Poli Compass

[Die Rote Fahne]

I made this. How accurate do you think it is?

What revisions would you guys make? because I am totally aware of how off I am with some of this.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdgraphpng.php?showform=&Left+Communists=-9%2C-8&Marxist-leninists=-8%2C-4&Anarcho-communists=-10%2C-10&Republicans=7%2C6&Demcorats=6%2C3&Tea+Party=8%2C8&Libertarians=8%2C-8&Ancaps=10%2C-10&Social+Democrats=-4%2C-3&Stalinists=-5%2C10&Stalinists=on&Stalinists=-5%2C8&newname=&newec=&newsoc=

[praxis1966]

I made this. How accurate do you think it is?

What revisions would you guys make? because I am totally aware of how off I am with some of this.


My primary gripe would be where you've placed the Democrats... Sure, they have their authoritarian tendencies, but there's certainly a huge left-right spectrum in that party. Guys like Joe Lieberman (who only left the party because he couldn't get nominated in a re-election bid but still caucuses with the Dems) certainly belong there. But, guys like Dennis Kucinich are actually closer to social democrats. Basically, for lack of a better place to put them I'd say they belong squarely on the y-axis and a couple of bars up the authoritarian side.

Basically, like this:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/picture.php?albumid=608&pictureid=8010

And if anybody's curious, this is where I graph:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/picture.php?albumid=608&pictureid=6343

[ZeroNowhere]

There is no political spectrum. This is my issue with the project.

[Tablo]

Not enough dimensions. Politics are too complex for little charts like that.

[Q]

I made this. How accurate do you think it is?

What revisions would you guys make? because I am totally aware of how off I am with some of this.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdgraphpng.php?showform=&Left+Communists=-9%2C-8&Marxist-leninists=-8%2C-4&Anarcho-communists=-10%2C-10&Republicans=7%2C6&Demcorats=6%2C3&Tea+Party=8%2C8&Libertarians=8%2C-8&Ancaps=10%2C-10&Social+Democrats=-4%2C-3&Stalinists=-5%2C10&Stalinists=on&Stalinists=-5%2C8&newname=&newec=&newsoc=

Why are there two entries for the Stalinists and "Marxists-Leninists"? Do you mean Trotskyists with the latter (Bolshevik-Leninists)?

[Zanthorus]

There is no political spectrum. This is my issue with the project.

What if we try for something a little more like...

http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy96/Zanthorus/Revleft_compass.jpg

[Tablo]

What if we try for something a little more like...

http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy96/Zanthorus/Revleft_compass.jpg
I think this is worse than the political compass.

[ZeroNowhere]

What if we try for something a little more like...

http://i781.photobucket.com/albums/yy96/Zanthorus/Revleft_compass.jpgHm, care to explain the formalism axis? I presume it doesn't have to do with the aesthetic theories of these currents. Still, it does look interesting.

To be fair, though, I wasn't referring to a spectrum of socialists (I'm not sure where the Proudhonists came from), but moreso to the political spectrum in the sense of a spectrum which spans politics in general and hence places both, for example, socialism and liberalism on the same spectra organized by economics and so on. In this connection, one could probably make a spectrum from liberals to communists (here in the Manifesto's sense, ie. disregarding voluntarists, utopians and such) displaying the average time spent reading 'Capital', but I wouldn't count this a political spectrum as such, but rather only a worthy endeavour.

[Zanthorus]

Hm, care to explain the formalism axis?

I used 'formalism' in the same sense as Loren Goldner to ascribe currents which reduce everything to a question of management or political forms. The placement of tendencies on the graph as a whole is probably somewhat arbitrary by the way. I just posted all the tendencies I like in the bottom left, the ones which are shit in the top right, and everything else went either side.


I'm not sure where the Proudhonists came from

I have too much spare time on my hands.

[Q]

Democratism? Revolutionary totalitarianism?

[Zanthorus]

It basically refers to those who think that one of the tasks of the proletariat consists of struggling against 'totalitarian' capitalism rather than for it's own class dictatorship (Raising up 'the democratic principle' against proletarian revolution as per Kautsky, as well as supporting the various popular frontist, anti-fascist etc ideologies).

The final political and social victory of democratism over the revolutionary doctrine of the old communist movement was reached when it succeeded in portraying "resistance to totalitarianism" as the task of the proletariat, and of all social strata oppressed by capital.

This tendency, whose first historical manifestation was anti-fascism (both the war and pre-war varieties) affected all the parties linked to Moscow (and ones like China which broke away) and ended up negating the one party (a form indubitably Leninist and communist in origin) as the necessary revolutionary guide and leader of the proletarian dictatorship. In the "people's democracies" of the so-called "socialist camp", power was in the hands of popular and national "fronts", or of parties or "leagues" which explicitly embodied a bloc of several classes. Meanwhile, the "communist" parties operating in the "bourgeois camp" have solemnly abjured the doctrine that revolutionary class violence is the sole way of attaining power, and have denied the fact that the sole means of maintaining the class dictatorship is through the communist party alone. Instead they flatter other parties, socialists, catholics etc., by engaging in "dialogues" with them, and promising a "socialism" which will be jointly managed by several parties representing "the people". This tendency, which is warmly welcomed by all enemies of the proletarian revolution (Stalinist "communism" rejects anything that reminds them of the glories of the Red October) is not only defeatist but it is an illusion. Just as the proletariat stakes no claim to any liberty for itself under the despotic regime of capital, and therefore doesn't rally around the banner of either "formal" or "genuine" democracy, it will, on having established its own despotic regime proceed to suppress all the liberties of the social groups linked to capital, and this will be an integral part of its program. For the bourgeoisie, struggles in the political arena take place not between classes, but as "debates" between free and equal individuals; the struggle is one of opinions rather than of physical and social forces divided by incurable contradictions. But whilst the bourgeoisie disguises its own dictatorship under the cloak of democracy, communists, who since the time of the Manifesto have "disdained to conceal their views and aims", proclaim openly that the revolutionary conquest of power, as necessary prelude to the social palingenesis, signifies at the same time the totalitarian rule of the ex-oppressed class, as embodied in its party, over the ex-dominant class.

Anti-totalitarianism is a rivendication of classes which are situated on the same social basis as the capitalist class (private appropriation of the means of production and the products themselves) but which are nevertheless invariably crushed by it. It is the ideology – common to the multifarious movements of "intellectuals" and "students" which infest the current political scene – of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie and middle classes, a desperate attempt to cling to the historically condemned myths of small production, of the sovereignty of the individual and "direct democracy". It is therefore both bourgeois and anti-historical and thus doubly anti-proletarian. The ruin of the petty-bourgeoisie under the hammer blows of big capital is historically inevitable, and constitutes in a social sense – in the capitalist manner, brutal and drawn-out at the same time – a step towards the socialist revolution in that it brings about the one and only real historical contribution of capitalism: centralization of production, and socialization of productive activity.

For the proletariat, the return to less concentrated forms of production (even were it possible) could only mean turning aside from its historical aim of achieving a completely social production and distribution. It therefore recognises as its duty neither the defence of the petty-bourgeoisie against "big business" (both equally enemies of socialism) nor the adoption of pluralism and "polycentrism" in politics, which it has no reason to accept on either the economic or social level.

The slogan "struggle against the monopolies" in defence of small-scale production is therefore reactionary, as is the erroneous petty-bourgeois response to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution which is connected to it. For us, the cause of the degeneration was the failure to spread and extend the proletarian revolution, and the abandonment of communist internationalism, whilst for the petty bourgeoisie, the revolution was a failure from the start because it was anti-democratic, because it installed a proletarian dictatorship. All the equally reactionary movements of the middle-classes see the revolutionary process as consisting of the gradual conquests of little islands of peripheral "power" by proletarian organisms organised in the workplace (and condemned to it); this is the fantastical "direct democracy" (as in the Gramscist and Ordinovist theory of the factory councils). What these theories ignore is the central problem of the conquest of political power, the destruction of the capitalist State, and the need for the party as centralising organ of the working class. For others, all that is needed to realize "socialism" is a network of "self-managed" businesses, each with its own plan arrived at by "decisions from below" (Yugoslavian theory of self-management). Thus the petty-bourgeois theoreticians completely negate the possibility of the "social production regulated by social prevision" which Marx showed to be "the political economy of the labouring class", and which is made possible only by transcending the basic productive cells of the capitalist economy and the "blind rule" of the market in which they find the only, chaotic and unpredictable connective element.

Before and after the taking of power, in politics as in economy, the revolutionary proletariat does not and cannot make any concessions to anti-totalitarianism; a new version of that idealistic and utopian anti-authoritarianism denounced by Marx and Engels in their long polemic with the anarchists, and which Lenin, in State and Revolution, showed to converge with gradualist and democratic reformism. However, the small producers will receive a very different treatment from the socialist proletariat than that meted out to them under capitalism, which throughout its history has treated this class with the utmost ferocity. But towards small production itself, and its political, ideological and religious reflex, its action will be infinitely more decisive, rapid and, in short, totalitarian. The proletarian dictatorship will spare humanity the infinite amount of violence and misery which under capitalism constitutes its "daily bread". This it will be able to do precisely inasmuch as it doesn't hesitate to use force, intimidation and, if necessary, the most decided repression against any social group, big or small, which seeks to obstruct the fulfillment of its historical mission.

To conclude: whoever combines the notion of socialism with any form of liberalism, democratism, factory councilism, localism, pluripartyism, or worse, anti-partyism places himself outside history, and off the road that leads to the reconstitution of the party and the International on a totalitarian communist basis.Taken from 'What Distuinguishes Our Party (http://www.international-communist-party.org/BasicTexts/WhatDist.htm)' by the International Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista).

[ZeroNowhere]

I just posted all the tendencies I like in the bottom left, the ones which are shit in the top right, and everything else went either side.Maybe there is a political spectrum after all.

[khad]

The political compass is a libertarian interpretation of the pournelle axes, ie statism x rationalism

http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.jpg

[Wanted Man]

Not a big fan of any Compass. Challenge for the OP: using only the Compass, explain the differences between "Anarcho-Communists" and "Left Communists".

[Kotze]

There is no political spectrum.Suppose politicians get a questionnaire with one-dimensional questions. I mean something where there isn't much doubt that the answers lie on a line (like low to high speed limits or a simple yes-dunno-no question). Imagine a website that stores how politicians answered many such questions and you can query it for a specific question and ask to display politicians from your region. It could display them as dots on a horizontal line, maybe those having the same position regarding that question stacked on top of each other.

Graphical representation could also work with displaying another question and its answer on another axis and maybe yet another question at once in one big colourful thingie, but it gets more and more confusing. The problem people have with such displays seems to be this: An answer to a single question doesn't tell me much, so I want many questions. But doesn't each question add another dimension, so when you have 30 questions, you have 30 dimensions?

The trick is that a question only potentially adds a dimension. That is when you have 2 questions where there is an answer pattern in the data so that when you have the data and I tell you how a random politician I don't name answered question A you can tell me with 100% certainty how that politician answered question B, the answers to these 2 questions can be displayed on 1 axis. If the correlation isn't perfect doing that isn't perfectly correct, but doing this flattening for stronger correlated answers is less wrong than doing if for less correlated answers. From a study I read ≈2 years ago about answer patterns by US politicians I know that the correlation is so high that hardly anything gets lost when you put them on 1 axis. You might believe that thinking of an object in a space with 30 dimensions is hard, but it's actually easy if that object is like a cigar.


using only the Compass, explain the differences between "Anarcho-Communists" and "Left Communists".An atlas can never work. Using only the atlas, tell me how many shingles are on the roof :P

[GallowsBird]

I made this. How accurate do you think it is?

What revisions would you guys make? because I am totally aware of how off I am with some of this.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdgraphpng.php?showform=&Left+Communists=-9%2C-8&Marxist-leninists=-8%2C-4&Anarcho-communists=-10%2C-10&Republicans=7%2C6&Demcorats=6%2C3&Tea+Party=8%2C8&Libertarians=8%2C-8&Ancaps=10%2C-10&Social+Democrats=-4%2C-3&Stalinists=-5%2C10&Stalinists=on&Stalinists=-5%2C8&newname=&newec=&newsoc=


"Stalinist" isn't towards the left enough on there as Stalin (who I would guess is a Stalinist) according to that system is far nearer to -10 than you have put "Stalinists"... if you are going to use it then play by the rules of the thing you are using. Also why do you have "Stalinist" and "Marxist-Leninists" when "Stalinism" is really just a pejorative term for Marxism-Leninism. Am I missing something?

These are closer to what the Political Compass thinks Stalin and Marxist-Leninists/Stalinists should be:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/axeswithnames.gif

http://web.nickshanks.com/personal/compass

So you are roughly correct (according to the compass) on how left Stalinists/Marxist-Leninists (accoring to the "Marxist-Leninist" position on the graph, NOT the Stalinist one) are but not on the "authoritarian" side of the spectrum and "Stalinist" should be removed.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Not a big fan of any Compass. Challenge for the OP: using only the Compass, explain the differences between "Anarcho-Communists" and "Left Communists".

Use of the state and a socialist stage.

[Zanthorus]

Use of the state and a socialist stage.

First of all the second point is false. Second of all the challenge was stated such that you were only allowed to use the compass.

[Wanted Man]

Use of the state and a socialist stage.

Where does the compass say that? If left communists believe in a state, shouldn't they be further up? And what makes the anarcho-communists more left? I think these questions cannot be answered with the compass, and that makes it a pretty useless tool.

Further, as mentioned, I don't believe that left communists have a "stageist" conception of a socialist state, if they have one at all.

[Ocean Seal]

I made this. How accurate do you think it is?

What revisions would you guys make? because I am totally aware of how off I am with some of this.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/charts/crowdgraphpng.php?showform=&Left+Communists=-9%2C-8&Marxist-leninists=-8%2C-4&Anarcho-communists=-10%2C-10&Republicans=7%2C6&Demcorats=6%2C3&Tea+Party=8%2C8&Libertarians=8%2C-8&Ancaps=10%2C-10&Social+Democrats=-4%2C-3&Stalinists=-5%2C10&Stalinists=on&Stalinists=-5%2C8&newname=&newec=&newsoc=
I think that the political compass is in itself very way off. I've seen Maoists and Hoxhaists score on the libertarian side of the compass and I think that the most authoritarian I've seen has been around +2. Also why are Stalinists so far away from Marxist Leninists? That makes the least sense to me. Also on the right Libertarians really don't look for too much liberty (certainly less than the soc-dems) so I would put them as more authoritarian and certainly the Tea Party should be less authoritarian than the Republicans. Also in my personal opinion Left-Comms should be higher (while of course making every socialist tendency but Stalinists and AC's higher) But other than that its fairly accurate.

[Zanthorus]

I think that the political compass is in itself very way off. I've seen Maoists and Hoxhaists score on the libertarian side of the compass and I think that the most authoritarian I've seen has been around +2.

The problem is that the authoritarianism/libertarianism doesn't refer to the kind of questions that get referred to under that rubric here (i.e the use of state force to repress counter-revolutionaries and so on) but rather to social values. The things that put you further up on the 'authoritarian' axis are things like supporting traditional family values, abortions, being against gay rights and so on. You couldn't be above that dividing line without being restricted on here.

[Dumb]

"Stalinist" isn't towards the left enough on there as Stalin (who I would guess is a Stalinist) according to that system is far nearer to -10 than you have put "Stalinists"... if you are going to use it then play by the rules of the thing you are using. Also why do you have "Stalinist" and "Marxist-Leninists" when "Stalinism" is really just a pejorative term for Marxism-Leninism. Am I missing something?

The implication is that Lenin wasn't the same as Stalin.

[praxis1966]

You couldn't be above that dividing line without being restricted on here.

You're basically circling around what I was thinking upon revisiting this thread. What I get out of this discussion is not necessarily that the idea of the Compass is inherently flawed, but that the questions on the test are designed for too wide a range of opinions to be useful on a site like this one.

What you would have to do for it to be useful on this site is rewrite the test narrower in scope so that the questions only applied to people already presumed to fall someplace in quadrant III of the x-y axis.

Basically, plop the vertex of the axis right in the middle of quadrant III and then magnify it. Theoretically, this should be entirely possible and would make for a much more accurate descriptor of what exactly people think within the presumed spectrum of leftist thought. Of course, whomever writes the test is certain to get howled at for writing loaded, sectarian questions no matter what their tendency or how hard they try to remain impartial. So, I have my doubts about whether the questions could be written to an even marginal level of acceptability by the populace of this board.