On Tuesday, November 20, 2018, 12:08:58 PM PST, Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:
There IS a "Left" and there IS a "Right"...
Yes, and the origin of that meme was the outcome of the French revolution in 1789 onwards. "The right", of that location and era, sat in the legislature on the "right", and "The Left", of that location and era, sat in the legislature on the "left". Simple for post-revolutionary France. But applying that to other nations and at different times can be difficult. And, being only one-dimensional, it's quite inadequate and highly misleading.
Right=Fascism Actually, while I realize that this has become a 'convention', an agreed-upon idea, I challenge that concept. The Italian "Fascist" Party was formed by a schism (an ideological split, a feud) within the Italian Socialist Party, in 1915, over the relatively simple idea of whether Italy should enter WWI, which it eventually did on the side of France and Britain. Benito Mussolini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini famously headed the "Fascists", as they were called. Nevertheless, "Fascists" were still "socialists". "Fascists" did not suddenly decide, 'we are tired of being left-wingers, we want to be right-wingers instead!!!' <ha ha> No, they were still socialists. And, like socialists, they wanted big, controlling governments. It's just that THEY wanted to be in control of those big, controlling governments. And eventually, they wanted to use government-directed violence against citizens, as would eventually be done in Russia, China, and every other communist nation. Similarly, Germany eventually formed the Nazi party. Why should we call that "right-wing"? Strong, authoritarian government, that uses violence against its citizens. Why didn't 'we' call that "left-wing", rather than "right wing"? Given that the terms "left-wing" and "right-wing" originally came from Post-Revolutionary France, I wonder how anybody could be strongly confident that one label or another applies in any given situation. In any case, I think that the 'convention' that we refer to "fascism" as being "right-wing" was, and is, completely phony. I think it was primarily based on the fact that there eventually became a war between "national socialists" and "communist-socialists" between 1939 and 1945. Some Socialists couldn't stand the idea that other Socialists had just started a war, one that had killed 60+ million people. Don't forget the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of 1939 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact , in which Stalin gave Hitler the 'cover' he wanted to become confident to start WWII, and he did so. The "solution", I suggest, was that they decided to label "fascism" (one kind of socialism) as being "right wing", safely kept away from another kind of socialism (Communism). So, each could safely blame each other for all the ills of the world, without seeming to be attacking themselves.
Left=Anarcho-Communism(communalism et al)
Sorry, I have to disagree again. One big problem is that the term "anarchist" gets thrown around a lot. I have considered myself an "anarchist libertarian" since 1995, because I figured out how to solve the problem of eliminating that last bit of government, becoming my Assassination Politics essay. So, I think I should have some credibility here. (Many and probably most people who called themselves "anarchists", even today, were not aware of David Friedman's "Hard Problem", to which I described the solution when I invented AP. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf (Sadly, for 20+ years, David Friedman has seemed to have trouble acknowledging that I at least sketched out the solution to his "Hard Problem", in my AP essay. I wasn't even aware that he had called that problem "The Hard Problem" in January 1995, when I found the solution.) I think that many people who call themselves "anarchists", and people who are called "anarchists", don't really BELIEVE in the concept of "zero government". Many of them, today, I believe, are actually pro-big-government socialists who have become discouraged by the failure of virtually every attempt at Communism that has been tried. Even Red China's 'main claim to fame', in the last 20 years, has been the adoption of what should probably be labellable as an (imperfect) market economy. Put simply, if China hadn't done that, it would have been about as backward a nation as it was in, say, 1970. And Walmart would have had to find another supplier for a large portion of its items for sale.
"...and an infinite number of points in between"
I think a one-dimensional political spectrum is hopelessly crude and misleading. Far better is the Nolan Chart, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart and the World's Smallest Political Quiz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Smallest_Political_Quiz ×
From the moment that I first became aware of it, probably around 1980, I realized that the Nolan Chart EXPLAINED something: Why libertarians looked, to conservatives, like liberals, and why libertarians looked, to liberals, like conservatives. The reason was simple: So-called liberals, of that era, had no respect for the concept of economic freedom. And so-called conservatives, of that era, had no respect for the concept of personal freedom. The Nolan Chart also explained why seeming "dictators of the right", and "dictators of the left" looked much alike in their most-extreme cases. Why shouldn't they? Jim Bell