The Left Values test seems highly biased/flawed to me. It felt like it was written by from a specifically Marxist (possibly Leninist) viewpoints, including an over-reliance on idealism vs. scientific socialism - which is an extremely flawed and inaccurate representation of the socialist philosophers branded as such, especially with the added slur "Utopian".
(This kind of baseline misinformation usually comes from people reading Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", which was a part of a hit-piece called "Anti-Dühring" where the goal was to use any means to destroy Dühring and get all German Socialists to rally behind the Social Democrats - essentially the movement was splitting and he deployed lies, misrepresentation and historical revisionism to show Marxism/SPD as the only path - you can argue it was a noble goal perhaps, but the result is a lot of extremely disinformed Socialists: The worst being the claim that Marx discovered both "Scientific Socialism" and "Surplus Labor Value", the former being coined by Proudhon, but you can even read Hodgskin, who was arguably the first Socialist economist (at least the first to publish a major economic work), for thorough materialist analysis based on scientific and historical data, the latter being a principle dating back to "Classical Economics", and thoroughly developed and explored by Socialists, including the previously mentioned Hodgskin and Proudhon, before Marx).
Another extreme oversight, and I realize that they like counter-points, but they essentially erased the co-operative/market socialist strategy (which is the strategy with the most vocal focus right now, was almost entirely erased), hell they didn't even have "market" as one of the 14 measuring points. In fact there is
not a single question about co-ops and
not a single question about markets.
In fact there is only one question related to ownership, which asks if businesses like factories should be socially owned ...
In other words it does not even see if you support worker ownership, or if you want a mixed model. Anarcho-Communists should also be upset, communes are not mentioned once, and in terms of economic management we see a few questions on centralism, and then an extremely broad one related to trade unions and worker councils (which literally encompasses everything from syndicates, to guilds to soviets). There was
not even a question related to the Syndicalist general strike .... Yet "union" is one of the key measuring points.
More stunning,
there were no questions related to why/how capitalism is problematic (or is worse than X alternative), which is one of the easiest ways of distinguishing the base frameworks
There are also some weird obfuscations such as "A highly centralized planned economy is not socialism but rather state capitalism." This is not what is called State Capitalism, the term is generally used to describe State Managed Capitalism or the State owning the means of production as opposed to the people (i.e. the state is not democratic). There is obviously a theoretical difference between State Capitalism and State Socialism, and it seems they don't even know/understand what the critiques of "Leninist" are.
Essentially, this poll reads like someone entirely ignorant of general Leftist theory and history, and it shows in the results as well.
Anyways, I got "Centrist Marxism", which I find pretty darn funny, but then again, these were the only other choices ...
Council Communism
Orthodox Marxism
Anarcho-Communism
Left-Wing Nationalism
Democratic Socialism
Market Anarchism
Eco-Marxism
Eco-Anarchism
Left Communism
Social Democracy
Utopian Socialism
Marxism-Leninism
So yeah ... not impressed.
Anyways, results:
