I had my family take the test at the Political Compass, but my mother objected to his placement on the right side.
Some snips from our argument:
To which I replied:
They ranked the figures not by putting them down where they thought they should go, but by giving the answers that, historically, those persons would have given to the questions on the test. So assuming they did a good job researching Hitler–he ended up where he ended up.
And the one party in Japan is called The Liberal Democratic Party–and is much more conservative than the Republican in the US. “Socialist Party” doesn’t mean socialist unless they actually enacted Marxist laws; and Hitler didn’t. He did buy his way out of depression (short-term*) via massive government deficits**, but he didn’t seek to change the overall layout of the economy in Germany. And the layout of Germany at that time was probably less socialist than the modern American one is.
Short-term in the sense that the economy would have collapsed again if he hadn’t expanded the borders. http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/nazi.htm
** Which is largely what GWB did–except in his case it looks like it’s going to hold.
You’re missing the point of the two-axis layout. You’re arguing for Hitler being high on the authoritarian scale, where the government controls everything. And indeed, there he does rank high. Stalin wanted a wholly government-controlled socialist economy, Hitler wanted a wholly government-controlled capitalist economy. That is, the economy was allowed to continue as it was, so long as it went down the path he liked and that kept his approval rating high.
If the CEO of every single company was the same person, and he allowed his companies to compete against each other but would change his budget across the companies based on what he did and didn’t approve of, this is exactly what you would have.
Really what it is, is neither capitalist nor socialist but rather feudalist, as the three are differentiated at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist. But on the graph, Hitler’s feudalist economy ends up where it does and there’s not much that can be done about that–you would need a third dimension to add in a further economic goal.
Note that Hitler is only barely to the right of the arbitrary zero, well to the left of today’s politicians - notice that Labour has traditionally been the UK’s “socialist” party and it is well over to the right also, and both Labour and Hitler are quite a way to the right of Lenin and Stalin’s Soviet Socialist Republics. Indeed, the Compass itself says in its analysis:
“Socialist” is one of those flexible words like “liberal” - far more flexible than the specific “Marxist” or “communist”, I’d suggest.
Hitler did assume outright control of certain businesses (eg. those owned by Jews), but left others well enough alone compared to Lenin’s outright commandeering of all privately owned enterprises and factories. This was also a period of War Economics, with democracies like the UK and US assuming temporary control of key industries just as Hitler did. I think the Compass correctly places him near the arbitrary zero - a very slight tweak would indeed have him on the economic Left.
But, to play devil’s advocate, this would put Hitler as further right than the majority of the people on this board–and I would find the people on this board as more inclined to the free marketplace than Hitler.
There is actually a very broad spread economically - I recall that the average economic score was only marginally Left (-1 or something). As you said in your OP, comparing our overall attitudes to Hitler’s economic position regarding the extent of state intervention in the economy may not be comparing like with like. Hitler may have advocated completely different kinds of economic intervention (eg. letting the weak of certain ethnicities literally starve compared with our interventionist welfare approach, but heavily intervening in media businesses which we keep “free”), but the overall level of that intervention was still probably less than what, say, I would advocate.
Just to verify that I understand that statement correctly, you are saying that Dopers would want more government control in the economy than Hitler (though in drastically different areas)?
So then, on the Political Compass, the horizontal axis isn’t Socialism vs. Capitalism but rather a true counterpart to the vertical and simply an issue of how much the government should control the economy? If that is so would a person, who advocated a communist system where the government did not oversee that everyone pass around money equally and everyone just did it on their own, be a righty?
Yes. Someone near the arbitrary zero could, I think, reasonably call themselves “socialist” or “capitalist”. Even at -5.12, I call myself a capitalist up to a point, in that I think it should be the default and that public funding ought only be used to bring about a good that the private sector realistically cannot.
Yes, but the word “communist” usually does refer to such strong state control (or, at least, a questioning of the notion of “property” as such, which the Right asserts strongly). Such a “hands-off” government could itself be either left or right depending on what the status of property rights were (weak=left, strong=right): that is essentially what distinguishes US-type Libertarians from European-type Libertarians.
Cool. I guess then that I had simply misunderstood the horizontal axis.
This does strike me as somewhat removing the compass from the real world in that it doesn’t address any particular issues except “freedom”–but that’s not necessarily bad I imagine.
However, ssuming that a 9 on the economic scale is 0% government interference, and -9 as 100%, I might be inclined to believe that 0 is something more like 25% than 50% and there is a curve along that axis.
And with me matching up with Hitler, I would have to research the actual extent of governmental control to see whether I would agree with “that much” if not “that way”–so I guess verifying that will have to remain up to someone else.
Tangental, to the topic:
In modern years, it does seem that Communism and Socialism have both come to mean the same thing, but I’m relatively sure that Socialism is traditionally intended to refer to the intermediary step where government overseers monetary equality and Communism the final step where it is all done by free will without the necessity* of government. Communism would thus be far right while as Socialism would be far left.
Of course it may still exist to facilitate the process
Well, I’d disagree actually - the real world issues are those 30 or so propositions relating to tax, public/private funding and what should be bought and sold etc., and those responses determine your place on the horizontal axis. If anything, this removes unhelpful and inaccurate labels which are interptreted differetly by different people.
Only in the US, post-McCarthy. The rest of the industrialised democratic world seemingly understands them as distinct.
I’d say distribution rather than “equality”. Only extreme socialism (Marxism or, traditionally, “communism”) seeks to distribute absolutely everything absolutely equally.
Hmm, I don’t think that absolute free will is communism, really. It is more anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism grants “property” (even if it is only, ad hoc, what you can forcefully prevent other people taking), which is far Right. You seem to be talking about anarcho-communism, where everything is “owned” communally (“What is owned by everyone is owned by no one”), and thus cannot be traded in the first place. This latter is still Left since property rights are so weak.
Just think of the entire horizontal axis being moved up and down the vertical axis. At the top, you would have the strong state control of both Stalin (Left - no property) and Pinochet (Right - strong property). At the bottom, you would have no state control, only individuals, but still distinct differences where those individuals claimed monopolistic use of resources (“property”) versus those in which the individuals claimed no such monopoly, as in a commune. “Communism” would still occupy the Left of the horizontal axis regardless of where it lay on the vertical, I’d suggest.
We do have to assume that the makers of the test knew where to place us based on our response to the labels of current issues. For instance the issue of “The rich are taxed too much”, is this referring to the US where it is ~40% or the one place where it was ~70%? We have to assume that the test givers had a number in mind or else their grading will be off.
If the result is going to be free of labels, probably the test itself would have been better if instead of having single-phrase questions on current topics, instead it had full paragraph ones giving very explicit details of fictional societies and events. Of course then no one would ever take the test. But even in its current form, I would probably place it within 15% accuracy.
But anyways, now I’m just pontificating. Thank you for the answers.
Absolutes conceived as opposites on a linear continuum often tend to resemble each other (especially when viewed obliquely); that which looks or was intended to be linear is often a very curved space indeed.
IANAE (where E = Economist) but It is my understanding that the economic theory of the National Socialists was that government was to be an outgrowth of and agent of business. Picture the US or the UK where the nation’s biggest corporations select some CEO types and put them in charge of the country, and give them carte blanche to get things done. Rescind all rights of states and individuals, the government is the absolute boss, but not so much over the big corporations as on their behalf, as their guy. Such government will not have limits on its authority and can regulate all behavior on behalf of maintaining the general safety and establishing social cohesion.
You can see how (in theory) that differs from an agenda of the People of the US or the UK rising up and establishing a government which would be not at all the corporations’ agent but which would instead, on behalf of the People, rescind the rights of corporations and other entities owning private property to dispense with it at will, and distribute resources, protect people by regulating permissible behavior for the common good and to protect the ongoing success of the Revolution, and plan all business activity from a new central authority that would be the antithesis of the old corporate entities and would do its planning on behalf of everybody, rather than for the making of a profit.
Of course you can also see that give or take some rhetorical diffs and some overturning of actual personnel from the “who’s in charge” seats, the end result isn’t much different. Both economic systems are inseparable from the authoritarianism they depend on and mostly consist of. Both systems amount to “an entity will be in total control of both economic planning and regulation of all behavior public and private”
Even if we replace the linear continuum (or continuua? in the case of the x,y compass?) with what seems to me to be the true axis — coercion-based vs. voluntary cooperation —you get some weird dissolve at the extremes, where an anarchy so devoid of even the weight of the traditional authority of prior consensus isn’t distinguishable from an absolute/perpetual competitive totalitarianism in which no one ever obeys anyone else except when specifically and immediately coerced into doing so: in both cases you get a nonsystem of aggressive individuals taking what they can by force and no one working in tandem with anyone else whatsoever!
On the old left-right only scale I would be much more inclined to agree that the extremes meet, but on the compass which is essentially anarchy vs. totalinarianism as the extremes on both poles I really don’t see those coming together–except maybe in undesirableness.
Is National Socialism what Hitler strove for? Or are you refering to something else? I haven’t encountered the term before, so I’m not sure why you are including it.
I wouldn’t argue that Hitler was capitalist, per se. He may have had an od form of socialism, one not favored by Communists or traditional socialists of any stripe, but he did have nearly unlimited powers over the German marketplace, had he chosen to excercise them. He simply decided that coopting industry was better than crushing it.
There was a socialist wing of the Nazi party. IIRC it was strongest in Berlin. Once the Nazi’s were in control it was purged, even before the Night of the Long Knives.
The Nazi party did have views of the government being all encompassing (perhaps totalitarian?), and at many levels, operations would be run through the party rather than through the government proper. For example, relief efforts after bombings would be run by the local Nazi party rather than through a government office, though the resources of course had the same source. Good propoganda for the party, good machine politics.
However, the party was not friendly to labor, while being fairly business friendly (assuming those businesses were Nazi-friendly, of course). Good casual nazi capitalists could make a lot of money off of slave labor.
It should be noted, that the German baseline social welfare state was of long standing by that point, having been introduced by Bismark to undercut the socialists of his day. As is usually the case, mapping politics of other eras and locations to modern political spectrums is difficult at best.
