ideological map
I’ve been thinking about the political compass and trying to figure why different ideologies end up in the region that they do. Not just the fact of how hierarchical or capitalist an ideology is when we’ve seen it historically, but also how hierarchical or capitalist that ideology envisions society should be.
I find that the existing compass ends up causing a lot of hostility between supporters of Marxist-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist-Maoism and Anarcho-Communism. All three of those ideologies envision a socialist future, and eventually (for the first two of them) to a stateless future. A flaw in the current compass is that it seems to imply that society would be radically different between each when in reality they would be more similar than not.
I’m not so sure any specific graph will ever capture reality but their simplicity helps us when learning.
Now I’m not suggesting that I’ve improved on the established graph overall, the established graph is much better at comparing any number of ideologies. Rather what I am suggesting is that the established graph is not the best way to conceptualize ideologies when having popular discourse. This is especially important because people who are hearing about an ideology for the first time will be trying to understand what sets one it apart from other ideologies. They will be trying to imagine what that ideology’s vision of society is. And so for that reason I wanted to use new terms for the axes, terms which more carry more context than left/right or authoritarian/libertarian.
The established compass tells you if the society will be hierarchical or capitalist but it doesn’t tell you how people will relate to each other. Without the framework of non-political everyday discourse to anchor the debate we’re left bickering over what a “real leftist” is. We call ourselves leftists, we have cute names like leftbook, but left is an abstract concept. If you could replace the left-right and authoritarian-libertarian axes with ones which people can relate to there will be less misunderstanding and faster learning. They would relate best to words they use in everyday non-political discourse.
The axis to replace left vs right that made the most sense to me was egalitarianism vs elitism. Does an ideology envision a future where everyone shares and prospers together, or one where it’s possible to improve your lifestyle by playing the game of life well. When you follow egalitarianism to it’s end goal you get a classless / stateless society, but elitism’s end goal is a hierarchical society in which some have considerably more wealth / power than others.
As you can see I also changed the libertarian vs authoritarian axis to an axis of “centralized government” vs “localized government”. This removes the contention between Anarchists and Marxists by using an axis which doesn’t denote a specifically bad thing (authoritarian) versus a specifically good thing (left libertarianism). Both centralized government and localized government can be done in a good or bad way, rather than an axis where one end was a clear favorite. The old axis provides a continuous supply of arguments over whether “all authoritarian states are bad” or “how can you expect to remove the state in an instant”.
Rather than arguing over hierarchies lets make the top-bottom axis something more objective, in which case there’s still a difference of opinion but it becomes based on the material conditions more than how good or bad having a state is. My hope is that if we compare ideologies by their vision for society then we can discuss which ideology practically meets the material needs of the workers at a given place and time.
Looking at the material conditions is always the first step in developing praxis that will significantly benefit the workers. In the condition that the anarchist political line has not penetrated the society in question sufficiently then you may have to maintain a hierarchical model of society until self-government is possible. People need to be taught self-management, it isn’t something you can learn overnight. To avoid a transitional state that anarchist political line would have produced a self-managed society as the revolution happens.
There are also versions of a centrally governed society which are just as utopian as their locally governed counterpart to the workers in those societies. Imagine a society which has automated itself to post-scarcity and has a state, but that state is run by a benevolent artificial intelligence. Such a society would not be considered authoritarian but it would be considered centrally governed.
The last optimization was to split the compass into nine squares of equal size. On the existing compass the ability to plot a point or region allows any number of ideologies to be compared to each other. However as the motivation for my chart is to make public discourse easier, limiting the chart to just 9 regions makes it easier to conceptualize. To reduce to just 9 ideologies however, any ideology which is too similar to another will be left out and an umbrella term used for all similar versions.
The existing compass has four quadrants but each quadrant encompasses so much ideological territory that two incompatible ideologies might share the same quadrant. Bumping this up to nine gives you just over double the amount of regions while keeping it easy to describe as we see this formation in geographic directions. You can either be in the center, or one of eight possible directions (North, North East, East, South East, South, South West, West, North West).
In fact with nine high level categories you could identify one ideology per region as the dominant ideology, or find a broader categorization that encompasses the whole region. You’ll notice that ideologies like Liberalism, Conservatism, Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Conservatism, Progressivism etc. are missing because they’re subsets of other ideologies that are represented. In future I may come up with a quiz or something to help those new to politics to figure out which ideology best matches their worldview.
Looking at this compass at face value there are some similarities but also some differences.
Some points of interest:
- Neo-Liberalism is a subset of Free Market Capitalism.
- Social Democratism covers all the ideologies that want the system we have now but for it to be more responsive to the people’s voice.
- “Anarcho”-Capitalism makes no appearance as it is either going to be done well and result in something closer to market anarchism or done badly and result in Feudalism.
- Marxist-Leninist-Maoism is shown as being more structurally independent than Marxist-Leninism because of it’s focus on grassroots, with policies like the mass line and protracted people’s war.
When discussing ideologies along these axes all comrades in the west section of the map can agree on being equally desirous of an egalitarian society rather than identifying as left. Using these new terms would also avoid the problems that arise from the ambiguity around some traditionally left ideologies but which include markets.
For example, the line between capitalism and socialism sits one third from the left of the chart rather than halfway across and it specifically implies any ideology in that column would be more egalitarian than anything right of it. So not only can we still call ourselves leftist but when we say left we will mean egalitarian and not simply “not capitalist”.
Simply by changing the axes the chart can illustrate that socialism and egalitarianism are directly linked. The chart also implies that any ideology that includes markets or capital is inherently less egalitarian than those that don’t.
The distinction between a society with a state and a stateless one is made on the vertical axis similarly to the established compass. The bottom one third of the chart has the ideologies which are stateless like anarchism and feudalism.
Although it would be possible for an anarchist society to be highly interdependent thanks to distributed systems like the internet and automation, it would still be made up of self-managed federated structures, they will just be coordinating with each other seamlessly thanks to technology.
The last major distinction I could think of between two regions on the chart was that of how democratic society would be in each ideologies worldview. The rightmost column contains ideologies which would not be democratic in nature.
These distinctions help to explain the thought process behind which ideologies I chose to put where and why I used the axes that I did. I’m sure many people may disagree with my decisions and if so feel free to make changes using the templates I’ve included throughout this post.
Even if this chart is meaningless to you, I hope it at least got you to ask the question as to whether the current discourse is being influenced by the established compass too much, and if so how could we change that. As leftists (westerners?) we should at least try to find easier ways to explain ourselves so that people don’t get scared off by new concepts with which to try and interpret the world.
If we can all agree ideologically on egalitarianism being our most defining feature then we can figure out what structures to implement as the material conditions change rather than trying to prove that your particular ideological bent is More Correct(tm) than other people’s.
If you found this post interesting you might like my post on the definitions of capitalism and socialism.
You are also welcome to join me on facebook to chat about this stuff :3
