1980’s however was a strange time for both sides and NATO and USSR were losing allies left and right and neither side wanted to engage in conflict so both sides tried to downsize their military while also trying to scare the other side.
National Socialism being 'Right Wing'
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Less biased now, but still problematic.
What does “Total Government” mean?
If it means that the government controls all aspects of life, then I am doubtful that any political ideology belongs at the far end (except for, maybe, religious fundamentalism).
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The concept of ideology as opposed to politics is an interesting one, which somewhat reminds me of the concept of pure science versus applied science. And it’s a good point that some systems which sound fine in theory can get awfully messy when you try to implement them in the real world populated by real human beings. However, the thing about the first chart which I find problematic is that it puts two different dichotomies on the same continuum: the terms “left and right” and the concepts of Total Government versus Total Freedom. As two separate continuums (continua? whatever…) on two separate charts, they’d be clear enough. Putting them together, however, creates a one-to-one correlation at each extremity of the chart that doesn’t completely hold up, as shown by the fact that, when you go from the first chart to the second one, Nazi Germany jumps from the left side to the right side.
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Also, what happens when an ideology only wants control over specific segments of life?
Lets say an ideology wants totally unregulated capitalism but also wants total control over religion, sexuality, speech, etc.?
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Less biased now, but still problematic.
What does “Total Government” mean?
If it means that the government controls all aspects of life, then I am doubtful that any political ideology belongs at the far end (except for, maybe, religious fundamentalism).
Again, I did not create this scale so bear with me…
“Total Government” meaning or equivalent to “Totalitarian Government” or “All citizen rights granted and administered by the Government” or “State control over all areas of economic, social and academic life” or “The State is the ultimate and utmost entity of society” … I think any of those would fit the intent.
Obviously this is the most extreme end of the spectrum and not even the Soviet Union completely fits this description, though it comes very close. Theoretically, we are talking about a government which has a hand in everything the individual does, down to what they eat and what clothes they wear. However, the Soviet Union or North Korea could be considered the two closest examples of this that we have in modern human history, even if they do not deserve to be at the absolute Left.
Theoretically, Communism is extremely egalitarian and liberating (supposed to be a good thing), however, in practice we see that it restricts a great deal of personal freedoms in the interest of the State. You can decide whether this is good or bad yourself, but it pushes Communism farther toward the Left end of the scale.
Conversely, Anarchy is the absence of government or law, so obviously there are no examples of nations to put down as subscribing to such a model. This is where the different interpretations of Left and Right become problematic. If we are speaking philosophically/ideologically, there is no government that is Right, but if we are talking politically, then usually people reference National Socialist Germany or monarchies as being “Right”.
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@CWO:
However, the thing about the first chart which I find problematic is that it puts two different dichotomies on the same continuum: the terms “left and right” and the concepts of Total Government versus Total Freedom. As two separate continuums (continua? whatever…) on two separate charts, they’d be clear enough. Putting them together, however, creates a one-to-one correlation at each extremity of the chart that doesn’t completely hold up, as shown by the fact that, when you go from the first chart to the second one, Nazi Germany jumps from the left side to the right side.
That is the issue. We are trying to define two different interpretations or meanings of Left and Right on a single scale, which is difficult if not entirely impossible. It is the unfortunate circumstance that a jump occurs, as you pointed out, but it is like comparing the same data on graphs with different axes. The axes of graph one (the Ideological model) are system of government vs aggregate government control. Graph two (the Political model) has system of government vs social stratification. Again, neither one is more valid than the other, they are just comparing the same data set (system of government) against a different data set.
Something like this is perhaps a little better, because it tries to incorporate both, albeit imperfectly:
The above is (once again) theoretically speaking.
Also, what happens when an ideology only wants control over specific segments of life?
Lets say an ideology wants totally unregulated capitalism but also wants total control over religion, sexuality, speech, etc.?
This is a good point because it really shows the flaw in any of these scales or graphs. It is pretty easy to illustrate one extreme or the other, but it does not handle middle ground very well. For example, in the above scale I gave Democracies and Republics a wide range and put them on the Left (Egalitarian) side. Different national government models have significant play with how far they stray into laissez faire government or socialist-tinged government. Most also have right side elements such as recognized classes of people or nationalist tendencies. Theoretically, these constructs are not de jure, but rather de facto and we must view Democratic or Republican governments as Left entities. The economic-social constructs of class and national policy are just that; constructs that do not necessarily reflect the model of said government. For example: the classes in most democratic countries (lower, middle, upper) are due to economic realities not to a government structure which necessitates it. Whereas medieval feudal governments which structured a King, vassals and peasants (and serfs/slaves) with no possible upward or downward change in class for an individual.
In the end we may need an actual 2D graph with quadrants to fully flesh out the concepts. I have seen some of these, but not studied them very much yet.
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The quadrant graph I am most familiar with uses personal/political freedom as one axis and economic freedom as the other axis.
Partly the confusion is that when I read “Communism” (with no tag or modifier) I understand that to mean Communism as ideology/theory/how-it-works-on-paper.
When I read “Soviet”, “Communist China”, etc. I understand those to refer to real-life practical examples.
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You’ve both mentioned the possible need for a two-dimensional graph, and I was thinking along the same lines. Here’s something I’ve just put together as a possible model. I’ve deliberately not positioned any political systems (or historic states) anywhere on it, but it occured to me that some of them might potentially fit in more than one place, depending on whether one is discussing pure ideology or practical politics (which gets back to one of the points LHoffman made earlier). And to pick up on something Wheatbeer mentioned, some variables wouldn’t even show up on this chart – for instance, how would one position a party that was (for example) socially progressive but fiscally conservative? I think a separate chart would be needed for those elements.
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@CWO:
You’ve both mentioned the possible need for a two-dimensional graph, and I was thinking along the same lines. Here’s something I’ve just put together as a possible model. I’ve deliberately not positioned any political systems (or historic states) anywhere on it, but it occured to me that some of them might potentially fit in more than one place, depending on whether one is discussing pure ideology or practical politics (which gets back to one of the points LHoffman made earlier). And to pick up on something Wheatbeer mentioned, some variables wouldn’t even show up on this chart – for instance, how would one position a party that was (for example) socially progressive but fiscally conservative? I think a separate chart would be needed for those elements.
Yeah, I had been thinking about the Soviet Union (or really any Communist nation in history). Even though the communist model is based on equality of all, the proletariat, etc… in practice they have all had a very stratified society. Or at the very least divided into the political/military elites and regular citizens. Oligarchical rather than totally egalitarian.
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Yeah, I had been thinking about the Soviet Union (or really any Communist nation in history). Even though the communist model is based on equality of all, the proletariat, etc… in practice they have all had a very stratified society. Or at the very least divided into the political/military elites and regular citizens. Oligarchical rather than totally egalitarian.
Yes, the USSR’s actual way of operating is probably what George Orwell was thinking about when he came up with the title “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” for the fictional book that appears in his novel 1984.
Nazi Germany had its own brand of double-speak. On the one hand, it liked to talk about the virtues of community (it sometimes arranged communal meals at which workers and industrialists all ate together) and one of its buzzwords was “Volksgenossen” (folk comrades). Politically and administratively, however, Germany became stratified along the lines of the Nazi party, with Hitler at the top and a whole hierarchy below him: gauleiters (answerable directly to Hitler) in charge of the political districts (Gau) into which the country had been divided, then kreisleiters below the gauleiters, ortsgruppenleiters below the kreisleiters, zellenleiters below the ortsgruppenleiters, and blockleiters below the zellenleiters. This political stratification didn’t directly translate into economic and social stratification, but it did parallel the oligarchical elements of Soviet society (which was also fond of the equalitarian-sounding term “comrade” – “tovarishch” in Russian) in the sense that having good Party connections could help person get ahead in life in ways that weren’t open to people who weren’t members of the Party.
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Maybe a fruitful question would be: how did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union differ in practice?
Off the top of my head I would contrast:
Soviet activist atheism vs Nazi ambiguous religious attitude
Soviet efforts to dissolve ethnic difference vs Nazi racism
Soviet class warfare vs Nazi class management -
(I pose that question because I think that the difference is not at all analogous to Bloods/Crips as the OP suggested)
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Maybe a fruitful question would be: how did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union differ in practice?
Off the top of my head I would contrast:
Soviet activist atheism vs Nazi ambiguous religious attitude
Soviet efforts to dissolve ethnic difference vs Nazi racism
Soviet class warfare vs Nazi class managementGood points, but I do think that one of the most important defining elements of each was internationalism vs nationalism. Someone else mentioned this earlier, not sure if it was you Wheatbeer, but it does sort of go along with the dissolve ethnicity vs racism point. National Socialism was less about world-conquering than Soviet Communism. Was it Lenin/Marx who espoused the world (international) communism model? But then Stalin who modified it to “Socialism in one country”? I forget exactly, but I remember reading the technicality that “communism” was intrinsically a world-wide system and the word should only be applied as such. Whereas “socialism” was the government of an individual nation. Therefore all the socialist countries would make up the whole of world communism. Something like that. Either that or Stalin saw the need to establish socialism in the Soviet Union and expand it worldwide from there. I think that sounds more accurate. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country)
Anyway, the goal of communism being international vs national socialism being intrinsically national. Russia and China and France and Brazil could all become communist (of equal standing with all the other communists), but national socialism preserved all nation-state distinctions and prerogatives in any practicing country. A National Socialist Italy would be similar to but different from a National Socialist Germany. A communist China theoretically would have equal political footing (and alliance) with Soviet Russia. However, with the socialism in one country practice, it was the USSR that pulled all the strings of her satellites.
National Socialism in Germany was all about Germans. National Socialism in France (had it existed) would have been all about the French. National Socialism in Australia would have been all about Australians. Ethnicity may play a part, but primarily National Socialism (Fascism) would focus on a country’s population and their citizenship. Communism would theoretically care only about party affiliation and not about ethnicity or citizenship.
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Maybe a fruitful question would be: how did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union differ in practice?
The first difference that comes to mind has to do with their economic systems, both in theory and in practice. The USSR’s economic philosophy was, at least in terms of its general lines, Marxist (at least to my knowledge, since economics – Marxist or otherwise – isn’t my strong suit). Philosphically, Marxism was an anathema to the Nazis. To give just one example: soon after he came to power, Hitler granted German workers the May Day holiday they had demanded…then abolished the labour unions the following day.
In practice, the USSR under Stalin featured collectivized farms, state-owned industries, centralized economic planning (the notorious Five-Year Plans being an example) and, as far as I know, very little private-sector activity (at least officially). Nazi Germany’s economy, especially during WWII, was a complicated mixture of private enterprise and state control which has been described as “falling between the barstools” of the USSR’s centralized economy and the USA’s system of free-market capitalism. To my knowledge, the big industrial companies like Krupp remained in private hands, but their businesses were heavily involved in manufacturing things for the government and the Wehrmach, with government and/or military representatives dictating specifications to them (sometimes in the course of acrimonious arguments).
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LHoffman,
Certainly that works as a contrast since the Soviets did foment revolution in their own mold.CWOMarc,
I was hinting at that by mentioning class dynamics, but I wasn’t sure how and to what extent the Nazi state altered base economic organization. Clearly, they didn’t come anywhere near the Soviets in terms of radical economic reorganization (Soviet agriculture was particularly shocking). -
I wasn’t sure how and to what extent the Nazi state altered base economic organization.
One major economic change that occurred in Germany as the war progressed was an increasing reliance on foreign workers. These ranged from people who had “volunteered” to various degrees (for instance in exchange for the repatriation of prisoners of war) to conscripts and deportees (see Vichy France’s STO, the Service de Travail Obligatoire) to outright slave labour (as in the notorious Mittelwerk complex). These were employed to fill the gap caused by the absorption of German men into the armed forces, and by the Nazi regime’s initial reluctance to bring German women into the industrial workforce. The result, ironically, was that Berlin (and other big urban areas) became precisely what Hitler had hated so much about Vienna as a young man: a city full of foreigners.
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@CWO:
You’ve both mentioned the possible need for a two-dimensional graph, and I was thinking along the same lines. Here’s something I’ve just put together as a possible model. I’ve deliberately not positioned any political systems (or historic states) anywhere on it, but it occured to me that some of them might potentially fit in more than one place, depending on whether one is discussing pure ideology or practical politics (which gets back to one of the points LHoffman made earlier). And to pick up on something Wheatbeer mentioned, some variables wouldn’t even show up on this chart – for instance, how would one position a party that was (for example) socially progressive but fiscally conservative? I think a separate chart would be needed for those elements.
Yeah, I had been thinking about the Soviet Union (or really any Communist nation in history). Even though the communist model is based on equality of all, the proletariat, etc… in practice they have all had a very stratified society. Or at the very least divided into the political/military elites and regular citizens. Oligarchical rather than totally egalitarian.
Ideology and reality are 2 different things. A particular ideology might want certain circumstances but reality pushes it in a different direction. For example, the Leninists hoped for a more libertarian society–but it didn’t happen that way, given the pressures of war, the inheritance of the traditions of the Russian state (known for brutality, secret police, contempt for human rights, and the like), and the Leninists’ contempt for Western liberal standards.
Similarly, many national socialists in Germany would have liked far more radical changes in economic organization and religious life but it was impossible given the demands of war and the need to placate the masses as well as the industrialists.
Many theorists of the 40s-50s argued there was a worldwide trend toward buerocratic collectivism. I think the Cold War actually intensified this trend–both powers gravitated towards stratified buerocratic oligarchy as they competed with one another.
One more point to keep in mind is that the Stalinist turn in the Soviet Union was not percieved as a “leftist” move–on the contrary, Lenin characterized his ideological opponents in Western Europe as “infantile leftists”, and Stalin himself was not considered a leftist or an internationalist, although he did end up adopting many Trotskyist policies after he expelled Trotsky, and Stalin was a materialist theoretically.
Left/right may be somewhat useful when talking about dreams and/or ideology, as long as one clearly defines what one means by left and right, but it is probably useless when talking about reality.
One last point–I can’t commend any left/right spectrum that places anarchists on the right. Anarchists tend to argue against ownership of land or means of production, and tend to argue that meaningful liberty requires meaningful equality. And they are anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchy. These are traditionally leftist notions. It is interesting how the anarcho-capitalists have taken up the Old Left idea of anti-statism and made it theirs. The irony is that the socialists in the 19th century (including even Marx) shared this dream of doing away with the state. The turn towards left ‘statism’ seems to have occurred largely after 1900 and the emergence of ‘progressive’ political parties that entered parliament and implemented many socialist ideas on a national level.
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The thing to keep in mind is that ideology and reality are 2 different things. Â A particular ideology might want certain circumstances but reality pushes it in a different direction. […] Left/right may be somewhat useful when talking about dreams and/or ideology, as long as one clearly defines what one means by left and right, but it is probably useless when talking about reality.
This reminds me of the old joke about a new invention being demonstrated before a committee, whose members are all impressed by its performance except for one person who asks the inventor, “It obviously works in practice, but does it work in theory?” :lol:
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Many theorists of the 40s-50s argued there was a worldwide trend toward buerocratic collectivism. I think the Cold War actually intensified this trend–both powers gravitated towards stratified buerocratic oligarchy as they competed with one another.
Interesting thought. More than a grain of truth perhaps.
One last point–I can’t commend any left/right spectrum that places anarchists on the right. Anarchists tend to argue against ownership of land or means of production, and tend to argue that meaningful liberty requires meaningful equality. And they are anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchy. These are traditionally leftist notions. It is interesting how the anarcho-capitalists have taken up the Old Left idea of anti-statism and made it theirs. The irony is that the socialists in the 19th century (including even Marx) shared this dream of doing away with the state. The turn towards left ‘statism’ seems to have occurred largely after 1900 and the emergence of ‘progressive’ political parties that entered parliament and implemented many socialist ideas on a national level.
If we are just talking about anarchy as it refers to the level of government then, respectfully, yes, anarchists should be at one end (usually called Right) and totalitarian or ultimate government societies should be at the other (usually called Left). That was the point of the Ideological graph, which perhaps is not the right term for it. I agree that anarchists and communists espouse many of the same tenets. However, the ideal of communism must intrinsically be maintained by a surpassing government… or am I wrong? I have not read Das Kapital. Political anarchists, while espousing similar ideals, goes about it in the complete opposite fashion: lack of government. I assume that for the anarchists non-governmental utopia to be maintained everyone must work together with no malice and complete understanding. Talk about a disconnect from reality.
Besides which, it seems like political anarchists are quite different from the literal definition of anarchy (which is what is meant on the spectrums I have included). Just from Google, Anarchy = a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal. Even if we consider the second portion, it still references absence of government. Did Marx (and Lenin) intend for communism to have no government? If so, they were just advocating an anarchy pipe-dream in which there was no materialism, no personal ownership and fully egalitarian. This would be contravened immediately just because anarchy means people can do what they want without any sort of higher level enforcement.
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Capitalism as we know it is very young relative to the age of our species.
I don’t think it’s irrational to believe that some day, humans might transition to something different without the prerequisite of a repressive government apparatus.
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Capitalism as we know it is very young relative to the age of our species.
I don’t think it’s irrational to believe that some day, humans might transition to something different without the prerequisite of a repressive government apparatus.
Isn’t that sort of what dialectical materialism says about the inevitable progress of human societies towards a more perfect state, or something along those lines? (Philosophy is even less my area than economics, so I’m really out of my depth here.)
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