Political Clarity

By Robert Thomas Drury

3/18/2018 (updated 5-1-2022)

Buck Melton's * Economic-Political Ideologies Spectrum (below) illustrates how we can organize economic-political ideologies to clarify the relevant facts about human nature to guide us toward serving life with minimum work/cost/harm, to maximize universal wellbeing. This map is presented also at anarchy.no as the Anarchist Economical-Political Map, with documentation.

The top of the map represents anarchism, defined here as serving life with minimum work/cost/harm, to maximize universal wellbeing. The bottom of the map represents fascism, defined here as serving life with maximum work/cost/harm. The far left and right points on the map represent marxism and liberalism respectively, both waging work/cost/harm. Given anarchism asserts that we thrive most by serving life with minimum work/cost/harm, it is clear that both marxism and liberalism fail to achieve the anarchian goal to maximize universal wellbeing.

Here we define authoritarianism as the lack of anarchism. Fascism, marxism, and liberalism, and their blends, are all authoritarian, given all impose some unnecessary degree of work/cost/harm. Continue on reading below the map for an elaboration of the concepts behind this economic-political map.

Buck Melton's Individualism versus Collectivism table helps to clarify how the perpetual contest between marxism and liberalism (left/right) distracts us from the most relevant question: Anarchism versus authoritarianism (top/bottom). Associating collectivism with marxism and individualism with liberalism, this table illustrates how marxism/liberalism attempt to serve life with intolerable amounts of avoidable work/cost/harm. We see abundant evidence of accelerating growth of this harm in the early decades of the 21st century as authoritarianism has displaced anarchism over the previous decades, e.g. the dismantling of the New Deal in the USA.

Expanding the concepts behind the economic-political map, we may associate the economic and political dimensions with vector magnitude and direction, respectively. In more relevant terms, we may associate the economic and political dimensions with power and control, respectively. In pure anarchy, each individual secures self-determination, or the needed power and control to independently and fully meet all of one's needs, with minimum work/cost/harm.

An individual's power and control to meet one's needs comes from access to natural resources, while control comes from experience and knowledge. Authority restricts individual self-determination, and denies individuals the power and control to meet one's needs, by confiscating individual power and control, creating unnatural infantilization and harmful dependency.

For each individual to meet one's needs, one's power and control are preserved by universal respect for intrinsic worth and free will, respectively. Universal respect for the intrinsic worth of life manifests as equality, while universal respect for the free will of life manifests as autonomy, so that individual power is associated with equality, while individual control is associated with autonomy.

On the economic-political map, we see Socialism associated with equality.