Re: Two Mad Kings
William,
Well, the question you posed was not whether “Leftist” properly refers to “people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx,” but whether there was another short word that could do the same work just as well. If there is such a word then there are independent reasons (already explained) for preferring that other word to “Leftism” when what you mean is “state socialism” or “government economic planning.”
I am not sure that I understand your objection to using “state socialist” in particular. Doctrinaire Marxists famously believe that the “workers’ state” is a transitional phenomenon, which will become unnecessary with the emergence of communism proper. Does that make the label “state socialist” inappropriate for, say, V.I. Lenin? Well, in one sense yes, and in another sense no, since he advocated state socialism in the short term and a form of anarcho-communism in the long term. But whatever complications this may introduce into applying the label, it will introduce exactly the same complications for your usages of “Leftist” and “socialist,” since you’ve made those identical with state economic control, and it was advocacy for state economic control during a “transitional” period, but not after, that supposedly generated this problem.
As for the common usage of “Leftism,” you’re right that when most people use the term, they are referring to state economic control. When most people think of “free trade,” they are referring to IMF-financed state corporatism, and when most people think of “anarchy,” they are referring to riots or civil war. What Wittgenstein advised looking to was not just the unordered facts about usage, but the logic of the use, and if the usage is incoherent or confused, the thing to do is to disentangle the confusion, not to pander to it. In any given case, depending on the breaks, it might be better to disentangle it by abandoning the word for a different word, or it might be better to keep on using the word, so long as you use it more rigorously or precisely. One should often do the latter when there is something challenging and genuinely valuable embedded in the package-deal which it is important to emphasize or affirm. I hear that some Russian radical once made similar efforts to reclaim or redeem the package-deal term “capitalism” from advocates of government privilege for the business class. While I disagree with the application on this point, I see nothing wrong with the method.
Anticopyright.