[iDC] What is Left? / What Does a Distributed Politics Look Like?

[Dmytri Kleiner]

Abe Burmeister wrote:
> What is Left?
>   
I don't start with the assumption that any movement or individual that 
self-identifies as left is in fact so.

When I'm thinking about this issue, I find it useful to understand left 
as the the belief in the extension of economic power to political power.

Therefore the left wing of any tendency is the one that emphasizes 
bottom-up or community-based practices.

Right is the belief in the extension of political power to economic 
power, therefore the right of any tendency wants to enforce it's agenda 
from the top down and emphasizes authoritarian practices.

Socialism and Capitalism are not themselves either left or right, rather 
each has a left and right wing.

Socialists believe that extraction if surplus value by appropriating the 
scarcity value of land and capital from the product of labour is theft, 
Capitalist believe it is a natural extension of their right to 
self-ownership, and a feature of voluntary exchange.

In my opinion, neither belief is itself right or left, it is the 
proposals on how to bring about and maintain these property relations 
that can be either right or left.

In many ways I feel more affinity with the left of Capitalism than the 
right of Socialism, however both left-wing Capitalists and right-wing 
Socialists are either gravely misguided or sinisterly disingenuous in my 
opinion, but that is another topic.

-- 
Dmytri Kleiner

editing text files since 1981

http://www.telekommunisten.net