But you end up grouping me--someone who is pro-life and pro guns--as farther to the left than Hillary Clinton.

Pro-guns is technically a viewpoint that ends up on both sides because it can be framed in terms of two different social hierarchies. Marxists have always been highly pro-gun.

You have to completely abandon the way that normal people use the term to get to your definitions of them.

The way people use the terms in the US fails to line up with the history of these movements. Academia has always used the terms in a manner similar to what I describe.

I'm not saying that the concept you have come up with is bad. I'm saying that there isn't any reason to call these categories that you've come up with "left" or "right."

This is fair. The names of terms are arbitrary, but the way I'm using the terms is historical. The only place it isn't is in the US where far-left never got a foothold. If we go back to the origin of the terms, we can see the right was the monarchists and the left were those that opposed that social hierarchy.

It's not what anyone else means. If you try to use your version with people, it causes nothing but confusion.

But it also serves as an education point to illustrate that people who talk about class exploitation, income inequality, etc don't necessarily have to want to use the state to solve these problems and solve them through other means (mutual aid networks). Most people are stuck in the overton window given to them by mainstream discourse and have never explored radical politics.

You can't take the labels that people have assigned, where they have chosen one person to be left and another to be right, and figure out some method to the madness. You can't boil down the usage into a definition that will categorize people in the way that the normal usage does.

I think our point of disagreement comes from what is considered normal usage. In the rest of the world besides the US, the terms are used in the manner I describe.

Concepts like these aren't used to categorize particulars. They're used as social bludgeons. They're means of signalling and attacking. That's all. That's what people want them to be. If I'm on the left and I don't like you, guess what? You're on the right, and I get to group you with all those nasty people on the right. I don't give a damn if it doesn't make any sense. It makes emotional sense. The human brain likes it. That's how it is with a lot of things. We're logical machines, but only in some ways.

This is fair. People on the left throw around liberal at anyone who isn't left enough. I've heard Kevin Carson be called a liberal lmao. Unfortunately, group signaling is necessary to organize a movement.