We discussed Communism recently, which is one type of left wing belief.
I would suggest that the left’s core belief is:
Everyone should have a good life and society should work to make that happen.
What different left ideologies are arguing about his the means more than the end. A Communist believes the only way for this to be achieved is for the proletariat to control the means of production. (This makes them effectively the left oppositional image of capitalists.)
I, personally, want everyone to have enough and be happy. I recognize that the second is impossible: but it’s a guiding principle. However, at least since the 20th century it’s been more than possible for everyone to have enough food, water, shelter and medicine. We produce or can produce more than enough of all of them (especially food). We simply choose not to distribute to everyone because our current main economic ideology says that if you don’t have enough money you don’t deserve anything.
In the modern world there are three main ideological groupings. Broadly the right, the left, and liberals/neoliberals. These don’t appear on a line, they’re a triangle and each has something in common with the others. The left, generally speaking, is anti-war, for example, and so are parts of the right, especially paleocons. Liberals are very identity politics focused and the left has sympathy for that, but isn’t as dedicated to it. The left’s primary focus is on economic issues and relationships and the relationship to IP is more of “of course everyone should be treated equally.”
The left’s argument about IP is that is splits coalitions when taken to extremes like micro-aggression hunting and reeducation for everyone because everyone’s racist and sexist. Liberals IP, on the other hands, is along the lines of “of course women and minorities should be able to become CEOs and President!”
Neoliberals, the dominant sub-ideology of liberalism believe in regulated markets intended to funnel money towards market winners and to keeping the mass of the population from making long term real wage gains. That’s why, over time, they’ve lost the support of the working class. Democrats were left wing under FDR, a coalition of left and liberals (not neoliberals) from 44 to 79, and have been neoliberal controlled ever since.
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Neoliberalism is in direct opposition to most strains for left-wing ideology. All may not be as extreme in their distrust of concentrations of wealth and capital as communism, but all believe that you can’t take care of everyone if the rich are too powerful. FDR had 90% top marginal tax rates for a reason and estate taxes under post-war British governments were absolutely punitive, but didn’t break up the great Ducal estates, alas.
We’ll discuss conservatives at a later time, but the general orientation is towards authoritarian identity. The left emphasizes horizontal ties, conservatives emphasize primitive identity (religion and culture) mediated through vertical ties. Ruler, nobles, rich, church. Nation and race and ethnicity. (The exception is theoretically libertarians, but they’re completely marginal.) The NASA mission to the moon was about many people’s contribution. Admirers of SpaceX give all credit to Elon Musk, who’s hasn’t engineered or built anything on his rockets.
Liberals are the great apostles of capitalism, not conservatives, though they like the way capitalism stratifies society. Left wingers are the opposition to capitalism. The most extreme versions want an end to it entirely, the moderate versions want it under firm control, made to contribute to mass prosperity, not turned to produce billionaires.
And, again, this is because what the left wants everyone prosperous, not a highly stratifed society, where a stratified society is a goal both liberals and conservatives share.
mago
Left wing, right wing, chicken wings.
Bread it shake it bake it
It all comes out the same
Gristle fat skin and bone
Chomp it down boy
Wipe your lips your hands your fingers
Everybody’s dying everywhere you go
Can’t chicken out of that
No pretending no dissembling
You gotta go when you gotta go where you’re gonna go.
Cue the Clash: go straight to hell boy . .
hauntologism
Being left wing means luxuriating in resentful denial about human nature, human inequality and human potential.
In the US post 1980 it usually means you either hate your father or never knew him, which are two of second wave feminism’s biggest outcomes.
Purple Library Guy
Wow, hauntologism, projection much?
Yeah, this column is hard for me to add much to–that’s pretty much the way of it. Although . . . the triangle thing I’m not so sure. If it’s a triangle, it’s not equilateral; I still feel there’s more distance between conservatives and leftists than between liberals and either.
Liberalism strikes me as an ideology that has these built-in contradictions. Right wing ideology has contradictions, but they’re not exactly internal. The contradiction in right wing ideology is mainly between the ideology itself and the necessity in democracies of getting majority buy-in (even outside of democracies you need some popular acceptance and legitimacy); it’s between the core elite-dominance objectives of the ideology on one hand, and on the other all the bullshit they have to tell people to get them to vote against their interests. This bullshit tends to have some recurring common characteristics because there are themes in what works when it comes to fooling gullible people.
Liberalism, though, in the Enlightenment sense, tends to be based on principles which, if followed through on thoroughly, would lead to leftism. The contradiction is whatever point at which Liberals come up with some way not to follow their principles to their logical conclusions. So for instance, take John Rawls and Rawlsian Justice Theory. In my opinion, justice theory is a gorgeous construction. He goes through this whole thing rigorously defending a very common-sense picture of justice as fairness. Then he comes up with this way of figuring out what would be a good and fair society. The idea is that a good society would be the one which most people would decide on if they were deciding without knowing who they would get to be in that society–under a “veil of ignorance”. They’d know all about what each possible society was like, but not whether they personally would get to be high up or downtrodden, so they’d decide based on fairness, unbiased. And he concludes that people would necessarily decide on a society in which inequality would only be allowed to the extent that even the worst off were at least as well off as in any more equal society. It is a really cool idea.
And then, he concludes from this that the society people would decide on would be a capitalist welfare state. And I’m like what? No they wouldn’t. There’s certainly possible societies where the worst off would be better off than they were picking fruit in the US circa 1970. But Rawls was a Liberal, and so he came up with these great principled ideas and then convinced himself that they’d give Liberal results.
Anonymous
The last year again proves the (real) leftists to be correct. Scratch a liberal and find a fascist. Liberalism is and has always been a way for fascist/imperialist/capitalists to put a more humane face on their exploitation of the masses, whether at home or abroad. Whenever a crisis happens, the vast majority of self identified liberals will show that their true loyalty is to the fascist state, no matter how much they grumble and protest along the way.
Harris got 48 percent of the votes after over a year of complete support for the most obvious case of genocide in the history of the world. Jill Stein and the other anti-genocide third party candidates got less than 1.6 percent. This is what liberals are. When their class interests and identity is threatened, they’ll plug up their ears, support *their* genocide candidate, and gaslight everyone else. Now the worst of them are gleefully anticipating Trump hurting the Muslim and Arab communities for being “disloyal” to their Democrat *masters*.
Anonymous
There’s been no case of leftist takeover in any of the core imperialist countries (e.g. US, UK, Germany 1914). Even the post-WWII Labour Government was completely imperialist in mindset and fought multiple bloody colonial wars in Malaya, Kenya, and Egypt to try to retain their system of imperial exploitation. Marxist-Leninists center the betrayal of the German social democrats in the lead up to WWI as evidence why the revolutions cannot happen in the imperial core, because the workers can be sufficiently bought off and subverted to turn against the proletariats elsewhere.
True leftist takeover only happen in the exploited hinterlands. In LatAm again and again even under constant coups, rightwing paramilitaries, and endless sanctions. Russia 1917. China 1949. Vietnam, Algeria, and so many other countries after decades of bloody struggle (westerners like Norm Finkelstein who are despairing about Palestinian liberation have no idea what the process of successful anti-colonial struggles look like).
The only way the real left can succeed in the West is if their national neocolonial grip on the rest of the world is broken. Break the dollar. Break the international system set up to secure the West’s control over the rest (e.g. UN, IMF/World Bank, NGOs, SWIFT, WTO, IP protection). Break the ability for westerners to get southern hemisphere blueberries in winter and Niger’s uranium for pennies on the dollar. Then maybe the Western bourgeoisie will lose sufficient power and control against their own populations and the problems will finally overturn this horrible system.
Ian’s climate doomerism would dictate that it doesn’t matter in the long run. Maybe. Maybe not. Our world sucks and obvious problems are not dealt with because the world has been dominated by 500 years of Western imperialism (exploitation and outright theft under the guise of “civilization” and manifest destiny…BTW, notice how often Palestinian’s purported anti-LGBTQ+ position is referenced as justification for Israeli actions – that’s condensing 500 years of Western colonial logic right there).
That’s not what the Chinese are doing and they’re far more effective at coming up with solutions that benefit everyone over those that enrich their bourgeoisie. Chinese are doing remarkable R&D in renewable energy and battery tech. It’s doing amazing things in automation that’s quickly leading to superb EV cars at less than half the cost of anyone else. Their heavy machinery is a quarter of the cost of Caterpillar and John Deere. Yet the Chinese stock market has not appreciated in decades. It’s a different system. It’s far from perfect but it’s proving to be far far better than anything every offered by the West.
Listening to capitalist people like Steve Hsu (https://youtu.be/-b4-ivxJeiA?si=5lLxv9tbDPUEzzTT) also indicate that there’s been a cultural phase change in China in the last five years, where they’ve shifted to be much nicer people living in much nicer environments. Maybe they’ll fail given the monumental challenge but they’ve shown that they’re far more capable than the West and maybe they can pull human civilization through to the other side.
Jefferson Hamilton
>Everyone should have a good life and society should work to make that happen.
This could easily (well perhaps not easily, exactly) be the belief and practice of a monarchy, so no.
Being left wing means you don’t believe in aristocracy (that some people are just meant to rule over others), essentially. Being right wing means you do. That’s the heart of it.
Mary Bennet
In the USA, Libertarianism is hardly inconsequential. Libertarians came out in droves to elect Trump while Conservatives were complaining that The Big Orange isn’t a real Conservative. They may have done so in exchange for a promise that they would get to Be Important, but they were hardly inconsequential.
The fallacy at the heart of Communism is that human nature is not perfectible. Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or rather, of a gang of scruffy intellectuals ruling in the name of the proletariat won’t turn your population into saints and heroes.
The fallacy at the heart of Conservatism is that inherited privilege does not automatically confer virtue and character. How often have we seen great men and women produce worthless offspring?
People who hate one or both parents usually have good reason for that emotion. I would recommend that Hauntologism look up CPTSD, except that he, or she, probably he, would not believe it because the theory has nothing to do with Freudian fantasies, or archetypes, or any similar ideologies.
Daniel Lynch
I don’t disagree with Ian’s definition, but I prefer my own litmus test which is a policy is left wing (or progressive (or whatever label we are using at the moment) if it helps the poor. And conversely, a policy is not left wing if it helps the rich. In other words, I view policy through a class lens.
One of my other rules of thumb for policy is we should try to help those who need help the most. I.e., helping the working class is good, but helping the poor is better. It’s like Finland’s education policy that focuses on lifting up the students at the bottom, in contrast to America which sometimes focuses on “honor” students.
The catch is that some policies that help poor humans may hurt non-humans. I.e., industrial logging helps a few working class by providing jobs, but is bad for the environment and for many forest creatures. Reducing consumption is generally good for the environment, but may reduce our standard of living, which we tend to define in terms of consumption and production.
That brings us back to Ian’s use of the phrase a good life. What exactly is a good life, anyway? His definition of left wing is incomplete until “a good life” is defined.
Joan
I am a leftie, which in the US is a Bernie bro and in some countries in Europe might put me as center-left but likely not far left. The only time I haven’t engaged in lesser of two evils voting was when I voted for Bernie. Anytime I’m voting for a corporate democrat running against a republican it is lesser of two evils voting.
If we had a genuine multi-party system, the Bernie and Tim Walz types wouldn’t be anywhere near the Clinton types, and I could vote for that leftie coalition again and again.
In the 90s I watched my dad’s hometown in the rural south get hollowed out by Walmart. I’m a leftie who wants manufacturing to be brought back to the US, and for these huge companies like Walmart to be broken up. I want small businesses and local farmers to thrive. All of that is what Bernie talked about.
Anonymous
Joan,
Listen to Michael Parenti’s opinion about Bernie Sanders in 1999 and then look at how Bernie sheepdogged the left to Hilary Clinton, then to Joe Biden, and then to Kamala Harris during a US backed genocide. Sanders is at best a liberal Zionist who verbally supported a two state solution but cares far more about the continued survival of that Apartheid white power colonial state.
I would suggest looking considerably further afield for a bit terrible politician. The American Greens and PSL are both problematic, but they and the Libertarians are not known for sheepdogging for genocidaires.
Anonymous
There are two distinctions being made. One is about who gets to govern. The other is who should be the primary beneficiary of governance. Communists are clear about both, whereas many socialists are okay with letting money influence the political economy and think they can balance moneyed oligarchic interests against proletarian interests. History show that’s a dead end and eventually money interests will get more and more power for themselves and use that power to pursue their own benefit. Look at the complete mess of ostensible European left politics, subverted and tyrannical, completely unaccountable to their own electorates and their own laws and tradition. It took decades but the dream of a non-Communist socialist Democratic Europe is now well and truly dead.