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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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IMO this is why it takes an additional axis to define a government, not just left/right but also free/authoritarian. You can find examples of all combinations. Left wing and repressive? Cuba. Left leaning and free? Sweden. Right wing and repressive? Russia, Saudi Arabia, whatever. Right leaning and free (mostly)? USA.
Obviously, there’s a gradient within these axes, but it’s strange to see people cheering on a country that matches their preferred left or right wing ideology if they’re super repressive.
This is why we need to reeducate people and stop using the traditional left-right spectrum and start using the axis spectrum
Even the axis spectrum is unproductive, ideologies and frameworks cannot be distilled into single data points on a map, no matter how many axes you add.
The axis spectrum has proven to be very efficient imo. A lot of the politics we talk about are mainly composed of social and economic elements which the axis spectrum portrays well.
You cannot distill complicated views into linear axes, though.
I don't know what you're trying to refer to, here. Marxists have always discredited the Political Compass as overly simplistic and erasing nuance.
These views aren't complicated though, or aren't as complicated as you think. Most of our political opinions can be boiled down to any of the 4 quadrants of the axis.
Can you name any view that doesn't fit into this axis?
Many. Which is more "authoritarian" and which is more "libertarian," a fully publicly owned and democratically controlled economy, or a highly decentralized market economy with a nightwatchman state?
Well it depends right, let's not act like there isn't nuance to this.
It falls on the libertarian-left if individuals and communities genuinely govern themselves without coercion e.g democratic socialism. However, if the system requires a strong central authority to enforce public ownership and suppress alternative systems, it moves toward the authoritarian-left e.g Marxist-Leninism
This is just a straight up libertarian right economy. A nightwatchman state equals laissez-faire capitalism which aligns with libertarian-right philosophy.
To answer your question, it depends on the type of publicly owned and democratically controlled economy we're talking about.
See, this is where your analogy falls apart. Marxist-Leninists support recall elections and more democratic methods than what you describe as "democratic socialism." You're trying to add to the existing example to make it mean something it doesn't, I asked you a straightforward question and you had to add to it in order to force it into your tidy and neat boxes.
Same with what you call "lib-right," I would consider that more "authoritarian" because people have far less actual control over their lives than they would in the other example, despite focusing on decentralization. In such an economy, warlordism would be the dominant factor in decision making.
This is why the Political Compass is an exercise in absurdity, you cannot simplify viewpoints to 4 quadrants because that's not how economics or politics actually works. You can only describe them by their real and existing mechanisms.
Again my argument isn't that the compass is a rigid framework; rather, it is a guiding tool. Ideologies themselves are not static, but how they are applied or implemented in specific contexts determines where they fall on the compass. This is why i added the nuance earlier.
Take Marxist-Leninism as an example. In theory, it emphasizes democratic control, but in practice, it often relies on centralized enforcement. The inclusion of recall elections might move the system towards the libertarian-left quadrant. However, if those elections are tokenistic or used to maintain centralized authority, the system trends authoritarian-left again. The Political Compass isn’t saying Marxist-Leninism is always authoritarian-left—it’s showing where it falls based on how it’s applied in practice.
Similarly, decentralized market economies might theoretically align with libertarian-right values. But if power becomes concentrated through corporate dominance or "warlordism," it would practically shift toward authoritarianism.
If anything, you agree with me that it is how these ideologies are applied in practice that matters most. No framework is perfect. The political compass, when used with nuance, is a very valuable analytical tool for measuring trends and shifts in governance and power dynamics.
My point is that using it as a tool ends up doing more to obscure the actual mechanisms at play than it does to reveal them, and thus is useless when you can just state the general guiding principles themselves.
Your analysis of Marxism-Leninism is a good example of the dangers of over-simplifying and trying to make sense of it in a manner that fits on the political compass. Marxism-Leninism proposes democratic centralism and a mass line, concepts that have no way to fit on the political compass and yet give more power to the working class than Anarchism would, because Anarchism limits their reach of influence to their internal communes or syndicates. Even in practice AES states have had recall elections.
Additionally, there is no such thing as a "libertarian right," because there cannot be a market based Capitalist economy without corporations dominating it, no matter how small the state, because there is no chance of working class power.
The political compass erases nuance and oversimplifies to dangerous degrees. It's an idealist framing of material reality and distorts trends and mechanisms, rather than helping track them. The sooner it leaves discourse the better the discourse will be.
How in the world has it "proven to be very efficient"? Did you run laboratory tests?
I think Saudi Arabia is the perfect example of why even that model isn't even enough. I mean sure they are a monarchy and quite self-focused but not really in a nationalistic way. To be fair I don't know much about their domestic politics. To put them into the same corner as Russia, eh dunno.
I couldn't ask for clearer evidence than not accepting Saudi Arabia as authoritarian to demonstrate that "free vs authoritarian" are just propaganda terms and that how "free" a country allegedly is is really just a function of how aligned it is with the US.
In what universe is Saudi Arabia more free than Cuba?
I think some aspects of freedom are to some extent objectively observable, eg, is freedom of speech or religion observed? These can exist independently of US alignment - there are many countries in the global south that can qualify as free or partially free.
Mhm. I wonder, which objective metrics led you to list the US as more free than Cuba?
Cuba's family code is one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in the world concerning LGBT rights and gender equality, meanwhile, there are parts of the US where you can get arrested for using the bathroom, or for merely failing to rat out trans kids to the cops. The US performs mass surveillance on all citizens and has the most sophisticated spy network in the world, it has used extrajudicial, indefinite detention without trial (in addition to having the highest incarceration rate in the world), along with torture (ironically, on illegally occupied Cuban soil). The US has kangaroo courts where children as young as six have to represent themselves in court with no right to an attorney, against threat of deportation. The police are equipped with military-grade equipment designed to fight insurgents, with the police budgets of individual cities exceeding that of the militaries of many countries: Cuba's military spending is several times less than the police budget of Phoenix, AZ.
Does any of that factor into your analysis?
Cuba lacks basic freedom of speech or freedom of the press, to say the absolute least. Typical tankie whatabout-ism. In fact, you’re proving the point of the person I originally replied to in this thread!
https://freedomhouse.org/country/cuba
What did I say that's whataboutism? You claimed that Cuba was authoritarian and the US is free, therefore it's perfectly valid for me to compare the two against each other. It would only not be valid if you had placed them both in the same category.
Freedom House is literally funded by the US State department lmao. Nice objective and unbiased source you've got there!
The only "freedom" that Freedom House cares about is how free the bourgeoisie are to infiltrate the government and capture regulatory agencies. By that metric, Cuba is much less "free" than the US, sure.
Authoritarianism doesn't necessarily require nationalism or vice versa, though they're often linked, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. The USA is pretty flag waving, nationalist brained but individual freedom exists. Versus a country like Saudi as you mention is not particularly nationalist, but repression is widespread.
They are quite different than Russia, but looking only at individual freedom, the two are similar in that freedom of speech is not respected and leaders are not fairly elected.
The thing is, Left vs Right is already a measure of authoritarian vs Democratic.
The original use of the terms comes from the French Revolution. There was a vote on if the King should have an absolute veto over laws passed by the assembly. Those who said no sat to the left of the Speakers podium. Those who said yes sat on the right.
The reason why left and right were applied to economic policy was because Marx described Communism as a form of extreme Democracy. Whereas Capitalism concentrates power into the hands of a select few.
It's still a measure of where the power rests. In the hands of the people or the hands of the state/leader.
You can break it down to dozens of categories, but it's all authoritarian vs Democratic in the end.
As a note, Lenin style single party "communism" is about as far from Marx's ideal as you can get.
Dictators and Kings are all the enemies of the people.