What’s in a name?
There were a few things to come out of that little stoush yesterday and one of them was the old dilemma – nomenclature.
Confession time – I introduced the Holy Cow into the post because the blind reverence given him is misplaced and gets in the way of understanding the issue. However, as sure as night follows day, I knew full well I was in for a real pasting for daring to utter his name in vain – you can’t take on a hero to show his flawed thinking and get away with it. Just not done.
No matter – interesting exercise.
Applying the maxim “there’s no smoke without fire”, I ask the question, “Why would politics have fallen into Left/Right designations so easily anyway?” Going back in the mists of time, how did the political model become linear ?
Though the designations are clearly a bit outdated and those on one side of the ledger get apoplectic about such designations, hence it being better to use this sort of model or a different one, there had to be some original reason to use the Left/Right designations, otherwise no one would have used them. They’d have used something else.
Therefore, what was it which caused such designations in the first place?
Three sided spectrum
If the idea is posited that at a minimum, there are three poles to the political spectrum, as follows:
… then this takes care of the uncanny resemblance between Communism and Fascism which so characterized the early Nazi party, namely that both tended to coercion and one-size-fits-all solutions. It’s just that they used different rhetoric, different nomenclature. Where it falls down is that the two other poles in the spectrum are not poles – they’re general areas of thought – and yet they are quite identifiable areas, backed by certain philosophers and thinkers these people find strike a chord with them.
The Soft Leftists
Variously known as liberals in America and [not entirely correctly] socialists or social democrats elsewhere, they inhabit a fuzzy world in which they have a concept of National Pie and thus they employ slogans such as “fair for all”, “equality” and “fair distribution of wealth”, as if such wealth is somehow produced by the state and not by the hard work of individuals who set up businesses and take risks.
In this world, the lazy benefits taker is exactly the same as the man who sets up a corner shop and to each person goes a “fair” redistribution of the pooled wealth. This involves two principles – dispossession of the people who took the risks and enforced equality. Hence diversity and equality legislation.
Central to this is the concept of one’s labour – that the risk taker would never have had his wealth in the first place if workers had not produced it for him. Thus, the corner shopkeeper who poured his life savings into setting up his business is the same as the shopgirl he employs and that she has a proportional claim to the wealth the business makes, on top of her salary.
Rhetoric is vital to this process and it includes “fairness”, “equitable”, “kind”, “racist”, “sexist”, “disablist”, every other “-ist”, “homophobic” and all are designed to shame people into complying with the constructs. One thing which always identifies a Soft Leftist is that he HATES designations. He says that there is no such thing as PC or Leftist – that all people are individual, whilst at the same time, he favours state intervention to make people not individual – to make them all the same. He hotly disputes that this is why he wants the State to dispossess the Haves – he says he only wants to enforce Fairness.
What it’s really all about is Theft – theft from the risk-taker and redistribution to those who will take no risks. He claims that the only theft is what the Capitalists do.
The Bourgeois Rightist
You find him, with his family, down pleasant cul-de-sacs in pleasant houses [mortgage being repaid], with clipped lawns, on Sunday mornings and with a “respectability” to their existence. He believes in hard work, owning the fruits of his labour, in inheritance, in property and the model is that, over one’s lifetime, one builds up one’s assets, which are then passed on to the family in due course.
He believes fervently in the right of the individual to go to a plot of land [subject to zoning], build an enterprise there, employ people and actually produce wealth by selling a product.
What he fails to understand and the Soft Left is correct here, is that though his wealth was largely produced through his know how, elbow grease and risk taking, at some stage he must employ someone or outsource and when he does, then the old Capital/Labour dichotomy arises.
The Soft Left would say that that automatically gives the worker a stake in the enterprise. The Bourgeois Rightist would say no – he took the risks, he put his capital up front and he worked to get the enterprise off the ground – therefore the fruits of the enterprise are his. A sensible BR would link the success of an enterprise to his employees in the form of bonuses, pay increases and other benefits but the Soft Left points out that the chances of a BR being sensible and not greedy is slim.
Therefore there needs to be some regulation in place to force him to be fair to employees, hence unions and hence industrial action. [Your not so humble blogger sees the force of this argument.]
If both sides stepped back and conceded some of the other’s argument, then you’d have enterprises which would be free to thrive instead of sinking and where the distribution of salaries and benefits was proportional to the success of the business, provided the State effing well kept its mitts out of it.
The Stateless Extremists
These are the ones this blog is dedicated to bringing down and this puts him in bed with both the old Right and the old Left – both sides wishing to curb the raping of the planet by the SEs. Look at any post on this blog and you’ll see the SEs – the Morgans, Goldman Sachs, Mandelson, Davignon, the Bavarian Bruderheist, Exxon Mobil, Club of [insert city here], BIS, IMF, WB, NATO etc. etc., Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Gore, Maurice Strong, Bernanke, Krugman, Keynes, Communists, global socialists, Communitarians, Veronique Morales, the Radical Feminists, one can go on and on – they are legion.
This is a place I very briefly found myself in, rubbing shoulders with these people [before I went to Russia] and I didn’t like what I saw.
They have no state, no faith beyond a reasonable rate of return, no loyalties beyond their enterprise and to them, there are two classes – Them and the Plebs. They do rape the planet because at the upper echelons, something happens to them – they come into contact with some dark religion of elitism.
The Soft Left just cannot see that these people are any different to the Bourgeois Right – the SL brain does not compute this difference. Equally, the BR just cannot compute in the brain that Communists and JP Morgan are different manifestations of exactly the same thing – that it all ends up with oligarchical monopoly and control.
You
Obviously you have characteristics of the SL and BR within you in varying proportions. You might lean more one way than the other and that’s why the terms Left of Centre/Right of Centre enjoy the vogue they do. That’s the ground each of the Big Three are trying to capture.
You’re more likely to be softer on some aspects and harder on others.
Filed under: Politics & economics
