Fair Trade Is Good Capitalism

Galloping Beaver points out that the vulgar liberaltarian Adam Daifallah is claiming Fair Trade Coffee campaigns are Left Wing.

Mon Dieu, and there I thought Fair Trade was good for farmers, good for the developing world, good for business, good for trade, the good old fashioned authentic market place.

Not the Oligopolistic Capitalism that Daifallah defends.


SEE:

Cooperative Commonwealth=Free Market

Chocolate Worms

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Anarchist Economics

This years Nobel prize in economics was given to an American Political Economist who for all intents and purposes espouses the anarchist economics of community control, mutual aid and direct action. While much attention has been given to the fact that this was first time a woman was given the award much commentary has been that this was another Euro slap at the rampant liberaltarian free market economics of the U.S. In fact Elinor Ostrom's political economic analysis is far more libertarian than the apologists for U.S. capitalism.

Professor Ostrom - who shares the prize with Oliver Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley - has spent much of her career challenging the view that when people share a finite resource, they will inevitably end up destroying it. This widely held belief, known as the tragedy of the commons, is used to support arguments for tighter regulation or even privatisation.

She has approached the argument from an unusual perspective, too. Through her study of the way that natural resources have been managed around the world, she has found that, left to manage resources on their own and given the right support, local people often develop the most effective methods of sustainable development.

“We have a team of people studying forestry in 200 cities around the world. This is very big study, trying to understand why some forests have just disappeared and others have been sustained. We started in 1992. We have been able to go back and go back and go back to get very good data sets.

“Our findings are that some local people who have had long-term assurances of harvesting rights are able to manage forests more effectively than people who do not have the same assurances. The lessons are that when regulation comes from a distant authority and is uniform for a very large region, it is not likely to succeed.”

Professor Ostrom - whose doctorate is in political science and who considers herself a political economist - will not be drawn to comment on hot political issues, such as the push for tighter regulation of Wall Street or the perennial question of American healthcare. They are, she says, not her field.

But she does have a message for government: “The big message is that we need to have respect for the capabilities of humans living all over the world, not just those occupying high positions,” she said. “It’s not that we want to get rid of government. It’s about getting rid of the idea that government can solve everything.”

To this end, she is a firm supporter of direct action. “I have recently written a paper on global warming and argued that we should not sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to do something. We should act now. There is a lot we can all do at all levels,” she said.

Neo-Liberal State Capitalism In Asia

Reading the Right from the Left.

Free Trade Zones are the newest formation of state capitalism. Of course the contradiction here is that they pose as a form of free trade. When in fact the difference between them and state enterprizes is simply a matter of ownership. Name change really. Of course there are concrete structural differences to. But for all intents and purposes both are forms of state capitalism.

Whether they are called new economic zones; in Canada's Maritimes (dominated by call centres rather than the traditional use of these zones for manufacturing), Maquiadoras in the Caribean, Latin and South America, or Special Enterprize Zones zones in Asia and Aftica or economic reconstruction Zones in American inner cities, they remain a market distortion.

In India they are finding that the creation of these Special Enterprize Zones (SEZ) distort the market place. And since they are implemented as one of the tools of neo-liberalism to free the market of state control it is another contradiction of real existing captialism, rather than the text book capitalism of the Austrian or Chicago schools. Such text book capitalism showed its failure in the melt down of the Russian economy after its failed attempts to privatize with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.


Attack on Indias economic zone plan

Since the passing of the Special Economic Zones Act in February, hundreds of businesses have rushed to take advantage of generous tax breaks, causing consternation in the finance ministry, the central bank and even the International Monetary Fund.

Special economic zones have been established in several countries, most notably in China, where they attracted the foreign investment and know-how that were central to the modernisation programme launched in 1978. However, critics claim SEZs attract investment only by offering distortionary incentives rather than by building underlying competitiveness and can delay real economy-wide reform

But economists believe the proposed SEZs are unlikely to help Indian manufacturers achieve scale efficiencies, since 133 of the 267 are less than 1 square kilometre in area. The average size is just 4.2 sq km.

“Mega-sized SEZs are the ideal solution,” said Chetan Ahya of Morgan Stanley. “We believe that in today’s highly competitive globalised world, the concept of small-sized SEZs is completely outdated.”

In a continuation of a long-running turf war with the commerce ministry, finance ministry officials said the scheme was providing unnecessary tax breaks to real estate development that would have taken place regardless of whether there was a SEZ scheme in place.

It remains the function of the state to create these zones, through cheap land, tax and regulation breaks, in particular labour laws, health and safety regulations, etc. In other words it is not about trade or even production but cheap manufacturing of goods, which can only be brought about by an attack on labours wages and benefits, which eat into surplus value (profit). When the neo-liberals call for de-regulation, ending red tape, etc. it is always the labour laws they focus on or laws that impact on workers. A couple examples from the Financial Times online should suffice to make the point.

UK in secret deal with Italy on China trade

Britain has just enough EU member states ready to support its exemption from the working time directive – seen as a vital part of Britain’s flexible labour market – but the coalition is flaky.But the proposed deal has hit a hitch: Italy has so far refused to give Britain the written assurances it wants on working hours. Communists and socialists in Mr Prodi’s coalition believe the UK’s working time “opt out” exploits workers and gives Britain an unfair advantage over countries where the 48-hour limit applies.



Another shift in ownership from an autarkic form of state capitalism to a monopoly state capitalism like India's (their so called Democratic State Capitalism) is currently occuring in China as part of its economic reforms. That is the creation of capitalist law, specifically bankruptcy law.

China state firms win stay of execution

The move, aimed at cushioning the social impact on employees of financially strained state companies, will slow the disposal of bad loans held by state banks and distressed debt companies and perhaps also reduce buyout opportunities for foreigners.

The bankrupcty law, passed in August after more than a decade of debate, is seen as crucial stage in China’s reforms as it enables creditors and investors to weed out underperforming companies by filing for bankruptcy to recover at least part of their funds.

However, the law, which is due to come into effect in June 2007, will not apply to 2,116 state-owned enterprises considered at financial risk by the Chinese authorities until at least the end of 2008.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Professor Li Shuguang, one of the authors of the new law, said that for those companies, employees’ health and wage claims would still take precedence over creditors’ claims, an arrangement that had so far slowed restructuring in some sectors.

Estimates of the claims by state employees range from hundreds to thousands of billions of renminbi, China’s currency.

In other words before the capitalist risks their investment, the public has alread invested more than the private capitalist ever would. Any change in the regulations of the state, do not minimize the state, they simply make it more open to the influence of monopoly capital for its own interest.

Private equity firms’ and foreign multinationals’ efforts to buy and restructure state companies would also suffer a setback.

Professor Li, who hosted a seminar for Wall Street analysts and investors at New York’s China Institute in September, said it was “the most important law in China’s development of a market economy”.

“It shows the central government’s commitment to introducing a market economy and to use the legal system to deal with the issues arising from a market economy. That would have been unthinkable 10 or even five years ago.”

Actually the most important development of the Chinese economy in its transition to monopoly corporate state capitalism from the autarkic variety was the opening up of the banking system to foreign investment and the development of a stock exchange.

The later was further enhanced by China's take over of Hong Kong one of the biggest market exchanges in the world. While the PR was that this was the end of British colonial rule over the island and the end of the age old battle between China and Britain which began during the opium wars, Hong Kong's value was its investment and banking window onto the monopoly capitalist world.

A major portion of the foreign investment in China consists of Chinese private capital
recycled through Hong Kong. The importance of Hong Kong for the growth of nonstate
enterprises in China lies in its efficient financial markets and legal system.
A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal -Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

This new bankruptcy law however is a major and significant change for enabling foreign captial to buy and operate state enterprizes, not create new ones with their own capital. In other words a Public Private Partnership (P3) the keystone of the neo-liberal economic reforms in this period of globalization.

Foreign Direct Investment, FDI in China is not being invested in new enterprize zones nor in the developing private sector. Rather it is focused on Partnerships in existing State Enterprizes or SOE's as they are called. This means that Western corporate monopolies financial and manufacturing, are partnering with existing state enterprizes awaiting the day they can buy them at fire sale prices.

The market reforms in China, as they have been applied elsewhere, once again shows the textbook liberaltarian idealists of the Von Mise institute and the neo-liberals at the CATO institute overlook the key determinant of the capitalist market that is the labour theory of value.

For them labour is reduced to an input value not unlike raw materials and technology. It is a form of variable capital investment. More importantly for this form of liberal economics, cost, price and consumption rule. Yet in reality, by their own admission labour value is the key to capital creation. Even in China during this transisition from the autarky of State Capitalism to a privatized state capitalism.

The key here is that the two components of liberalization are P3's in State industries and the transfer of the responsibility of social benefits to the State.
What makes private industry competitive is its ability to keep wages and benefits low even more than a cheap tax regime. The lattter is gravy.

China has allowed both private industry and its own state enterprizes to transfer their responsibility for wages and benefits to the state. Ironically the state has no infrastructure for the delivery of unemployment insurance, health care, welfare or social assistance, pensions etc. because these orginally had been the responsibility of the State enterprises.

With Dengs capitalist reformation the result was an uneven playing field. Free Trade Zones and private companies were allowed to exploit the vast labor market with low wages and no benefits. While the state enterprizes were expected to carry on with higher wages and benefits.

This produced the false impression that private enterprize and Free Trade Zone businesses are more productive than state owned enterprizes. They are not more productive, they are more profitable because they keep more of the surplus value of their labour due to lower wages and no benefits.

The sources of the Chinese economic miracle are well known. The
rise in rural incomes, with the adoption of the household responsibility
system (the shift away from collectivized farming) and the bonus
from the demographic transition with a fall in the dependency ratio
(the ratio of children and the old to workers), led to a marked rise in
savings rates.

A monumental unintended consequence of the decollectivization
of agriculture was the initiation of a boom in small-scale,
nonfarm rural enterprises, which began with Deng Xiaoping’s injunction
that it was virtuous to be rich. Local party officials took this to
heart, becoming directors and managers of township and village enterprises
(TVEs).

With the rise in farm incomes, the pent-up demand for manufactured
goods and housing was met by the TVEs, which were run as
profit-making capitalist enterprises, even though they were collectively
owned. They provided the local authorities with “extrabudgetary
revenues” and gave officials legal opportunities to become
rich.

Unlike SOEs, the TVEs did not carry any welfare responsibilities
and were free to hire and fire the abundant local labor. With Deng’s
creation of the Special Economic Zones in China’s southern rim in
the early 1980s, the TVEs—and later individually owned private
firms—became the spearhead of a Dickensian capitalism.

These nonstate enterprises have made China into the processing
center for manufactured goods in the world. Success has occurred by
using cheap labor in the Chinese countryside along with foreign technology,
and relying on self-financing from household savings and
enterprise profits, along with foreign capital from the Chinese diaspora
and a myriad of multinationals, and engaging in fierce locational
competition promoted by local municipal authorities.
This labor intensive industrialization is now spreading inland along
the Yangtze (The Economist 2004: 13).

These spin-offs from the decollectivization of agriculture were
aided by the massive buildup of infrastructure by the state.

Labor intensive export industries were further helped by domestic price
reforms and by one of the largest unilateral liberalizations of foreign
trade in history.

The rapid export-led industrialization in the private sector is based
on processing imported components with domestic and foreign
capital and technology, and cheap domestic labor.

In the pre-reform period (before 1978) China’s development strategy
provided only limited urban employment opportunities. Consequently,
the government assigned several workers to the same job,
leading to a large labor redundancy in the SOEs. As these industrial
workers only received a low wage to cover current consumption, the
government also had to cover their pension, health, housing, and
other social expenditures from the SOE revenues, which were mandated
to be remitted to the government.

In the reform period, the SOEs have been responsible not merely for wages but also for these “social” benefits, which has imposed a “social burden” on them that is absent in their non-SOE cousins. This burden has grown in the reform
period as wages and benefits paid by the SOEs have grown by 16 percent per annum between 1978 and 1996, while their output grew by 7.6 percent per annum (see Lin 2004).

A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal -Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

The new bankruptcy law as well as reforms to State owned companies, the ability to layoff and fire workers, reductions in wages and benefits, and a shift of the responsibility for these to the State, are being implemented in China. The profitability of SOE's is reduced because of the surplus value absorbed by labour.
Again it is not investment, nor techology nor the bueracracy that is the source of profit it is labour. In the case of the newly privatized corporations if the costs were the same they would actually be making less profit for Chinese investors as the techology and marketing aspects of these companies are in the hands of their foreign investors.

The fact is that both the private sector and the state owned enterprizes are kept afloat by the Chinese people by low wages and the banks investing their savings in these companies.

The key to the historic development of capitalism was the privatization of agriculture. The end of the commons and the creation of the encroachment acts. Historic capitalism developed in England before its advent anywhere else in the world. Because of the privatization of agricultural production. This has occured in China with the Deng reforms, privatization of land is the modern equivalent of the English encroachment acts, thus creating a capitalist economy regardless of the politics of the State.

The state can call itself anything it wants, communist, socialist, democratic, republican, blah, blah. The political ideology of the state is is irrelevant to capitalism as a system. Capitalism created the state in its image, for the centralized accumulation of capital. Its political forms regardless of the propaganda of the left and right, are neccasary for the primitive accumulation of capital. If a state is authoritarian at first, as the state was prior to the advent of capitalism, then it will be liberalized as it creates its own bourgoise, the private owners of wealth. Which accounts for the development of the national state in the 19th century and its further development in the 20th.

As long as the state functions to provide private land and labour for those with inherited wealth, then the economic system is capitalism. In the case of China instead of inheriting land, labour and wealth from ones aristocratic and fuedal status and holdings, the inheritance came from ones position in the Communist Party of China.

China’s task of moving from the plan to the market was much easier than that of the other
socialist transition economies of Russia and Eastern Europe because of differences in their
initial conditions. Russia and Eastern Europe had about 90 percent of their labor force in
industrial SOEs, while most of China’s labor force (80 percent ) was in agriculture. For
Russia and Eastern Europe the only route to a market economy was a “big bang” to
dismantle SOEs, which resulted in short-term losses in output and employment. In contrast,
China, by replacing its rural communes with the household responsibility system, all
but in name restored privately run and owned family farms. This Chinese rural “big bang”
led to a rise in output and allowed China time for gradual reform of its inefficient stateowned
industrial enterprises.

A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal -Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

China's advantage over India as stated at the begining of this article, is a matter of land. Both countries have labour capacity, manufacturing base, but it is land capacity that restricts India's ability to compete with China for manufacturing. Which is why India's techonolgical development has been centred, like our own in the Maritimes, around call centres, and the outsourcing of IT and software development, as well as phamaceuticals. Such tertiary businesses do not need large amounts of land, and with cheap labour can provide for high rates of profit.

India is the world's fastest wealth creator
So, where is the growth going to come from? The answer is infotech (IT), pharma and textiles. With more wealth, the investment pattern too is expected to change from predominantly cash deposits (which constitute over 60% of the AUM in India, China and Korea) to equities and more sophisticated instruments.

China is becoming like its neighbours , Korea and Japan, a market driven state capitalist economy. India is developing as primary resource based manufacturing economy; steel and developer of tertiary industries in its fordist economy.

The neo-liberal shaping of state capitalism in both China and India into market states relies soley on its devaluation of labour, not tax or land incetives.

See

China

India

Marx

Capitalism

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A Critique of P3's From The Right

As regular readers will know I have been critical of P3's, public private partnerships, from the Left. Now here is an interesting critique of them from the Liberaltarians around the Von Mises (pronounced by Sylvester as von meeses) Institute.

Unfortunately the author misses the point that it was the neo-cons who promoted the Reinvention of Government the liberaltarian ideal of getting the State out of business and business to take up the slack of the state, in other words his arguement is upside down. In fact it is the folks at Von Mises and others like the CATO and Fraser Institutes that promote the so called free market ideology that promote P3's.

His critique of sustainable development suffers from a similar misunderstanding of the political economy of the neo-liberal state. The State has been run by the neo-cons for more than twenty years and sustainable development is their way of creating a Greener capitalism without actually investing in industrial ecology or social ecology.

Once again the Liberaltarians fail to understand the simple fact that the State is a manifestation of Capitalism. In their efforts to create a mythology of a pure and simple capitalism, they view the State as somehow apart and separate from its birthmother, modern capitalism. It is not the State that hinders capitalism, on the contrary it is the State which abets and promotes capitalism. Their argument is based upon a percieved American exceptionalism and thus remains a-historical and a flight of fantasy.

While their key argument that big business and its state hinder markets, competition, free association remain cogent, it not a question of either or but rather the elimination of both. See: Libertarian Dialectics

Public-Private Partnerships, The Undermining of Free Enterprise, and the Emergence of “Soft Fascism”

There are now thousands of public-private partnerships in place throughout the country, engaging in activities ranging from building roads and neighborhoods to providing waterand wastewater services to renovating government schools to overseeing the management
of real estate to providing health care. This number seems destined to grow in theimmediate future.

It is fair to say that public-private partnerships have been accepted
without question by the ‘mainstream’ of both government and business. This is because a new ‘paradigm’ for the relationship between the two has emerged, verygradually, over the past few decades. This ‘paradigm,’ of course, is that of sustainable development, which combines the power of the purse, one might call it, with the power of
the sword. The resources of business (the power of the purse) are utilized to do the work of “governance” (the power of the sword)—with the former’s full cooperation and support.

The reports we cited noted several examples of what appear to all intents and purposes to be successful public-private partnerships—successful, that is, in achieving the ends wanted within government.

Expansionist or interventionist government—the idea that government should undertake responsibility for managing huge portions of a country’s economy and infrastructure—is taken for granted, but limits on the capacity of government to effect change by itself are acknowledged. The solution to the problem of the limits on the capacity of government, in the new paradigm, is to employ the resources of business, in a way that brings business fully on board and enlists it as collaborator—or partner.

Of course, the larger the business the better, because bigger businesses tend to have deeper pocketbooks than smaller businesses. The critics of public-private partnerships usually cited in the favorable literature are not those who do not trust government but those who do not trust business.

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Bloggers Budget Reaction

As expected there was uniform joy in the land of Blogging Tories over the Harpocrite budget. These guys are so predictable. The majority all cooed over the budget like the syncophants they are. And they denounce the left for being in lockstep. Ha.

One critical comment on the budget, because it failed the military, and one link to my comment on the budget. I shocked the BT's. And only one liberaltarian amongst the lot who reviewed the budget in a balanced way.

Stephn Taylor the webmeister of BT runs the closest thing to a critical comment in his blog where he basically quotes the reactions to the budget.

On the other hand this blog and others of us in the Progressive Bloggers did not do the knee jerk reaction thingee, showing which blogosphere actually does not follow the party line. In particular the following did not go with the usual Liberal or NDP criticism of the budget. One could say these were fair and balanced comments from the No Spin Zone (wink).

Liberal Catnip

RCI Budget Analysis

Capitalist Pig vs. Socialist Swine

Pample the Moose

Calgary Grit

Syncategorematic

Red Tory

The Moderate Post

The Liberal Times

Flash Point Canada

And at least Progressive Bloggers pointed out, with no help from the political spinmeisters that the Harpocrites are incapable of telling the truth about their budget.

Lies Lies Lies

Flaherty Lies, Layton Cries

Tax reduction? Only if you're wealthy enough

Now if only the Blogging Tories could be as honest or at least take off the rose coloured glasses and speak truth to power. For political honesty in comments on the budget the score is PB 14 BT 2



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Migration

Immigration is when the State imports people into a country.

Imperialism creates migration.

Migration is displaced,' free', labour forced to seek work elsewhere because of underdevelopment of the local economy.

Globalization is the corporate face of Imperialism in the 21st Century.

Immigration is the States ability to import labour to add to the 'army of underemployed/unemployed', for the purposes of taxing them.

Migrant labour will displace our jobs/migrants do the jobs our (insert country here) workers won't goes the arguement.

In reality just like immigrants brought in by the State, migrant workers will find low paid jobs in sweat shop economies of the black market. Jobs that indigenous workers do not have access to normally. In other words there exists a 'free' or black market in labour.

Nannies are one of the legal forms of chattel slavery that the State sanctions and has been a large source of labour migration into Canada that functions similarly to the black market operations such as sewing sweat shops.

Where migrant labour and immigrant labour meet is in the black market; the underground economy as Finacial Post editor Diane Francis calls it. That is the world of unregulated labour, labour that is not covered by government labour laws.

Farm workers were not covered by provincial employment standards acts in the but UFCW won the right to unionize them in a Supreme Court ruling.

This is a significant step forward for undocumented, temporary workers as well as documented imported temporary workers. It also bodes well for temporary construction workers imported into Alberta. Unfortunately management goons associated with labour contractors can easily replace real unions as 'workers representatives' in Alberta. Again showing the coorespondence between the 'legal' economy and the 'underground economy'.

This can be sub contracted trades work, taxi cab driving, janitorial companies, delivery services, fast food joints, small craft businesses; tailoring, shoemakers, etc. A large number of the service industries that business writers and neo-con apologist term; the new service economy.

There was an interesting liberaltarian perspective on migration published at Vive le Canada. Interesting because Vive is part of the nationalist Canadian left. The article is from a right wing libertarian site. For a Left Libertarian perspective on immigration reform in the U.S. see;the view from below . And actually we all agree, that migration is not problematic however contradictory its economic function is.

Condradictory because it exposes the developmental weakness of decadent capitalism. This is the crux of Negri and Hardts theory of Empire and its contradiction; the Multitude. The multitude is free labour, migration, rather than immigration. It is not yet a negation of globalized capitalism, since as a class the 'multitude'; the migratory proletariat have not yet become self concious. Yet.

The spontaneous demonstrations, the growing mass rallies in the US over the last ten days against their jingoist racist security laws over undocumented workers shows that the 'multitude is beocming class conscious. labour is leading the fight for migrants rights in the U.S. as it did with the IWW at the begining of last century when migration and immigration swelled in North America.

This shows that the movement that Negri and Hardt call the multitude, comes from rural underdeveloped economies, not yet industrialized enough to become economic Tigers.

I don't say countries, because much of the exodus North from Latin America and Africa is by peasants farmers displaced by corporate agribusiness, and water privateers. In effect it is provincial movement from countries, whose national capital is export business rather than the creation of regional market based capitalism. Sustainable capitalism in the world economy. Another contradicition. To be sustainable the market has to be small and based on the village cooperatives.

These cooperatives are destroyed and displaced by global investment capital, aiming for production for export, secondary production for export, and IMF funding for imports.

The destruction of nomadic and traditional farming results in famines which then impact the traditional geographical economies. Actual village cooperatives have survived the current ten year drought in some areas of Africa by the development of local economies, such as maize production from farming to its grinding into meal. Because they have taken care of the land which is the basis of their production.

The nomadic cattle herders, have been the ones to suffer the worst effects of the drought creating a landless multitude swarming to the capitols of Central Africa to end up dying enmasse. Those that survive move towards work, survival.

The entire Middle East is made up of masses of imported workers. The Arab republics of oil could not function without them. In the case of Kuwait for instance the entire indigenous population are property owners, a small wealthy population who consume and act as managers. The real working class, is imported. This then is one aspect of the global market state.

The migration of workers from the hinterlands to the metropols is as old as capitalism, since the mechanization of production, production that begins with agriculture. Capitalism developed out of agriculture, and its displacement historically is of peasants, through enclosure, forcing them to become a new industrial proletariat.

Migration is the result of the underdevelopment of local sustainable economies, the destruction of those economies, in order to colonize the people as consumers rather than producers.










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Political Compass

There are lots of these political compass tests out there, this is the first one that has extensive questions to answer and an accurate reading of those answers.

Usually the simpler versions of this "Tiniest Political Quiz" types end up only simplifying ones political position between the four posts as you will see below.

This quiz accurately gauges differences, and since its from the UK it isn't subject to the usual American right wing liberaltarian triteness of the other quizzes.

I am impressed.

I am also impressed that the authors make reference to being inspired by Wilhelm Reich and Theodore Adorno. That makes them part of the Libertarian Left.

But I am not impressed enough to pay them to send me my chart with suitable graphic.

So I will just post my results here. To promote this as the very best version of the Political Quiz/Compass on the web that I have found.

And I have posted the one they have for Canada. To compare where I stand in relation to My Fellow Canadians (he said in his be Diefenbaker waddle).

A tip o the blog to The Left End of the Dial for this.

About The Political Compass

In the introduction, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line.

If we recognise that this is essentially an economic line it's fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That's the one that the mere left-right scale doesn't adequately address. So we've added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy).

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples law of the jungle right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.

In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily "right wing", with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today's Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.

Your political compass

Economic Left/Right: -7.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.21

Authoritarian
Left		Right
Libertarian

The Canadian Party Political Compass

In response to many requests from Canadian visitors, we're pleased to produce this chart.

Yes, we know that there are smaller parties that some of you would have liked us to include, and individual politicians whose positions would be nice to have up there as well. There may be other additions in due course. We do what we can with our advertising-free and free-to access site. Should we secure a Canadian sponsor, we can, of course, produce further interesting charts.

We'd like to thank those Canadians who generously gave their time to assist our research. Bloc Québécois presented us with a real challenge, since it is primarily a single-goal party promoting Québec independence. As such, it attracts members from all quadrants of The Political Compass who often have little else in common.

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