Hi! I’m an anarcho-syndicalist. All I need now is a chant that uses the phrase “libertarian socialism” and I’ll be ready to march on Parliament Hill for less government control over our lives and a thoroughly planned economy. Or at least I would be ready to march, if Jean Chrétien wasn’t also an anarcho-syndicalist himself, according to the folks at the Political Compass.

The Political Compass (politicalcompass.org) is a tool for helping people locate themselves politically. You answer about five minutes’ worth of questions regarding your views on social and economic issues, and then the Political Compass calculates from your responses where you lie on a grid of political stances. In my case, I ended up deep in the lower left quadrant, evenly situated between Communism and Anarchism… hence, apparently, the term "anarcho-syndicalist".

The site was created out of a belief that the old political formula of left versus right, represented by a single horizontal line running from liberal, on the left end, to conservative, on the right end, was an inadequate model for determining people’s actual, real-life political beliefs. Stalin, for example was very leftist in terms of economy (planned economies and all that), but very rightist in terms of personal liberties (gulags, secret police and all that).

So, the Political Compass’ creators added a vertical line to the horizontal one, distinguishing between liberal and conservative economic policies along the horizontal axis, and authoritarian and libertarian social policies along the vertical axis. With this tool, they "believe that, in an age of diminishing ideology, a new generation in particular will get a better idea of where they stand politically - and the sort of political company they keep."

Whatever you may think of the idea of us living "in an age of diminishing ideology", personally I feel a little more comfortable with the notion I'm more likely to keep political company with the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela in the lower left quadrant. George W. Bush, like most other contemporary political leaders, resides in the upper right quadrant, combining a firm hand at the whip with a belief in the virtues of free markets and relatively unfettered capitalism.

As a PERC volunteer, I find the Political Compass useful in a couple of ways. First of all, it has helped reinforce for me that the PERC is a place where people’s sensibilities are likely to be similar to my own. It’s my understanding that a number of other volunteers have also done the Political Compass, and we've all landed in the same lower-left quadrant.

Obviously, a group called the Peace and Environment Resource Centre is not likely to be in favour of, say, invading the Ukraine or lobbying for the death penalty to be reinstated, but I find it never hurts to have further confirmation of this fact.

To this end, it has been brought up that the Political Compass could also serve as a useful tool for helping to orient new volunteers. If we were able to determine where most of the PERC volunteers fell on the Political Compass, then newcomers could use the Political Compass to determine for themselves that the PERC is a place where they would probably feel comfortable, or a place full of crazies whose political views are totally incomprehensible.

Obviously, the process of choosing to volunteer at the PERC is probably pretty self-selective in the first place, so that any new volunteers are already likely to be roughly aligned with the PERC’s goals before they even walk in the door. Any tool that makes the orientation process more efficient, however, is bound to benefit the PERC in the long run, and that, darn it, is what it’s all about.

Should you be interested in checking your own orientation on the Political Compass, and if you feel comfortable with sharing what quadrant you landed in, feel free to send us an e-mail at pvn@perc.ca.