Fixed the font. All else is unchanged.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
I thought OP's message was cut-and-dried political science everyone knew, then I saw the comments here debating it. Wow, people on lemmy are lost. This information is everywhere: just go to wikipedia.
It's the 1ˢᵗ axis of the political map commonly shown.
The political compass is propaganda. There is no such thing as auth-left or lib-right. There is no division between social and economic axes.
The definition of the right-left spectrum is rooted in the french revolution. Rightism is about consolidating power and creating strict socio-economic hierarchies so the more-privileged can subject their will on the less-privileged, while leftism is about flattening those hierarchies to prevent anyone from subjugating others and ensuring equality and egalitarianism are maintained.
Whoever has power controls economy and vice-versa. Period. So rightism will always be authoritarian, hierarchal, and have a functionally captive economy. How benevolent this authoritarianism is toward the populace is meaningless as any liberty is an illusion provided at the pleasure of the more wealthy-powerful classes.
Liberalism arises from the willing abuse of an under-regulated economy that allows consolidation of wealth and, therefore, accumulation of power. Therefore the end result of unchecked liberalism is always rightism.
There are many forms of leftism, because leftism is about tearing down and preventing accumulation and consolidation of power. The goal is to prevent runaway snowballing of wealth or power that would allow any person or group to subjugate others, ideally in a way that is sustainable and stable. Therefore leftism is about personal liberty and freedom as long as it does not threaten to diminish or supersede the liberty or freedom of others.
The concepts cannot be separated. They travel together and influence each other directly. The political compass is merely an attempt to make “both sides” seem equivalent without addressing the actual cause-effect of wealth and power accumulation, which serves who? Rightists. Capitalists. Liberals. Those who would seek to selfishly hoard more power, privilege, comfort, and authority than everyone else at the expense of anyone else.
Your comment is propaganda.
Tell that to Marxist-Leninists or North Korea.
Tell that to conservatives or right-wing libertarians.
Wikipedia refers to division over Ancien Régime, ie, the monarchy & aristocracy of nobility classes. It was specifically over the right of the king to an absolute veto of the new constitution: opposers sat to the left of the president of the National Assembly & advocates sat to the right.
That's a distinction in political authority rather than entrepreneurial economics. That political power of the king aligns with social inequality & concentration of authority. In that society, social inequality was related to hierarchal authority of aristocratic & royal privileges culminating to the king. Their reforms had more to do with ending the unequal inherited privileges & authority of feudalism: legal equality (equal access to justice, equal legal punishment, equal eligibility to public office, equal taxability, equal imposition of authority) regardless of (aristocratic) class or birth.
Here's an exclusive: power[^power] is power. It's not always economic: wealth doesn't necessarily lead to power. Someone with enough iron or lead can carry off anyone's gold, so authority can deny wealth power. Authority also is power, so whoever has it[^has-authority] unrestricted necessarily poses a threat for subjugating others or repressing personal freedoms. Considering power that way is simply more general than claiming all power is economic & guarding against only that.
Power can come from anything: ability to inspire & indoctrinate, popular support, social ties, institutional (ideological, moral, traditional, governmental) legitimacy, (dis)information, expertise. People who haven't deluded themselves with idioticly reductive ideologies into thinking the only power is economic recognize this.
The National Assembly of the French revolution were keenly aware: they ended unequal power relations due to feudalism & lineage, not due to wealth, to gain personal freedom.
So, personal political freedom isn't entirely dependent on economic equality. That's why totalitarian communist states are considered as oppressive as fascist states despite corresponding to opposite ends of the political spectrum. That's why political scientists find utility in splitting distinct considerations like authority into separate dimensions: they reveal a similarity hidden by a simpler model.
There are other models with more solid academic work such as the cultural map of the world values survey along dimension of secular-rationalism & self-expression. There, ex-communist societies systematically cluster toward less self-expression.
If that's the case, then why are liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia more economically equal than most communist states? Could your approach is too reductive?
The same can be stated for all other freedoms. In a completely unregulated society, people would be free to abuse each other. Government authority already restricts people from abusing each other economically & non-economically. The huge concern you're overlooking is not abuse between individuals, but between the government & its people, ie, abuse of authority.
This and the rest you wrote are nonsense that overlooks the significant role of government in the abuse of individual liberties & rights throughout history. Government can authorize itself to abuse all rights & liberties equally or prohibit itself equally: both approaches can deliver social equality. It's a separable consideration as demonstrable by ideologies on the map failing to all align on a single diagonal line.
[^power]: the ability to influence or direct the actions, beliefs, or conduct. [^has-authority]: not necessarily the wealthy
You definition seems right to me. However it imply the following : Staline ant Trotsky are right figures and individualist saying that "the system will change when everybody have change themselves" are leftist
Stalin was extreme right, using leftist trappings to seize and consolidate power for himself as Lenin withered away.
Trotsky was leftist, but still a believer in the ML vanguard gamble that resulted in Stalin seizing power. Rightist means will almost always lead to rightist ends.
Tolstoy, being generally anti-state and anti-capitalist, was also leftist. His famous quote philosophically addresses the stability of any leftist movement.
The path to leftism and the methods to preserve it against rightism are very much the realm of philosophy.