Political Terminology

Still trying to unravel political terminology. My latest attempt:

The opposite of liberal is socialist

The opposite of conservative is progressive

The opposite of libertarian is authoritarian 

These three axes are theoretically independent of each other.

I think some will find this counter-intuitive because these terms are typically mixed up. We call authoritarian groups "far-right" and we think of liberals as of "the left". But I've always found this confusing and the more I study the history of liberalism, the less it makes sense.


Liberal/Socialist

These are primarily economic terms. Liberals are for small government, free markets, and laterly for monetarism (using monetary policy to control inflation). Socialists are for state ownership on behalf of the people, regulated markets, and usually take full employment as their economic goal. The original liberals were against democracy because it threatened a tyranny of the majority (which we have in the case of Brexit).

Many people will be confused by the association of liberalism with the right-wing. But all the key right-wing economic policies came from the classical liberals (Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Mills, etc).

To be far-right in this view is to advocate for allowing markets to decide everything without interference. In this sense, neoliberals who see a role for state in the markets are less right wing than the classical liberals. Mind you the role of the state is strictly limited to managing the money supply to control inflation (monetarism) and preventing monopolies. The latter has not prevented most industries seeing a massive contraction in the number of players. Virtual any class of goods and services you might purchase is not controlled by 3 or 4 companies globally. 4 oil companies, 3 food manufacturers, and so on. And though they are not monopolies these very large and dominant conglomerates have the same effect of suppressing competition. They simply swallow up any competition.

Socialists mainly advocate state ownership of the provision of basic services such as housing, utilities, education, and healthcare. In the past this led to full employment but also to inefficiency.

There are two distinct approaches to welfare. One of the classical liberal arguments for how the state should help citizens is "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he can feed himself for the rest of his life." Liberals want to help a person to help themselves. What welfare liberals imagined is everyone with a fishing rod catching fish to feed themselves. Socialists take the approach that if the strongest members of the society go fishing with a net, they can catch enough fish to feed everyone.

But actually happens under liberalism is that a businessman captures the market on nets, boats, and fish and sells fish to people at the highest price they can extract from the people. In the name of freedom they make everyone slaves to this system.

Now socialism sometimes works well as it did in Scandinavia where everyone paid very high levels of tax (60-90%), but the govt ensured everyone had a job, everyone received an excellent education, very good healthcare, and they had the highest standards of living anywhere in the world. In other places, socialism led to stagnation as the state control was bureaucratic and apathetic. In Scandinavia government was highly motivated to look after citizens, whereas in Britain, with it's much greater population and history of rigid class distinctions, the system bogged down and worked against the citizenry.

As far as the environment goes, liberals treat corporations as legal persons who have the right to engage in economic activity unhindered by excessive regulation. Laissez faire attitudes meant that pollution, greenhouse effects, and habitat loss were acceptable consequences of economic activity, even if they negatively impacted on the health and well-being of citizens. This reminds us that liberalism has always talked expansively, but acted to preserve the privileges and profits of the elite.


Conservative/Progressive

Conservatives are for the status quo. The aging members of the Soviet Politburo were conservatives of the left. Americans who oppose changes to gun laws on the basis of individual liberty are conservatives of the right.

Progressives want to change things. One of the most striking changes of our time was the transition from Hick's interpretations of Keynesian economic policies to those of Friedman and Hayek interpreted by Alan Greenspan. I call this "progressive", not because it led to progress or was a good change, but because it moved decisively away from the status quo.

The problem here is that the term "progressive" is usually associated with progress towards some ideal. With liberals the goal is always individual liberty (though of course companies have the rights of individuals in law). Indeed liberals argue that liberty is not something the government can grant, because liberty is our inalienable natural right. Government can only limit or deny liberty. Most liberals accept, following arguments first made by John Locke, that there are a narrow range of situations in which the government may limit the liberty of an individual and that is where an action or activity harms another citizen.

Just as there are few if any socialists in the USA, there are few if any conservatives in the UK. The Conservative Party of the UK was historically a party which resisted change being proposed by liberals (free markets) and radicals (democracy). But they were taken over by neoclassical liberalism in the 1970s and began a series of massive social and economic reforms, completely changing how the UK economy worked, negating the power of labour unions, and privatising government assets and enterprises (crippling the ability of the state to help citizens).


Libertarian/Authoritarian

I think these terms are fairly clear. Although the UK follows liberal (right-wing) economic policies, these have been adopted by governments who insisted we have no choice. They also happen to resist evidence based policies in favour of the moral commitments of the leaders - typically a "we know best" approach. And this is authoritarian. At the extreme are leaders who dominate (or attempt to dominate) the process of governing, like Trump.

Beyond this are absolutist forms of government such as what we see in North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Libertarians of the right or left (anarchists) are resistant to anyone telling the what to do.

And at the other extreme are the people who don't think the government should tell anyone what to do. These are often people who are already in a position of privilege who see the liberty of other people as a threat to their own power. This has been a feature of the history of liberalism - classical liberals resisted democracy for example, working against the extension of voting rights at every step.

Many libertarians turn out to be socially conservative. They don't want anyone to tell them what to do but they're against the expansion of rights for other groups. So we see US libertarians against the extension of civil rights to transexuals for example. Fundamentalist Christians are anxious to assert their absolute rights to freedom of assembled, worship, and expression, but some of them will murder a doctor who performs an abortion because they insist their worldview is the only valid one. Any libertarian who is against pluralism should face some hard questions, though they seldom do.


Conclusion

This is where I've got to in trying to understand political terminology and the dynamics that it applies to. I'll be continuing to think about for a long time to come I suspect.

It does seem helpful to understand where these terms come from and how the usage has changed over time. It seems helpful to disentangle some of the terms that have begun to merge: like liberal and socialist or liberal and progressive, and all of these with "left-wing"; or conservative and right-wing.

If we can call things by the proper name then it will help us to understand our differences and similarities. For example, although I see many of the liberal attitudes as pernicious in practice (if not always in theory) I can appreciate that the concept of liberty is one that they championed. Liberty is certainly something to celebrate, but it would be nice to spread it around a little more in my view.

But also I think it will be essential in the fight against the climate and biodiversity crisis to frame it in the values of the people we are trying to persuade to help us. Where liberalism is the dominant ideology, as it is in most of Europe and America, it makes sense to frame the discussion in terms of liberty.

If someone poisons the air I breath and thereby shortens my life or causes me to suffer, then this can be frame in many ways. But one important way to talk about, given the values of the ruling elites, is as an infringement of my liberty. It is fundamental to liberalism that if the government has any role at all, it is to prevent other citizens from infringing on my liberty, especially in the form of harming me.

The opposite of  socialist is liberal

The opposite of progressive is conservative

The opposite of authoritarian is libertarian

Neoliberalism articles

Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world. The word has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human. By Stephen Metcalf. Guardian. Fri 18 Aug 2017.

Neoliberalism: Oversold? Finance & Development (IMF Journal), June 2016, Vol. 53, No. 2. Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri. Inside the stock exchange in Santiago, Chile, one of the first countries to adopt a form of neoliberal policies. Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. George Monbiot.  Guardian. 15 Apr 2016. Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Degrowth & Deflation

I keep seeing naive arguments for degrowth that don't account for the disastrous impact of deflation on an economy, especially in the light of very high levels of private sector debt (across the first world). It would not be so bad if the advocates of degrowth had any sense of how deflation works, but they seem not to.

Deflation

Deflation has similar risks to inflation and can get out of hand just as easily. Deliberately pursuing a course of deflation is dangerous. In deflation, prices fall and consumers assume that if they delay a purchase the price will be lower. So it makes sense to delay it if possible. Demand for products tends to drop, putting further downward pressure on prices (there is a positive feedback loop). But as demand falls off, production has to fall off as well. Supply chains slow down and sometimes dry up. Wages start to fall, and businesses start to lay off workers, usually starting with the low paid, unskilled workers.

Normally we would hope that the fall in wages and rise in unemployment would counteract the deflationary spiral. But if we are actively pursuing degrowth then the deflationary spiral will keep going, we might see the first examples of hyper-deflation. 

We don't live in the kind of world that accepts equality of economic outcome as a goal. Thus the poor are going be worse off. The middle classes will cling on, while they have job. The ruling elite are now excessively insulated against declines by the ability to short stocks and buy credit default swaps in advance of the change of economic policy. They will actually grab an even larger share of a shrinking pie. And this will exacerbate the effects of degrowth. Businesses will downsize and force workers to work harder to preserve investors capital.

Debt Deflation

A problem that almost no one talks about is the fate of debt under deflation. While it is true that buying power increases in the short-term the subsequent fall in wages will cancel that out in time. The trouble comes when your debt stays the same in numerical terms, but your income is shrinking in real terms. In effect deflation multiplies debt. And we need to be clear that the first world is highly indebted. Politicians bang on about govt debt, but private sector debt is much larger. In the UK private sector debt is about 350% of GDP. Household debt alone is slightly over 100% of GDP. But debt is currently rising. Households have spent more than they earned for 9 straight quarters in the UK.

The interest on these debts must be a significant figure, though I have never found anyone who could tell me what that figure might be. If the average interest rate is 10% then the interest payments on debts to the value 350% of GDP are 35% of GDP per annum! As I say, no one seems to be able to tell me what that figure might be, not even the heterodox economists who bang on about private sector debt.

Consuming Less & Kill the Third World

There are powerful arguments for consuming a great deal less in the West in order for us all to survive the climate emergency and to turn around the mass extinction. But this will have massive consequences.

However, this is going to be happening on a global scale. Those countries most at risk from the climate emergency are also most at risk from degrowth.

If Europe stops consuming, say, jute and cheap clothing from Bangladesh, then vast numbers of Bangladeshis lose their livelihood and have no welfare to rely on. And just as we wipe out their economy to save ourselves, their whole country is inundated with floods and because we are following degrowth we have much less to offer them in terms aid.

If Western Europe rapidly stops using gas from Russia and Ukraine for cooking and heating then 190 million people are affected. Gas is by far the largest export from Russia and it mainly goes to the EU. We could expect mass unemployment, again without a welfare safety net. And at the same time their wheat crops are failing from the persistent drought that is already beginning to affect them. But of course we have to stop using fossil fuels and soon.

We desperately need to stop consuming plastic and a lot of the plastic tat we buy is made in China. If China suffers a downturn then we could be looking at 100s of millions of people losing their jobs.

If we suddenly stop going to Greece, or Bali, or Fiji, any of a 1000 places that rely on tourism then again, there will be job losses that create a drag on the local economy, exacerbating the deflationary trend. Factor in the effects of the climate emergency and we can see that a lot of places are going to cease to exist.

There are many of these strong dependencies in a globalised world and the poorer nations are always more vulnerable than the rich.

Surviving the Climate Emergency/Mass Extinction 

Degrowth has the potential to make things a lot worse and the worst impact will be on the poor. Which is not to say that we should not consume less. The catch 22 is that if we do not consume less we will probably all die.

I would say that our priorities would be consuming less locally produced energy. Cutting down the amount of coal and oil burned to power our lifestyles. Next would be transport. It's not enough that we all switch to electric cars. We have to be thinking in terms of using a fraction of the energy resources that we currently do. We need to switch from cars to bicycles, shared vehicles, and public transport.

Switching to plant/fungi/bacteria based foods so that animal farming is reduced will make an important contribution. We need to stop exporting animal products as well. But we need to be cautious about cutting back drastically on goods from poor and services countries, especially where their economic base is narrow. They need time to work out how they will survive the coming economic crash on top of the climate emergency/mass extinction.

Some single products such as palm oil might be good to target. Making and transporting the stuff involves cutting down vast swathes of rain forest and consumes vast amounts of energy. And yet it is not so central to any nation's economy that stopping it would bankrupt them. There must be many similar such products. Coffee and chocolate are probably both in this category and we'll probably discover how committed we are when we consider them.