The difference between "left" and "right"

There are an awful lot of poorly considered political arguments out there, but one of the absolute worst is the claim that there is no difference between left-wing and right-wing.

In this article I'm going to explain the difference, take a look at how such confused claims that there is no difference come about, and then take a quick look at why the simplistic left vs right paradigm (although meaningful) is still far too simplistic.

The difference between left and right

The main difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is about economic organisation.

Economically left-wing

Left-wing politics focuses on the public ownership and operation of essential infrastructure and services such as the health service, public transport networks, schools, the police & army, the land registry, mail service, energy infrastructure, social housing. The further towards the far-left you go, the more things are classified as public property and the fewer things are allowed to remain under private ownership.

Economically right-wing

Right-wing politics focuses on the private (and often unaccountable) ownership and operation of essential infrastructure and services such as the health service, public transport networks, schools, the police & army, the roads, the land registry, the mail service, energy infrastructure, social housing (while the public still pays the cost of building/maintaining these things through their taxes). The further towards the far-right you go, the more things are classified as private property and the fewer things are allowed to remain under public ownership.

Other differences

Aside from the core economic difference between left and right there are some other differences too. One of the important common distinctions is that left-wing politics often has a focus on directly combating poverty and inequality, while right-wing politics tends to work on the (ridiculous) assumption that deregulated markets and increased private ownership will tend to reduce poverty and inequality.

Another difference is that left-wing politics has more often been associated with liberal social values than right-wing politics. This traditional association between left-wing political groups and liberal social values sprung up because of the obvious difficulty in reconciling the left-wing desire for greater equality with the practices of overt social discrimination (against women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, disabled people ...) that existed in the past. 

It's important to remember that although the political left has been in retreat for the last four decades or so, liberal social values have been in the ascendancy. In modern Britain we have anti-discrimination laws and gay equality, yet only a few decades ago homosexuality was considered a "crime" worthy of punishment by chemical castration and racial discrimination was all too common (see the openly racist Tory election leaflet from Smethwick in 1964).


The left is more often associated with social liberalism and the right with social conservatism, however liberal social values are clearly not a necessary condition of left-wing politics, and social conservatism is not a necessary condition of right-wing politics. It's perfectly possible to be an economically left-wing bigot, just as it's possible to be economically right-wing and oppose social discrimination.

How the confusion arises

The increasingly common confusion between left-wing and right-wing politics has arisen as a result of a number of factors. In this section I'll detail a few of the important ones.

Political propaganda

One of the main reasons that people struggle to grasp the difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is the way that modern political discourse is framed by the mainstream media.

The UK has the most right-wing biased press in Europe. This means that political coverage is more often than not skewed with an extreme right-wing bias. It's almost impossible to find anything resembling accurate definitions of left-wing and right-wing politics in the mainstream media. The situation has got so bad that social democrats like Jeremy Corbyn (who believe in finding a balance between state socialism and regulated capitalism) are routinely derided as being "dangerous", "radical" "extremists" from the far-left, while the radically right-wing "privatise absolutely everything we can get away with" Conservatives are treated as if their hard-right policies are centre-ground, moderate, common sense and fundamentally beyond question (this refusal to question is particularly noticeable with the widespread acceptance of the macroeconomically illiterate policy of austerity in the mainstream media).

As result of the extreme bias of the right-wing press we've found ourselves in the extraordinary position where the traditional social democratic centre ground is routinely derided as the extreme-left, while the ideologically driven austerity and mass privatisation policies of the most fanatically right-wing UK government in living memory are treated as they are essentially beyond question by the vast majority of journalists.


"Third way" politics

One of the other main causes of confusion between left-wing and right-wing politics is the way that so many nominally left-wing political parties abandoned left-wing politics in order to embrace right-wing economic policies like privatisation, financial market deregulation, globalisation and free-trade. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were two of the first to convert traditional left-wing political parties to pushers of right-wing economics, but they were far from the only ones. PASOK in Greece and PSOE in Spain are two other high profile examples of supposedly socialist political parties that were guilty of embracing hard-right economic policies.

This rightward shift in mainstream politics contributed to the confusion between left and right because swathes of the mainstream media continued to refer to parties like New Labour as "the left" and "socialists" even though they were blatantly pushing right-wing economic policies like the privatisation of public property, PFI, financial deregulation and de-industrialisation. No wonder people began to get confused when the supposedly "left-wing" political party was busy pushing exactly the same kind of right-wing policies as their conservative predecessors.


The immigration debate

The tabloid framing of the immigration debate is another contributor to the confusion between left-wing and right-wing politics. The tabloid press in the UK love to blame "the left" for mass immigration even though the open borders policy in the EU is clearly a right-wing free market economic policy.

The tendency to blame "the left" for mass immigration is inaccurate for a number of reasons. It's a right-wing free market policy that favours employers over employees; the New Labour government that oversaw a big increase in net migration was an economically right-wing  one; the Tory government that followed them has overseen the biggest spikes in net migration in recorded history and it's the most right-wing government in living memory.

When the tabloid press are intent on blaming the consequences of right-wing economic policies imposed by right-wing governments on "the left" (which hasn't been in power since 1979), it's no wonder so many people get confused.

It's more complicated than "left vs right"

The difference between left-wing and right-wing politics is undeniable, but it's simply not sufficient to rely on this one-dimensional distinction alone. I've already addressed the fact that social liberalism and social conservatism are distinct from left and right wing economic policies, then there's the distinction between libertarian and authoritarian style governance to add into the mix too.

Instead of viewing the political spectrum as a simplistic one dimensional line between left-wing and right-wing, it's possible to add other parameters to create more detailed political spectra like the political compass.

The fact that the majority of modern mainstream political parties have occupied the upper right quadrant of the political compass makes it clear where a lot of the confusion is coming from. If the distinction between right and left in mainstream politics has been measured by the difference between a radically right-wing authoritarian party (the Tories) and a slightly less right-wing authoritarian political party (New Labour), then it's no wonder people begun to believe that left and right are essentially the same.

The problem isn't that there's no difference between left and right, it's that mainstream politics has become increasingly confined within the right-wing authoritarian quadrant of the political compass, while other areas of political discourse like left-libertarianism (my kind of politics) and right-libertarianism have been left almost completely unrepresented within the political establishment.

Conclusion 

If you believe that pretty much everything should be public property (either run directly by the state or through more anarchist methods like local syndicalism) then you're very left-wing.

If you believe that pretty much everything should be private property (including essential infrastructure and services like the health service, education system, road networks, the police, public transport ...) then (like the Tory government) you're on the extreme-right.

If you believe in some kind of compromise where some essential infrastructure and services (the police, the roads, the education system, the health service ...) are best off run as not-for-profit public services, while other things (non monopoly businesses, private dwellings, personal property) can be privately owned, then, like Jeremy Corbyn, you occupy the traditional centre-ground.

Just because, for whatever reason, people are incapable of recognising the distinction between left-wing and right-wing politics, doesn't mean that the distinction doesn't exist.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The lamentable decline in the standard of public debate

For all of its faults during the time of empire, the United Kingdom used to be a thriving hotbed of intellectualism. Not only was the United Kingdom the driver of the industrial revolution, it was also a land of rapid intellectual, scientific and political development. 

These days, as the standard of public debate continues sinking to every more dispiriting lows, I think it's worth looking back and considering how the hell have things gone so wrong.

Background

Its obviously an over-simplification to start at any arbitrary point, but we must start somewhere, so the rise of liberalism in the 17th Century seems as good a point as any. It was from this period onward that the persecution of non-conformism declined dramatically.

In the 17th Century the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke established the concepts of the social contract and natural rights that gradually eroded the tyranny of the monarcy-state-church nexus.

The English Civil War resulted in the fall of the monarchy, but the powerful political elites who took the place of the monarchy imprisoned and marginalised radicals like John Lilburne ("Freeborn John") and the Levellers to prevent an egalitarian reformation of British society. Despite these efforts by the powerful elites to stamp out political and religious radicalism by persecuting non-conformists like the Levellers, Seekers, Quakers and the Diggers, the unstoppable trend towards liberalism and tolerance of of religious non-conformism had been set in motion.

It was never the case that persecution of non-conformity was eliminated entirely, but from the late 17th Century onwards the people of Great Britain found ever more freedom to express non-conformist political views, and to practice whichever religion they liked, or none at all for that matter. 

Another visionary liberal philosopher to spring up in 17th Century Britain was to inspire the independence revolution in the United States. Thomas Paine's revolutionary essays inspired the movement that excised the monarchy-state-church nexus from vast territories of North America.

The vestiges of the tyrannical monarchy-state-church nexus persist in Britain to this day. The UK state is an anachronism with its monarch serving as joint head of state and head of the established church, its antiquated and unrepresentative electoral system and its unelected religious clerics in its bloated and entirely unelected House of Lords. However the power of the state to silence, imprison and execute critics of the establishment order has been gradually eroded, such that we can publish our republican sentiments, our anti-establishment political views and our non-conformist theological thoughts with little fear of being economically sanctioned, imprisoned or garotted by the monarchy-state-church nexus for airing such views.

The 19th Century heyday

The 19th Century wasn't just the heyday of the industrial revolution, it was an age of rapid public enlightenment and social progress: Libraries, educational institutions and museums sprang up all over the nation; education and basic literacy gradually became the norm rather than the privileges of the wealthy; and barbaric practices like slavery and child labour were abolished.

Against this backdrop of rising standards in literacy and freedom from oppression, Britain played host to an extraordinary array of political movements. Liberals, anarchists, religious non-conformists, Owenites, socialists, communists, libertarians, laissez-faire capitalists, free-thinkers, mutualists and syndicalists all competed for attention from an increasingly literate population.

Non-conformists and hetorodox political thinkers had a much more difficult time on the continent. A look at the lives of many of the most interesting European political thinkers of the age (Proudhon, Bakunin, Michel, Galleani, Malatesta, Blanqui ...) reveal lives interrupted by prolonged periods of imprisonment and exile. Britain was not free of political persecution by any stretch of the imagination, however the more liberal environment meant that London became a safe haven for all kinds of heterodox political thinkers including Marx, Engels, Herzen, Mazzini, Kossuth and Kropotkin.

In response to a furious letter from the Spanish embassy decrying Britain for harbouring political exiles in 1871 the British government declared that "all foreigners have an absolute right to enter the country and remain", and that they have the same right as British citizens to be "punished only for offences against the law".

Public intellectuals

The growing tolerance of unorthodox political and religious thought in the United Kingdom led to the rise of countless public intellectuals, many of whom worked to educate the public through the publication of essays and literature and were deeply involved in the political affairs of their age.

It's impossible to provide a definitive list of 19th Century public intellectuals, however naming just a few high profile individuals from the period goes to show how intellectuals were held in high public regard: John Stuart Mill, William Morris, George Holyoake, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Marshall, Alexander Graham Bell.

The high public profile accorded to intellectuals continued well into the 20th Century. It's unlikely that anyone but the most determined early-mid 20th Century dullard would have managed to remain completely unaware of the writing and political views of the likes of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, John Maynard Keynes, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley...

The late 20th Century onwards

Who are the great British public intellectuals, philosophers and political theorists of the 21st Century?

There are obviously a great deal of very intelligent people in Britain, who could rightly be considered public intellectuals, however, it seems to me that very few of them have a large enough public profile that they would be recognisable to the majority of people.

Tim Berners-Lee deserves enormous credit for inventing the World Wide Web, but how many people could tell you what he was famous for just from hearing his name or seeing his photograph? The same goes for a number of other modern day intellectuals. What percentage of the general public could even identify the likes of Robert Skidelsky, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Tariq Ali, Susie Orbach, AC Grayling, Andrew Motion, Alan Bennett, Mary Beard or Roger Penrose?

The only high profile public intellectual I'm completely confident that the majority of British people could identify is Stephen Hawking.

When it comes to politics the situation is utterly embarrassing. When a revisionist halfwit like Michael Gove is considered to be one of the great intellectuals of the Tory party, and a the likes of Tristram Hunt and Gordon Brown are lauded as the great intellectuals of the Labour Party we know that we're in trouble. 

Anti-intellectualism and stupification

The United Kingdom has turned from a country that celebrated intellectualism to one that treats it with suspicion and contempt, especially if intellectuals (these days so often prefaced with "so-called" by the tabloid press) dare to voice a political opinion that goes against the established orthodoxy. When people speak out against the right-wing economic orthodoxy that has dominated UK politics for almost four decades, they are hounded by the tabloid press. In my view an awful lot of public intellectuals are afraid to speak out against the right-wing economic orthodoxy for fear of the abuse they'll suffer from the right-wing press. 

The hounding of public figures who speak out against the orthodoxy is not the only way in which the tabloid press helps to control public debate. Newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail are deliberately written in the vocabulary of children in order to make their glib right-wing political tropes accessible to even the least intelligent adults. It's not just conjecture that the tabloid newspapers have contributed to the stupification of the British public either. Research has shown that reading a tabloid newspaper is worse for your vocabulary than not reading a newspaper at all, and that "the presence of tabloid newspapers in the home during childhood has been linked to poor cognitive attainment at age 16".

It's not just the tabloids that are to blame. Generations of politicians have turned the UK education system into an absolute shambles, where children who attend state schools are denied the absolute basics in critical thinking, philosophy and economics and taught that correct answers are handed down to them by authority to be uncritically rote learned and regurgitated upon demand in order to obtain rewards in the form of grades. It obviously makes no sense for the establishment to teach future generations critical thinking skills and basic macroeconomics, otherwise they'd grow up to ask questions and find out that their own rational self-interest is not best served through continued support for an out-of-touch establishment minority that is clearly intent on hoarding political power for their own class and enacting ideologically driven economic policies that enrich the already rich at the expense of everyone else.

The declining standard of political debate 

The standard of political debate in the UK continues suffering a steep decline. People seem to no longer even understand the meanings of fundamental political words and phrases. Terms like "communism", "anarchism", "liberalism" and "socialism" have been weaponised, so that simply calling somebody a "communist" is somehow considered sufficient to discredit their entire position, without any obligation for the term communist to even be understood, let alone it be demonstrated that the accused actually subscribes to any of the numerous communist ideologies.

We live in a world where hurling words like "communist" around as if they're crude insults rather than political words with specific meanings or publishing pictures of the opposition leader looking odd while he eats a bacon sandwich are considered dynamite by the political right. Meanwhile many on the left seem to think that simply calling David Cameron a "pigfucker" (instead of criticising any of the countless socially and economically destructive policies Cameron's government have inflicted on the UK) is a debate winning tactic, rather than the kind of crude unsubstantiated assertion that makes the left look like a bunch of ranting extremists.

The rise of someone like David Cameron was pretty much inevitable given the stupification of the electorate. Cameron has proven himself an egregious liar, an abuser of the English language, a snide and manipulative person who refuses to answer direct questions or act in good faith and a coward who is terrified of having to think on his feet (hence his refusals to participate in unscripted public debates). However, despite all of this evidence that David Cameron is a fundamentally dishonest charlatan and clearly the least intellectually capable Prime Minister in living memory, somehow over 11 million people saw fit to actually vote in favour of keeping him in power!

It doesn't matter whether you agreed with the likes of Benjamin Disreali, John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill, William Beveridge or Clement Attlee, it's pretty much impossible to argue that they were stupid people who just read out a load of scripted nonsense and ran away from any form of actual debate. These were intelligent men of principle who knew what they were talking about and were unafraid of open honest debate.

I'm not Tory but I'm pretty damned sure that the likes of Disreali and Churchill would be utterly appalled that the Conservative party is now being led by such an intellectually stunted, snide and downright dishonest chancer like David Cameron.

What can be done?

It seems that little can actually be done as long as the parliamentary authorities allow David Cameron to continue repeatedly evading questions and blatantly lying to parliament, and as long as the mainstream media refuse to hold David Cameron and the Tories to account for their litany of lies and broken promises to the public.

David Cameron can sign a "contract with the electorate" then simply have every trace of it deleted from the Tory website when it became clear that they'd broken nearly every pledge it contained; he can lie to parliament that the UK has been "bankrupted"; he can lie to the public that the Tories are reducing the national debt (when they've actually created more new debt since 2010 than every Labour government in history combined); he can use all kinds of Orwellian language to claim that black is white and white is black; and he can lie over and over and over again about the leader of the opposition. He can do all of this and get away with it because virtually nobody holds him to account for it.

Even if David Cameron is removed from power, if the means to lie, distort, adopt bad faith positions and spout logical fallacies remains so desperately unchallenged, his successors would be fools to limit themselves to honest, good faith debate.

The poet WH Auden once wrote that "Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth". Surely nobody believes that it's possible to engage in this kind of honest debate with the likes of David Cameron? Surely nobody believes that David Cameron would voluntarily stick to the truth, argue in good faith or answer direct questions (rather than repeatedly evade them with a load of heavily scripted and largely inaccurate tabloid style rhetoric and snide political point scoring).

Unfortunately, until the public begin to demand a higher level of public debate from their politicians, any politician who does try to adopt the traditional British form of debate (by limiting themselves to avoiding lies and smears, arguing in good faith and actually answering the questions they're asked) would be voluntarily tying their hands behind their back while allowing other less scrupulous politicians to repeatedly punch them below the belt to cheers of delight from the tabloid-minded masses.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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What value can be found in religious contemplation?

I find a lot of theological writing to be tortured, laborious, inaccessible and uninspiring, a real chore to wade through and a thoroughly unrewarding investment of my time. Other examples I find lucid, powerful and thought provoking. In this article I'm going to consider what value can be found in religious contemplation.

Avoiding absolutism

I'm of the opinion that much of value can be taken from things that have stemmed from religion and religious contemplation. I don't necessarily have to agree with something for me to see some inherent value in it, or for it to have at least impacted and informed my worldview.

To give a rather crude example of how good can be found in religion, many years ago I did repair work on a number of Church of England churches. I've never been Church of England and I have deep reservations about the entanglement between the CofE and the UK political system. As a child I attended a number of state funded Church of England schools and grew to deeply resent the religious indoctrination I was subjected to from a very young age. The idea of an official state religion with special privileges in the political establishment and in society at large concerns me deeply, especially as I have studied the terrible persecutions of heterodox religious groups and individual thinkers enforced by the Church of England-UK state nexus in the past.

However my deep revulsion at this anachronistic Church of England status as an Official State Religion with special social and political privileges could never be enough to destroy the beauty and wonder of repairing an ancient building in the English summer, the tranquility of the Churchyard, the wind in the yew trees, the centuries of dedicated craftsmanship invested in the building and the profound sense of shared community history.

For all of the bad that has been perpetrated by man against man in the name of religion, good has sprung of it too. Beautiful religious architecture is one example and thought-provoking religious philosophy is another.

To deny that there is that of both good and bad in vast entire aspect of human endeavour is to take a militant absolutist stance.

Swami Vivekananda

"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or mental discipline, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free.  

This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details."

In my view this Swami Vivekananda quote contains great truths born of religious contemplation.

I sincerely believe that you don't have to be of a religious persuasion to see the truth in what Swami Vivekananda was saying, although I can understand how stuff like the concept of "divinity" could be offputting to those of irreligious sentiments. However I don't consider the replacement of the overtly religious concept of  "divinity" with the philosophical concept of "transcendence" or the more psychological concept of "self-fulfilment" to be unacceptable debasements the essential meaning of the first paragraph.

Transcendence

"Any person can achieve transcendence. The goal is to achieve self-fulfilment through self-discipline and active engagement with the world. Freedom can be found through constructive activity, contemplation or both."

To rephrase and slightly simplify the first paragraph in this manner does not eradicate the essential meaning, but it frees it from the kind of overtly religious undertones that many find offputting. Could anyone now disagree with this statement?

Dogma

The second paragraph is particularly close to my own beliefs about the fundamental distinction between spirituality and dogma.

It is possible to believe in God(s) without believing in organised religious dogma, just as it is possible to for people to devote their lives to practicing organised religious dogma without ever really contemplating the existence and nature of the God(s) that their religious order is actually dedicated to. The two things are separate, but linked by centuries of association.

A declaration of the primacy of individual enlightenment over religious dogma resonates strongly with my libertarian and anarchist sympathies. Of course we should be free to develop our own personal worldviews, whether we believe in God(s) or not. Thus if religion is to exist then it should exist to encourage and support people in their own self-enlightenment, not to enforce an ideological orthodoxy through indoctrination and the punishment of transgressions.

Conclusion

Of course people are still free to contest that nothing good has ever stemmed from religion and sneer at the use of words like "divinity" if they want to see the world like that. However such a stance betrays naive absolutist thinking. To witness attempts to occupy some kind of intellectual high ground by decrying anything that has ever stemmed from religion is to witness a bold scrabble towards an imaginary plateau of rational enlightenment, the like of which will forever remain unobtainable to those who close their perceptions through simplistic absolute judgements about incredibly complex issues.

However you define your goal in life (enlightenment, transcendence, self-fulfilment, divinity ...) there are many paths to achieve it, however one of the most impassable obstacles on any path is closed-mindedness.

Like I said in the intro, I find an awful lot of theological writing to be turgid, unrewarding and often deeply hypocritical or contradictory stuff, but amongst all the dross there are still many gems to be found. Concepts that are concisely expressed and thought provoking to those with the openness of mind to contemplate the meaning of things without necessarily accepting them at face value.

To conclude I'll leave you with another Swami Vivekananda quote:

"To believe blindly is to degenerate the human soul. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly."

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Tory ideological mission

  

Why I don't speak on behalf of the collective left

As a political writer, one of the things that I find really frustrating is the fact that so many people tend to simply dismiss my views by crudely labeling them as those of an enemy ideology.

By far the most common label that people tend to use to dismiss my work is "leftie" (usually combined with a smattering of crude insults, fallacious arguments and lazy assumptions) but many others have also tried to condemn me by labeling me as a "communist", "Marxist", "socialist" "anti-capitalist" and many other things, without ever having tried to justify their assertions with facts, evidence or analysis.

The idea that I somehow represent any of these political viewpoints is completely wrongheaded, and the tactic of labeling me as such and then attacking the label is an extremely weak debating strategy indeed.

I'm just a guy

The views that I express in my work are my own. I don't speak on behalf of any organisation or ideology whatever. People are free to agree with me or disagree with me as they please, in fact I actively encourage people to try to find something I've said that they disagree with, because I'm just a guy from Yorkshire, and nobody should be 100% agreeing with everything I say.

I'm not a member of any political party and I never have been, however there is obviously some overlap between my views and those of particular political groups. A few examples of this kind of overlap include Positive Money, The Green Party, Common Weal, Unlock Democracy, Basic Income Europe and Rethinking Economics, but I don't endorse everything that these groups say, and I certainly don't speak on their behalf.

I don't speak on anyone's behalf but my own. If people agree with what I've said, they're absolutely free to share my articles and infographics, to quote me or to borrow my arguments for their own use. They can do this without the act of borrowing a specific veiwpoint of mine being a blanket endorsement of everything I've ever said.

Heuristics

The tendency for human beings to put simple labels on things is perfectly natural. The world would be impossibly complicated if we had to consider the incredibly complex detail of everything we experience, rather than just labeling things "tree", "cloud", "person", "blogger", "left-winger" or whatever.

The act of putting simple labels on things is a normal and necessary part of human existence, but there's still a strong distinction to be made between people who understand concepts like heuristics and confirmation bias, and recognise within themselves that they often use simple labels to reduce the incredible complexity of things to a manageable level, and those of us who don't, and tend to think rigidly within the limits of the simplistic labels they've applied to things.

I'm not trying to be judgmental or anything, or to say that some people are more inherently aware than others, because as far as I'm concerned it's within almost anybodies grasp to understand stuff like confirmation bias and heuristics if they have the opportunity and inclination to learn about them.

Labeling things

I am always very hesitant to label my beliefs, especially because so many political and economic words have become so layered with meanings that go so far beyond the original intended senses, that in many people's minds they mean something completely different to the actual definition.

I'm pretty sure that most of the people who tend to use words like "leftie" and "socialist" as insults to hurl at people actually have very little idea of what the words actually mean. While someone who self-identifies as a socialist believes that the means of production should be owned socially and run cooperatively for the benefit of all sectors of society, the person who has only ever read about the perils of socialism in the Murdoch press or the Daily Mail is likely to be using some kind of simplistic short-hand platitude like "spending other people's money" or "jealous of success" as their definition of what socialism means. Thus, to self-identify as a socialist is to give many people a convenient label with which to immediately dismiss your views as ridiculous.

I'm not saying that socialism is right or wrong. There are so many different branches of it that any such simplification would be an exercise in lazy absolutism. What I will say is that I strongly agree with some socialists about some things, I strongly disagree with other socialists about other things, and that the vast majority of my views on socialism fall somewhere between the two extremes.

My reluctance to pigeonhole myself by labeling my views with specific words is summed up by one of my favourite (and most easily memorable) existentialist quotes:

"Once you label me, you negate me" - Søren Kierkegaard

Left-Libertarianism

One of the very few labels I have ever allowed myself to self-apply is left-libertarian because the term simply doesn't carry the layers upon layers of (often bizarrely warped) political baggage in the same way as so many other terms like socialist, capitalist, communist, anti-capitalist, anarchist etc.

In reality my political and economic views are too complex to be constrained by a term like left-libertarian, but I am prepared to wear the label because it should be reasonably self-evident that a left-libertarian is concerned with promoting social justice and maximising freedom, and even if it's not self-evident, people would either have to think a while about what it means or go and look it up (both of which are good outcomes). They certainly wouldn't be able to use it as a convenient label to dismiss my views as, and to hurl at me as an insult, because "you left-libertarian bastard" and other such potential insults just don't parse.
  
The divided left

When people try to dismiss my work by labeling it "leftie" they often make the mistake of talking about "the left" as if all left-wing people are some kind of hive mind, and as if generalistic criticism of anything that is claimed to be left-wing carries the same weight as actually reading what's been said and addressing any of the specific points that have been raised. It's easy to spot these kinds of collective criticisms because they often refer to "the left" as if everyone who is not as right-wing as they are is part of one homogeneous blob that can be generalised about and dismissed.

Anyone who knows anything about left-wing politics (or has seen The Life of Brian) must be familiar with the problem of factionalisation. One of the most bitterly frustrating things about left-wing people is that so many of them seem to have more determination to attack other left-wing people for promoting the wrong shade of left-wingness, than they have to actually criticise the real enemies of the left like powerful right-wing media barons, entrenched establishment interests, tax-dodging multinational corporations, the pushers of neoclassical pseudo-economic dogma and the crony capitalist political elites.

It is easily apparent that "the left" is so divided and factionised that anyone who makes sweeping generalisations about "the left" clearly doesn't actually know anything much about it at all.

Not all "lefties" agree with me

Some of the strongest and most heartfelt criticisms of my work come from other people on the left who think that I'm doing it wrong. Other strong criticisms come from the libertarian-right.

I think the reason that the strongest criticisms of my work tend to come from people with whom I have something in common is that they are capable of actually engaging with what I've said, rather than simply labeling it as "leftie bollocks" and hurling a sequence of insults and logical fallacies at me.

It's obviously a lot easier to build a coherent counter argument to something if you actually read what has been written and set out your specific objections to the parts you disagree with, as opposed to simply dismissing the whole thing as "leftie bollocks".

It does seem like a strange phenomenon, but my experience bears it out. The most coherent criticisms of my work almost always come from people who occupy the green and yellow segments (see diagram), whilst the vast majority of insult and logical fallacy laden "critiques" of my work see to come from supporters of political parties that occupy the red quadrant.

The idea that I somehow represent all "lefties", or all libertarians for that matter, is nonsense, especially given that the most coherent criticisms of my work almost invariably come from other "lefties" and other libertarians.

Why I don't speak on behalf of the collective left

I don't speak on behalf of the collective left because I'm just a bloke sharing my opinions. I don't represent any political parties or protest groups, and neither do I claim to speak on behalf of people who follow my Facebook page or share my work. I speak on my own behalf, and if other people choose to agree or disagree with any of the things I've said, that's entirely their own prerogative.

People who try to dismiss what I'm saying by making generalised criticisms of "the left" as if I'm some kind of spokesman for the "leftie" hive mind, or by hurling political words at me as if they are insults (rather than technical terms with specific definitions), are basically demeaning themselves by publicly demonstrating the fact that they don't actually have a meanigful argument against what I'm saying, and that they're incapable of even understanding that what they've said doesn't even remotely constitute a coherent counter argument.

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