The Essence of the Left

[JollyRoger]

It has been a privilege debating you on these points.

 

[warpus]

The more I look at it, the more "The essence of the left" sounds like a cologne of some sort. "Essence of the left", by Pierre Trudeau. Don't you dare go out there harming your social class smelling like a peasant.

 

[Linkman226]

The more I look at it, the more "The essence of the left" sounds like a cologne of some sort. "Essence of the left", by Pierre Trudeau. Don't you dare go out there harming your social class smelling like a peasant.

L'essence de la Gauche by Calvin Klein. Coming out this winter.

 

[Old Hippy]

If a leftist is confronted with a reality in which total equality is impossible to achieve and they have to choose between an inequal but overall better off society or an equal but universally poor society, then they choose the latter option. And this usually ends badly for everyone, not just for the richest 2%. In a rich capitalist society accumulated wealth eventually leads to a situation when even the poorest people live better than most people in a typical socialist society, which doesn't accumulate wealth but only redistributes what it has, wasting large % of it in the process. This is why communism ultimately fails, with empty shelves in shops like in the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s. I prefer inequality over equality in which everybody is EQUALLY POOR. Only truly jealous people would prefer a situation when everybody has 500 Simoleans a month (full equality), to a situation when they have 1000 Simoleans a month but someone else has 2000.

Assuming you can buy the same amount of goods for the same amount of Simoleans in both scenarios, of course.

===================================

Leftist fascination of hunter gatherer communities which were "more equal" than 21st century world, only proves my point.

Who cares to "be equal" when you can have a house, hot water, an internet connection, etc. Unlike "equal" hunters.

In a post-Zombie-apocalypse world, all Zombies are equal to each other. But who would like to be a Zombie!

yet they founded the great capitalist USA with the declaration that all men are equall...

it is not about whether you had porridge or smoked salmon for breakfast but are you equall before the law...

being equall means that someone born tommorow will have a house, hot water and an internet connection...

 

[Pangur Bán]

Well I wouldn't call a collection of barely united Frankish dominions a "French State". For me the French state is gradually born as the nobles lose their autonomy and power.

Yet, that is the origin of the French state. Nobles were integral to the French state prior to 1789. Aristocracies are integral to the functioning of any large healthy state. They are aristocrats rather than, say, village headmen or tribal chiefs, because they share a status within a locality that is shared by other people of the same status throughout a state, a status sustained by wider political structures (court patronage, system of land tenure, taxation system, service ideology, etc). If military aristocracies are displaced by more 'middle class' orientated governments in the 18th and 19th centuries, it's because power already shifted there, because development of guns & other changes meant that the masses were a greater source of power than aristocrats.

Remember, a 'state' is not a type of government. It is government. The most common model of government development is the evolutionary model of Elman Service, where human organization is divided into bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. For archaeologists using this model, the growth of human inequality and 'state formation' are for all practical purposes indistinguishable.

Look at the population pattern of the Yanomamo:

Egalitarianism is built into the living conditions.

Now look at Sao Paulo:

You were trying to say that 'the state' protects the poor from the rich; but without 'the state' these slum dwellers, numerically superior, could not be held in check. Without the divisions of labour, administrative technology, markets, currencies and economic systems set up in states, there would be no way to build up such vast inequality; without the legal and education systems that are part of modern states, there would be no way of ensuring social reproduction to sustain the inequalities across generations; without the legal systems, police and armies, there would be no way of protecting elites through these processes.

If you restrict inequality just to palaces and fancy goods the Yanomami will by definition be perfectly equal, because they can't build palaces or fancy goods.

Exactly, now you are getting closer to understanding my point. You need structures and cultural technologies that put the labour of the many at the service of the few to establish such inequality. That is the state. If individual Yanomamo emigrate to Caracas or Sao Paulo or Rio, they will find such inequality.

But they are a society where the strong lord over the weak, where women and men have strict and pre-defined roles, and where killing, looting and raping is socially acceptable.

This is how most 'Western' societies work, but I don't see what this has to do with inequality.

I really don't see how it's the same with other Brazilians. It's not socially acceptable for some guy from Rio to kill, rape and loot in São Paulo. But it is socially acceptable for a Yanomami warrior to do that to a cousin tribe which is much less distant than Rio is to SP.

What's that got to do with economic inequality?

 

[jackelgull]

Reading this thread is painful. Full of nothing but straw man arguments, it assumes some kind of universal knowledge of human nature from the right. Well leave me out of it. what I am sensing is a smug detachment from the human race and feeling of condensation from the OP. A sense that he knows all there is to know about the world and that other people, the rest of humanity must be governed by elites for its own good. That the last century has been one big slide backwards. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong by the way.

The "leftist" as the OP likes to call them do not live in this idealistic world which leads to intolerance of the reality and eventual violence. If for nothing else but the simple virtue of the fact that they are real people and keeping people unaware of the difficulty of fighting inequality is impossible.

And the comparison between Chile and the Soviet Union doesn't work because the is not an apples to apples comparison here.

Finally, on force and the modern state- all governments exist on force. That is their sustenance. The level of force used though is directly proportional to the level of inequality present in the social hierarchy and the inequality present depends largely on the population to resource ratio. So I would argue that tribes by nature have less inequality because there were fewer people living in them and more resources per person. Certainly when the Europeans came there were only twenty million natives inhabiting the New World.

 

[Tee Kay]

The Right is content with the past and the present. The Left dares to look for a better future.

That's essentially all it boils down to.

 

[Tigranes]

That's essentially all it boils down to.

I miss boiling down threads. Especially the one about whales.

 

[Ajidica]

The Right is content with the past and the present. The Left dares to look for a better future.

That's essentially all it boils down to.

I would disagree with that. Richard Nixon was firmly in the right but was quite progressive and forward thinking. The American Right only began drinking the Kool-Aid large scale with regards to actual policies when Reagan wandered in.

 

[Tee Kay]

I would disagree with that. Richard Nixon was firmly in the right but was quite progressive and forward thinking. The American Right only began drinking the Kool-Aid large scale with regards to actual policies when Reagan wandered in.

There are certainly exceptions, where the Right has found it useful to act progressive in order to avoid more far-reaching changes.

 

[aelf]

The rightist wants mankind to transcend itself, the centrist wants mankind to be mankind and the leftist wants mankind to transcend nothing.

Transcend itself by worshiping money and economic profit? Sure, that is such a noble goal.

Inequality doesn't need to be maintained, it's the natural state.

It's a (silly) Marxist myth that our modern liberal state "enforces" class distinctions and uses violence and threats of violence to "maintain inequality". The opposite is true. Our state exists to protect the weak from the strong. To limit the power of the strong.

This is hilariously wrong and uninformed. Have you never read basic political theory? What defines the state, first and foremost? The legal monopoly on the use of violence. Take that away and, frequently, you get a 'failed state'. And which state does not have an elite ruling over it? That's inequality right there, maintained by the use of force.

Your view of the state is ironically very statist, one might call it a classic Marxist-Leninist view even.

 

[Tahuti]

Transcend itself by worshiping money and economic profit? Sure, that is such a noble goal.

I don't consider self-proclaimed Right-Wingers who are focussed on narrowly economic issues to be Right-Wingers.

 

[Linkman226]

Transcend itself by worshiping money and economic profit? Sure, that is such a noble goal.

Not in Kaiser's case. He believes that the monarchist past was full of nobler intentions, when serfs would shovel manure from dawn to dusk search their souls for greater meaning, and derive their oppression life's meaning from their allegiance to the king.

This is hilariously wrong and uninformed. Have you never read basic political theory? What defines the state, first and foremost? The legal monopoly on the use of violence. Take that away and, frequently, you get a 'failed state'. And which state does not have an elite ruling over it? That's inequality right there, maintained by the use of force.

Your view of the state is ironically very statist, one might call it a classic Marxist-Leninist view even.

Unsurprising of course, horseshoe theory and all that.

 

[Flying Pig]

It's not a ridiculous idea that there's less inequality under a well-governed state than there is in the absence of one, so I'm not sure pointing out that the state maintains some inequality is necessarily to the point.

 

[gay_Aleks]

The point of a state is to be a bringer of inequality?

 

[Linkman226]

It's not a ridiculous idea that there's less inequality under a well-governed state than there is in the absence of one, so I'm not sure pointing out that the state maintains some inequality is necessarily to the point.

[citation needed]

The point of a state is to be a bringer of inequality?

The point of smallpox is to reproduce via use of the host's cells.

Sadly this also kills the patient.

But that's not the intention of smallpox, see? Smallpox is really a good guy.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Great, but what does this have to do with the topic? Unless you believe the essence of the left is smallpox.

 

[Flying Pig]

[citation needed]

Places where states have no effective power are equivalent to places with no state at all, and in those inequality doesn't magically disappear - you end up with the bad parts of Sicily, the parts of the inner cities which the police give up on, and Somalia.

 

[aelf]

I don't consider self-proclaimed Right-Wingers who are focussed on narrowly economic issues to be Right-Wingers.

Okay, not focused just on economic issues. They also have their eyes on things like abortion, homosexuality, immigration and multiculturalism.

Their god is still money, though, aside from hopeless romantics like yourself, according to whom the right-wing, the 'True Believers', consists of about 1% of its current size.

It's not a ridiculous idea that there's less inequality under a well-governed state than there is in the absence of one, so I'm not sure pointing out that the state maintains some inequality is necessarily to the point.

The point was directed at this claim:

It's a (silly) Marxist myth that our modern liberal state "enforces" class distinctions and uses violence and threats of violence to "maintain inequality".

 

[gay_Aleks]

Places where states have no effective power are equivalent to places with no state at all, and in those inequality doesn't magically disappear - you end up with the bad parts of Sicily, the parts of the inner cities which the police give up on, and Somalia.

That presumes great criminal activity. What if, God forbid, you're part of that criminal activity?