are.
But the single axis (or even two axis) political compass doesn’t really capture the nuance and especially the authoritarian aspect.
I get the feeling that by your measure, nearly everything but collectivist anarchy would be “right wing” by virtue of some axis. At which point I don’t think it’s a useful way to frame things.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
You’re right that I don’t think anything outside of the lib-left corner is actually left wing, if left wing means anything useful.
In fact, part of my point is that the political compass is misleading and rehabilitates certain ideologies in a way that they shouldn’t be. It is hopelessly naive in accepting whatever definition the proponents claim.
I don’t call an caps or right wing libertarians anarchists or libertarians. In the same way, I think tankies aren’t actually left-wing, because left wing results aren’t even in their goals. They expressly want to keep control of the means of production in the hands of a few.
Like if your version of left wing is “claims to be on the left”, then that’s equally useless, because that includes the nazis. It includes nazbols. It includes democrats.
It includes the accelerationist dickbag I spoke to one time who told me that everybody was a fascist if they were even slightly abusive, and all fascists should be ounched at all times. Trump, according to this person, wasn’t a fascist, and I should vote for him because it would accelerate the destruction of society. But that person claimed to be a leftist, so I guess they’re in the club?
Like what does left-wing mean in the political compass? Is there a rigorous definition, or is it kind of vibes-based?
My solution to this is to call tankies faux-leftist, and the neo-feudalists I would call faux-libertarian. I think accepting their labels gives their cooption of left-wing language power.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
So this sounds more like a semantic/linguistic debate more than a philosophical one. You simply use an uncommon definition of “the left”.
Calling something “the left” only has meaning when people agree on what that means. If you disagree that something is “left” but you are using a different definition of “the left” then we haven’t actually communicated anything.
You say that the political compass rehabilitates certain ideologies, presumably by calling them “left” and therefore “good” or at least assigning them certain attributes that people may want, but I believe the opposite; using the single left/right axis is worse because then you’re either lumping together a whole bunch of ideologies, or everyone is using their own bespoke definition of left/right which makes communication impossible.
The more axis you have, the more descriptive you can be about the relative beliefs of your ideology… But the harder it is to draw.
I don’t know that I disagree with your ideology, but I disagree that left means “things I think are good” and everything else is “right”, which is essentially what you’re doing.