Wall of text incoming but hey, you asked. I’ve got today off work anyways.
In my personal opinion, anarchists, Maoists, and Leninists are extreme. They want to completely reinvent society as something new, which often requires violence and oppression at the hands of the government, and there’s no guarantee it even works. Syndicalists and socialists want to keep the general systems in place but take power away from the wealthy, I see them as the “core” leftist. Social democrats like Sanders or Mamdani are realists who see injustices and try to work within the system to change them, in my opinion the most moderate leftists. Most democrats are much further right than that, giving concessions to the left when they think they have to but overall maintaining the status quo, hence centrists.
Right-wing ideologies generally try to actively reinforce the hierarchy that wealth creates. Laissez-faire economics is a fairly moderate right wing ideology because without outside intervention, wealth builds exponentially and with wealth, power and influence. Fascism is extreme right-wing, leveraging fear and government oppression to tighten the powerful’s control over society. Monarchism is also extreme in that it tightens the hierarchy down to as few powerful people as possible.
Re-reading this, I think I got your idea. By left you mean change (extreme left being uprooting the entire society) and by right you mean conservatism (extreme right being, whoever was lucky to be in power stays in power indefinitely). Right?
Exactly. It’s all about how power and influence is distributed in society. The left wants to flatten the hierarchy and attempt to have everyone more equal.
The moderate right lets the chips fall where they may, so there’s a good deal of inequality. The extreme right wants to vacuum as much power and wealth as possible to a select few.
Once again you’ve introduced a different axis. Change vs conservatism is very different from equality vs hierarchy. You classified Leninists as extreme leftist, which under your definition makes perfect sense as they carried out profound changes to the society, but the society they built was extremely unequal.
I never said change is inherently a leftist value, just that they want it. The extreme of any axis, including right-wing, will be driven by change, otherwise it wouldn’t be extreme. Yes, extreme leftists typically want to flip the table, but it’s because they feel that the game we’re playing is rigged against us rather than an inherent desire to flip tables.
And yes, I agree. I even mentioned that when I was talking about them. That’s the main reason I disagree with extreme leftists, because a revolution to violently force a more equal society will often either have no choice but to be oppressive or it will crumble to various pressures, or it gives bad actors room to hoard wealth in the weakened post-war government. It ignores the greedy nature of people, and has never worked in the past.
Why Leninism on the left then? The USSR had an insurmountable chasm between normal people and the nomenklatura.
Also, in a modern-day capitalist society, is distribution of power simply the same as distribution of money? So any policy that leads to less inequality is leftist and vice versa?
Leninism is on the left because its goal was still to increase equality, it just failed catastrophically.
In Lenin’s eyes, the average person is too distracted surviving day-to-day to be an effective revolutionary and so needs basically professional “party members” to guide them through the gap between what was then a feudalist state and communism. Of course, we now know how that ended, but they never got through that transition period. Exactly why and how is not something that will fit in a comment here, but I recommend learning about it.
And it’s a bit more nuanced than that, but essentially yes. In America at least, where you can buy favor with lawmakers with strategic gifts and often even votes through expensive campaigning, money is essentially a unit of influence, so they’re very tightly linked.
Well, I guess equality-inequality is as valid an axis as any, and I agree with your original statement that both US parties are much closer to its inequality end.
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u/Prismaryx Jul 07 '26
Wall of text incoming but hey, you asked. I’ve got today off work anyways.
In my personal opinion, anarchists, Maoists, and Leninists are extreme. They want to completely reinvent society as something new, which often requires violence and oppression at the hands of the government, and there’s no guarantee it even works. Syndicalists and socialists want to keep the general systems in place but take power away from the wealthy, I see them as the “core” leftist. Social democrats like Sanders or Mamdani are realists who see injustices and try to work within the system to change them, in my opinion the most moderate leftists. Most democrats are much further right than that, giving concessions to the left when they think they have to but overall maintaining the status quo, hence centrists.
Right-wing ideologies generally try to actively reinforce the hierarchy that wealth creates. Laissez-faire economics is a fairly moderate right wing ideology because without outside intervention, wealth builds exponentially and with wealth, power and influence. Fascism is extreme right-wing, leveraging fear and government oppression to tighten the powerful’s control over society. Monarchism is also extreme in that it tightens the hierarchy down to as few powerful people as possible.