>Not sure what I am talking about anymore.Neither do I.
>Left and right are the two main political divisions, from which all others are related somehow. It has to do with progress, equality vs. hierarchy, property, economic intervention and societal roles in general.Have you actually looked into the history of the divide?
It is chiefly a class war between bourgeois liberals and conservative aristocrats, according to the factors of production: capital and land. For example, the Corn Laws (1815–46) were implemented following the Napoleonic Wars to increase the domestic revenues for farmland by imposing tariffs on foreign imports of corn. This benefitted the landed aristocracy. Opposition to this came from both socialists and liberals, who wanted free trade to cheapen food. On the liberal end, this was to further cheapen labour. For example, the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League was Cobden, a prominent liberal and textile manufacturer. The Corn Laws were abolished in 1846 by Robert Peel; the leader of the Peelite movement, and creator of the Conservative Party (1834–), a party which by that time was anti-Tory (e.g. the aristocratic party), since the Conservatives were Whigs, in reality. By 1852, Marx associates the different parties with different classes:
<Whigs, Free Traders and Peelites coalesced to oppose the Tories […] Opposed to Whigs, Peelites, Free Traders and Tories, and thus opposed to entire official England, were the Chartists.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/08/06.htmThe Chartists were the representatives of the working class, which in England lost its party form until the later Labour Party (c. 1900), and which ever since has become a main opposition to the Conservatives. Of course, the Chartists never called themselves "left-wing" nor were they even "socialist". Labour too has never been a socialist party. The main contention thus was between free trade and protectionism; this is the basic dynamic of left/right in the classical period. Adam Smith (c. 1776) is seen as a great liberal since he promoted free markets in his political economy, for example, which was composite with the trade policies of the US founding. In the US was the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists; Jefferson's liberal party opposed the conservative party which promoted ties to the English monarchy; once more proving the class division. Ecclectic policies emerged in the early 19th century however, where Jefferson saw that industry was required to maintain independence, requiring tariffs to develop infant industry. At the head of an "American System" was Henry Clay and Friedrich List from 1812 onwards, which diverted economics to more nationalist ends, in the North, while the South still maintained a free trade policy of cash crops granted by slave labour. It was this economic conflict which reversed the positions; since now it was the slaveholding aristocrats promoting free trade and industrial capitalists promoting protectionism. This culminated in the US Civil War (1862–65), where the Republicans are today considered to be left-wing and the Democrats (e.g. Dixiecrats) are considered right-wing, despite the opposite policies of liberalism and conservatism. Of course, Lincoln was not an anti-racist, since he also rejected the concept of racial equality, and sought to actually deport the freed slaves back to Africa. Contemporary framing distorts the reality of the situation. There is no such thing as "left" and "right" except as heuristic, since the agenda of classes concerns their own self-determination, not determination from without. Lenin himself disparages "left-wing Communism" as an "infantile disorder" due to their opposition to bourgeois parliaments. The posthomous "left opposition" to Stalin by the Trotskyists was not in the cause of lifting repressions, but in centralising production in the hands of the state, as opposed to the "right deviation" of Bukharin, who is framed as market-oriented. So, left-wing here means greater state intervention; a total reversal of its prior meaning. Only from the 1950s onwards do you get the "New Left" out of France which spreads ideas of personal autonomy, substituting class war for civil rights. This is part of growing anti-Communist leftism, such as in Arendt and Foucault. There is no coherence to this, since leftism is de-politicised. What I mean is that all politics is class war, so compromise with the ruling class is not politics; it is bargaining. The labour movement also was not political, since collective bargaining easily operates within a capitalist framework. This is why the Owenites or Chartists could not be synonymous with the labour movement. Lenin writes (1901):
<We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htmMy basic point thus is that to see reality, you have to abandon loyalty to the contradiction of "leftism", since it has no political substance. It is a heuristic, not a doctrine. As for the supposed qualities of liberté, egalité and fraternité, Marx dispells all sentimental illusions (1848):
<Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htmDid Robespierre really seek to grant equality to the masses?
Only as much as Abraham Lincoln did, which means not at all.