1 Often the confusion of left and right positions — as in the familiar claims that they “end up the same”, they “meet at the extremes”, and so on — is projected back onto these positions themselves as their confusion, so that the adoption of a life or right posture is seen to be in itself the failure of reason which, it is suggested, clear-minded men might best resolve by eschewing talk of “left” and “right” altogether. Though there is a certain comfort in thereby attributing one's confusion to the positions one is confused about, especially when the attribution affords one the luxury of transcending provocative issues, irrational convenience is clearly no argument for continuing to conceive the muddle about the left and right as the muddle of these positions themselves.

2 We know of no exposition in the social sciences which has identified any precise sense to the concepts left and right. Most either refuse these terms any principled explanation whatever, using them in inverted commas or not at all; or, when the conceptual problem is addressed, cite an array of variant ideas which merely further evidence the problem. For example, the standard Encyclopedia of the International Social Sciences (ed. David L. Sills, Macmillan, New York, 1968) has no entry for left and right at all, while the Dictionary of the Social Sciences (ed. J. Gould and W.L. Kolb, Macmillan, New York, 1965) proposes only a pell-mell list of particular left and right beliefs.

3 Many general terms, like “big” or “small”, “good” or “evil”, admit also of infinite degrees, but few are exclusively human in their reference, not even standard human-referring concepts like “mind”, “action” and “free will” (which are applied as well to dogs and chimpanzees). For this reason, the concepts of “left” and “right”, which do so refer, might be held as the most significant human predicates of all: a special status which they might be argued to still further warrant in view of their applicability and use in virtually every contemporary human society in the world today.

4 By Chiangists, we refer of course to the supporters of Chiang K'ai-shek, former leader of the anti-communist Kuomintang behind whom most of those committed to capitalist restoration in China have traditionally rallied.

5 It is not clear why unregulated capitalism is called “free”, since it involves the ownership of the majority's working lives by a minority, who are in turn themselves constrained by the profit imperative in all their decisions as how to utilize these working lives they own. Who is “free” in such a situation? Evidently, it is not people, but capital. When we use the term “free” in this connection, then, we do not mean it to apply to people, which it seems it does not, but to what it does seem to apply, namely, the mechanism of profit extraction.

6 Karl Marx himself proposes such a “left-wing deviationist” democratization of power in, among other places, The Civil War in France. “Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune”, he says, “than for hierarchic investiture to supplant elective, responsible and revocable government in all branches of the Administration” (CWF, Martin Lawrence, London, 1933, p. 42). However, Marx is never on this account called a “left-wing deviationist” by Party authorities, who prefer to pretend that he never held such a position. But with the post-1917 advent of Rosa Luxembourg's criticism of Lenin, the Kronstadt uprising, Russian, and later international, anarchist resistance to the methods of Bolshevism, and so on, the term “left-wing deviationist” came increasingly into vogue as a mode of polemically invalidating radically democratic positions which challenged Party hegemony.

7 Though our example here of extreme punishment for nudity may appear capriciously selective, it is not. The terms left and right are standardly applied to the phenomena of punishment, left to its relaxation and right to its intensification; and what we have done here is to provide an example which is free of any confusing factors of class differentiation or injury to others which might tempt the rejoinder that increased severity of punishment can, against our argument, be properly classified as left wing.

8 Lest the dogma that Marxism is egalitarianism mislead one into supposing that his principle “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” somehow does not mean that he presupposes inequalities of people's abilities and needs, it is well to consider what he adds in the same context: “They would not be different individuals unless they were unequal individuals” (The Gotha Program, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966, p. 16).

9 The way in which the inequalities endorsed by the left differ from the inequalities endorsed by the right is that the former promote the material realization of everyone's varying abilities and needs, whereas the latter promote only the realization of the few's abilities and needs (though it is purported otherwise by construing the rest as having few or none).

As we shall soon see this distinction between left and right principles of inequality provides a key to the ultimate distinction between left and right principles in general.

10 We define “material enablement” as follows: p is a material enablement if and only if a range of action other than the consumption or exchange of p can be performed with p which cannot be performed without it. By this definition, food, shelter, literacy, health care, play areas, tools, and so on, clearly qualify as material enablements; whereas, in contrast, Junk food, temples, rhetoric, spectator sports, prisons, status symbols, and so on clearly do not qualify as material enablements.

Are then, say, art objects material enablements? Standardly, no: thus the fondness of the right wing for “art”, objects which enable nothing beyond their consumption, status-yield or sale. But not necessarily no, since a musical score can make possible a dance, or a painting a transformation of politics: thus the left wing's opposite predilection for praxis art, art which enables people to act.

11 We can see here that fascism's reputation for “efficiency” is radically misleading. For if maximum efficiency is maximum utilization of available resources, and if fascism destroys in the tens of millions the best of these resources, humans, wasting moreover extensive further resources to do so, fascism is, in fact, vastly inefficient.

12 This idea of a natural or divine necessitation of social elites is standard to right-wing thought — whether such necessitation be conceived as by godly fiat, human natural dictate, an iron law of oligarchy, the reality principle itself, or whatever. Perhaps the most explicit and forceful advocacy of this pattern of thinking emerges in the work of Nietzsche, with its recurrent idea of natural Ubermenschen seizing upon the common herd and fashioning it like sculptor's clay in accordance with their, the supermen's, great, artistic wills: a pitiless imposition of higher forms by nature's aristocracy without which, in Nietzsche's view, all human shape and development would cease.

13 Thus arises the centre's primary critical conception, “going too far”: a “going too far” which begins when merely “leaning” to the left or to the right gives way to “beyond the pale” positions on either side.

14 Since the number of unemployed is in general many times greater than the Jobs available (currently a ratio of 30 to 1 in Canada), P₁ seems less a proposal to end unemployment, on which count its absurdity is manifest, than an expression of sociological illiteracy. However our concern here is not so much to evaluate the truth-value of the positions we are considering, as to test the capacity of our criteria to correctly locate these positions on the right/centre/left spectrum.

15 But, the rejoinder might be, this redistribution of income from the public to private corporations is “eventually” redistributed back to the public again in the form of wages to the formerly unemployed and additional tax revenues paid by the corporations. Though such an argument is certainly a popular one, it has to be demonstrated as well as said to count as rebutive. We know of no case where it has been demonstrated.

16 For example, one might argue that the recent “Baader-Meinhof gang” in Germany or the “Red brigade” in Italy have been left wing in policy (i.e. both have espoused social ownership of the means of production), but right wing in practice (i.e. both have conducted elite-run campaigns of terror that have, with media contrivance, alienated the general public from the objectives espoused).

17 Tao te Ching. Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Wing-Tsit Chan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1963), p. 155.

18 Interestingly, the ancient Tantric yoga of sexual intercourse, forbidden to the Hindu yogi but a standard Kundalini technique, is known as “the left-handed path”. Here too, in yet another ancient culture, the concept of left is used and, as now, stands for a broadening of material enablement, in this case release from sexual prohibition.

19 Vico, Giambattista The New Science, trans. Bergin, T.C. and Fisch, M.H. (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1957), p. 78.Google Scholar

20 Of course, there are peculiar pretences to the contrary. In North America, for example, there is a naive ideology that everyone, or Just about everyone, is a “capitalist”. Needless to say, such a conception of capitalist is absurd, since capitalism entails a distinction between those who own capital and those who own labor-power to sell to the former, an entailment which renders the conception of everyone as capitalist a contradiction in terms.

21 The term “left” or “left-handed” has at various times meant “deal unfriendly with”, “illegitimate”, “ill-omened”, “inferior”, “underhand”, “spurious”, “worthless”, “squandered”, “weak”, “mean”, and “treacherous.“ Left-handed people have, moreover, been forbidden marriage, burnt as witches, sent to war, and forcibly converted to right-handedness. Today we still do the latter, and readily use such words as “gauche”,” sinister”, and so on as pejorative epithets. The overwhelming impression given by historical investigation of the term is, in short, that “left” has with amazing consistency implied or directly meant, “wrong.”

Consider, in contrast, such phrases as “in the right”, “come out all right”, “the right way”, “set right”, “upright”, “right-thinking”, and “in his right mind.” In the end, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the antonymic pairs right/left and right/wrong have been, and still are, largely interchangeable.

22 So far as we know, it was not until the success of the French Revolution that the term “left” could refer in its European use to anything legitimate whatsoever. Even since 1789, its connotation has been conventionally one of blameworthiness.

23 Jesus may not seem to have been one much concerned with the left-wing value of extending material enablements (or so the churches have mystified his work to appear), but in fact his concern is to demonstrate that love does Just that —makes the lame walk, the blind see, the guilt-ridden function, the possessive share, and the dead live. Indeed, he prescribes the issue of such real “fruits” as the essential criterion whereby the good is to be told from the bad (Matt. Xll:33).

24 Hegel's social philosophy is obviously right wing in its endorsement of unceasing international war, institutionalized hierarchy, and repression of individual liberties, but also somewhat to the left in its advocacy of rule by law rather than by arbitrary will. Mill, on the other hand, is significantly to the left in his support of participatory democracy, universal education and even socialism; but at the same time significantly to the right in both his proposal of a plural-vote for the elite, and his explicit assent to political imperialism (i.e. “free states” governing “dependencies”).

25 Mo Tzu was China's primary utilitarian thinker (fifth century B.C.), whose left-wing doctrines of “universal love without distinctions” and “promotion of benefits for the world and removal of harm” so scandalized the hierarchial and conventionalist Confucians that his teachings were more or less abused into extinction. What the Confucians, the center in this case, found most appalling in his doctrines was his refusal to incorporate the five relations of ruler-ruled (e.g. father-son, husband-wife, older brother-younger brother) into his concept of love “without distinctions”, whereas what the right found even worse was his outright condemnation of imperial wars. Interestingly, historical evidence indicates that Mohism's early followers, before the movement was repressed, were prisoners, slaves and workers (Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Wing-Tsit Chan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1963), pp. 211-12).

26 Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, trans. Chan, Wing-t'sit (Columbia University Press, New York, 1963), p. 272.Google Scholar

27 Communism, Fascism and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations, ed. Cohen, Carl (Random House, New York, 1966), pp. 409-21.Google Scholar

28 The idea of communism as necessarily hordes of them — as opposed to all of us — follows from this concept of self: thus, the right's perennial posture of “reaction” and “counter” in the face of it.

29 “Hence”, says the Justice Minister of Italian fascism, Alfredo Rocco, “the necessity for sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals — [and] hence the true explanation of war, the eternal law of mankind” (Cohen, p. 343).

Of course, the fascist right claims also to believe in a “higher self” of the Nation, of which the individual is a transient organic part (i.e. obedient citizen), or an enemy (i.e. everyone else). However, since this “higher self” thus excludes almost all the world's people, including much of its own citizenry, and is, moreover, conceived to ultimately reside in a single person, and in fact historically ends with him, even it remains ultimately trapped within the confines of dispensable particularity.

30 It is because of this concept of the self as externally directed that the right always stands for Nature's given struggle against man's transformation of it, for hierarchy against self-government, for the laws of the market against producers’ plan, for punishment against learning, and so on; not to mention for ever greater military and police forces to ensure that external direction in all its forms is maintained or increased.

31 The Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, has, among others, recognized the similarity of the Christian and the Communist on this score:

32 Thus we have the colloquial expression, “somewhere right of Attila the Hun”: that is, one whose violence against others knows no limit in self-aggrandizement.

Although the fascist right claims to reject egocentric interests for the higher interests of the Nation, a key to understanding its inner logic is to penetrate past this ideological pretext to the unlimited self-interest which, in fact, governs its membership — from the absolute egomania of its leadership to the extraordinary self-serving blindness of its “ordinary citizens” (usually while the Nation itself is in the process of devastation: see note 11). Fascism's success at mass killing and imprisonment seems, indeed, dependent on this restricted concept of self — “it's not me” — inhabiting the outlook of the public it rules.

33 One way in which the centrist concept of self falls between the right and left “extremes” is by being non-relational altogether, as with the standard philosophical concepts of the self as nothing more than one's own memory and/or bodily continuity.

34 “A state is a community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (From Max Weber, ed. Mills, C. Wright Oxford University Press, New York, 1970, p. 78Google Scholar).

Corresponding to Weber's criterion of the state is the diplomatic criterion, by which governments are normally recognized if they have demonstrated that they can enforce their commands across the territory over which they claim to preside.

35 Jesus is not the pure pacifist he is made out to be in Church teachings; but in fact even in the Gospel accounts selected as canonical by the Church authorities, predicts and endorses violent revolutionary upheavals:

Intriguingly, Karl Marx uses precisely the same language of “birth-pangs“ in his rather better known prediction and endorsement of revolutionary violence.

36 The common philosophical position that force on behalf of the law is not properly conceived as “violence” is proof of this predilection. Such a position, however, yields obvious anomalies of description: for example, the legally sanctioned killing of millions of Jews counts, according to it, as not violent.