Political Jargon

Agorism

A mild-mannered flavour of anarcho-capitalist slightly leftish libertarianism that distinguishes between capitalism and the free market. Tend to be very positive about "counter economics", commercial transactions not part of the statist system, the profit-making equivalent of direct action, which can be anything from a lock-in in a pub to squatting to smuggling to dealing drugs. They are also rather negative about "intellectual property", which is using state power to enforce unnatural privilege.

"Agora" is Greek for the central market place and town square of a city, so (exactly like the Latin "forum") it has connotations of both a market place and a public meeting. Speakers corner in the mall. Society is a a talking shop.

Anarchism

The political philosophy that ideally there should be no rulers or government - that every human has the right to make independent choices about their own life, and that all associations should be voluntary and free.

Anarchism is as varied as anarchists, and almost any generalisation about them is false, so there isn't much point in going into further detail, other than to point out that in Europe, especially in north-western Europe, anarchists have, on the whole, been seen as left-wing, and have tended to associate - at least tactically, and with much argument - with radical socialists. In the USA, Libertarian or anarcho-capitalist ideas have a much bigger profile. The theoretical difference between these is about the nature of property, the practical difference is in the trade union and working class basis of socialist anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, the moral difference in the value they give to fraternity and solidarity

Anarcho-Capitalism

The idea that all the functions now perfomed by states, including policing and defence, could or should be arranged by voluntary deals between commercial providers and willing customers. Just as you now choose which phone company to subscribe to, come the anarcho-capitalist revolution you will be able to choose which police force and air force to subscribe to.

Authoritarianism

If it wasn't just a term of abuse it would be someone who believed that people were happier or better or more productive when they have external order imposed on them.

Capitalism

An economic state of affairs in which the direction of productive enterprises is largely in the hands of private owners or corporate suppliers of capital. These days it is the normal way economic production works in most places, most of the time.

When capitalism becomes a political programme, instead of just the way things are done, it is based on the idea that there is no fundamental difference between kinds of property such as land, factories, stocks, shares, fishing rights, mineral rights; and personal property such as someone's clothes or the contents of their pockets. So the owner of a mine or a farm or a lake has as much right to use it, or leave it alone, or lay waste to it, as the owner of a can of cola has to drink it, give it away, or pour it down the drain.

In English-speaking countries it is generally assumed that capitalism goes hand-in-hand with free trade and democracy. It is also observed that capitalism leads to faster economic growth and technological development than other systems - though again that might really be the benefits of free trade, free speech, and democracy, rather than capitalism, if these things can be separated from capitalism.

As capitalism is, more or less, the dominant economic system of the modern world, most other economic and political movements are in some way or other reactions to capitalism.

Centrism

Not a helpful word. We all, or most of us, think we are reasonable. Everyone's middle of the road is in a different place. Most of us like to think we are different from others as well. Nobody knows what its like to be me? Sorry, everybody does. So "centrist" is always going to be used to describe people who differ from us - but not too much. Few people will ever admit to being "centrist" but almost no-one will ever admit that their enemies are.

Christian Democracy

European political movements, often associated with the Roman Catholic church. In general they are in favour of a traditional approach to moral and social issues, and a mixed economy. By US standards they are often economically liberal but socially conservative. They have been usually been opposed to trade unionism, and in favour of a paternalistic welfare state.

Christian Socialism

Politicians self-describing as "Christian Socialist" have been most prominent in Britain where they tend to be divided into paternalistic managerial Fabians (often with a sentimental back-to-the-land tinge, especially if Anglo Catholics) and far-left mutualists. The "Christian Socialist Movement" is affiliated to the British Labour Party. Tony Blair and perhaps a third of his cabinet ministers were members of it.

There are also explicit Christian Socialist groupss in other parts of northern Europe and in Latin America. There would probably be more of them in the USA if the word "socialist" wasn't so unfashionable over there. I could imagine Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, John Howard Yoder, or Jim Wallis calling themselves "Christian Socialists" in a British context.

In Britain (and more or less only in Britain, which escaped the anti-clericalism of the Continent) some of the more radical Christian Socialists, and the left-wing of the Labour Party, have a lot in common with left-wing radical socialist movements. The old crack about the British Labour Party owing more to Methodism than Marxism happens to be true - and it owes a lot to the Ranters, Diggers, and Levellers as well, and not a little to William Morris.

These are not at all the sort of people who call themselves "Christian Social Unions" in Austria or Bavaria, which are a more blatantly Roman Catholic version of Christian Democrats. Though apparently the Christian Social People's party in next-door Switzerland is on the left.

Collectivism

Collectivist - political or economic system that rejects individual rights ion favour of group ones. I have no idea if this is really different from being communitarian

Communism

you almost never meet anyone who calls themselves communist any more. What a surprise. Though their candidate for US president did come 8th last time

The word "communist" decribes both a supposed past or future situation in which the means of production are held in common and for the use of all, rather than by organisations or individuals; and any of hundreds of political philosophies that think that desirable or parties that claim to be trying to bring it about.

In Marxist jargon "communism" is the final stage of human political development, after "socialism", when the state shall wither away. And as such very little different from the future hopes of left anarchists, distributists, Christian socialists, libertarian socialists and mutualists in general - the difference is in the method proposed to get us there.

For most of the 20th century the word was associated almost entirely with revolutionary Marxism, and then with Soviet and Chinese style of centralised bureacratic state. Other people who might have called themselves communists once started to call themselves democratic or libertarian socialists. Western Communist parties were typically the tools of the Kremlin - or else Maoist or Trotskyist sects in rebellion against them. During the long slow collapse of the old Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1990s many European Communist parties split from Moscow and adopted one form or another of Eurocommunism - a sort of strange green-tinged mix of managerial Fabianism, academic Marxism, punk, and optimistic technophilia.

Nowadays Most Communist parties outside the direct influence of China are left social democrat organisations in favour of democratically accountable central planning, not that different to much of the British Labour Party in the mid-20th century. I wouldn't want to hazard a guess about what, if any, commitment the Communist Party of China now has to anything Marx or Morris would have recognised as communism. It seems that, as the old joke about Russia said: "In China there are only communists - there are nonpolitical communists, conservative communists, capitalist communists, liberal communists, socialist communists, communist communists and anarchist communists."

Communitarianism

Supposedly a political or economic system that rejects individualism. Some people seem to use to word to mean the mutualist ideas of Bakunin, Kropotkin and so on. Others give it a radically anti-individualist flavour. In some contexts it describes a kind of philosophy that holds that the meaning of words exists between rather than within individuals. Which is good to know because I am having trouble pinning this word down.

Sometimes it is the "third way" stuff that Blair came out with a few years back. With emphasis on the state guaranteeing positive rights to individuals but requiring and enforcing behaviour in return. The worst thing that can happen to you is to be socially excluded.

Conservative

The original usage is the obvious one, someone who is in favour of keeping things as they were, of gradual reform, if any; one who fears that drastic change is likely to lead to a worse state than before, who trusts the gathered wisdom of generations over the labile fashions of the moment. In that sense it was used in the 19th century for people who opposed reform and liberalism.

In the UK (and some other Commonwealth countries) the word "conservative" is inevitably associated with the Conservative Party, that is the Tories. British "conservatives" often have strong monarchist or even anti-capitalist views of a sort almost unknown in the US. Also they have often supported interventionist or paternalist social policies - for example many of them opposed the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

But in economic policy most European "conservative" parties, including the British Tories, subscribe to the mixed-economy, welfare-state, social-democratic consensus, and so would seem liberal to US conservatives.

In the US the word is used generally for just about anyone who has doubts about what is called liberalism over there, some of whom would be very right-wing in a European context. Others, especially libertarians, might appear very radical, maybe even anarchist.

It is also used in a specialised theological sense disconnected from its political sense, to mean someone who bases their religion on tradition or scripture; rather than on reason or experience. It is possible (and in some countries, though not the Americas, common) to be a theological conservative and a political liberal.

Crypto-Anarchy

Technological determinism meets the geeks. Ubiquitous high-powered computing and near-universal networking allow private persons and organisations to use strong cryptography to protect their communications from others, including government. As well as obviously enhancing freedom of speech (whish is also freedom to trade and freedom to conspire), this makes settlement by digital payment possible. Such payments could in principle be completely anonymous and completely invisible to anyone not a party to them. Not just for goods or services which can be delivered online (software in the widest sense - such as music, pornography, education and so on) but for any goods or services whose delivery can be confirmed with a high probability. (The classic example is putting money in escrow to pay an assassin who successfully predicts the moment of the kill)

Crypto-anarchists envisage an increasingly large proportion of business and personal activity moving out into cyberspace where, because of encryption, it will be invisible to anyone not a party to it. This is sometimes seen as a return to an imagined pre-industrial situation where most work wasn't taxed, and most speech wasn't censored, because it was invisible and inaudible to the authorities. High-performance computing enables us to do what our great-great-grandparents could do merely by walking out into a field.

Not so much the replacement of the state (as revolutionaries plan for), or the reform of the state (liberals and moderate conservatives) or the recruitment of the state as a servant of change (Fabian socialists and more extreme conservatives) but the rejection of the state. The Net gives su the chance to pack our bits and walk away. A large part of our everyday transactions move into a new private sphere where government is not privileged over any other actor.

Although most people who ever espoused it would distance themselves from many of his views Tim May is still one of the most intelligent explainers of the idea - Google for "cyphernomicon" to see more. This sort of thinking originally rose in science fiction writing and was popular (for obvious reasons) among the early adopters of Internet technology. Up to the late 1990s it was in some ways the default stance of online political speech - that it was almost unknown to "serious" political commentators in the press or broadcasting, and almost entirely ignored by governments, just went to prove the point. That's no longer the case, and we've entered an era where governments are using the threats of terrorism, drugs, pornography, and illegal immigration to support massive increases in intervention and monitoring of their citizens lives.

But the technological realities haven't changed. The big deal is control of money. If large amounts of business - whether in legal or illegal goods - can be done online anonymously and bills can be settled by electronic currencies outwith the control of territorial governments, then government will be taxing a decreasing share of economic activity. If the cypherpunk story ever was true it probably still is.

Democrat

Outside the USA "democratic" just means that elections are held, and the word is the opposite of "autocracy" or "dictatorship".

Most Europeans probably think of the US Democratic party as being something along the lines of European Liberal or Social Democratic parties, which is of course a vast oversimplification. When they actually find out something about its members or policies they are often quite surprised how right-wing, by their standards, they can be.

Democratic Socialism

You'd think it meant the same as "Social democracy" but actually it is more left wing. Think Old Labour. In fact most of Labour, though probably not Mr. Blair. More committed to class conflict than Fabianism to its right, more optimistic about the state than libertarian socialism to its left

Distributivism

A utopian political theory publicised by Belloc and Chesterton in the first quarter of the 20th century, based on an idealised Roman catholic middle ages, which could be regained by distributing ownership of land and property among the maximum number of people. It is best defended in Belloc's book "The Servile State", an argument for the belief that capitalism tends naturally to monopoly and the enslavement of the workers. In many ways it is almost indistinguishable from a Morrisite small-scale socialism, but strongly opposed on moral grounds both to "Collectivism", (i.e. state socialism) and to revolution. But they proposed no way other than revolution of returning the property from the capitalists to the people. So Distributivism foundered in a mass of well-meaning back-to-the land pamphletry, then more or less vanished after the second world war made Belloc's near-fascism unacceptable (it was not shared by Chesterton who remained in many ways a political liberal, but he was out of the picture by then).

Fabianism

Fabianism - a British style of non-revolutionary managerial technocratic state socialism. Popularise by the Fabian society HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Nesbit, Bernard Russell The original Fabians were united more by means than ends, rejecting revolution and direct action in favour of working through government and institutions of the welfare state.

Falangism

A Spanish name for what the Italians had already taught us to call fascism. The symbolism is the same, unity is strength - "phalanx" is the old Greek word for a body of spearmen fighting in close order. The name "falange" tends to be used by people wanting to associate themselves with a superficially Christianised brand of nationalistic fascism (in practice almost always Roman Catholic). As well as Franco's party its been used in South America, Austria, and Lebanon.

Fascism

Strictly speaking, the kind of government imposed on Italy and Spain in the 1930s, based on an idea of social and national solidarity that puts order and hierarchy above individual freedom.

There is no point in arguing about whether the fascist economic system was a kind of capitalism (as socialists say) or a species of socialism (as conservatives claim) because the distinctive thing about fascism is nothing to do with economics, it is the idea that the nation, or the race, is a real thing in itself, and that individuals within it are merely parts of it. Fascism automatically leads to racism and militarism, as the army is seen as the defender of the unity of the nation, and war becomes a means to strengthen and purify the army, and hence the nation.

For what its worth, Fascism in Europe only did well in communities that were heavily under the influence of the Roman catholic church. I do not know why this is, if there is any reason at all. Racism and militarism are no part of catholic teaching, though the idea of social solidarity and the interest of the whole community in the moral state of each member, are. In Iberia in particular it posed as Roman Catholic, under the name of falange.

The word "fascism" as used in politics in English-speaking countries is almost always an insult. And a very useful insult it is too. Margaret Thatcher was certainly not a fascist (though some of her friends, such as Pinochet, were) but it gave us lots of harmless fun to call her one. There are real fascists around in current politics, especially in France and Austria, and on a much smaller scale there are even a few Nazis about.

Federal

An alliance of separate states. In the USA the word has come to be associated with the national government in Washington, so someone who calls themselves a "federalist" might be a supporter of strong central government, and opposed to strong local government. This is the exact opposite of what it means in most European countries. In this case British usage tends to follow the US. So it is quite common to hear a British politician say that they are opposed to a "Federal European Union", meaning that they want to preserve the current arrangement of a loose organisation of independent nations - in other words a federation.

In early 2003 the British government were proud that they had kept the word "federal" out of the draft constitution for the European Union - despite the fact that for most people a union is a much more centralised and less diverse thing than a federation

Free Market

A free market is one in which people are able to trade at mutually agreed prices, without coercion.

There probably aren't any free markets.

A perfect free market would imply equal access to information - if one party knows much more than the other they can selectively release or conceal information in order to manipulate demand. It would also require the absence of customs and immigration controls, and of sales taxes (or else a completely flat universal VAT)

But there probably are quite a few markjets that are free enough and large enough that the ratios between prices do reasonably closely reflect the different worth of the goods to buyers and sellers. Which is good enough to make some of the classical economic oversimplifications work.

Green

Political movements that give are based on environmental or biological concerns rather than economic ones. The word chosen in the 1970s as an alternative to "ecology party" (which was misleading because clashing badly with the scientific meaning) and "conservation" or "enviromentalism" which sould like luke-warm special-interest groups.

Greens have tended to be most influential in mainland northern Europe, and also in New Zealand, but they have recently become the third largest party (in terms of popular vote) in the USA. In Britain they are mostly, so far, the recipient of left-wing protest votes which might otherwise have gone to Labour. They usually get little support in poorer countries, where they are often associated with rich-country hobbyists or tourists, though there is some record of sucess in East Africa, and in Sri Lanka and parts of India.

There is a contrast between "deep green" or "dark green" policies that give priority to the planet, and "pale green" or "light green" ones which are merely conservationist at best, shading into NIMBY. For example a "pale green" would want to demand that oil companies remove disused rigs from the sea bed to return it to the the pretty state it was in before. A deep green would more likely want to leave it there as an artificial reef to encourage sea life and, witha ny luck, a threat to shipping. Deep green sees our life as part of the life of the whole system. Green parties often accuse liberals and other traditional politcal parties with conservationist tendencies of being merely pale green. though, at least in public, most Green parties are pretty pale themselves.

The German and many other Green parties commit themsleves to "Four Pillars of Greenness":

• Ecological Sustainability
• Social Justice
• Grassroots Democracy
• Non-Violence

Labour

Originally parties based around trades unions and intended to get working-class representatives in parliaments, later to bring about a measure of nationalisation. Mostly significant in Britain and Scandinavian countries, and in some ex-British colonies. The French and Italian communists, and the German SDP, were often in the past something like Labour parties. These days they are nearly all plain social-democratic parties like everyone else.

The British Labour Party (the one I know best, having been more or less brought up in it, and having been a member of it for over 30 years) can be considered as a coalition of three broad and overlapping streams of political thought, often more united by fear of the Tories than by any common political program:

• The Trade Union movement, which founded the party, and still funds it. It, of course, operates in the interests of its members, which means that it nearly always comes into conflict with a Labour government when it manages to get one elected.
• Non-Marxist socialists (very often with a Christian background). They have had little influence on the party in government, though in most places and at most times they supply the majority of its individual members.
• Fabian Social Democrats, dedicated to political reform, and the paternalistic, or at any rate managerial, welfare state. Since the mid-1970s this has been the dominant strand within the Party and now as "New Labour" has rebuilt the Party in Parliament (though not necessarily the country) along mainstream European Social-Democrat lines. To Americans they appear as left-wing Liberals, to most of the members of their own party they are right-wingers.

Marxist influence in the British Labour Party has been small but strident, with various groups accused of being entryist parties within the Party - most notable the "Militant Tendency", one of the many incarnations of a Trotskyist organisation, now of almost no influence at all.

Left-wing

The word "Left wing" is derived from the seating arrangements in various legislatures, perhaps starting with the revolutionary assembly in Paris after the Revolution, in which the more liberal or progressive deputies sat on the left of the chamber. Later sections of political parties more in favour of rapid change towards socialism or of worker's revolution came to be called "left".

These days it is almost a cliche to say that talk of "left" and "right" is a hangover from outmoded class-based politics and meaningless in our more complex post-modern age. I'm not so sure of that. You tend to know in your guts who is of the left and who of the right without explaining it in detail. There does seem to be some sort of basic personality difference between them. It was summed up by Roy Hattersley (who used to be called a right-winger but now counts as left because the centre has moved so far to the right) who said that the 11th Commandment of the Labour Movement was "Thou shalt not suck up to the boss". The basic feeling of "I'm as good as you are" still pervades the Left. I think that most people who call themselves "left-wing" in Britain today would stand up for all the old French Revolutionary "Rights of Man". See below for a model of left vs. right based on Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

In Britain and other western-European countries, the Left - or the far left at any rate - has typically been suspicious of the state and of big government. In the USA the word "left-wing" is largely associated with what they call "liberal", which in Europe would be "social democratic" or "state socialist". So any European who says they are left-wing to an American is liable to find themselves accused of all sorts of beliefs which they may well not hold. Also, many Europeans mean socialists or anarchists when they say "left-wing" and would call people like German social democrats, British "New Labour", and US liberals, centrists or even right-wingers rather than leftists.

Liberal

The big unmentionable L-word, the one that means something quite different on different sides of the Atlantic.

Originally a "liberal" was someone who was in favour of political reform and against the monarchist anciens regimes of Europe. So they would likely be in favour of legal equality, free trade, and universal suffrage; and opposed to restrictive practices that were seen as hold-overs from a feudal past.

That is still, more or less, what a "Liberal Party" is in most European countries. They tend to be business-friendly parties, in favour of low regulation and liberalisation of trade, but socially open. They are usually secular, republican (in the European sense), and opposed to government intervention and regulation in private life. In US terms they are often economically conservative and socially liberal, or small-l libertarian. The British Liberal Party, (currently known as "Liberal Democrats" for very boring historical reasons) have for many decades been rather to the left of most other Liberal or Liberal Democrat parties in Europe.

In the USA the word "liberal" has become almost an insult, used to mean much the same as "socialist" (which to most US people is an insult). It means big government, "tax and spend", intrusive regulation. More or less what a European would call a "social democrat", with overtones of Big Brother. This usage is spreading to other English-speaking countries. This makes the word "liberal" almost unusable in political discussions.

It is also used in a Christian context to mean theology based more on situation, experience, and reason than on revelation or tradition. It is possible to be theologically liberal and politically conservative, and vice-versa - though not common in the USA, where liberal religion and liberal politics are often equated.

Libertarian Socialism

General term for a variety of socialisms that rejected reliance on the coercive state to impose socialism by force. Was more or less identical in meaning to "libertarian" in 19th century.

Not quite the same as revolutionary vs. parliamentary socialism. Both the Marxist revolutionaries and Fabian gradualists were committed statists. And there are socialist-anarchists and libertarian socialists who both think revolution is necessary but that it can only work if it moves directly to a new freedom, not if it is hijacked by some transitional arrangement of a supposedly socialist state.

Lots of people, including lots of Americans, have called themselves "Libertarian Socialists", especially in the early 20th century. Although they often had widely different views - some of them in effect anarchists (especially of the anarcho-syndicalist variety), others members of mainstream political parties, others various varieties of Christian socialist. Many of them might now, and perhaps even then, have preferred to have been called anarchists)

Great names of the past might include William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Mikhail Bakunin, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin. And even some North Americans: Eugene Debs, Joe Hill, Daniel DeLeon, Woodie Guthrie, Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, perhaps even Sam Clemens AKA Mark Twain, Henry Thoreau or Emiliano Zapata. Or amongst the living Ken MacLeod (excellent sf writer), Noam Chomsky, Kim Stanley Robinson (another sf writer!), Iain Banks, Ursula K LeGuin, (maybe this kind of politics appeals to sf authors or maybe I just read too much sf....)

In Britain and some other European countries the chances are that a large proportion of political activists who admit to any form of socialism would claim to be some kind of libertarian socialist, at least in the privacy of their own pubs. Even ones who work for the state.

Libertarianism

Three meanings here:

In the weaker sense, "small-l libertarianism" is the idea that people should be free to do anything that doesn't harm anyone else or break any laws. Since the victory of 19th-century liberalism this idea has become almost universal in developed countries and would be accepted by just about every mainstream political party except a few nationalist neo-fascists and maybe some religiously-based parties. It is a motherhood-and-apple-pie idea. No-one argues against it.

In the stronger sense it is the idea that all government or communal restrictions on the rights of property owners to dispose of their property as they wish are undesirable, if not immoral, and desires a minimalist state that will only act to keep the peace and enforce contracts. It is associated with the idea that the operations of the free market, and voluntary contracts between private people, will be able to provide all the services now provided by the welfare state - or at least those that people actually want and are willing to pay for. In Europe, especially in France, this would be called classic liberalism (which confuses Americans) This goal is sometimes called Minarchism.

In the strongest sense, mainly used in the USA, it is the idea that any first use of violence, or threat of first use of violence, for political or economic ends is immoral. This includes the use of police or the apparatus of the state to collect taxes or impose laws. This, of course, means that there is no financial basis for a state at all, and is really a kind of anarchism. Though most American Libertarians don't use that word of themselves, perhaps because of its associations with European left-wing anarchism.

Minarchism

Desiring minimum government. The range of meaning goes from from those liberal conservatives who merely want to tighten up and reform the Welfare State, through classic liberal laissez-faire positions, to the Randroid species of anarcho-capitalism that would like to see the world run by a sort of superstate in the mode of late colonial Hong Kong, that kept the proles off the streets but let the capitalists get on with making money.

Mutualism

Another word that has been re-used dozens of times for different things. Most often for the left-libertarian stance of Bakunin and Kropotkin, a socialist anarchism that wants to hold land in common rather than as personal property of an owner.

Nazi

Historically of course the word can only refer to the NSDAP of Germany in the 20th century. It is only ever used as an insult these days, being a stronger form of fascist But it might have some use in current politics distinguishing the irrationalist and occultist neo-nazis (such as the founders of the British NF and BNP, or the various Scandinavian Odinist loonies) from the more general run of fascists (such as the French FN, or some right-wing parties in Italy and Spain)

Fascism is a kind of nationalism that looks on the nation, the state, culture, and race, as a kind of organic unity; whose preservation against other nations, and whose strengthening through war, is the main duty of every citizen. I think I agree with Golo Mann that Hitler and his colleagues, at least by the end of their rule, were not German nationalists in any meaningful sense. They did not love the German nation, they hated it and were quite willing - possibly even eager - to see it die, as long as they could use it to kill off the Jews as well.

The style of Nazism - the dabbling with the occult, the irrational hatreds, the showmanship, the ambiguous sexuality, the obsession with odd bits of history and mythology, is really indicative of a kind of nihilist religious cult rather than any, even far-right, politics. Hitler brought Germany to ruin as a kind of apocalyptic special effect for his own personal suicide, a pathetic fallacy come to death.

Objectivism

Philosophy of Ayn Rand supposedly based on materialism and developed by reason. Economically Rand and her followers were laissez-faire capitalists, classic liberals. Politically they were minarchists.

One of the main sentimental roots of the modern US libertarian anarcho-capitalism. It stressed the immorality of altruism, and held self-interest to be the highest (or only) good. At least in her novels Rand seemed to concentrate on a minority of superior humans (presumably including herself) who had to be given the maximum freedom of action so that they could seek their own self-interest, but at the same time had to be protected from the great mass of drones and proles and wastrels. Sort of like Aleister Crowley without the kinky dressing up.

So even if an anarchist or libertarian system might be thought desirable in some ways it is seen as impractical because a state has to exist in order to enforce laws and to defend its borders. All government is for is to hold the monopoly of force within territorial boundaries - the the coercive function of the state is all that remains, the iron hand but not the velvet glove.

Patriotism

Oh, I can't resist it.

Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. (Emma Goldman)

I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel. (GK Chesterton)

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. (Ambrose Bierce)

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy. (GB Shaw)

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. (GB Shaw)

Populism

Not so much a political philosophy as a way of doing politics. Appealing direct to the people apparently over the heads of the establishment. Trying to get mass support by selling your policies to the lowest-common-denominator. Big in late 19th and early 20th century USA and France.

Mostly used as an insult in British English. The general connotations of the word are somewhere between smarmy TV evangelists and Nazi warlords burning decadent art objects. The main targets would be right-wingers thought to be stirring up the prejudices of the lower rungs of the ladder against the very bottom, or the middle ranks against the not-quite-top. Populism as an organised political force hardly exists in Britain - though every Tory leader since Home has at least dabbled with it as a tactic, and Ken Livingstone is no stranger either. Its main representatives here are the tabloid newspapers.

Republican

Originally "republic" simply meant "public things" that is either public property, or matters of public importance. In the middle ages it came to mean much the same as we would mean by the State these days, and did not imply the absence of a monarch - although it might have implied the absence of an autocratic absolute divine-right monarch, because in that case the government would be their personal property, rather than public property as it is in a constitutional monarchy. The Republic of Novgorod had a Prince. In England it was possible to write a book called "Republica Anglicana" in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and not have your head cut off. That might not have been the case during the reign of the next two kings.

Nowadays in ordinary usage in most places to call somewhere a "republic" simply means that there is no monarchy. So if a Brit or a Swede calls themselves a "republican", all they mean is that they want to abolish the monarchy. (This ignores the obvious fact that a supposed republic like, say, Syria is far more monarchical than a kingdom like Denmark).

Of course in the USA the Republicans are a political party. Those of us who are not US citizens tend to see them as right-wing compared to more left-wing Democrats - which means that we have all sorts of unspoken assumptions about them, such as that they are most probably more religious than the Democrats (because in most European countries the left has been associated with anti-clericalism) or that they are likely to be more centralist (because in most European countries the right has tended to be in favour of strong central government and against local autonomy). These ideas are likely to be wrong about many if not most Republicans

Some Americans make a rather abstruse technical distinction between a "democracy" and a "republic", saying that the USA is, or at one time was, or should be, or was intended by its constitution to be, a republic; but has now become, ir will become, or is becoming, or is in danger of becoming, a democracy. They usually regard this as a Bad Thing. No-one outside their country knows what they are talking about.

Right-wing

The opposite of left-wing

So if a left-winger is someone in favour of the old Three Rights, a right-winger is someone who doesn't like them. We could say that a right-winger is someone who:

• ...rather than Liberty, is in favour of authority and order
• ...prefers autocracy, hierarchy, and social structure to Equality, and thinks that people are better when there is a place for everyone and everyone knows their place
• ...thinks that "there is no such thing as a free lunch", and that a man is better for standing on his own two feet, and that altruism and Fraternity sap the will and weaken the people

As there is no real reason to think that these opinions are held by the same people, "right-wing" is probably an even more ambiguous term than "left-wing" these days.

Social Democracy

The original social democratic parties in Europe were left-wing socialist parties, often revolutionary, sometimes Marxist. They have gradually moved into the mainstream of European political life, becoming ever more friendly to business and the established order as they go on. These days the words don't really mean much at all - effectively every European political party that ever wins elections is social-democratic apart from a few extreme nationalist or neo-fascist groups. The political habits and economic outlook of social democracy are now shared by most electable politicians of Christian Democrat and conservative political parties in most European countries; as well as by most Liberal and Labour parties.

If the word means anything at all, it is roughly what most Americans might mean by a moderate "liberal", or the British by "Fabian". They are in favour of secular parliamentary democracy in managerial nation states, a welfare state funded by a mixture of tax and private saving, and private ownership of business constrained by government intervention for the common good.

Some form of this is the policy of every government in the world that is together enough to have a policy. In the USA (but not Europe) it is also called "liberalism", and even the Republicans support it in practice (if grudgingly and stingily). People on the left usually don't like calling this "socialism" at all.

Socialism

Socialism is basically a set of economic ideas formed in reaction to or opposition to capitalism,

There are different kinds of political platform called "socialism", which sometimes have little more in common than that they all involve either or both legal restrictions on what kind of property capitalists hold, or else communal direction of some enterprise or other. This doesn't have to mean nationalisation of industry - people calling themselves socialists have supported all sorts of arrangements including worker's co-operatives, consumer co-operatives, ownership of land by local governments (or neighbourhoods, or villages, or voluntary associations), distribution of land to private farmers or families, and private (rather than corporate) ownership of small businesses.

In the USA the word "socialism" is often little more than an insult, and when it has any referent at all it nearly always means the kind of large-scale state socialism that is generally thought to have gone out of fashion with the Soviet Union. Some Americans use "socialist" to mean any involvement of government in welfare, or in business regulation. Which can lead to occasional absurd arguments when someone like or Winston Churchill, or Richard Nixon, or Condoleeza Rice, or even (and I have seen this) Otto von Bismarck, is castigated as a "socialist".

Among some different things that have been called "socialist":

• Labour parties, organised around Trade Unions or workers control.
• Left socialism: Various kinds of non-Marxist radical socialisms or in favour of worker's control of industry, land redistribution, and decentralisation or complete dismantling of the State. In their more extreme forms these can be indistinguishable from socialist anarchism or "primitive communism" or Belloc's distributivism. If there is one thing they have in common it is that they are ideals rather than realities.
• State socialism (also called "state capitalism" by its left-wing detractors, and "liberalism" by its right-wing opponents).
• Social democracy: legal or traditional limits on the freedom of capitalists, combined with taxation to fund a larger or smaller welfare state. This is the default form of government on the world today.

Socialist Anarchism

Most anarchist movements in Europe have tended to associate more with the Left than the Right and most anarchists you actually meet would own up to being some form of Socialist Anarchist. They differ from many socialists in rejecting parliamentary processes and the bureaucratic trade unions and political parties that take part in them, in favour of local self-organisation and direct action. And they differ from anarcho-capitalists and libertarians in looking for the common ownership of property and supporting democratic or consensus decision-making, rather than leaving everything to the market.

The most commonly encountered from of Left Anarchism is perhaps Anarcho-syndicalism, (also known as Revolutionary Unionism, or Libertarian Communism) which grew out of revolutionary industrial trade unionism in Spain. It is the application of individualism and common ownership to economic organisation, imagining a society where industries are run by free unions of workers organised along democratic lines, and what larger organisation is needed is conducted by negotiation between delegates of unions and other autonomous communities.

State Socialism

The idea that the government takes over whole industries and runs them as a sort of branch of the state. This kind of regime was established by revolutionary Communist governments wherever they could manage it - originally as part of a supposed transition towards a future communism - and was the way most of eastern Europe was run until the 1990s and most of China still is.

Some western European countries approached 50% state control of industry in the 1950s and 60s, and Britain achieved over 95% in the second world war - in fact more of the British economy was in state hands than even than Germany. Even nowadays there is no functioning state that doesn't run it's military on these lines and few places that leave the police in private hands.

State socialism is also called "state capitalism" by its left-wing detractors. Western European apologists for left-wing socialism sometimes like to claim that the Soviet Union wasn't really socialist, but state-capitalist. On the other hand right-wingers often claim that all socialism is state socialism, or inevitably leads to it. In their eyes the liberal welfare state brings about nationalistation and state socialism which then degrades into to authoritarian communism. If this were true than socialists who think themselves libertarians would merely be self-deluded. At best ineffectual do-gooders, at worst the useful idiots of Communism.

Statism

"Statist" is term of abuse for anyone who thinks the State is more important or should have more coercive powers than you.

"State" itself is one of those terms we love to use but are loth to define. As I use it it means something between "government" and "establishment". A self-sustaining network of organisations that claims to itself the right of violence over some territory. What would be left of the government if you took all the politicians away.

Tory

A political party in the UK and some other Commonwealth countries. Officially the "Conservative and Unionist" party, but universally called "the Tories". In Britain, they have usually been the natural party of government. Anyone from Britain, Canada, and some other Commonwealth countries, who uses the word "conservative" is likely to have the Tories at the back of their mind, which is one of the main reasons that that word has different overtones for them that it is likely to for English-speakers from the USA.

They started back in the 18th century as the supporters of the King, the Established Church, the great landowners and aristocrats, and of strong central government; being in some ways the heirs to the Royalist side in the Civil Wars of the 17th century. They remain monarchist, nationalist, and centralist - though they have mostly abandoned (or been abandoned by) the Church of England. (It is a long time since there was an Archbishop of Canterbury politically to the right of the Prime Minister of the day - certainly 30 years, possibly 70). They are also nowadays an almost entirely English party, having more or less collapsed in Scotland and Wales.

Like any other mass-based political party, the Tories are an informal coalition. This (hostile) observer can see four main strands in the Tory party of today:

• What is left of the landed and aristocratic interest. They haven't run the Tory party since at least the 1960s, possibly since the 1910s, but they are influential within it. They also try to present the Tories as the rural, as opposed to urban, party. Their great issue of the moment (2002) is fox-hunting, which they are trying to blow up into a constitutional crisis.
• Nationalism and monarchism. Many - perhaps most - Tories have a gut instinct opposed to further European union. They are all supporters of royalty. This is perhaps the main difference between the Tories and the US Republicans. The Tory party has also been the natural political home of the sort of people who in Italy or Spain would be in fascist parties - one of the main services they have performed over the decades is preventing any far right party from gaining mass support in Britain.
• Strong support in England (though not Scotland and Wales) from what used to be called the "lower middle classes" and from people working in service industries. The Tories have been the traditional party of the self-employed, of plumbers and shopkeepers as well as of shop assistants and office workers. The Left used to disparage this as "the deferential vote". The Right will say that these are people who want to improve themselves and have broken away from traditional class-based politics.
• Pro-business politicians, in favour of lower taxes and "small government". These kind of people make most of the running in the Tory party at the moment, and have for decades. Their rhetoric is often quite radical, strikingly similar to some Libertarians. But somehow, whenever the Tories have been in power, the autocratic, centralising tendencies win out in the end. Thatcher's government never did reduce taxes noticeably - and they passed a great many rather unpleasant laws. They are also very opposed to strong local government, and to devolution.