Three years ago, before I went back to uni, I voted Liberal. Why? Three reasons: (1) Because my Dad voted Liberal. (2) I wasn’t interested in Politics. (3) I didn’t know the difference between Liberal and Labour (Australia’s Right and Left). Not a good place for any voting citizen to be. And certainly not the best intellectual place for a person who has just enrolled in a Master of Arts. But that was why I was there. I felt an abyss of lacking knowledge and a desire to try to fill it.
I thought in case some of you are in this place it might be worth sharing some of my notes.
Some definitions, and possibly a more accurate and simple model is the continuum above – showing Left to Right.
The picture blow locates key political ideas in a circular diagram, with left and right to the sides, classical liberalism on the bottom, theocracy at the top, and anarchism in the middle. I’m not sure if this is completely accurate, so please let me know if you think some elements might be put around different ways. I’m actually not sure what inspired this, or how I came to locate these where they are.
Of course, as with any definitions, words carry different meanings in different contexts, different places and at different times – as this clip of Noam Chomsky talking about Anarchism, Libertarian Socialism and the development of “renting out our labour”:
