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[primroseburrows]

You are a Social Liberal (86% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (0% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid.com: Free Online Dating Also : The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

I'm not sure if this is completely accurate, but I'm definitely not surprised. I've never seriously thought of myself as a socialist, but I'm pretty sure if I had to give myself a label that social democrat wouldn't be too far off. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I define myself politically and I realise I've never really thought beyond 'liberal', which is way too broad a term to really define anyone's political ideology.

Comments

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Anarchism isn't pro-capitalism, but it's anti-government completely, and that's not a lefty viewpoint. I don't know much more than the basics about Anarchism, but IIRC one of its main ideals is the elimination of the state entirely. Which taken on its own is the polar opposite of Socialism, where the people ARE the state. So Marxism = the people control the government, and the government controls most everything, and Anarchism = there's no government like no government. I think. I don't know if being diametrically opposed like that makes Anarchism upper-right, though, hmmm.

Also, Fun Fact: According to Wikipedia, Mikhail Bakunin "opposed the Marxist aim of dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of universal rebellion, and allied himself with the anti-authoritarians in the First International before his expulsion by the Marxists".

I don't like anyone's labels, which is why I don't really know why I'm wondering what political label I wear. Because labels are for clothing, pfft. Maybe it's just because I'm already wearing "Liberal" whether I want to or not and I think it's too broad.

[luzula]

Okay, I think we're talking past each other because we mean different things by the same word.

Anyway, imagine the words "as I understand it" in front of every sentence in the following. : )

Marxism doesn't mean that the people control the government (that would be democracy, wouldn't it? *g*). It means that the workers are in control of the means of production. In capitalism, the means of production (for example, a factory) is owned by a capitalist, who employs workers, sells the products, and gets the profit.

So, there are different ways to let the workers control the means of production. One way is to let the state own everything and the people control the state (though in the USSR I guess it was really Stalin who controlled the state...*g*). People who have this type of society as their goal tend to work through political parties.

Then you have the anarchist left, where the idea is that workers at a workplace own their particular means of production. Concretely, this means that a company is not something that can be bought or sold, but is controlled democratically by the workers at the company (like a co-op). Different companies in a sector go together in a federation, and then the different federations work together in larger matters. And there's no central government. Of course, there are different versions of this (the version I've described above is basically anarcho-syndicalism), depending on whether people think there should still be a market or not, etc etc. People who have this type of society as their goal tend to work through labor unions rather than parties.

So this split is what your quote about Bakunin was talking about.