Like most politicos, I’ve been fascinated and a little disheartened by the ding-dong between the Libertarian Party leader, /u/Friedmanite19, and various Labour members taking place in the press over the last few days. Fascinated because these two parties were not a fortnight ago joining forces to extract the Tories and Liberal Democrats from the Government, but are now, naturally, at loggerheads; and also because the fundamental ideological discussion is clearly of sincere relevance to both sides.

But I’m disheartened because the nature of the discussion is undermined entirely by a false assumption made on the libertarian side. Let’s ignore for now what I consider to be exaggerated meta claims of racism, tokenism and antisemitism because they’ve been dealt with elsewhere. The crux of the matter is why the link between socialism and fascism is so often misstated.

I was impressed with this piece in the Independent explaining in technical rather than rhetorical detail why the Nazis were not, in fact, socialists at all. Indeed, to quote /u/Captain_Plat_2258:

The Nazis were not socialists. They weren’t even social democrats. They weren’t even centrists.

Shortly after The Independent published this piece, The Telegraph went to press with a rebuttal article - I understand this to have been rebuttal to the myriad arguments made by Labour members in the last couple of days - which sought to put distance between libertarian policies and nazi, or fascist, or far-right, policies. Note that one of the lights to the touchpaper for this whole saga was an oblique implication from /u/redwolf177 that the Libertarians’ economic policies favoured a particular race of people.

Let’s look at one of the lines in /u/Friedmanite19’s latest piece (emphasis mine):

Private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis, the actual ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. It was the German government that decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid. Market exchange did not exist in Nazi Germany.

The idea that the Nazis were some sort of free market cult is nonsense, and the idea that they were right wing economically is laughable.

This, I think, is fundamentally the problem with this debate: each side is arguing past the other, and the reason for that is the broken and spookish idea of a left-right paradigm. We all have a vague idea of what it means to be left wing or right wing, or far-left or far-right, or centrist or moderate, but can we be sure that this one linear axis can cope with all political ideologies? Sure, some have tried to expand the concept into two axes - like the much-derided ‘political compass’ - and others have attempted to restrict its meaning only to economic matters. But, as we can see from this debate, the left-right line is both so broken and so embedded in political discourse that it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So let’s look at this particular debate in more depth.

In among his exegesis of the Libertarian Party’s policies, /u/redwolf177 wrote in Labour Weekly 5 that:

The LPUK is an increasingly right wing party. Their party policy is less of a document for liberty, and more of a program to benefit white people.

Ignoring the “white people” faux pas for the moment, because it’s been dealt with elsewhere, the basic idea here - and it is basic because the rest of the article was a policy critique flowing from this particular point - is that the cause of liberty cannot be described as “right wing”. For the author, the right wing and liberty are either incompatible or at best uncomfortable bedfellows. We cannot speculate on why he thinks this, but that much seems clear. We can also see that there is an implied racial element, or at least the accusation that there is something about the right side of the left-right line that means policymakers are likely to benefit one group over another, whether that be on grounds of race, class, creed, or whatever.

/u/Friedmanite19 of course disagreed with that, and I should make clear at this point that, having known him for some time now, I do not believe he thinks of his policies in this way and I do believe that his offence at the implication is sincere. In his first rebuttal, he made what I believe to be an entirely fair point:

Anyone who dares to question ARichTeaBiscuit and their hard left cult on the numbers is labelled as far-right.

We should generalise this statement to mean that, generally speaking, if those on the self-described ‘left’ do not like something, it will often be because they consider this thing to be on the ‘right’. This to me seems like a fair point; note how /u/redwolf177 immediately implies a racial element to the LPUK policy on the basis of its self-admitted ‘right’-ness, and he does this despite the plethora of policies we can find in history of self-described ‘left’ policies also discriminating against races or creeds.

Now, I point this out not to say that either /u/redwolf177 or /u/Friedmanite19 are wrong. They’re both right and both wrong in the same way.

So, let’s move on to /u/Friedmanite19’s second rebuttal, where he says:

It has never been more important for parties on the centre and centre-right to set aside their differences to prevent economic disaster.

So there is no disagreement that the Libertarians consider themselves to be on the ‘right’ side of the line. What’s at stake, really, is the idea that they share that side of the line with the Nazi party, or fascists generally, whom I assume /u/Friedmanite19 despises with similar passion to /u/redwolf177 and /u/Captain_Plat_2258 and honestly most civilised people. This then requires a game of semantics and redefinition to ensure his party and his ideas are separated from a party to which his own party has been compared.

For the sake of fairness, I will add that this is a tendency that also afflicts those on the ‘left’ of the line. Quite rightly, people will ask why policy X is a good idea when the Soviets tested it to destruction. The response is usually some variation on the no true Scotsman fallacy. Of course, not all responses are like this, and many socialists will accept Soviet mistakes and seek to learn from them, but many will engage in the exact same exercise /u/Friedmanite19 engages in here, which is to say, “No, they are not in my side of the line, they are on yours.”

Why do I point this out? Well, /u/Captain_Plat_2258 comes close to doing this in her article - by establishing that capitalism is not of the ‘left’ - but is careful to focus on the concepts in themselves rather than where they sit on the line. For example (emphasis mine)

The Nazi Party was a fascist party of economic centralisation and privatisation

While she doesn’t state it outright (understandably, because that wasn’t the article’s purpose), the problem really is clear. The Nazi party and fascist ideology do not fit neatly on the left-right line. Most ideologies in fact do not. Capitalism, I would argue, does not fit neatly on there either. I concede that all self-described ‘far left’ ideologies are not capitalist, but apart from that any other ideology arbitrarily plopped onto the left-right line may or may not be capitalist. What about my own ideology, Georgism? To many on the libertarian-style ‘right’ of the line, it is basically land communism and collectivist nonsense, while to many on the left it is a mere band-aid on the horror of capitalism. But it isn’t really even centrist, given that most modern centrist parties have all but abandoned the idea. While it is very unlike fascism, like fascism it doesn’t work in the left-right paradigm.

And this, I think, is the problem with this debate. In his last rebuttal, /u/Friedmanite19 looked at other self-described far-right parties in Europe - like the BNP in the UK, or National Rally in France - and pointed out that their policies were very statist. Just like the Nazis’. Which means either they are not far-right at all - because libertarians are the proper standard-bearers of the far-right - or in fact they loop around the political horseshoe and end up as far-left. But how can they not be far-right, when most of their ideas are violently opposed by the self-described far-left?

The left-right paradigm is, to put it simply, broken. Think of how many ways we can describe far-left:

• Anti-capitalist
• Anti-market
• Pro-market
• Anarchist
• Pro-state
• Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist
• Marxist?

And far-right?:

• Capitalist free market
• State-owned corporatism
• Individualist
• Ethnonationalist
• Adherents to Locke
• ...Followers of Mussolini?

And these varying definitions are selected from like a menu, bundled together under a vague term - ‘far left’, ‘centre right’, ‘centrist’ - and flung into political discourse with no examination whatsoever, where we then end up with libertarians, socialists and fascists all having the characteristics simultaneously of far-left, far-right and everything in between.

What the participants to this debate need to remember is that political ideologies if they are coherent may not match with a predefined line which itself has its own ideology. To say that the Nazi party had policies that in many ways are endemic to the far-left is not to say the party has a lot in common of ideologies that describe themselves as left; similarly, to say that the Nazi party had policies in many ways endemic to any kind of right-wing is not to say Libertarians have a lot in common with them.