this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Your last two paragraphs explain how they are actually right wing, because the authoritarianism has already happened and they still support it.
"Planned economy" is just state capitalism. It's not better than neoliberal capitalism, it just has a red flag, and tankies are fool enough to think that makes difference.
Surely there is a meaningful difference between a planned economy/command economy and a semi-regulated market economy? Like, I get that corporate control can still be authoritarian, but it's different to state control in some ways, I think?
I didn't say it was no different. You can tell because I used different words for the two things.
I said it was no better.
this is why left vs. right isn't nuanced enough for real political discussion outside of a two party system
It's why we can't just go around believing everybody who claims to be a leftist. We need to evaluate the actual effects of their actions. If they are oppressing the workers as every state does, they are not left wing.
Labels never more useful than just as a shortcut to understanding someone's whole nuanced belief..
Yeah, but that's what I'm doing. I am evaluating the beliefs of authoritarians of all kinds and concluding that they are right wing.
I'm not throwing out the labels, I'm saying this left-right-auth-lib pair of dichotomies is not useful.
They 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.
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 (EDIT: actually they're pretty much right there on the surface). 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.
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.
I accept that the single axis is insufficient, but I think the compass is worse.
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 punched 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.
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.
I have explained a more nuanced method of understanding things than the political compass.
By calling these groups "faux-leftist" and "faux libertarian" I am drawing a distinction that the compass doesn't draw, without losing any of the - extremely limited - resolution that it offers.
But you reduced what I said down to:
That tells me that you're not really interested in what I'm saying. It's hard to understand how someone could read what I've written and honestly come to that conclusion. I can explain further, but I think I'd need to hear that you were curious to understand my point, otherwise it's probably going to be a waste of my time.
You haven't explained anything other than you think people are disingenuous with their real beliefs, which is not useful for talking about what things mean. This seems to be nearly the entirety of your stance.
You ever so briefly touched on how you think authoritarianism is inherently anti-worker with absolutely no nuance whatsoever
You made no coherent argument about why to change the common definition of "left".
Distinction between theoretical and practical still has value. You can talk about where a political philosophy falls on a compass AND you can talk about how an individual differs from the philosophy they claim to espouse.
I'm not really curious to hear more about your point because you've repeatedly demonstrated that your point isnt actually coherent or useful for everyday (or even academic) discourse.
There's such a thing as left wing authoritarianism too.
There's such a thing as right wingers who coopt left wing rhetoric and fool people into believing they are left wing. But anyone who says authoritarianism is left wing because it has some supposedly liberatory ideals is - and tankies will hate to hear this - an idealist.
Joseph Stalin: famous right wing politician
State capitalism isn't a thing.
Engels, Lenin and Bukharin all talked about state capitalism. Lenin decried it as not real socialism.
That was until after the October revolution, at which point he seemed to think it was based and cool actually, and that it was definitely what the USSR was doing.
This is around the time he stripped the soviets of their power and disenfranchised the workers in favour of a central state that alienated them from control over the means of production.
You know, like a capitalist.
And now tankies are distancing themselves because they can't square the circle that their beloved ~~revolutionary~~ heroes were actually capitalists, and they pretend the concept doesn't exist.
So tell me, was Lenin wrong about this? If so, was he wrong twice? Why the flip-flopping on whether it was good or bad? Nobody seemed to dispute at the time that it existed, and an analysis of what happened shows that the USSR liberalised quickly. The bolsheviks were in effect liberal reformists.
EDIT: They weren't revolutionary, I don't know why I ceded that rhetorical ground.
You're taking things out of context. In the first example, Lenin specifically says "bourgeois reformist assertion", he's talking of monopoly in the context of a bourgeois state, not in a worker's state. He understands that for as long as a strong bourgeoisie exists, not even a state monopoly can be considered socialist, because the state is in fact controlled by the bourgeoisie.
Wow, so you're telling me that, when confronted with real situations and material conditions, the opinions of someone can change? Baffling.
Good luck fighting a civil war in which you get invaded by 14 other world powers for the sin of being a communist, while your industry is disorganized and not centralized towards the war-effort. Give as an answer as to how to fight and win such a war, maybe the entire communist part just didn't think hard enough? Or will you say that the people who spent most of their adult life in jail or exile for organizing workers and distributing communist newspapers during Tsarism were ackchually just power-hungry tyrants?
Wait, so tankies are actually against centralized economic planning? Strawman
"liberalism is when centrally-planned economy". Seriously, do you know what "liberalism" means?
You know your REAL problem with the Bolsheviks? That they won. The problem YOU have with Bolsheviks, is that they had to face real historical and material problems, and big ones, and therefore had to make tough decisions. You claim to know better than the people of the time that spent their literal lives in jail or exile prior to the revolution, studying and theorizing and discussing about communism in real life, risking their lives in organizing the workers and in fighting against Tsarism, and you know why? Because the ONLY socialists that supposed "leftists" like you will support, are the leftists who failed. You'll support Salvador Allende because he didn't face the real conditions of his time and didn't apply the necessary policy to fight the advance of fascism. You'll support the anarchists in the Spanish Second Republic because they failed to fight against fascism and, because of rejecting taking power, they didn't have to apply harsh policy to fight reactionarism. But you won't ever support actual socialists who DID understand the dangers of fascism and of capitalist counter-revolution, and actually did something about it, because as soon as they apply their ideology to real-world conditions, they're not perfect anymore. Because they ACTUALLY were a threat to the system, and so the propaganda will paint them as intolerable autocrats, and you'll swallow that propaganda whole and share the same views of socialists than fucking Zbigniew Brzezinsky.
At no point in any of this are you addressing the argument being made, which is that state capitalism absolutely is a thing, which means Lenin became a capitalist.
You can make excuses for it all day, the only difference between them and the liberal revolutions is ideological at that point, which makes you an idealist.
Edit: the state is counter-revolutionary
"I will overfixate on a debate on the academic definition of capitalism in order to be able to call X communist leader a capitalist instead of looking at the actual policy implemented" isn't an honest framework to deal with this. In a worker state without bourgeoisie, such as the soviet union, there is no such thing as surplus value because there's no capitalist class appropriating the wealth for itself. Instead, salaries are decided centrally, goods are provided at centrally-planned prices and NOT through the market principles. This is enough for me to claim that the USSR was socialist and not capitalist, and I refuse to engage in semantics rather than talking about policy: the USSR was materially and significantly different from any classical capitalist state, and much better by ANY actual metric than any capitalist state, and you're just trying to bend definitions to call your Marxist-Leninist of choice a capitalist
Bourgeoisie aren't some genetically distinct group. The party supplanted the bourgeoisie and became them.
I will never understand how tankies can see a small group gain control of the means of production and understand it as anything but a new bourgeoisie.
The party didn't have nearly enough wealth, especially not intergenerational, they were as much public workers as doctors and teachers.
Again proving you don't know shit about soviet historiography and democratic mechanisms
That's a hell of a gpt response and all, but no, state capitalism isn't a thing and left wing thought has evolved in the last nearly 200 years. Except in the US.
How in the hell is that comment anything GPT-like other than the fact that it's slightly long???
Oh wow, you called me a bot and an American. Checkmate. No need to respond to anything I actually said, you obviously know how to get right to the heart of dismissing me so you can repeat your opinion without any actual argument.