What counts as radical in the context of politics, not just feminism?

Just thinking a bit more about this. I think the kind of radicalism which says 'we're going to smash the existing system and rebuild the world anew NOW' is always pretty questionable. That kind of 'Year Zero' paradigm shift. If you think of people who have done that in history the results have been pretty dire. The French Revolutionaries, The Khmer Rouge, the Leninists have all created equally oppressive or even worse regimes to the ones they overturned. Even if you think of less extreme examples the results have not been good. Margaret Thatcher was a radical in that she completely bulldozed the post-war consensus and imposed a regime that caused massive problems - many of which we're still living with today. Similarly Blair and Bush's radical attempts to overthrow Middle Easter dictatorships and rebuild them as liberal democracies were calamitous.

All the best kind of change in history has happened quite incrementally and through dialogue and gradual reform. Of course sometimes life under autocratic regimes is so intolerable that radical solutions are necessary. But even then those revolutions often lead from the frying pan into the fire. Look at Libya. And how much better life is in Russia since the wall came down is debatable.

Lots of people say now they want to overthrow the capitalist system. But you can't do that. The capitalist system is not a discrete entity, but a near global economic culture. You can just address bits of it at a time, and slowly push towards what is hopefully a more just economic system. But that process is partly organic too. The capitalist system will eventually just auto-destruct by itself as a result of its own internal contradictions - just like the communist system did.

I understood the same as speak but was admonished for suggesting that this implied radical feminists were seeking dramatic or far reaching societal changes that were of any business to anyone other than women.

Well, paternity leave already exists, albeit to a very limited degree. So extending it to longer and making it "use it or lose it" is a big change to an existing policy. So not radical using the first definition of changes from the root up. But a big change, so radical in the common usage sense.

Rather than talking about capping top exec pay they should be talk8ng about raising the pay if the lowest workers to the 20x ratio.

Hmm..I believe in just imposing higher levels of taxation on the rich. If you want to pay people more at the bottom, you're going to have to tax people at the top.

A 60p top rate of tax makes much more sense than a cap.

Hmm. I don't think the right are particularly radical.

Well, they're radical in a very retrogressive way. Obviously not a good way. I suppose could Nazism was radical, but in the monstrous way imaginable.

We should remember that ideological radicalism - whether left or right - can be very dangerous. People who can do terrible things in the name of radical ideologies.

As a radical feminist, I think the issue here is two different uses of the word radical. So, radical feminism to me goes back to the latin radix (meaning root of a plant. Blame my O-level english teacher who kept telling us that 'radix mallorum est cupiditas' from Chaucer means that greed is the root of all evil.).......

Anyway, I understand radical feminism as meaning that male supremacy etc is at the root of society throughout history, and probably a lot of prehistory as well.

Hence something that means we need to redesign from the root to counter it, that a series of legislative changes to the existing system probably won't cut the mustard. Thinking twigs here.........

Hence why we have the confusion, I think, between 'radical' meaning root as above, and 'radical' change meaning just big (or shocking) change.
So 'radical' just meaning big change is kind of like 'quantum leap' -- strictly speaking misapplied (since quantum leaps are actually the smallest possible leaps you can have), but so frequently used now that we just have to live with the dual meanings. And then just guess which one someone meant when they used the word ambiguously.

Plus I'll be unhelpful and just stick to radical feminism, that's hard enough at the moment without getting into what other 'radical politics' is supposed to mean, and whether or not someone is being correctly radical .

My understanding is that radical means changes at the root, so dismantling existing frameworks and creating new ones. So extending paternity leave isn't a radical change, even if it is a big step away from the current position.

I think that many people, me included, are very used to radical meaning a general "big change" rather than a specific meaning of removing existing systems and developing better replacements.

I don't think Corbyns proposal is radical, I think it's a big change but not radical in its actual nature ifyswim!

I think radical these days anything which goes against the tenets of neoliberalism and open markets - because they've been hegemonic for about thirty years now.

So challenging that system would mean challenging the 'existing legal frameworks' that support it. Yes, some people on the radical left have tried to challenge it within existing frameworks - like Syriza in Greece and Sanders in America - but they have failed.

What is interesting though is that the people considered radical at the moment are not on the far left, but the far right. European nationalists like Farage, Le Pen and Wilders are considered insurgents against global capitalism, as is Donald Trump. But curiously when you look at their economic policies you see that they really represent a new species of neoliberalism. Donald Trump's cabinet is made up of corporatists, hedge fund managers and investment bankers. I think one appointee is this hedge fund guy who has made billions from the same failing steel industry that Trump is supposed to be saving. Of course the rust belt people he claims to represent are just going to get screwed over even more.

Imo, what has happened is that capitalism is fucking up - or at least the market capitalism that we've had in the West for the past three hundred years. And while the populist right have got a radical response to this (blame migrants, Muslims, cuddle up to Putin and Assad and make lots of offensive comments about groups favoured by liberals, basically), the left are stumped. They have no idea what kind of system to argue for in its place.

So while I think Corbyn and people are right to put forward these quite radical and much needed policies (like a wage cap, for a universal living wage), they are not coming up with policies which address core problems like automation. We cannot go back to the kind of mixed economies with full employment that existed in the post-war era. The left need to think of something else.

So I would say no one much is being particularly radical on the left at the moment. Everyone is just fumbling around, not quite sure what to do while the world goes wrong, and proposing policies which are essentially sticking plasters rather than structural correctives.

Worryingly the only people who do have a radical agenda with electoral viability are crypto-fascists. This could be the beginning of another fascist Europe. Or it could be the start of a new form of social democracy. Who knows.