10 ms·

The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)

37 points by vmchale 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250915141229/http://vmchale.com/static/serve/taxonomy.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250915141229/http://vmchale.co...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
josefritzishere 1y ago
This is an interesting read, and it makes me want to read more. But the intro could use some context. I have so many questions now.
- lapcat 1y ago
  > But the intro could use some context. What do you mean by that?
  - josefritzishere 1y ago
    For example that the author is a conservative marxist writing that treatise at the time of the "August Coup" which is a pretty interesting historical event itself. It toppled Gorbechev, and Yeltsin took over. Kondylis is also more reknowned than I was aware.
  - LeifCarrotson 1y ago
    I (like GP, most likely) did not live through the events that occurred in Moscow during 1991. The only news media I consumed at the time was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, which did not cover Soviet politics, and we did not cover any of this in school later in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of what I learned after the fact has been from Fox and MSNBC and Red Alert 2 and Call of Duty - that commies and socialists and Soviets are bad people who want to give kids free school lunches, will disrupt the temporal equilibrium, and give adults universal health care. I can skim the Wikipedia article about the coup [1] and I recognize the names of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but I cannot even begin to articulate the political philosophies of their platforms or the power dynamics, coalitions, and incentive structures that either used to leverage one position or the other. The intro paragraph, I think, is trying to use this to its advantage by describing an unfamiliar political landscape with conservatives and parlimentarians and Stalinists and "putschists" (what even is that word?). I barely know what conservativism means as distinct from "whatever the American Republican party does". I clicked on the article because I've observed that liberalism/conservativism/libertarianism/socialism/populism/marxism/fascism/neo___ism/etc. are bandied about more like sports team names to be cheered or derided rather than comprehended, and hoped to understand this phenomenon better. I'll push through the article eventually, with frequent dictionary lookups for "societas civilis" and "diptych" and "affairs curricula". But it's clearly written for an expert in political philosophy and will take me a long time to do so. I'm an expert in computer engineering and pretty innately talented at understanding that, I'm not an expert in the social sciences and they don't come easily to me. But I still live in a society, and try to participate in its governance as best I can...while neither journalists nor public education have really helped me to get there. I don't observe my peers reading Chomsky, Hayek, Putnam, Piketty, Turchin, and Zinn before they go to the voting booth, but they get one vote each just the same. I've actually looked it up and found that my local community college offers a "PL230 - Introduction to Political Theory" course, this winter it's held mid-day for full-time students but they're offering it virtually in the evenings next summer so that people who work during the day can participate. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      While I also neither lived through 1991 nor knew those terms, I found the text fairly understandable. But that might be, because I'm familiar with the political landscape the text describes. I think this text is touching the basis of what became known of as the story of "the end of history" which we did cover in schools history lessons although not very detailed. The article describes a trend of both the political right and left to the center, i.e. modern liberalism, which means that these distinction became less extreme. However this trend has now reversed. On the right that trend led to a rising of a new political party (AfD) that poses as the old conservatists to frustrated voters, but are actually more fascistic. On the left the party previously called communistic now calls for more aggressive "actions", accelerated by the split of of the not more conservative, but more aligned with more "bourgeois interests" flavored wing of the former. This also explains while the latter now is also seen favorable by voters who would previously would have been more aligned with the political right. Thus, the text is neither outdated nor topical. It does not describe the current political landscape, but the origin and causes for it that lay in the previous one. As such it is very topical again.
bpt3 1y ago
The rise of populism, especially in the US, has accelerated the breakdown described here. It's difficult to place political parties or even individual politicians in neat boxes, which would be a benefit in some ways in theory if it wasn't really caused by the political parties (and one in particular) becoming completely unmoored from their historical platform and agenda. These shifts have happened a few times in the past, and it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
c54 1y ago
This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago. What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful. These days I think JREG is doing good work tracking political categories if you’re interested and don’t mind some irony-poisoned jargon check him out.
- Pxtl 1y ago
  Yeah, I think we've all seen the term "socialism" prettymuch destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember, for example. I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    > "socialism" pretty much destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.) Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is. Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up. Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way. "Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp. A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism. It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed. Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels. Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority. Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers. Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin. Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today. Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
Afaik, there are already specific political definitions. It's just that "the common man" isn't very educated in them, and the "language of politics" eschews logic and specificity in favor of generalization (in order to induce rancor and thus party-alignment). Here is the political classification of the top 50 developed nations (I tried to organize them, but it's hard...): Qatar Absolute monarchy Oman Absolute monarchy Saudi Arabia Absolute monarchy Brunei Darussalam Absolute monarchy United Arab Emirates Federal absolute monarchy Kuwait Constitutional monarchy (emirate) with parliamentary elements Bahrain Constitutional monarchy (unitary) United Kingdom Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Netherlands Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Japan Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Denmark Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Norway Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Sweden Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Luxembourg Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Spain Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Australia Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Belgium Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Canada Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Liechtenstein Hereditary constitutional monarchy with elements of direct democracy Croatia Parliamentary republic Czechia Parliamentary republic Estonia Parliamentary republic Greece Parliamentary republic Hungary Parliamentary republic Israel Parliamentary republic Italy Parliamentary republic Latvia Parliamentary republic Lithuania Parliamentary republic Poland Parliamentary republic Slovakia Parliamentary republic Slovenia Parliamentary republic Finland Parliamentary republic (semi-presidential features) Austria Federal parliamentary republic Germany Federal parliamentary republic Switzerland Federal directorial republic (collegial executive of seven Federal Councilors) Andorra Parliamentary co-principality (two Co-Princes: French President & Bishop of Urgell) Chile Presidential republic Portugal Semi-presidential republic Argentina Federal presidential republic United States Federal presidential constitutional republic (representative democracy) Cyprus Unitary presidential republic South Korea Unitary presidential republic France Unitary semi-presidential republic (Fifth Republic) Iceland Unitary parliamentary republic Ireland Unitary parliamentary republic Malta Unitary parliamentary republic Singapore Unitary parliamentary republic New Zealand Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy Hong Kong (China SAR) Special Administrative Region of China with “one country, two systems”
lapcat 1y ago
In the United States, terms such as "conservative" and "liberal" seem to be used primarily to describe whatever currently happens to be popular in the duopolistic Republican and Democratic parties. I'm old enough now to have witnessed both parties, and the definitions of those terms, morph into something unrecognizable to partisans of my youth. And the (morbidly) funny thing is that people today call themselves "true conservatives," for example, apparently with no recollection or recognition of the recent past. My own view is that the terms don't signify real, stable ideologies but rather just give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics.
- Gormo 1y ago
  The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment. IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse, so gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    > IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime Can you elaborate?
    - Gormo 1y ago
      Tax hikes on American consumers and businesses. Expansions in federal spending against growing budget deficits. Government pursuing ownership or de facto control of private industry. Aggressive use of executive fiat to pursue novel policies without clear legislative basis. Federal interventions that try to direct or challenge state sovereignty on numerous issues traditionally outside the scope of federal authority. Hesitant foreign policy that seems overly deferential to traditional US adversaries, especially Russia.
amradio1989 1y ago
I’m starting to think political definitions only have use as propaganda. Definitions are definite, yet political definitions are anything but. In the US, much is made about “the left” and “the right”, but we can hardly describe what these things mean. “The left” is simply more liberal than I, while “the right” is more conservative than I. On what issues, no one knows, because we hardly ask. The point, I think, is simply to label the opposition while hiding any commonality or points of agreement. Useful for propaganda, but useless for substantive political discourse; you know, the kind that underpins a healthy democracy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  the kind that underpins a healthy democracy To be fair, this kind of presupposes that all actors in a polity actually have as their goal, "healthy democracy". Pretty sure that's not the goal of most people in power nowadays. (At least in the US it's not the goal of people in power.)
- dijit 1y ago
  I'm not sure I agree here. There are "right wing issues" and "left wing issues" and there is friction between them. What concerns me most is political "slurs" where everyone forgets the meaning of the term but constantly throws it around as if it's just a bad word. Then the conversation just goes off the deep end as soon as they're invoked. "You're a wokie" or "you're a fascist"; as if either of the people using those terms even knows what they're referring to primarily, they just decided it's bad and because the person they're talking to is bad they must be whatever bad word I have in my vocabulary. PS: I will say that "woke" has a more concrete definition than fascist to many, but I don't want to be accussed of being for (or against) any particular side when writing this comment, and I can't come up with many off the top of my head that the right wingers use against the left wingers... so, sorry.
  - jrm4 1y ago
    "Woke" is perhaps the freaking platonic ideal of what this article criticizes. I'm black. It once was just a mostly fun little word that meant "Hey man, are you paying attention to the world around you?" And today it is completely without concrete meaning. For the left, it's kind of whatever, because it's responding to what it is for the so called right -- literally nothing more concrete than "what I don't like right now that might be associated with any group possibly considered a minority."
mallowdram 1y ago
Try "Obsolescence of all Definitions" Tom Givon used to say in class: "What true language requires a dictionary?" Language is decontextualized in the West, it's about attributes of individual objects where simplifying laws are derived, rather than language used as interdependent. At a certain point arbitrary language dissolves into meaninglessness. That's entropy and arbitrariness. As we accelerate language and primate status spirals the role of language is simply to dominate subjectively. It has no end point except for dissolution.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  "Mathematics is what mathematicians study. Mathematicians are those who study mathematics."
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    Formal description and studying is what I would define what mathematicians do.
MangoToupe 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
The_Rob 1y ago
I agree with the point this article is trying to make. As political definitions change, we start to lose sight of what these terms actually mean. I believe a more helpful comparison than left vs right, is open vs closed. https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-right/ https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-rig...
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Oddly, the article doesn't discuss the terms "open" or "closed" at all, much less what makes them uniquely resistant to be coopted and bastardized. Edit: apparently that is in "part two" which isn't linked anywhere
mxmilkiib 1y ago
"..summon “unsullied” socialism, a game with ever more variations, which long since has become confusing—and boring." to quote a comment I found, because it puts it better than I could; "Murray Bookchin's concept of communalism and his follower Abdullah Öcalan's similar concept of democratic confederalism. It can be summed up as "refocusing politics around local government by popular assemblies, while higher levels of government being confederations of these local units". Thus communalism does mean there would still be a state, although far more decentralised. This was one reason why Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist, though his disillusionment with the '90s the anarchist scene was another." . libertarian municipalism + communalism, a kind of libertarian socialism with social ecology as the philosophy framing our situation Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971); https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post... some use the meme of "google Murray Bookchin", because once you get into their work, so much of it makes good sense (and their polemic bits are funny too) a really good podcast on Murray; https://youtu.be/V0Z2KGudYrA https://youtu.be/V0Z2KGudYrA + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin . and there's the adapted democratic confederalism of Ocalan, which is actually used in Rojava (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria) https://nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-helped-the-kurds-create-a-new-democracy https://nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-h... this is the group that was US aligned until Trump said no, which allowed Turkey to do a land-grab and dispossess folk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism http://ocalanbooks.com http://ocalanbooks.com
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jrm4 1y ago
Nailed it. Many, if not MOST "political debates" you see can probably be deflated by just clearly having each side define their terms. E.g. Capitalism is often either "people making favorable trades" or "exploitation through decreased liability for big money investors" depending on. (and please, don't get me started on "woke." Sigh)
incomingpain 1y ago
This article was a good read but having been written in 1992, it completely misses the 2009 inflection point and subsequent polarization. Which has more recently resulted in becoming extremely violent for politics. Now the definitions are even worse than the article proposes. It's clear that the definitions are being abused intentionally. This is the death of a political definition, I cant give it a label, see OP. It will become a religion after this; only then will we have the violence end in our politics. I would say the EU pact from 1997 was brilliant. They had to have known of the human costs; but it's over now. We've seen the end. Mind you, yes, there's stillpain to come; but it's too big. I'm predicting, since history is repeating for like the 6th time, we're still about 10 years out on the end of political violence.

37 points by vmchale 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250915141229/http://vmchale.com/static/serve/taxonomy.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250915141229/http://vmchale.co...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

josefritzishere 1y ago

This is an interesting read, and it makes me want to read more. But the intro could use some context. I have so many questions now.

lapcat 1y ago
> But the intro could use some context. What do you mean by that?
- josefritzishere 1y ago
  For example that the author is a conservative marxist writing that treatise at the time of the "August Coup" which is a pretty interesting historical event itself. It toppled Gorbechev, and Yeltsin took over. Kondylis is also more reknowned than I was aware.
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  I (like GP, most likely) did not live through the events that occurred in Moscow during 1991. The only news media I consumed at the time was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, which did not cover Soviet politics, and we did not cover any of this in school later in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of what I learned after the fact has been from Fox and MSNBC and Red Alert 2 and Call of Duty - that commies and socialists and Soviets are bad people who want to give kids free school lunches, will disrupt the temporal equilibrium, and give adults universal health care. I can skim the Wikipedia article about the coup [1] and I recognize the names of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but I cannot even begin to articulate the political philosophies of their platforms or the power dynamics, coalitions, and incentive structures that either used to leverage one position or the other. The intro paragraph, I think, is trying to use this to its advantage by describing an unfamiliar political landscape with conservatives and parlimentarians and Stalinists and "putschists" (what even is that word?). I barely know what conservativism means as distinct from "whatever the American Republican party does". I clicked on the article because I've observed that liberalism/conservativism/libertarianism/socialism/populism/marxism/fascism/neo___ism/etc. are bandied about more like sports team names to be cheered or derided rather than comprehended, and hoped to understand this phenomenon better. I'll push through the article eventually, with frequent dictionary lookups for "societas civilis" and "diptych" and "affairs curricula". But it's clearly written for an expert in political philosophy and will take me a long time to do so. I'm an expert in computer engineering and pretty innately talented at understanding that, I'm not an expert in the social sciences and they don't come easily to me. But I still live in a society, and try to participate in its governance as best I can...while neither journalists nor public education have really helped me to get there. I don't observe my peers reading Chomsky, Hayek, Putnam, Piketty, Turchin, and Zinn before they go to the voting booth, but they get one vote each just the same. I've actually looked it up and found that my local community college offers a "PL230 - Introduction to Political Theory" course, this winter it's held mid-day for full-time students but they're offering it virtually in the evenings next summer so that people who work during the day can participate. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    While I also neither lived through 1991 nor knew those terms, I found the text fairly understandable. But that might be, because I'm familiar with the political landscape the text describes. I think this text is touching the basis of what became known of as the story of "the end of history" which we did cover in schools history lessons although not very detailed. The article describes a trend of both the political right and left to the center, i.e. modern liberalism, which means that these distinction became less extreme. However this trend has now reversed. On the right that trend led to a rising of a new political party (AfD) that poses as the old conservatists to frustrated voters, but are actually more fascistic. On the left the party previously called communistic now calls for more aggressive "actions", accelerated by the split of of the not more conservative, but more aligned with more "bourgeois interests" flavored wing of the former. This also explains while the latter now is also seen favorable by voters who would previously would have been more aligned with the political right. Thus, the text is neither outdated nor topical. It does not describe the current political landscape, but the origin and causes for it that lay in the previous one. As such it is very topical again.

bpt3 1y ago

The rise of populism, especially in the US, has accelerated the breakdown described here. It's difficult to place political parties or even individual politicians in neat boxes, which would be a benefit in some ways in theory if it wasn't really caused by the political parties (and one in particular) becoming completely unmoored from their historical platform and agenda. These shifts have happened a few times in the past, and it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

c54 1y ago

This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago. What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful. These days I think JREG is doing good work tracking political categories if you’re interested and don’t mind some irony-poisoned jargon check him out.

Pxtl 1y ago
Yeah, I think we've all seen the term "socialism" prettymuch destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember, for example. I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  > "socialism" pretty much destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.) Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is. Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up. Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way. "Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp. A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism. It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed. Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels. Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority. Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers. Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin. Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today. Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

Afaik, there are already specific political definitions. It's just that "the common man" isn't very educated in them, and the "language of politics" eschews logic and specificity in favor of generalization (in order to induce rancor and thus party-alignment). Here is the political classification of the top 50 developed nations (I tried to organize them, but it's hard...): Qatar Absolute monarchy Oman Absolute monarchy Saudi Arabia Absolute monarchy Brunei Darussalam Absolute monarchy United Arab Emirates Federal absolute monarchy Kuwait Constitutional monarchy (emirate) with parliamentary elements Bahrain Constitutional monarchy (unitary) United Kingdom Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Netherlands Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Japan Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Denmark Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Norway Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Sweden Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Luxembourg Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Spain Parliamentary constitutional monarchy Australia Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Belgium Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Canada Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy Liechtenstein Hereditary constitutional monarchy with elements of direct democracy Croatia Parliamentary republic Czechia Parliamentary republic Estonia Parliamentary republic Greece Parliamentary republic Hungary Parliamentary republic Israel Parliamentary republic Italy Parliamentary republic Latvia Parliamentary republic Lithuania Parliamentary republic Poland Parliamentary republic Slovakia Parliamentary republic Slovenia Parliamentary republic Finland Parliamentary republic (semi-presidential features) Austria Federal parliamentary republic Germany Federal parliamentary republic Switzerland Federal directorial republic (collegial executive of seven Federal Councilors) Andorra Parliamentary co-principality (two Co-Princes: French President & Bishop of Urgell) Chile Presidential republic Portugal Semi-presidential republic Argentina Federal presidential republic United States Federal presidential constitutional republic (representative democracy) Cyprus Unitary presidential republic South Korea Unitary presidential republic France Unitary semi-presidential republic (Fifth Republic) Iceland Unitary parliamentary republic Ireland Unitary parliamentary republic Malta Unitary parliamentary republic Singapore Unitary parliamentary republic New Zealand Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy Hong Kong (China SAR) Special Administrative Region of China with “one country, two systems”

lapcat 1y ago

In the United States, terms such as "conservative" and "liberal" seem to be used primarily to describe whatever currently happens to be popular in the duopolistic Republican and Democratic parties. I'm old enough now to have witnessed both parties, and the definitions of those terms, morph into something unrecognizable to partisans of my youth. And the (morbidly) funny thing is that people today call themselves "true conservatives," for example, apparently with no recollection or recognition of the recent past. My own view is that the terms don't signify real, stable ideologies but rather just give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics.

Gormo 1y ago
The problem is that these terms do signify real, stable ideologies, but the vast majority of people are superficial trend-chasers who don't actually adhere to any stable ideology, so misuse these terms to refer to whichever tribe they emotionally associate themselves with at the moment. IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime, but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse, so gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  > IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime Can you elaborate?
  - Gormo 1y ago
    Tax hikes on American consumers and businesses. Expansions in federal spending against growing budget deficits. Government pursuing ownership or de facto control of private industry. Aggressive use of executive fiat to pursue novel policies without clear legislative basis. Federal interventions that try to direct or challenge state sovereignty on numerous issues traditionally outside the scope of federal authority. Hesitant foreign policy that seems overly deferential to traditional US adversaries, especially Russia.

amradio1989 1y ago

I’m starting to think political definitions only have use as propaganda. Definitions are definite, yet political definitions are anything but. In the US, much is made about “the left” and “the right”, but we can hardly describe what these things mean. “The left” is simply more liberal than I, while “the right” is more conservative than I. On what issues, no one knows, because we hardly ask. The point, I think, is simply to label the opposition while hiding any commonality or points of agreement. Useful for propaganda, but useless for substantive political discourse; you know, the kind that underpins a healthy democracy.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bilbo0s 1y ago
the kind that underpins a healthy democracy To be fair, this kind of presupposes that all actors in a polity actually have as their goal, "healthy democracy". Pretty sure that's not the goal of most people in power nowadays. (At least in the US it's not the goal of people in power.)
dijit 1y ago
I'm not sure I agree here. There are "right wing issues" and "left wing issues" and there is friction between them. What concerns me most is political "slurs" where everyone forgets the meaning of the term but constantly throws it around as if it's just a bad word. Then the conversation just goes off the deep end as soon as they're invoked. "You're a wokie" or "you're a fascist"; as if either of the people using those terms even knows what they're referring to primarily, they just decided it's bad and because the person they're talking to is bad they must be whatever bad word I have in my vocabulary. PS: I will say that "woke" has a more concrete definition than fascist to many, but I don't want to be accussed of being for (or against) any particular side when writing this comment, and I can't come up with many off the top of my head that the right wingers use against the left wingers... so, sorry.
- jrm4 1y ago
  "Woke" is perhaps the freaking platonic ideal of what this article criticizes. I'm black. It once was just a mostly fun little word that meant "Hey man, are you paying attention to the world around you?" And today it is completely without concrete meaning. For the left, it's kind of whatever, because it's responding to what it is for the so called right -- literally nothing more concrete than "what I don't like right now that might be associated with any group possibly considered a minority."

mallowdram 1y ago

Try "Obsolescence of all Definitions" Tom Givon used to say in class: "What true language requires a dictionary?" Language is decontextualized in the West, it's about attributes of individual objects where simplifying laws are derived, rather than language used as interdependent. At a certain point arbitrary language dissolves into meaninglessness. That's entropy and arbitrariness. As we accelerate language and primate status spirals the role of language is simply to dominate subjectively. It has no end point except for dissolution.

bonoboTP 1y ago
"Mathematics is what mathematicians study. Mathematicians are those who study mathematics."
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Formal description and studying is what I would define what mathematicians do.

MangoToupe 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

The_Rob 1y ago

I agree with the point this article is trying to make. As political definitions change, we start to lose sight of what these terms actually mean. I believe a more helpful comparison than left vs right, is open vs closed. https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-right/ https://unherd.com/2018/07/open-vs-closed-rise-fall-left-rig...

MangoToupe 1y ago
Oddly, the article doesn't discuss the terms "open" or "closed" at all, much less what makes them uniquely resistant to be coopted and bastardized. Edit: apparently that is in "part two" which isn't linked anywhere

mxmilkiib 1y ago

"..summon “unsullied” socialism, a game with ever more variations, which long since has become confusing—and boring." to quote a comment I found, because it puts it better than I could; "Murray Bookchin's concept of communalism and his follower Abdullah Öcalan's similar concept of democratic confederalism. It can be summed up as "refocusing politics around local government by popular assemblies, while higher levels of government being confederations of these local units". Thus communalism does mean there would still be a state, although far more decentralised. This was one reason why Bookchin stopped calling himself an anarchist, though his disillusionment with the '90s the anarchist scene was another." . libertarian municipalism + communalism, a kind of libertarian socialism with social ecology as the philosophy framing our situation Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971); https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post... some use the meme of "google Murray Bookchin", because once you get into their work, so much of it makes good sense (and their polemic bits are funny too) a really good podcast on Murray; https://youtu.be/V0Z2KGudYrA https://youtu.be/V0Z2KGudYrA + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin . and there's the adapted democratic confederalism of Ocalan, which is actually used in Rojava (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria) https://nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-helped-the-kurds-create-a-new-democracy https://nybooks.com/online/2018/06/15/how-my-fathers-ideas-h... this is the group that was US aligned until Trump said no, which allowed Turkey to do a land-grab and dispossess folk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism http://ocalanbooks.com http://ocalanbooks.com

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

jrm4 1y ago

Nailed it. Many, if not MOST "political debates" you see can probably be deflated by just clearly having each side define their terms. E.g. Capitalism is often either "people making favorable trades" or "exploitation through decreased liability for big money investors" depending on. (and please, don't get me started on "woke." Sigh)

incomingpain 1y ago

This article was a good read but having been written in 1992, it completely misses the 2009 inflection point and subsequent polarization. Which has more recently resulted in becoming extremely violent for politics. Now the definitions are even worse than the article proposes. It's clear that the definitions are being abused intentionally. This is the death of a political definition, I cant give it a label, see OP. It will become a religion after this; only then will we have the violence end in our politics. I would say the EU pact from 1997 was brilliant. They had to have known of the human costs; but it's over now. We've seen the end. Mind you, yes, there's stillpain to come; but it's too big. I'm predicting, since history is repeating for like the 6th time, we're still about 10 years out on the end of political violence.