The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991) (opens in new tab)

> These words have more conventional meanings.

Kondylis disputes the typical interpretation of "conservatism." Historically it was a backwards justification of feudalism. Easy to see why someone would talk up "history," "tradition" when they're at the top of the social order and an upstart comes on to stage.

"Woke" is perhaps the freaking platonic ideal of what this article criticizes.

I'm black. It once was just a mostly fun little word that meant "Hey man, are you paying attention to the world around you?"

And today it is completely without concrete meaning. For the left, it's kind of whatever, because it's responding to what it is for the so called right -- literally nothing more concrete than "what I don't like right now that might be associated with any group possibly considered a minority."

Let’s talk about it. What are “left wing issues” and what are “right wing issues”?

We can probably agree on what an issue is. But I’m not sure we have any idea what right wing or left wing are.

How far right is right wing? And right of what, exactly? What about the left? Where is the center point?

Here’s a fun one. To whom belongs the issue of racism? Is that a right wing issue or a left wing one?

It’s neither of course. It’s a human issue. And you have victims of racism across the entire political spectrum who care deeply about it. Yet discourse would have you assume it’s a “left wing” issue, when it’s anything but.

> "woke" has a more concrete definition than fascist

Fascist is a very concrete definition, as it is a comparison to a concrete existing historical movement. It's kind of the same as with Nationalsocialists. It is a term for a very concrete party, but is sometimes used as a slur.

Formal description and studying is what I would define what mathematicians do.

For example that the author is a conservative marxist writing that treatise at the time of the "August Coup" which is a pretty interesting historical event itself. It toppled Gorbechev, and Yeltsin took over. Kondylis is also more reknowned than I was aware.

I (like GP, most likely) did not live through the events that occurred in Moscow during 1991. The only news media I consumed at the time was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, which did not cover Soviet politics, and we did not cover any of this in school later in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of what I learned after the fact has been from Fox and MSNBC and Red Alert 2 and Call of Duty - that commies and socialists and Soviets are bad people who want to give kids free school lunches, will disrupt the temporal equilibrium, and give adults universal health care. I can skim the Wikipedia article about the coup [1] and I recognize the names of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but I cannot even begin to articulate the political philosophies of their platforms or the power dynamics, coalitions, and incentive structures that either used to leverage one position or the other.

The intro paragraph, I think, is trying to use this to its advantage by describing an unfamiliar political landscape with conservatives and parlimentarians and Stalinists and "putschists" (what even is that word?). I barely know what conservativism means as distinct from "whatever the American Republican party does". I clicked on the article because I've observed that liberalism/conservativism/libertarianism/socialism/populism/marxism/fascism/neo___ism/etc. are bandied about more like sports team names to be cheered or derided rather than comprehended, and hoped to understand this phenomenon better.

I'll push through the article eventually, with frequent dictionary lookups for "societas civilis" and "diptych" and "affairs curricula". But it's clearly written for an expert in political philosophy and will take me a long time to do so. I'm an expert in computer engineering and pretty innately talented at understanding that, I'm not an expert in the social sciences and they don't come easily to me. But I still live in a society, and try to participate in its governance as best I can...while neither journalists nor public education have really helped me to get there. I don't observe my peers reading Chomsky, Hayek, Putnam, Piketty, Turchin, and Zinn before they go to the voting booth, but they get one vote each just the same.

I've actually looked it up and found that my local community college offers a "PL230 - Introduction to Political Theory" course, this winter it's held mid-day for full-time students but they're offering it virtually in the evenings next summer so that people who work during the day can participate.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt

> No consistent ideology or underlying theory of government

> just blind support for your chosen side's leaders.

These are two different questions.

I'm not sure whether the political parties should have consistent ideologies. Even if they did, it's impossible for two or even three or four political parties to represent the diverse political views of over 300 million Americans. Each of the two major US parties have always consisted of shifting coalitions of interests.

On the other hand, loyal partisanship leads to the phenomenon that I described: inventing ideological terms as a kind of personal identity for the partisan, giving the pretense that their loyal partisanship is backed by consistent, stable views, when in fact the parties are demonstrably shifting coalitions of interests.

I mean, there's very specific reasons either color gets support from their voters. I wouldn't say all of those reasons warrant the same amount of fervor, passion, and loyalty that they do. But "blind support" is a bit reductive when for some people it literally means their rights being stripped away.

What appears to be "blind support" is people desperately clinging onto what tiny bit of representation they have. It's sad for both sides. It's Stockholm syndrome mixed with political pragmatism. It sucks, but the current political landscape in the US has entrenched itself so deeply in a local minima that people feel like they have to work backwards to make progress. Just see how any discussion of a third party is seen as a psyop to get that side to have a spoiler effect.

People want to belong to a tribe. I think it's often quite a tossup where a young person ends up, depending on friends or whichever online circle accepts them best. It's also not rare for young people to flipflop between nominally widely opposing tribes before setting into one. People gradually learn all the opinions they are supposed to have on the various issues to truly belong to the tribe. It's not unlike learning the dogmas of a religion. It's much much more convenient socially to speak the same language and have the same cultural references and opinions to bond over and feel camaraderie about and curate a bubble of friends following the same opinion-setters, vs. creating one's own grab-bag idiosyncratic set of opinions that doesn't fit neatly into either well known combo-deal. You gotta support either this football team or the other one. People who start to lecture about how they like the goalie of the one team, but the striker of the other are just "not fun at parties", are kind of annoying and hard to relate to, especially online where people decide in a split second whether to upvote or downvote based on a fast pattern matching check to my tribe / enemy tribe.

I agree that this is the claim of self-described true conservatives. However, I think the claim is empirically false, and they do not actually follow what the label meant in our youth.

Realistically the mainstream Democratic Party is liberal in the sense that you use it; the US is a fundamentally liberal place, a lot of Republicans are as well.

Even the idea of “banning free speech” that you mention is implemented in a liberal fashion in the US. There are rarely calls for the government to actually ban speech via laws. The ground where that’s fought is actually “should private companies broadcast/highlight via algorithm the speech of individuals who say things I don’t like,” it is a formulation that pits the speech rights of the corporation against the self-expression of the individuals using their services.

The framing you quoted (“these liberals who want to ban free speech”) is often used by one side to pitch the other side as falling outside the traditional free-speech consensus.

In the US they call that right-leaning version "libertarian".

> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime

Can you elaborate?

Trump is left of Carter, Obama, etc. ? How are you defining left-wing, exactly?

> IMO, the current US administration seems to be the most left-wing in my lifetime

Can you name even a single left-wing policy or rhetorical position of this administration?

> but contrived cultural wedge issues seem to have eclipsed actual policy positions in most public discourse,

“Cultural wedge issues” are about actual policy domains, and have a real left-right valence.

> gets called "conservative" despite its policies being almost the diametric opposite of what was called "conservative" 30 years ago.

30 years ago? The height of the neoliberal consensus when the Right leaned heavily on the cultural wedge issues of opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and affirmative action?

(I guess it was also just after a midterm election where the Republican Party, being out of the White House for the first time in a while and having just taken a Congressional majority after mostly being in the minority for a generation was also emphasizing restraining government and elected officials more than the Right normally has before or since, but that was pretty obviously a tactical adaptation to the immediate circumstances, not the essence of conservatism.)

> "socialism" pretty much destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember

This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.)

Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is.

Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up.

Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way.

"Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp.

A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism.

It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed.

Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels.

Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority.

Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers.

Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin.

Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today.

Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.

I don't know how it is in your country, but here China is still categorized as a developing country. We still pay them development aid. But I do think its miscategorized, if anything China is now the second world power and maybe soon the first. But of course the chinese government has now reason to stop this. The more power they can grab while still posing as a poor country, the better (for them).

Honestly I just asked ChatGPT for the list and didn't notice x.x Interesting omission on its part, haha. I asked ChatGPT what's up, and it replied:

"China is not in the top-50 group of “very high human development” countries. The United Nations Development Programme’s 2024 Human Development Index (HDI) places mainland China around the mid-60s globally (most recent figure is roughly 64th–68th, depending on the exact update). The “top 50 developed countries” list I used earlier is based on that HDI ranking, so China does not qualify as one of the top 50 most-developed nations. Hong Kong, which is a Special Administrative Region of China, does rank in the global top 10 and is why you saw “Hong Kong (China SAR)” in the earlier table—but that is treated separately from mainland China in the UN’s HDI reports."

It was added by the AI; "[ChatGPT] originally included that extra phrase only because many English-language sources habitually describe the U.S. as a “representative democratic republic”. To keep the wording consistent, you could simply shorten it to “Federal presidential republic”."