This article is a bit longer so it’s divided in 3 parts:

• rant about current status
• historical overview
• new ideas from me

What do the terms “politically left” and “politically right” even mean? To many, they’re a way of group-think; To give a name to people who see the world differently than oneself and to create a target of hate and opposition.

Politicians have tried to turn these terms into an “empty signified” (link), i.e. a word without inherent meaning. Such "empty signified"s are ways of talking without actually saying anything. Politicians and also managers of companies like to use it all the time, because these speeches often look good to a passer-by without having to come up with an actual policy decision or meaningful arguments. They avoid headaches for the listeners and are at the same time something that people can get behind emotionally, i.e. to many people, identifying as “politically left” is an emotionally important term, even in the absence of any meaningful definition.

In many cases, “politically left” is defined as “anybody who opposes the political right” and the political right, in turn, is defined as “anybody who wants to kill people based on their color of skin”. According to my own field research, people who fit this definition of “politically right” are about as rare as six-legged unicorns on a rainy day in the desert. In other words, they practically don’t exist, and even when they do, they’re engineered examples that are artificially constructed to make attractive newspaper headlines to keep the people at each other’s throats.

In this article, i want to forget everything about these stupid definitions and come up with new, natural, meaningful definitions.

I will first clarify the historical origins of the term “right” and later “left”.

The term “(politically) right” seems to go back to the Romans who already had the word “dextera” to refer both to the right hand of the body and also to a “just, righteous” way of life. (Link)

It is noteworthy that the often-heard explanation that these terms go back to the french revolution is just false. According to that myth, it was about who sat on the left-hand or right-hand side of the president of the assembly hall. Surely these terms were used there, but they were not the origin, merely their modern re-interpretation. The terms themselves are much much older than that.

The term “(politically) left” goes back to Latin as well, as the word “sinister” could refer to both the left hand of the body but also to a wicked, sinful character. (Link)

Now, what might a meaningful, natural interpretation of these words mean?

Let’s use biology to start from something natural:

As you can see, the liver is on the right-hand side (of the human; you look at that human from the front so everything’s mirrored). The liver is one of the hardest-working metabolic organs of the body, which means it does a lot of processes and transformations to convert input substances into output substances.

I think it is meaningful to compare that to labor in human society. Notice the similarity of words. This is evident when you speak the two words “liver” and “labor” out aloud often enough; It’s even more evident in german where the liver is called “Leber”.

While labor transforms some input products into output products in some capitalist factory, the liver does the same in the human body. So there is a natural analogy there.

I propose to define the political “right” as a group or movement that dictates that people should work, in other words that we should be a work-based society. Typical proponents of that group are capitalist stakeholders who want to see their stock valuations go up; As companies are typically listed higher when they produce more output, a company will have a natural incentive to make the people in it work harder. That could mean doing more work per hour or working longer hours.

On the other hand, i propose to define the political “left” as work-less, in other terms, as people who think that our lifes shouldn’t be dictated by constant laboring, and that we should be able to live even when we’re not being productive elements of society. In other words, people who think that it’s not the point of living to be constantly hustling, but who enjoy their leisure, their time off. And who think that working hours should be reduced, and that work should be paced at a more relaxed, comfortable rhythm.