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by ameister14
4242 days ago
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That's true, but you didn't mention that prior to distributing economic power equally, leftists must first centralize it. Further, as a means of administrating the continued equitable distribution of monies, political power is gathered in institutions. That's not the only reason, though; many leftists do not actually believe in distributing political power at all. The position that the state has a complete monopoly on the use of force is an example of this. |
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I didn't mention lots of practical issues that might occur in implementing left or libertarian views. But that certainly isn't a requirement of left ideology in general, though there are specific left viewpoints that favor some form of consolidation as a means to distribution (left libertarians, which are an important and growing group, clearly do not generally favor consolidation even as an instrumental means to distribution.)
> That's not the only reason, though; many leftists do not actually believe in distributing political power at all.
There's certainly leftists who believe that liberalism through the establishment of democratic accountability of the State to the citizenry has already, in many cases, acheived the desirable distribution of formal political power so that the focus should not longer be on that, such that further distribution of such power is no longer desirable and may be counterproductive, sure. There are also leftists who don't believe that.
(The same is true, mutatis mutandis, with libertarians vis-a-vis economic power by way of its divorce from control by formal political power in many modern states.)
> The position that the state has a complete monopoly on the use of force is an example of this.
The position that the State is defined as an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a concept which predates the existence of leftism as a distinct offshoot of classical liberalism (and probably predates classical liberalism as well.) This definition of what the State is is not an example of anything in any ideology, since its not a value statement.
Insofar as some leftists (though neither hardcore left libertarians nor communists in the vein of Marx and Engels, both of whom believe in the ultimate abolition of the State) hold that the existence of a State as so defined is desirable, this indicates that there are limits to how much those leftists believe that centralized political power should be limited by reducing the power of institutions instead of distributing control over institutions, but even that is different from demonstrating an absence of a belief in "distributing political power at all".