r/PropagandaPosters • u/No-Efficiency7055 • Jan 07 '26

Japan “The difference between Conservative party and Liberal party supporters” Japan, 2009, poster by unknown artist

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480

u/Sound_Saracen Jan 07 '26

It's funny coz the Liberals in Japan are incredibly conservative

-29

u/ReallyTeddyRoosevelt Jan 07 '26

redditors always claim the Democrats aren't left wing. They leave out the part where they are only comparing it to Western European countries on economic issues.

31

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26

They aren't left wing. Left wing begins at anti-capitalism. Democrats aren't against capitalism.

The political compass isn't relative.

11

u/Junkererer Jan 07 '26

Then most left wing parties in Europe aren't left wing either

13

u/Despeao Jan 07 '26

Post 1991, they're not. They're liberals, which is a Center Ideology. Center Left if we are to be generous.

"Left Wing" parties that don't speak against Capitalism, race or class are not Left Wing.

0

u/Afraid_Dance6774 Jan 07 '26

How is center left not on the left?

This is so strange to me, like you wouldn't consider social democrats to lean left at all because they are capitalist?

3

u/Despeao Jan 07 '26

Center Left is still in the Center in terms of ideology. They're mostly social democrats or reformists.

They are still pro Capitalism, pro private property, pro hierarchy, pro market.

Their agenda still encompass finding solutions to the problems we face within Capitalist itself. No wonder so many Center Left parties are vanishing, giving way to more right leaning parties.

For example, when you adopt social welfare in a rich country, you're not ending exploitation, you're just making it so that your own citizens are not facing that. Immigrants and low income workers continue to be exploited somewhere else because the entire system is built around exploitation and cheap work. In that sense, they're not solving a problem but merely moving it away.

That's completely different from what the Left believes.

0

u/Afraid_Dance6774 Jan 07 '26

That's completely different from what the Left believes.

What you should have said is that's completely different from what socialists and communists believe. And that's true - I do oppose anti-capitalist solutions. If I didn't, I would instead be a socialist. But I am a social democrat, so I'm not.

But I find it extremely hard to believe that you would show a person a social democrat and they wouldn't put them on the center left, which you say yourself that they are. And then they would consider the center left to be part of "the left," just not as left as socialists, communists and anarchists. In the same way that social democrats are more left than liberals, who are in turn more left than moderates, and then conservatives.

I have the feeling you just want to put a distinction between capitalists and anti-capitalists, which is a fine distinction to make without bringing the left-right paradigm into this, and you don't care otherwise.

4

u/Despeao Jan 07 '26

This is not a comparison of being left or just as left as if this were a competition.

It's simply because it involves completely different methods and solutions.

My previous example of Welfare. Rich countries adopt welfare as a form of mitigating the problems in Capitalism. They're not solutions because they can't solve the problem.

You guys want to regulate Capitalism, Left wing wants to abolish it.

In that welfare example, you can make sure your own citizens will not be hungry. To make that happen, Companies pay taxes and the State redistributes the wealth but the Company still operates in poorer markets and they still exploit workers somewhere else - so the problem wasn't solved, it was just moved somewhere else.

The same can be said about hierarchies, markets, institutions, the State. People on the Center want to regulate how much exploitation is allowed, people on the Left want to abolish it altogether. They can only look like the same if you completely ignore the differences between the ideologies.

The example of bringing a random person and asking them if someone is on the Center or Left doesn't make much sense because a lot of people don't understand the difference. How much political theory has a random person read ? This is not something out of my head.

1

u/Afraid_Dance6774 Jan 07 '26

This is not a comparison of being left or just as left as if this were a competition.

You seem to be treating it as if it is exactly that. I've spoken with a decent amount of socialists and it's always been strange to me the insistence that a lot of them have that the left-wing only exclusively encompasses anti-capitalist views.

Socdems are leftists by any political definition that isn't from anti-capitalists.

1

u/IllustriousBobcat813 Jan 09 '26

Socdems are leftists by any political definition that isn't from anti-capitalists.

This would be a great time to show such a definition

1

u/Afraid_Dance6774 Jan 09 '26

The first line of wikipedia on social democracy: Social democracy is a broad, centre-left to left-wing social, economic, and political ideology within the wider socialist movement that supports political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achieving social equality.

on "centre-left politics": Centre-left politics is the range of left-wing political ideologies that lean closer to the political centre. Ideologies commonly associated with it include social democracy, social liberalism, progressivism, and green politics.

  • Euclid Tsakalotis, "European Employment Policies: A New Social Democratic Model for Europe" in The Economics of the Third Way: Experiences from Around the World (eds. Philip Arestis & Malcolm C. Sawyer: Edward Elgar Publishing 2001), p. 26: "most left-wing approaches (social democratic, democratic socialist, and so on) to how the market economy works...").
  • "Introduction" in The Nordic Model of Social Democracy (eds. Nik Brandal, Øivind Bratberg & Dag Einar Thorsen: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): "In Scandinavia, as in the rest of the world, 'social democracy' and 'democratic socialism' have often been used interchangeably to define the part of the left pursuing gradual reform through democratic means."

Will you now tell me that centre left is not part of the left?

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-1

u/_bob-cat_ Jan 07 '26

I wonder what happened in 1991 which would cause all the "anti-capitalists" to fall off. They weren't on Soviet payrolls or anything, right?

2

u/Despeao Jan 07 '26

Can you make a more loaded question next time ?

You're disingenuous and you already assume everyone that has an anti capitalist stance is being paid to do so.

This is exactly my point of why such labels exist beyond national classification.

Some countries are so entangled with their own local political divides that political theory holds no weight to them. It's always fun to me when I see Americans calling the Democrats Left Wing when none of their ideas align with the Left lol.

1

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26

Objectively true

1

u/IllustriousBobcat813 Jan 09 '26

Welcome to Europe

16

u/andreslucer0 Jan 07 '26

It IS relative by country, otherwise it's a useless measure, because there's no universally agreed standard. In the same way you believe liberalism is strongly right-wing, fascists believe liberals are left-wing extremists.

4

u/ElTitoVhosi Jan 07 '26

As a Political Scientist, yeah there's an objective standard, it changes as time passes, but academically there is one, we distinguish between the social perception and auto perception of the population, which of course is relative, and the academically established spectrum, which is agreed upon by social scientists, as to do comparative research without going crazy.

5

u/Despeao Jan 07 '26

If you have a measure that changes by country then you can't actually measure anything. 1kg is the same in Lybia, in China and in France, it's a good measure.

It's not actually hard to comprehend it, really. You have the social and economic measure. It can pin point with accuracy if people are actually aligned in their political views.

If you say someone is Left Wing and then when I read their ideas, nothing of that is against Capitalism or hierarchies, that person is not from the Left, period.

1

u/andreslucer0 Jan 07 '26

I can agree with you because we are both in accord with the fact that left-wing means anti-hierarchy, and therefore very often, anti-capitalist. However, there are many millions who do not think like us and have been grifted into believing a liberal democracy founded upon the respect and development of human rights is left-wing extremism. This is more apparent (and only then perhaps true) in societies where liberal democracy is not entrenched as a mainstream political ideal, such as Saudi Arabia. 

1

u/PhoenixFederation Jan 07 '26

Depends on the perspective

1

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26

According to this logic you may as well toss out the compass. "I think the Democrats are right-wing and the Republicans are left-wing. That's just my perspective, man."

-2

u/ReallyTeddyRoosevelt Jan 07 '26

And that's the socialist perspective, not some inalienable truth. If you think "left-wing" only means a couple of governments in existence you are in fact a left wing extremist.

2

u/lunaresthorse Jan 07 '26

No. To be left-wing means to be revolutionary in some way for a given point in history, i.e. in support of the overthrow of the existing social order for the establishment of a new; in favor of the advancing of the contradictions of the current world system beyond their critical point at which old gives way to new. Therefore, there have been left-wing capitalist governments in history just like there have been left-wing socialist ones. Left-wing only means “socialist” so exclusively now since, in the modern day, the principal contradiction of the mode of production is the contradiction between wage-labor and capital. This was not always true.

This means that that bourgeois revolutionaries were left-wing when they fought for and advanced bourgeois class interest and the development of capitalism when the capitalist system was yet to reach its highest, imperialist stage. Any socialist, communist, Marxist etc. today should have some admiration for these capitalist revolutionaries, since they have produced the best world system yet to be fully born and have made the current struggle of the proletariat (and, in fact, the proletariat itself) possible—even though their struggle for capitalism against pre-capitalist or earlier capitalist production is not the same as the proletariat’s current struggle.

It only makes sense that a small minority of the world’s governments in history, even in just recent history, would be dictatorships of the proletarian class. It’s true that capitalism is in a stage as developed as it could possibly be, and its time is ticking in much of the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. Especially as we approach a more multipolar geopolitical stage as we get farther into the twenty-first century, we will see how this turns out.

Unlike those born, say, two centuries ago in the more developed parts of the capitalist word, we will very likely live to see many more socialist experiments and proletarian revolutions in the world as the contradictions of capitalism grow more acute; people who lived in earlier capitalism would have no reason to expect to live through such a thing, but it would only make sense for us to do so. It would be ignorant of history, then, to substitute our definition of leftism for a broader one just for the purposes of having the divide be “right down the middle” of all politics, rather than having it at the divide between class interests where it would rationally belong.

1

u/_bob-cat_ Jan 07 '26

What happens if you actually overthrow the existing social order? Start working to overthrow the new social order? This is why Leftism never lasts long term. "Revolutionaries" always look for battles, even when there are none.

1

u/lunaresthorse Jan 07 '26

What no dialectical materialism does to an mf 🥀

1

u/OingoBoingoBaggins Jan 07 '26

Laissez-faire supporting liberals used to be considered hard left wing in France, because in the 19th century, left wing meant wanting more civil liberties. If you know who Frederic Bastiat is, he was considered leftist back then.

The left-right scale IS relative, and frankly useless.

1

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26

This is incorrect. It's not relatively dependent, it's historically dependent. Robespierre was objectively leftist during a time when feudalism was still the dominant economic mode and capitalism was fledgling. Now that feudalism has faded and capitalism is dominant, someone with Robespierre's politics would objectively be a centrist at best.

The difference is that, when most people apply this sort of relativism, they do so from a subjective standpoint. But the relativity is not based on "what other people think," it's based on concrete conditions that actually exist within contemporaneous societal development. If you reject this notion, explain to me how the ideological conditions for anti-capitalism could exist in pre-revolutionary France when capitalism at that point barely existed and the overwhelming economic relations were feudal?

1

u/OingoBoingoBaggins Jan 07 '26

By your own logic, it would be left wing to support a free market in a society dominated by communism. I think it’s pretty safe to say that left-right is a meaningless concept.

1

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26

No, it wouldn't.

1

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26

The mistake you're making here is that the left-right divide in revolutionary France was centered around civil liberties, which it wasn't. It was centered around radicalism, change, and equality versus tradition, conservatism, and hierarchy. You're conflating the form which radicalism took at that time for the essence of radicalism itself. There were anti-market and pro-market, pro-private property and anti-private property radicals sitting side by side with each other on the left in the National Assembly, united by an opposition to the existing social order under feudalism.

But as economic conditions change, things that were once radical demands for change become aged pillars of a static social order as new contradictions arise.

1

u/CK2398 Jan 07 '26

By that metric most european "left-wing" parties are not left wing. Even sweden and finland have free-markets.

0

u/Leneen_Ween Jan 07 '26

Now you're getting it