Tober said:
An interesting take on the left-right political definition. I would look at it differently. I'm Dutch and we look at it from the perspective we call 'Maakbare Samenleving'. It essentially means 'can society be engineered to get an optimum society or not'. The left-right position is the scale on which how strong the belief is in this engineering and how much of it is wanted. Or the level of social engineering in other words. Far left in this case is a full belief that everything would need to be socially engineered, whereas far right would be a complete rejection of it. Or in other words how much to curb the inane individual Human instincts versus seeking the optimum from a group perspective. It is for this reason high population area's tend to be left leaning, where low population area's tend to be right leaning, because obviously the more people need to share a certain space, there is a stronger need to engineer/regulate the group to prevent chaos. Obviously means the higher the level of social engineering is, the more influence a central authority needs to have to make this possible. Therefore left leaning politics tend to lead to more government/regulation and right leaning politics tend to lead to less of it. This was visible during the Covid era. The more left leaning people accepting the Government's guidance more willingly , where the 'anti-vaxers' where more right leaning and more prone to protest other Covid measures. From this perspective anarchy I would call far right, because it's a rejection of centralized authority. Essentially the 'Survival of the Fittest' approach. Where far left is a total subjection to the central authority, because 'the central authority knows best.' The National Sozialistische Partei, or how the British invented the slang word Nazi for it, was founded in 1920 as a follow up to the German workersparty. It had a strong nationalistic belief system and to propagate it would mean to quell any dissent from its message. Therefore implementing strong censorship, rejection of religion and the centralization of power. Essentially 'the government knows best' approach. As a said earlier, it's interesting how different a take can be looking at the left-right political spectrum. I guess a lot of that has to do on where people live and what their daily exposure is to their regulatory bodies and how that influences their lives. |
Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution addresses this idea that humans are naturally social-darwinistic and without a centralized state they would be so.
He points out that in "the state of nature", rather than humans being hyper-individualistic (as Hobbes would suggest, with his "war of all against all") they tend to band together into social groups for mutual benefit. This is how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and the existence of states, as an example, but he also provides examples of this throughout all different developments of settled society too.
This is the table of contents:
Chapter 1: Mutual Aid Among Animals
Chapter 2: Mutual Aid Among Animals (continued)
Chapter 3: Mutual Aid Among Savages
Chapter 4: Mutual Aid Among the Barbarians
Chapter 5: Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City
Chapter 6: Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City (continued)
Chapter 7: Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves
Chapter 8: Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves (continued)
Appendix I: Swarms of Butterflies, Dragon-Flies, etc.
Appendix III: Nesting Associations.
Appendix IV: Sociability of Animals
Appendix V: Checks to Over-Multiplication
Appendix VI: Adaptations to Avoid Competition
Appendix VII: The Origin of the Family
Appendix VIII: Destruction Of Private Property on the Grave
Appendix IX: The “Undivided Family”
Appendix X: The Origin of the Guilds
Appendix XI: The Market and the Mediæval City
Appendix XII: Mutual-Aid Arrangements in the Villages of Netherlands at the Present Day
Basically the main thesis is that humans are social animals that use society (note: society =/= the state) to improve fitness. That's "survival of the fittest", not the social darwinist account of things.
Anyway, (political) anarchism has always been a movement of the left. Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Dejacque, Goldman, Berkman, etc, etc were all anarchist philosophers/thinkers who were identified on the left. The only real explicitly anarchist experiment to be attempted (Revolutionary Catalonia) was a far-left movement that called for a political economic and social revolution to restructure society into free and horizontal relations with federation as the principle of organization. This is probably where the idea of "social engineering" (a term with negative connotations, imo) goes hand in hand with anarchism -- the idea that society can be restructured from its current organization to an entirely new one.
Last edited by sc94597 - 4 days ago
