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What's the most left-wing country in the world?

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 9:24 pm
Post subject: What's the most left-wing country in the world?Reply with quote

This might be a trickier topic than it seems at first glance. What does it mean to be the most left-wing country? Is it socially progressive, like northern Europe and Scandinavia? Is it socialistic democracy, like Ecuador? Or is it full on dictatorship, like North Korea? What makes a country more left-wing than another?

I'd also be interested to hear what people think is the most right-wing country, and why.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 10:43 pm
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Good question and one I'm too tired to put brain cells into trying to answer in detail.

You're right in that left and right wing are really subjective opinions despite some supposed guidelines. eg China is allegedly a communist nation. Does that make them left wing?

Where do the military dictatorships fit? Is Mugabe left or right wing? Theoretically left but......

Egypt?

North Korea?

If you narrow it to democracies, the USA is probably right of the most of the west, the scandinavian countries seem to be to the left of most with their socially progressive stuff ups.

Short answer, IDK

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 05, 2016 11:22 pm
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I think it's fair to say that Egypt and most of the socially conservative Muslim majority states are right-wing (though some places like Iran and Gaddafi's Libya had old Marxist affiliations, just to confuse matters). I haven't studied this in detail, but it might not be uncommon to find Muslim countries that are socially conservative but economically leftist.

North Korea is a weird one. They're notionally far left, I guess, but such an oddball/extreme society that it seems hard to place them on the spectrum (whereas a dictatorship like Cuba seems more obviously on the far-left end of the scale). As for China, I think most observers see them as communist in name only nowadays – their political system seems to have shifted to capitalism and oligarchy.

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Wokko Pisces

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 1:08 am
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Venezuela on the Left, Singapore or Switzerland on the Right?

Not an easy one without bringing in the Authoritarian/Libertarian axis as well.
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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 1:28 am
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Surely Switzerland isn't to the right of Russia or Saudi Arabia, is it?

The libertarian/authoritarian axis does throw a spanner in the works, as both far left and far right can be highly authoritarian (and perhaps libertarian, too, if you consider anarchism to be a form of libertarianism).

Perhaps, instead, we could posit something like social left + economic left on one end of the scale and social right + economic right on the other – which is less of an authoritarian/libertarian divide than a statist/free market one. If that doesn't seem like a fundamental distinction, I think one could argue that Russia, for instance, is an authoritarian free market state whereas, say, the Netherlands is more of a libertarian statist one.

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Pi Gemini



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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 5:48 pm
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not sure what specific country fits where but if you were to do one those simple political compass things there are basically 4 extreme quadrants

Authoritarian Right: Queensland, women's christian temperance union
Authoritarian Left : North Korea, almost every university campus union
Libertarian Right: Garry Johnson, Milton Friedman, Switzerland
Libertarian Left: Portugal (drug policy) not Bernie Sanders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#/media/File:Political_chart.svg

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HAL 

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 5:49 pm
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roar 



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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 5:59 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
scandinavian countries seem to be to the left of most with their socially progressive stuff ups.

Can you expand on that, stui? The scandanavians seem to be traveling better than most.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 7:28 pm
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roar wrote:
stui magpie wrote:
scandinavian countries seem to be to the left of most with their socially progressive stuff ups.

Can you expand on that, stui? The scandanavians seem to be traveling better than most.


Not really, it's more perception based on individual snippets I've seen, not something I've researched or studied, which is why I said "seems".

With the socially progressive stuff ups, I'm thinking of the rape laws that let someone withdraw consent after the act and the treatment of sex workers as two examples that come to mind.

I may well be wrong, not something I'm invested in arguing about.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 8:11 pm
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Before asking the question, find out what "left wing" means. You are remarkably persistent in your willful ignorance on this matter, David.

(Yeah yeah, blather away with yet another lame attempt to justify your error. It won't change the fact: you don't understand the term and are flat wrong in your usage. Possibly your best career move from here would be to join the Liberal Party and take up a ministry. They seem to take pride in ignoring facts and regard monumental ignorance (Brandis: metadata; Bestiality: 18d; Dutton: pretty much everything) as a necessary qualification for office. OK, you are not nearly in Dutton's class, but everyone has to start somewhere and you clearly have some talent. Keep working on it!)

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 8:23 pm
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Venezuela seems like an obvious candidate. (Not that I know anything about the place.)

North Korea certainly isn't. I don't know what their economic system is (and I rather suspect that they don't even have one) but it doesn't strike me as noticeably left wing. Or noticeably anything, really.

Scandinavia is not left wing. In general, Scandinavian countries run mixed economies rather similar to Australia's remarkably successful mixed economy between about 1950 and about 1980 or so.

(A mixed economy, exactly as the name suggests, has a balance of publicly and privately owned enterprises, often operating in competition with one another. It is, by definition, neither left nor right but a balance between the two. Mixed economies, by the way, have (in general) an outstanding record of success on both the economic and social well-being fronts, though like any other sort of economy they can, if run particularly badly, fail just like any other sort.)

(The obvious example was the UK in the 1950 and 60s. It was succeeded by another almighty screwup of a different kind when Thatcher came to power and proceeded to wreck the joint. The UK's (partial, highly regionalised, and very painful) recovery since then only serves to highlight the successive failures which came before.)

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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2016 11:25 pm
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Tannin wrote:
Venezuela seems like an obvious candidate. (Not that I know anything about the place.)

North Korea certainly isn't. I don't know what their economic system is (and I rather suspect that they don't even have one) but it doesn't strike me as noticeably left wing. Or noticeably anything, really.

Scandinavia is not left wing. In general, Scandinavian countries run mixed economies rather similar to Australia's remarkably successful mixed economy between about 1950 and about 1980 or so.

(A mixed economy, exactly as the name suggests, has a balance of publicly and privately owned enterprises, often operating in competition with one another. It is, by definition, neither left nor right but a balance between the two. Mixed economies, by the way, have (in general) an outstanding record of success on both the economic and social well-being fronts, though like any other sort of economy they can, if run particularly badly, fail just like any other sort.)

(The obvious example was the UK in the 1950 and 60s. It was succeeded by another almighty screwup of a different kind when Thatcher came to power and proceeded to wreck the joint. The UK's (partial, highly regionalised, and very painful) recovery since then only serves to highlight the successive failures which came before.)


^ Nope, I saw the Uk in the late 1970s and moved here more or less permanently in 1991 (with three years back in Oz from 1994-98 ). From 1972-1980 the place was well and truly wrecked already.

When you can't bury the dead for weeks and you are running out of mortuary space, there are feet high piles of rubbish in most major towns and you cannot keep the lights on - the state of play in the UK by 1978 - you are pretty much on your knees as an economic failure ( I know that you are not disputing that). One can debate the reasons for this (they are many and not simple), but a "mixed" economy with very high tax rates and a plethora of large, union-dominated subsidised public enterprises run along Soviet lines made a substantial contribution.

By 2000, after harsh changes that hurt some very vulnerable people, the UK was performing well enough to be the fourth largest economy in the world again, with unemployment around 5% and a standard of living that was attracting talent right across the EU. If that is wrecking the joint, they are welcome at my place.

Since nothing is absolute, you are right about the recovery and growth being "regionalised". London and Southern England (and Edinburgh) have done best from the recovery, though Manchester and Leeds and Cardiff are doing well, also. Hull and Sunderland and Swansea, not so much. Britain has its pockets of disadvantage, despair and ugliness, as do most liberal nations of 65 million people ; but I travel to Liverpool, and Leeds, and Sheffield, and York and these are all vastly recovered compared to 1979-1995. The much-maligned Blair deserves some credit for that, but he built on what Thatcher laid down. So the UK is still, like Australia, one of the more benign (if not attractive) countries in the world to live in, even if you are at the bottom of the heap. It was not in 1979.

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 07, 2016 12:18 am
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Tannin wrote:
Before asking the question, find out what "left wing" means.


Well, that's kind of where I hoped this thread might go. I think it's clear that a lot of people (including me) have some idea of what the term means, but not necessarily anything terribly concrete.

Another question might be "what is the most progressive country in the world?". Where you and I might agree is that it's a different question likely to generate a very different answer.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 07, 2016 12:30 am
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It was indeed wrecking the joint, Mugwamp. Thatcher isn't still loathed for no reason.

Now you might argue that the place was already buggered, and I'd agree, but it was a whole different sort of buggered, and it is downright absurd to pretend that the mixed economy was the reason.

(1) First, mixed economies elsewhere in the world have been outstandingly successful - look at Scandinavia for starters, and don't forget Australia, which boomed post-war and did very well indeed up until around about the time of the Oil Shocks.

(2) The UK, in contrast, was on its knees at the end of the war: poor, inefficient, very unfair, and massively in debt.

Worse still, the UK hadn't lost the war. The UK had most of its industry intact .... and based not only on pre-war style machinery and technology in the main, but (much worse) on pre-war attitudes and practices. Where Germany and Japan had to rebuild everything from scratch, the UK muddled on. Where Germany and Japan had to create whole new economies, the UK buggerised about for decades trying to mend the old one, and only succeeded in making it worse.

Militarily, nations which win wars (as a rule) learn nothing. The Allies woin WW1, so they tried to fight it again in 1939 - and got smashed off the continent. The Germans lost WW1. As a result they reinvented their entire doctrine and developed unstoppable combined arms tactics, irresistable flying artillery, vastly better submarines, and so on. They very nearly won the next one. If they hadn't invaded Russia (which had also lost the First War and learned a thing or two), the Allies would not have had time to learn new skills.

Economically, the same applies.

(Note that this is a good rule-of-thumb, not an absolute law. Sweden, for example, did very nicely thankyou in WW2 but thrived nevertheless afterwards because they were smart and worked hard.)

(3) The UK recovery post-Thatcher was a very narrow, very sectarian recovery. London got rich at the expense of most of the rest of the country. That's still pretty much how things are today. The Brexit vote was no accident. A majority of UK citizens voted to leave because of (a) sustained economic pain and inequality (save London and surrounding areas, which got rich at the expense of the rest of the country), and (b) equally massive anger at Merkel's insane immigration policy. Now you might argue that that anger was unjustified, and you might argue that the cure of Brexiting was ill-informed and irrational (and on this second point I'd agree with you) but you can't argue with the fact that most of the UK voted "leave", and that parts that voted that way were (in the main) the ones which have suffered the most from the discredited trickle-down economics introduced by Thatcher and (in various modified forms) sustained by a motley crew of ever-harder-right governments since. (Don't bother citing Blair: his government was Labor in name only.)


Your point about rotten state-owned enterprises in the UK in (say) 1970 simply illustrates the fact that any economic system can fail miserably if you run it badly enough. It says nothing useful about mixed economies. Plenty of other industries and economies have been as bad, and that includes the full range of possibilities.

Compare with, for example, Australia at the same time. We had (among many other examples) the world's best, most reliable, and easily safest airline industry. Why? Because we had a well-run publicly-owned company setting the pace, and a (necessarily) well-run private competitor. Each one kept the other one honest.

In the UK, the car industry for example, was considered too big to fail, and every time they screwed the pooch, they'd get a bail-out. Of course it failed! It was designed to fail. At least, if you wanted to guarantee failure, running an industry the way the Poms ran their car industry would be a perfect way to do it.

Summary: England didn't get bombed back into the stone age during the war, so they invented Thatcher.

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Mugwump 



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PostPosted: Wed Sep 07, 2016 12:48 am
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^ "Progressive", David ? You have a better chance of working with "left-wing" : Much of what the Left consider "progressive" I consider regressive. The Soviet Union considered itself progressive, fulfilling the iron laws of historic progress as codified by Marx. The Eastern Europeans see liberal capitalism as progressive (as indeed it seems to be, relative to more statist alternatives).

If you want a definition of left-wing in the modern world, I suppose it would include the following, if one was trying not to be evaluative (and one leaves out the authoritarian axis and issues of national capability) :

1. A relatively high share of GDP being channelled through government
2. A sense that capitalism must continually re-justify and prove itself as a superior economic system as it cannot be justified on grounds of morality.
3. A preference for collectivist solutions over individualism
4. A desire for relatively equal economic outcomes across a society, either through redistributionist efforts or (less commonly) through capping individual rewards
5. General belief that government runs things (especially large corporate activity) better and more in the public interest than the private sector does.
6. In the modern left, a reflexive belief that government should act in the interest of all humanity, rather than the interests of its electorate
7. A tendency to Anti-Americanism
8. A belief that all cultural expressions are more-or-less equally functional and legitimate, short of extreme cruelty and barbarism, and their narrative deserves respect coequal with that given to our own cultural forms
9. A belief that the human rights claims of the poor are morally superior to those of the rich
10. A belief that the interests of employees and employers are systematically and irreconcilably misaligned, and that unions are therefore generally a good thing in most of their manifestations.
11. A general lack of concern for tradition and authority as things deserving prima-facie respect (until a hard-leftist political party gets into government, whereupon points 10 and 11 are immediately abandoned)

On this basis, Cuba and Venezuela probably get my vote. France is getting there. Sweden has some claims. Then there are various tinpot homicidal kleptocracies such as North Korea, Zimbabwe, Belorussia that might fit a number of the criteria above but are really too bizarre to fit any category.

That is not systematic, and I am sure that several of the criteria I proposed are branches manifesting the same root, while some are new left and not old left beliefs. In that regard, the tendency to split into fratricidal broken-bottle wars might be another acid test .....

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