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Enlightened Centrism
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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This is, quite frankly, just wrong.
To be a centrist in the context of American Political Parties is to be a right-winger. America has 2 right wing political parties, and the only point of being a centrist in this context is to separate yourself from fascists.
To be a centrist in the actual meaning of left and right, ie Socialism vs Capitalism, is to be a Social Democrat.
Left does not necessarily want gun control as well.
Right wing does not have better foreign policy positions than the left wing, right wing foreign policy is basically "minorities evil."
All of what you called the "far left" is just straight up wrong. The far-left wants Socialism, and maybe even Communism or Anarchism. It isn't about banning books or whatever evil strawman you want it to be.
The far right is just fascism.
What you call "reality" is just a leftist stance, the centrists don't care about class conflict and right wingers side with the bourgeoisie.
Let's also talk about the way "left" and "right" are represented.
Essentially, the terms come from the placement of seats in British parliament back in the day, it has nothing to do with some "poles" or "extremes".
Yet here we are, representing it as two extremes - something it has never been. You know what extremes actually are? Total oppression of majority by the minority (edge case - one person owning everyone else as slaves) and total oppression of the minority by the majority (edge case - entire world bullying one person). You know what's in the middle? Total equality, where nobody oppresses anyone. That's the center, the neutral state, where no oppression takes place.
You might call it some mental construct, but we've actually seen a lot of examples during socialist/communist revolutions, with minority of previously rich and powerful being systematically oppressed, sent to camps etc. This is "lefter" than the far left, however, as it makes it detrimental to have any sort of power, this state of things usually doesn't last long, which is why this is often ignored as a consideration. But it doesn't deny the fact such "actually left" exists.
Your talking about Racism (Oppression of minority groups by the majority group). Between the "Left" and the "Right" I think it's obvious which side tends towards that more...
Just because you can identify two opposite extremes doesn't automatically mean 1 is a Right Wing ideology and the other must be a Left Wing ideology.
I had to mention this goes in relation to minority in power, not just any minority.
The point I'm trying to make is that total equality is not an extreme it's made out to be. It's a neutral state, perfectly in the center between varous kinds of opposite oppression.
I think you're encountering an issue of taxonomic framework.
There are two general models I encounter when asking people to visualize the idea of political left and right. There is a sort of ring model where people veiw things as left with fascism on the far right and communism on the far left... But that facism and communism are also side by side creating a seemless loop. This sliding scale model is the most common and easiest for people to grasp quickly but has problems when seeming contradictory things occur that are not easily sortable.
The issue with this system is that it treats things like communism as a logical evolution of socialism.. Which is actually not particularly sensible because there are many things between those two systems that are fully diametrically opposed. (Also - side note I think we need more words other than Socialism for socialism because there are completely different formats of socialism existing under that umbrella term and the "that's not REAL socialism" sometimes gets hung up between two entirely valid forms both termed SOCIALISM)
The other model of left vs right which is gaining more traction turns to a more basic it continuum. It describes the relative distance between ideologies by a sort of triangulation method. The main factor of this model is how much does an ideology scatter power and influence laterally (left) vs how much does it reinforce powers into a heirachy or preserve hierarchies that already exist (right) . In this way it also allows you to navigate based on when and where you are and what power structures are in place.
For instance in this model libralism, often considered sort of center right for being quite pro-capitalist and concerning itself with individual property rights - would be actually center left IF the power incumbent is an autocracy like a monarchy. Since the fixed point is anchored in two basic poles it creates a navigation system when discussing the left and right with decent historical continuity and treats social ideologies as landmarks in relation to each other.
It also solves for some particular contradictory stances normally considered "left" or "right". Take the issue of gun control. From a leftist perspective gun rights and gun control are both potential ways to scatter power.-
On the one hand giving people a chance to self millitarize means you have the potential force to resist the demands of a heirachy imposed upon you. Hence you scatter power to resist violence.
On the other gun control can scatter power by creating a measure of public safety from a gun owning class. You scatter the power by valuing the freedoms of people who don't want to own guns and thus scatter power between those two groups.
Hence both are effectively in line with different spheres of leftist thinking. Gun control could also be a feature of the right to seize power to make citizenship more vulnerable to state violence and gun rights could be approached from a right wing perspective when veiwed as an factor that allows existing power hierarchies to be maintained if one is uncritical about how guns interface with issues of violence against vulnerable people.
Yea, more bullshit, lmao.
Communism is the abolition of state, class, and money, resulting in abolition of hierarchy. Fascism is a violent, Capitalist framework by which to cement hierarchy. These are not related in any way.
Communism is in fact an evolution on Socialism, rather its the completed form of Socialism. Once all Means of Production are owned in common, the logical next step is to work towards eliminating the state, class, and money in general.
Socialism is straightforward. It just means Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. Use it as you wish.
Left vs right is Socialism VS Capitalism. Even in your own example of anti-hierarchy vs hierarchy, liberalism would be firmly pro-hierarchy as Capitalism is inherently pro-hierarchy.
Please, just read a book.
I have read some books. I recommend Cory Robin as an author, he manages to be fairly entertaining. You also don't think maybe you are applying a slippery slope fallacy to socialism? Systems can be considered "complete" by the people experiencing them at any level of socialism. Generally speaking Communism isn't even very popular in very socialist countries.
Communism being adjacent to facism in the ring model of visualization is largely due to the fact it hasn't been successfully implemented and in being unstable eventually tips into a different form of autocratic format. I don't particularly subscribe to that visualization model personally. It's far more common on the right who has been conditioned to look at communism and facism as being natural progressions of each other.
And no. Socialism is not always in strict opposition to capitalism. None of this is that simple. It doesn't always front worker ownership of means of production either. Those are both socialist ideas yes in the same way Halloween and Friday the 13th are both horror genre. They represent only a fraction of many different presentations of socialism.
I wish I could give a simple overarching definition of socialism for you but quite frankly it's really hard to give a simple description of socialism that actually encapsulates all of Socialism.It is kind broadly divisible into market, non-market Socialism and Social Democracy as long as you're willing to ignore some of the more difficult to pin down stuff...
Market socialism is the chunk that really doesn't jive with your strict socialism / capitalism dichotomy. As a economic theory it both functions INSIDE the framework of capitalism existing as a given but is also anti-capitalist as far as it seeks to limit how capital can be invested or extracted. Non-market socialism looks for allocation of resources in ways outside of the idea of contemporary market systems.
Then there's Social Democratic Socialism - the branch of socialism we think of as social justice...it does kind of factor in money and economics tangentially because it is concerned with precarity of underprivileged classes but it more concens itself with ideas of equality in more of the sense people think of when they hear the words "woke". Disabling social hierarchies that value certain people over others.
There are a bunch of different disparate socialist ideas that intersect with virtually everything. The environment, government service, transit, models of economic systems, unionization, city design, public services, taxation structures... And while you can sort of aggregate different any particular socialist party into rough clusters around specific manifestations of socialism you can have very different manifestations which are still "socialist".
Historically one could blame this all on basically being a counterculture situation. When you dig up the thinkers behind libralism or conservatism you get your John Locke and your Edmund Burke. The writers that followed were more about hammering out the details. These people created fairly basic ideas. Basic because they were very European centric, narrow and were enforced on others in the form of colonization. They compressed everything into a simple straightforward philosophy that if you fell outside of somehow you basically earned your misery.
Socialism grew up in the shadows between liberalism and communism. Between the occupying force of liberalism which always had built in exceptions to the freedoms it promised and the Communist /anarchist idea of violent resistance. Socialism had so many writers in it's early days positing middle ground situations between those two extremes that it was always kind of a schizophrenic mood board ... But critically when you look at the early socialist writers a lot of them weren't trying to upset the capitalist applecart overly much. Some of them were even capitalists themselves.
And socialism keeps getting bigger. More and more thought into dissolution of the Eurocentric and traditional norms means you have feminist socialism, Indigenous Socialism, Black Socialism, Disability Advocates, Gender and sexuallity focused socialism, anti-kyriarchists... Marx and Lenin would be completely out of their depth trying to tackle it.
You are dipping your tin cup in a lake of socialism holding it to your chest and saying "all that exists of socialism is held in this cup" ignoring the fact there's a whole god damn lake you could swim in.
You're using things unrelated to Socialism and calling them Socialism. Social safety nets aren't Socialism. Market Socialism is socialism, but it's also absolutely not Capitalism, because Capitalism isn't just markets.
Social safety nets are socialism. Go read any of the early Socialist writers and that is sometimes the only thing they really concern themselves with. Robert Owens comes to mind as an example. If you are using power to establish a "common welfare" then you are creating resources that are socially held corporations meant to be publicly accessed based on need. Basically it looks at entire populations fronting the resources and sharing in the security created from those services.
Capitalism at it's most basic is the idea of investment capital. Capital is the money made and returned in profit by owning a means to production, paying workers for their time or labour and scalping off the top of that. It expanded the idea of stockholders and privately held property. We as a society have done a very good job of memeifying capitalism into a bogeyman that is an all consuming monster... But the reality of the situation is that while capitalism has a nasty history a lot of it is tied up in how liberal veiws of everything as potential personal property and veiwing social ownership as essentially just unclaimed property... Isn't actually a core principle of capitalism. Capitalism can exist by degrees just as Socialism does. Both are ideas about what constitutes a legitimate ownership of property and production of goods but inside those ideas are a bunch of smaller concepts that are potentially compatible mixes that can co-exist.
But the other half of this is how are those labels currently being used in the discussion we as a society are having now. Pure strains of Liberal Capitalism are currently ruining the world because it equates freedom with unrestricted protection of privately held properties.
Social Capitalism is an alternative to Liberal Capitalism by a degree based on the works of socialists that look at what constitutes a free society based less on individually held property rights and instead a dynamic interplay of the socially and privately held.
If strains of socialist philosophical discussion holds strains of capitalism as a force naturally existing and not a problem in some form it is not a dichotomy, it's a parallel. Calling Market Socialism something like "responsible Capitalism" is something that is legitimately done by people who just don't like the connotations of the label "Socialist". You could scoff at them sure but people's personal emotional reaction to how they label themselves is still kind of relevant. If a Market Socialist and a "Responsible Capitalist" are advocating for the exact same thing then are they actually fundamentally different in any way that matters?
It all really depends on how you want to use the term. Ask yourself if this rejection is because you feel upset because your feel like your personal label is being attacked? If so where is that feeling actually coming from?
Social safety nets are not Worker Ownership of the Means of Production. You don't need a wall of text. Bourgeois bastardizations and attempts to redefine Socialism to fit nicely into Capitalism are just that, bastardizations.
Additionally, there's no such thing as a Responsible Capitalist. They are not advocating for the same things as Market Socialists, who seek to establish Worker Co-operatives, rather than "ethical" Capitalist institutions (which again, do not exist).
All in all, I'm just not a fan of people like you taking established, well-defined terms and corrupting them for personal use.
You are correct that social safety nets are distinct from worker owned production. But those are still both socialism.
All in all I'm not a fan of people like you trying to compress a dense complicated history of a varied and interesting school of political thought into something the width of a tweet just because you want to create your personal True Scotsman and die valiantly the hill of semantics.
Chances were always good we weren't going to get along.
They are not still both Socialism, that's why Social Democracies are Social Democracies and not Socialist Democracies.
It's not semantics, I'm just really not a fan of people that are so confidently wrong.
Yea, I don't think I'd get along with someone who is adamant about redefining words just to fit a bourgeois narrative, and take away from Proletarian struggles.
Ah yes, of course I am simply a nasty bourgeois sympathizer who is oppressing you in your virtuous struggle. Whee.