What is your political party / philosophy?
Hopefully this doesn't cause any drama - that's certainly not the intent. But the General Chat's substance is a bit dry at the moment.
I was just curious what political parties and / or philosophies the users on here subscribe to.
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Aww yiss. This is my shit, lol.
I'm a registered Democrat, but at this point, it's mostly for defensive voting.
I'm in the Libertarian Socialist camp. I could also be called an Anarchist, for the sake of simplicity, though I'm not 100% sold on the complete abolition of states.
I believe that capitalism is an exploitative system designed to benefit a tiny percentage of the population. Capitalism relies on and is inextricably tied with the state's violence and therefore I don't consider authoritarian forms of Socialism (e.g. Leninism) to be any better. I believe that workers, not wealthy capitalists or the state, should own the means of production and that all forms of hierarchy should be critiqued, and challenged when they are found unjustified. I believe that Syndicalism (an organization of radical unions) would be the most feasible way of running a post-statist society.
I'm very far left on social issues, but don't see liberal identity politics as terribly helpful for anything more than bandaid solutions (cough : liberal feminism).
I generally try to live my political philosophy. I'm a new member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and agitate at my workplace. I've also involved myself in local politics, advocating for a new homeless shelter and needle exchange program.
My Biggest Influences: Kropotkin, Bookchin, Marx, Bakunin, Orwell, Benjamin Tucker, F. A. Hayek (opposed to my views, but I just quite like the man).
I try to be a good ambassador for my beliefs, so if anyone has questions, I'd be happy to answer.
I'm from France.
Basically, I don't feel represented in any party in the french's politic paysage. Soon, we will have to choose for a President, and it will either be the same fraud again who works for the firms, either the extrem right elected and it will somehow fuck our liberties/journalism's freedom/bring persecution over non white people and so on..
If asking what my philosophy is on politics, basically a kind of Robespierrism, meaning having values over the economy; and not the reverse.
Democracy is still young, and it has so much improvements to be done. Yet those improvements are not done and people are tired of this.
Also against all kind of corruptions and lobbies.
To my knowledge, the guiding principle of Right-Libertarianism is absolute ownership over oneself and one's property.
If that's the case, why do you, support the American Republican Party over say...the Libertarian Party? The GOP seems to be all about curbing privacy, civil liberties, access to contraception and gay marriage. Not to mention, they support taxation, imperialism, the drug war and other yucky stuff that all Libertarians traditionally dislike.
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Anarcho-communism.
Same situation but reversed, so forgive me if I bungle the positions of UK parties.
Okay I get that. This is basically what the Republican Party was like when the "Old Right" was in power up until the 60's. They were pro-small government, rather isolationist and socially moderate. Believe it or not, I don't mind these guys! We're bitter ideological rivals, but I have a measure of respect and sympathy for them. Nowadays, the Old Right has mostly moved to the Democrats or Libertarians, depending on how much they loved capitalism. Today's Republicans don't really resemble that. They're extremely hawkish, fiscally irresponsible (we have enough money for experimental weapons, but not enough to insure poor kids) and have drank the evangelical Christian Kool-Aid to a degree that is pretty frightening. Your Tories probably are closer to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party. Those guys are pretty much center-right except when they cynically exploit idpol. The Republicsns are more like UKIP, but with an unhealthy obsession over Christian values.
As long as I'm not being completely controlled I don't care what the government does (unless of course it's something major that has a major affect on the country or myself).
I vote for the libs in Australia.
Comrade!
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Even with the current very right-wing government we have, the republicans are still significantly more right wing than the Tories.
They're like half way between the tories and the EDL, if that helps.
America in general is much more conservative and anti-progressive than the UK, and so the 'centre politics' of the US is more right wing than the 'centre politics' of the UK (not to imply our current government is progressive).
As a result the conservative party is basically politically closest to Hillary Clinton in terms of policies, and Labour closest to Sanders, if that means anything to you.
To put that in some perspective, Theresa may/Boris Johnson are probably Ted Cruz, and Trump is a more extreme version of Farage.
I'm interested - how strongly do you ally with the right wing government? Do you agree/disagree about half and half? Or are you one of those tories who actively likes them doing things like reducing how much tax the extremely rich pay at the same time as decreasing how much support people in wheelchairs get?
Also, who do you want to take over the party when Cameron leaves?
Democratic socialist (not to be confused with Social democrat :P). Pro free speech, expression and all that. Feminist. Labour party supporter in the UK and Canada, likely, too. Believe in national healthcare which our current UK government is in the process of destroying, though thankfully it's quickly losing popularity, not least due to the Panama papers exposing tax avoidance of several Conservative politicians.
At the moment the UK is steadily moving away from the rather extreme right-wing country it has been for the last decade or so. Today over 150,000 people marched calling for the resignation of our prime minister.
Something that's excellent that's been happening is that younger people are getting much more involved in politics. I mean the average voting age is still something like 60, which is how right wing politicians get elected basically, but it's better than it has been for a while.
Saluting those marchers today. Solidarity and comradery is something the current British Right has never managed to inspire on such levels among the public.
That said, there's already a big thread for this called the 'political thread'. Would recommend that this be merged with that.
Though of course the economist fairly recently called the UK Conservatives 'economically flawed and politically adept' when talking about how they are good at talking the talk but not walking the walk? :P
Also, what does regressive left actually mean? I only see that term used by gun nuts in america and rarely by a british person. What specific policies of, say, Labour, are regressive? And what specific policies of the Conservatives are progressive?
In addition, no offence but isn't saying:
And then saying you dislike it when people talk about narrative instead of fact kinda..hypocriticial? Cause you're going off how you perceive left-wing people to act rather than actual political policy? :P
I can understand that, though I'd likely be considered an "SJW" by your standards. The main problem, I think, is that the mainstream left has lost some focus and perspective. Everything has become about winning and winning means appealing to as many minority and special interest groups as possible. It kind of sucks for those minorities too, because they're getting played. The politicians will talk them up like they're going to change the status quo and improve theor lives. In reality, all they have to offer is platitudes and band-aid solutions that only really help those bourgeois minorities who are doing pretty well already.
You can see it happen with Hillary. This is a woman who strongly supports the drug war and police militarization, voted for some of the most draconian """law and order""" measures in U.S. history and has an economic platform that overwhelming favors the rich at the expense of Black workers. Yet she has somehow managed to convince the working class Black community that she supports Black Lives Matter and has their best interests in mind. It makes me nauseous.
Maybe it was when Reagan and Thatcher were in charge, but now the GOP is more like a cartoonish parody of Conservatism.
Hmm...yes, though Hillary's policies can't really be considered anything other than (really quite) right wing, can they? Especially considering how many extremely rich people support her. So not sure we can solely blame left wing people for that.. Hillary is basically equivalent to a british conservative in her views.
That's saying something as british conservatism has become a cartoonish parody of itself :P
No Stirner? I thought with your pic... lol.
Question about the state power - in the event that capitalist state violence were overthrown in favor of syndicalism, what should be done for those who attempt to accumulate power? My worry is that after the revolution the same mechanisms which lead to the accumulation of power under previous forms of government are ultimately going to rear their ugly again, a la Animal Farm. That's not to say you're necessarily going to get Stalin, but that the mechanisms of authority via violence (IE law and the police) are going to be needed just as they were previously, and with those forces, inequality is the almost unavoidable biproduct. Overthrowing the capitalist state is really just a short detour back to the state of nature, from which the same leviathan will need to surpressed by force, which will in turn form the embryo of a new government.
Haha, I thought about putting Saint Max in, but decided against it as he hasn't really influenced me THAT much. I just haven't changed the avatar back cuz I really like it.
Liberal / Democratic Socialist
I base my political decisions based on rights - but both positive and negative. The government can't censor speech (negative), but I also believe if you work full-time, you have the right to a decent standard of living, including adequate food, shelter, and access to education and healthcare. The balance between these two can be tricky, and leveling where certain rights supercede others (IE: the welfare rights I mentioned vs. property rights) can be ambiguous, but those are the guiding principles I would say. I'll add, certain sectors should be private (stuff like shoes), others private but heavily regulated (no good example off the top of my head, but I'm going to tentatively say banks and telecommunications), and others fully public (education, health insurance).
That is only on a societal level - on an individual level, my politics are far more anarchic (not anarchist). I don't believe in the social contract, order is maintained through law, which is inherently violence. Government is inherently repressive, but I believe that is necessary to a certain degree (much as police use violence, but we generally agree their are cases in which police violence is warrented). People are free in the most absolute sense to rebel against that order, and the means by which they do so will generally be proportional to their level of commitment to change (ranging from protests, to strikes, to outright rebellion), and government will generally change in response to the level and direction of that force. This system doesn't have values - it is the actors within it that do. For instance, I use my voice and my vote to try and create the rights-based society I described above; others are free to advocate everything from fascism to conservativism to liberalism to communism - they only reason the ideas I espouse have more weight poiltically than, for instance, fascism, is that there are a lot more people who hold those ideas, and there are already structures of power (police, military), which, if they do not hold those ideals themselves, are at least amenable to them.
Biggest influence probably John Stuart Mill.
I'm registered with no-party affiliation as I don't like the bickering that comes with political parties. I really don't like how politicians often make decisions to conform to party lines in order to pander to what they view as their core voting base. I vote based on how close their views match mine (I've voted both Democrat and Republican), but it's often hard to tell with the pandering as it could be ungenuine (and pandering often leads to flip-flopping when it comes to changing their minds on particular issues).
The only downside to being registered without a party is that I can't vote in primaries, as I live in New York which has a strict closed primary system. Here, only registered democrats can vote in democratic primaries and republicans can vote in republican primaries (plus the cutoff for registering with a party if you do want to vote in primaries is extremely early - for this election, the cutoff was in December 2015).
Ah, just saw your question, I'd be happy to give my input! Mind you, I'm not exactly an expert on revolutionary theory. I tend to concern myself with more local/present issues.
To be frank, I don't think the present order could simply be overthrown violently and replaced with Syndicalism. If that were the case, then I'd say your fears are well placed. There's a good chance the the victorious Syndicates would re-establish hierarchy and turn into an ad-hoc state. A similar situation could be seen in Russia when the Worker Soviets failed to materialize and the anarchists / left communists were crushed by the Bolshevik counter-revolution. But if you really think about, violent overthrow has pretty much alway always been a tactic of statist revolutionary doctrine. The point of violently overthrowing the state is to seize it so socialist policies can be implemented through it. You don't seize the state in order to get rid of it. If you look at history, most anarchist/libsoc revolutions didn't involve violently overthrowing the government, they came about in times of crisis when the government was unable to maintain order and provide services. The anarchists would take advantage of this by building new , autonomous institutions independent of the state. Rojava and Anarchist Catalonia & Aragon are good examples. This is called "building a new society in the shell of the old". An anarchist revolution would probably look more like neighborhoods, towns and regions seizing their means of production and breaking away from the state one at a time, when it is too weak/preoccupied to respond properly. The thought that an anarchist society could be build throughout the country (or even large swathes of it, all at once, is pretty fanciful, even for a radical ideology.
Of course, there are Marxist Libsocs who would strongly disagree with me about all this and say that we should eventually take our current class struggle to its logical conclusion of revolution.
As for post-revolution, I think the best defense against the rise of central power is thriving, egalitarian local power. The community has been in a state of atrophy for decades now, for several different reasons. I think that the only way to properly establish any kind of libertarian society is to build a culture of mass participation, equality and mutual aid within the community. That has to start well before a revolution.
In all honesty, I doubt any present-day anarchists will see a positive revolution in the west during our lifetimes. However, I think we can help revolutions in the global south (e.g. Rojava, Zapatistas) and/or try to build working class power in our communities and give the next generation the tools they need to improve on our work and maybe even bring about a new way of life.
This just screams vote suppression, especially of the working class and students. Preventing "voter fraud" by committing voter fraud.
freedom of speech, freedom of economics, freedom of religion..
most of what Locke, Smith, and Voltaire said. and Wollstonecraft.
i agree in equality.
but i'm still young but i basically despise all the presidential candidates. i care about politics but i usually always despise whoever is elected or is currently elected.
whatever political party that is, just reply to this comment. thanks.
There's a movement now to try to get New York to at least adopt a semi-closed primary like California, where if you're registered Democrat you can vote at Democratic primaries and if you're registered Republican you can vote at Republican primaries, but if you're registered under any other party, are Independent, or have no party affiliation, you can vote in the Democratic and Republican primaries as well.
At this point, the state treats anyone who is not registered under one of the two major parties as though they are second class citizens. It's basically punishing you for not registering as a Democrat or Republican.
Liberal
Cool, I thought you were a liberal tbh. People like Corbyn give me hope that your labor party may go back to being worth a damn. They've fully embraced neoliberalism as far as I can tell. A far cry, even from their Social Democratic platform.
I was a DemSoc for a couple years, but the fate of SYRIZA and learning more about the old Reform Socialists really undermined my enthusiasm for it.
Well, that sort of goes into the argument by Trotsky, in that for communism (or in this case, anarcho-syndicalism) to take hold, it has to be world-wide, and I really don't see that happening. Whether southern Mexico or Kurdish Syria, it really is a matter of the nation-state either being unable or unwilling (or, most likely, thinks it isn't worth the effort), to exert authority over those areas. However, it would seem to me that it is necessary to have a centralized state to muster superior military and economic force. I don't think a commune can, in the long term, generate the kind of productivity necessary to be economically competitive, and if it did, the militarily superior nation states would simply muscle that wealth over. That played itself out in the 1930's and 40's - in true Hegelian fashion (and remember, Marx was a Hegelian), Democracy met its antithesis, fascism, and was forever changed by creating a democratic nation-state in which the means of production could be converted, by central fiat, into the production of military goods, and where individual sacrifice (specifically of the working class) is seen as necessary and natural to the benefit of the national identity as manifested in the government. As the late George Carlin said, Germany and Japan lost WWII, Fascism won it. And quite frankly, those remnants of fascism - of national socialism - (which FDR also espoused btw), lead to both increased economic productivity and military organization, irrelevant of rights or morality. It's ultimately a balancing act, and the balance of the people fighting to keep their rights, and power fighting to maximize itself, represents the domestic balance of power which is the basis of American political society, not unlike the balance of powers between branches of government (in theory anyway), and placing that balance in a certain place both ensures a certain level of rights, but also a certain level of economic productivity and military security.
In a word, if you want to fight against the rise of central power by thriving, egalitarian local power, you effectively need it to stay thriving, stay egalitarian, and stay local, and this has to be worldwide. Even then, I'm not sure that I agree that is the most beneficial society.
Two questions
1.) What entitles the private owners of the shoe company to the surplus profit from the sale of those shoes? Doesn't this constitute a theft from, and infringement upon the rights of, the people who make and sell the shoes?
2.) How do you reconcile your desire for meaningful reform with the limitations of the political system? Let's say a left-liberal/socdem government gets you what you want. What happens when they are voted out of power? How does reform stay in place when there is a strong voting bloc of people whose neoliberal dogma demands the privatization and deregulation of everything on God's green earth? We saw this happen to the New Deal and you can see it happening again today. My brother-in-law sells mortgages and they've gone back to doing the exact same shit they did before the recession. Also, in Europe, the influx of refugees is leading to talk of phasing out Social Democratic policies altogether. How do you make reform stick?
Reforming Capitalism is a carousel. You can move in whatever direction you like, but ultimately, you're gonna end up more-or-less where you started. Capitalism can't be fixed, it's already working as intended.
1) What entitles them? Nothing. It's a matter of what they can, and do, get away with. The rights I mention are how I believe government should work, that has no bearing on how it does, insofar as people allow it to. We're plenty happy for workers in China jump off the top of the building at FoxConn as long as we get the latest iPhone.
2) How do I reconcile? Disappointment. What happens when they are voted out of power, is that the majority believe that those principles are not the principles by which public policy should be formed. As unwholesome as I find the whole Ayn Rand crowd, the reality is that they represent a significant proportion of the population, and I can't authorize the government to ban or force my ideals on them, I can only convince them of it. You make reform stick by constantly fighting for it. Look at the French, they aren't afraid to strike, they aren't afraid to stand for their rights. Too many Americans are too afraid to stand up for fear of losing their meager jobs. In essence, I don't see the abuses of capitalism as much as a political problem as I see them as a cultural and philosophical problem, and it is my goal to persuade people to my side. The left has been decimated in this country, but as much as we love to blame politicians, we really should be blaming the public who let it get that way. But again, it is in that public - I can't take everybody who wants to vote for Ted Cruz and say 'you're opinion doesn't matter.' This is where it gets tricky - I think employment discrimination against gender/sexual minorities does warrent government intervention against pure democracy. Exactly where the minimum wage stands (again, welfare v. property), does lead to a similar question, and it's one which can't be solved completely by principle,but instead by a nuanced discussion balancing particular interests. I don't say that to be disparaging, but there is a point at which, in a democratic system, the 'Ayn Rand crowd,' as I call them, still have their own rights in a free society.
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Reform is a carousel, yes, but not one which goes back and forth, but one which ebbs and wanes towards a particular goal. Perhaps race relations might serve as an example - the Civil War ended slavery, then there was more oppression under Jim Crow, but it was still better than slavery, and while there is still racism after integration, it isn't as bad as during segregation. It is a long arc, but the arrow does curve towards justice.
here...
test
Was that supposed to take you to your results? If it was, it's not working.
None, I don't give a shit about this stuff. But I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, gay rights, all that jazz.
it works, just checked it the results are at the bottom of the page...
Weird, it starts at the beginning of the test for me. What were your coordinates anyway?
edit:
Yeah, hopefully that gets changed.
What really gets me is the ridiculously restricted window for party registration. That strikes me as an attack against poor, undecided and generally busy people. It seems like a system meant to curb the peoples' ability to get rid of incumbents, especially.
Fair warning, that test kinda sucks. It skews heavily toward the Libertarian Left. I made a political compass for the forums a few months back and almost everyone (even vocal right-wingers) wound up in the green area or pretty close to it.
Well I ended in team blue but thanks for warning.
Well, it's either skewed or people are actually more left wing than they'd care to admit :P