this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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You’re using a moral definition of “left” whereas in political science, “left” and “right” are only descriptive terms about economic organization (collective vs. private ownership respectively), and authoritarian/libertarian describes political power distribution. Your definition makes “left-wing auth” impossible by definition, but that’s a linguistic choice, not an empirical fact.
The problem with collapsing the axes is that it stops us from describing history accurately. Under your framework, a regime like the USSR which abolished private ownership and implemented central planning can’t be left because it wasn’t egalitarian in political power. But in mainstream classification, it’s economically far left and politically authoritarian a very different thing than right-wing authoritarianism.
Yes, wealth and power influence each other, but they are not identical; otherwise we wouldn’t need different terms. A billionaire under a strong democracy can have wealth without full political authority, and a military dictator in a collapsed economy can have political authority without wealth. Conflating them makes analysis less precise, not more.