Left-wing politics describes the range ofpolitical ideologies that support and seek to achievesocial equality andegalitarianism, often in opposition tosocial hierarchy as a whole[1][2][3][4] or certain social hierarchies.[5] Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished,[3] through radical means that change the nature of the society they are implemented in.[5] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, supporters of left-wing politics "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated."[6]
Within theleft–right political spectrum,Left andRight were coined during theFrench Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in the FrenchNational Assembly. Those who sat on the left generally opposed theAncien Régime and theBourbonmonarchy and supported the Revolution, the creation of ademocratic republic and thesecularisation of society[7] while those on the right were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Ancien Régime. Usage of the termLeft became more prominent after the restoration of the French monarchy in 1815, when it was applied to theIndependents.[8] The wordwing was first appended to Left and Right in the late 19th century, usually with disparaging intent, andleft-wing was applied to those who were unorthodox in their religious or political views.
Left-leaning economic beliefs range fromKeynesian economics and thewelfare state throughindustrial democracy and thesocial market to thenationalization of the economy andcentral planning,[17] to theanarcho-syndicalist advocacy of a council-based and self-managedanarchist communism. During theIndustrial Revolution, leftists supportedtrade unions. At the beginning of the 20th century, many leftists advocated strong government intervention in the economy.[18] Leftists continue to criticize the perceived exploitative nature ofglobalization, the "race to the bottom" and unjust lay-offs and exploitation of workers. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the belief that the government (ruling in accordance with the interests of the people) ought to be directly involved in the day-to-day workings of an economy declined in popularity amongst thecentre-left, especiallysocial democrats who adopted theThird Way. Left-wing politics are typically associated with popular or state control of major political and economic institutions.[19]
Other leftists believe inMarxian economics, named after the economic theories ofKarl Marx. Some distinguish Marx's economic theories from his political philosophy, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the economy is independent of his advocacy ofrevolutionary socialism or his belief in the inevitability of aproletarian revolution.[20][21] Marxian economics do not exclusively rely on Marx and draw from a range of Marxist and non-Marxist sources. Thedictatorship of the proletariat andworkers' state are terms used by some Marxists, particularlyLeninists andMarxist–Leninists, to describe what they see as a temporary state between thecapitaliststate of affairs and acommunist society. Marx defined the proletariat as salaried workers, in contrast to thelumpenproletariat, who he defined as the outcasts of society such as beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes.[22] The political relevance of farmers has divided the left. InDas Kapital, Marx scarcely mentioned the subject.[23]Mikhail Bakunin thought thelumpenproletariat was a revolutionary class, whileMao Zedong believed that it would be rural peasants, not urban workers, who would bring about theproletarian revolution.
One of the foremost left-wing advocates was Thomas Paine, one of the first individuals sinceleft andright became political terms to describe the collective human ownership of the world which he speaks of in Agrarian Justice.[27] As such, most of left-wing thought and literature regarding environmentalism stems from this duty of ownership and the aforementioned form of cooperative ownership means that humanity must take care of the Earth. This principle is reflected in much of the historical left-wing thought and literature that came afterwards, although there were disagreements about what this entailed. Both Karl Marx and the early socialist philosopher and scholarWilliam Morris arguably had a concern for environmental matters.[28][29][30][31] According to Marx, "[e]ven an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations".[28][32] Following the Russian Revolution, environmental scientists such as revolutionaryAlexander Bogdanov and theProletkult organisation made efforts to incorporate environmentalism into Bolshevism and "integrate production with natural laws and limits" in the first decade ofSoviet rule, beforeJoseph Stalin attacked ecologists and the science of ecology, purged environmentalists and promoted thepseudoscience ofTrofim Lysenko during his rule up until his death in 1953.[33][34][35] Similarly,Mao Zedong rejected environmentalism and believed that based on the laws of historical materialism, all of nature must be put into the service of revolution.[36]
From the 1970s onwards, environmentalism became an increasing concern of the left, with social movements and several unions campaigning on environmental issues and causes. In Australia, the left-wingBuilders Labourers Federation, led by the communist Jack Mundy, united with environmentalists to placegreen bans on environmentally destructive development projects.[37] Several segments of the socialist and Marxist left consciously merged environmentalism and anti-capitalism into aneco-socialist ideology.[38]Barry Commoner articulated a left-wing response toThe Limits to Growth model that predicted catastrophicresource depletion and spurred environmentalism, postulating that capitalist technologies were the key cause responsible for environmental degradation, as opposed to human population pressures.[39] Environmental degradation can be seen as a class or equity issue, as environmental destruction disproportionately affects poorer communities and countries.[40]
Global warming was the cover story of this 2007 issue of theMs. magazine.
Inclimate change mitigation, the Left is also divided over how to effectively and equitably reducecarbon emissions as the center-left often advocates a reliance on market measures such asemissions trading and acarbon tax while those further to the left support direct government regulation and intervention in the form of aGreen New Deal, either alongside or instead of market mechanisms.[49][50][51]
Nationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-nationalism
The question ofnationality,imperialism andnationalism has been a central feature of political debates on the Left. During the French Revolution, nationalism was a key policy of the Republican Left.[52] The Republican Left advocated forcivic nationalism[7] and argued that the nation is a "daily plebiscite" formed by the subjective "will to live together". Related torevanchism, the belligerent will to take revenge against Germany and retake control ofAlsace-Lorraine, nationalism was sometimes opposed toimperialism. In the 1880s, there was a debate between leftists such as theRadicalGeorges Clemenceau, theSocialistJean Jaurès and the nationalistMaurice Barrès, who argued that colonialism diverted France from liberating the "blue line of theVosges", in reference to Alsace-Lorraine; and the "colonial lobby" such asJules Ferry of theModerate Republicans,Léon Gambetta of theRepublicans andEugène Etienne, the president of the Parliamentary Colonial Group. After theantisemiticDreyfus Affair in which officerAlfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of sedition and exiled to a penal colony in 1894 before being exonerated in 1906, nationalism in the form ofBoulangism increasingly became associated with the far-right.[53]
TheMarxistsocial class theory ofproletarian internationalism asserts that members of theworking class should act in solidarity with working people in other countries in pursuit of a commonclass interest, rather than only focusing on their own countries. Proletarian internationalism is summed up in the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!", the last line ofThe Communist Manifesto. Union members had learned that more members meant more bargaining power. Taken to an international level, leftists argued that workers should act in solidarity with the international proletariat in order to further increase the power of the working class. Proletarian internationalism saw itself as a deterrent against war and international conflicts, because people with a common interest are less likely to take up arms against one another, instead focusing on fighting thebourgeoisie as theruling class. According to Marxist theory, theantonym of proletarian internationalism isbourgeois nationalism. Some Marxists, together with others on the left, viewnationalism,[54]racism[55] (including antisemitism)[56] andreligion asdivide and conquer tactics used by the ruling classes to prevent theworking class from uniting against them in solidarity with one another. Left-wing movements have often taken up anti-imperialist positions. Anarchism has developed a critique of nationalism that focuses on nationalism's role in justifying and consolidating state power and domination. Through its unifying goal, nationalism strives forcentralisation (both in specific territories and in a ruling elite of individuals) while it prepares a population for capitalist exploitation. Within anarchism, this subject has been extensively discussed byRudolf Rocker in his book titledNationalism and Culture and by the works ofFredy Perlman such asAgainst His-Story, Against Leviathan andThe Continuing Appeal of Nationalism.[57]
The failure of revolutions inGermany andHungary in the 1918–1920 years endedBolshevik hopes for an imminentworld revolution and led to the promotion of the doctrine ofsocialism in one country byJoseph Stalin. In the first edition of his book titledOsnovy Leninizma (Foundations of Leninism, 1924), Stalin argued that revolution in one country is insufficient. By the end of that year in the second edition of the book, he argued that the "proletariat can and must build the socialist society in one country". In April 1925,Nikolai Bukharin elaborated on the issue in his brochure titledCan We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat?, whose position was adopted as state policy after Stalin's January 1926 article titledOn the Issues of Leninism (К вопросам ленинизма) was published. This idea was opposed byLeon Trotsky and his supporters, who declared the need for an international "permanent revolution" and condemned Stalin for betraying the goals and ideals of the socialist revolution. VariousFourth Internationalist groups around the world who describe themselves asTrotskyist see themselves as standing in this tradition whileMaoist China formally supported the theory of socialism in one country.
The originalFrench Left was firmlyanti-clerical, strongly opposing the influence of theRoman Catholic Church and supportingatheism and theseparation of church and state, ushering in a policy known aslaïcité.[7]Karl Marx asserted that "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is theopium of the people".[59] In Soviet Russia, theBolsheviks underVladimir Lenin originally embraced an ideological principle which professed that all religion would eventually atrophy and resolved to eradicate organizedChristianity and other religious institutions. In 1918, 10Russian Orthodox hierarchs were summarily executed by a firing squad, and children were deprived of any religious education outside of the home.[60]
In the late 19th century, theProtestant Social Gospel movement arose in the United States which integratedprogressive andsocialist thought withChristianity through faith-based social activism. Other left-wing religious movements include Buddhist socialism, Jewish socialism and Islamic socialism. There have been alliances between the left and anti-warMuslims, such as theRespect Party and theStop the War Coalition in Britain. In France, the left has been divided over moves to ban thehijab from schools, with some leftists supporting a ban based on the separation of church and state in accordance with the principle oflaïcité and other leftists opposing the prohibition based on personal and religious freedom.
Various counterculture and anti-war movements in the 1960s and 1970s were associated with the New Left. Unlike the earlier leftist focus onlabour union activism and a proletarian revolution, the New Left instead adopted a broader definition of political activism commonly calledsocial activism. The New Left in the United States is associated with thehippie movement, mass protest movements on school campuses and a broadening of focus from protestingclass-based oppression to include issues such asgender,race andsexual orientation. The British New Left was an intellectually driven movement which attempted to correct the perceived errors of theOld Left. The New Left opposed prevailing authoritarian structures in society which it designated as "The Establishment" and became known as the "Anti-Establishment". The New Left did not seek to recruit industrial workers en masse, but instead concentrated on a social activist approach to organization, convinced that they could be the source for a better kind ofsocial revolution. This view has been criticized by severalMarxists, especiallyTrotskyists, who characterized this approach as "substitutionism" which they described as a misguided and non-Marxist belief that other groups in society could "substitute" for and "replace" the revolutionary agency of the working class.[64][65]
Thewomen's liberation movement is closely connected to the New Left and othernew social movements which openly challenged the orthodoxies of the Old Left. Socialist feminism as exemplified by theFreedom Socialist Party andRadical Women andMarxist feminism, spearheaded bySelma James, saw themselves as a part of the Left that challenges male-dominated andsexist structures within the Left. The connection between left-wing ideologies and the struggle for LGBTQ rights also has an important history. Prominent socialists who were involved in early struggles for LGBTQ rights includeEdward Carpenter,Oscar Wilde,Harry Hay,Bayard Rustin andDaniel Guérin, among others. The New Left is also strongly supportive of LGBTQ rights and liberation, having been instrumental in the founding of theLGBTQ rights movement in the aftermath of theStonewall Riots of 1969. Contemporary leftist activists and socialist countries such as Cuba are actively supportive of LGBTQ+ people and are involved in the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and equality.
In politics, the termLeft derives from theFrench Revolution as the political groups opposed to the royal veto privilege (Montagnard andJacobin deputies from theThird Estate) generally sat to the left of the presiding member's chair in parliament while the ones in favour of the royal veto privilege sat on its right.[73] That habit began in the original FrenchNational Assembly. Throughout the 19th century, the main line dividingLeft and Right was between supporters of the Frenchrepublic and those of themonarchy's privileges.[7]: 2 TheJune Days uprising during theSecond Republic was an attempt by the Left to re-assert itself after the1848 Revolution, but only a small portion of the population supported this.
During the 20th century, war resulted in a dramatic intensification of the pace of social changes, and was a crucial catalyst for the growth ofleft-wing politics.[82] Since the Right was populist, both in theWestern and theEastern Bloc, anything viewed as avant-garde art was called leftist across Europe, thus the identification of Picasso'sGuernica as "leftist" in Europe[83][page needed] and the condemnation of the Russian composerShostakovich's opera (The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District) inPravda as follows: "Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural, human music".[84][page needed]
In China, the termChinese New Left denotes those who oppose theeconomic reforms enacted byDeng Xiaoping in the 1980s and 1990s, favour instead the restoration of Maoist policies and the immediate transition to a socialist economy.[92] In theWestern world, the termNew Left is used for social and cultural politics.
In the United Kingdom during the 1980s, the termhard left was applied to supporters ofTony Benn such as theCampaign Group and those involved in theLondon Labour Briefing newspaper as well as Trotskyist groups such asMilitant and theAlliance for Workers' Liberty.[93] In the same period, the termsoft left was applied to supporters of the BritishLabour Party who were perceived to be more moderate and closer to the centre, acceptingKeynesianism. Under the leadership ofTony Blair andGordon Brown, the Labour Party adopted theThird Way and rebranded itself asNew Labour in order to promote the notion that it was less left-wing than it had been in the past to accommodate theneoliberal trend arising since the 1970s with thedisplacement of Keynesianism andpost-war social democracy. One of the first actions ofEd Miliband, the Labour Party leader who succeeded Blair and Brown, was the rejection of the New Labour label and a promise to abandon the Third Way and turn back to the left. However, Labour's voting record in theHouse of Commons from 2010 to 2015 indicated that the Labour Party under Miliband had maintained the same distance from the left as it did under Blair.[94][95] In contrast, the election ofJeremy Corbyn as the Labour Party leader was viewed by scholars and political commentators as Labour turning back toward its more classical socialist roots, rejecting neoliberalism and the Third Way whilst supporting ademocratic socialist society and an end toausterity measures.
^Gauchet, Marcel (1996). "Right and Left". In Nora, Pierre (ed.).Realms of memory: conflicts and divisions. p. 248.
^Maass, Alan;Zinn, Howard (2010).The Case for Socialism (Revised ed.).Haymarket Books. p. 164.ISBN978-1608460731.TheInternational Socialist Review is one of the best left-wing journals around...
^Schmidt, Michael;Van der Walt, Lucien (2009).Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. Counter-Power. Vol. 1.AK Press. p. 128.ISBN978-1-904859-16-1.[...] anarchism is a coherent intellectual and political current dating back to the 1860s and the First International, and part of the labour and left tradition.
^Revel, Jean Francois (2009).Last Exit to Utopia. Encounter Books. p. 24.ISBN978-1594032646.In the United States, the word liberal is often used to describe the left wing of the Democratic party.
^Barry, John (2002).International Encyclopedia of Environmental Politics.Taylor & Francis.ISBN978-0415202855.All surveys confirm that environmental concern is associated with green voting...[I]n subsequent European elections, green voters have tended to be more left-leaning...the party is capable of motivating its core supporters as well as other environmentally minded voters of predominantly left-wing persuasion...
^Arnold, N. Scott (2009).Imposing values: an essay on liberalism and regulation. Florence:Oxford University Press. p. 3.ISBN978-0-495-50112-1.Modern liberalism occupies the left-of-center in the traditional political spectrum and is represented by the Democratic Party in the United States, the Labor Party in the United Kingdom, and the mainstream Left (including some nominally socialist parties) in other advanced democratic societies.
^Gare, A. (1996). "Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken". In Benton, E. (ed.).The Greening of Marxism. New York:Guilford Press. pp. 111–128.ISBN978-1572301184.
^Doyle, William (2002).The Oxford History of the French Revolution (2nd ed.). Oxford:Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-925298-5.An exuberant, uncompromising nationalism lay behind France's revolutionary expansion in the 1790s...", "The message of the French Revolution was that the people are sovereign; and in the two centuries since it was first proclaimed, it has conquered the world.
^Winock, Michel (1993).Histoire de l'extrême droite en France [History of the extreme right in France] (in French).
^Kolko 1994, p. xvii–xviii: "War in this century became an essential precondition for the emergence of a numerically powerful Left, moving it from the margins to the very center of European politics during 1917–18 and of all world affairs after 1941".
^el-Ojeili, Chamsy; Taylor, Dylan (September 2018). Cheng, Enfu; Schweickart, David; Andreani, Tony (eds.). "The Revaluation of All Values: Extremism, The Ultra-Left, and Revolutionary Anthropology".International Critical Thought.8 (3).Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences:410–425.doi:10.1080/21598282.2018.1506262.eISSN2159-8312.ISSN2159-8282.S2CID158719628.
^McClosky, Herbert; Chong, Dennis (July 1985)."Similarities and Differences Between Left-Wing and Right-Wing Radicals".British Journal of Political Science.15 (3):329–363.doi:10.1017/S0007123400004221.ISSN0007-1234.S2CID154330828.Once one adjusts for superficial differences, Shils contended, communists and other radicals of the far left resemble right-wing radicals in zealotry, susceptibility to Manichean interpretations of human events, implacable hatred of opponents, intolerance toward dissenters and deviants, and an inclination to view public affairs as the outcome of conspiracies and secret plots.
^Chen, Cheng; Lee, Ji-Yong (1 December 2007)."Making sense of North Korea: "National Stalinism" in comparative-historical perspective".Communist and Post-Communist Studies.40 (4):459–475.doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2007.10.003.ISSN0967-067X.the role of strong anti-liberal ideology that combined both far left and far right nationalist elements was highly significant in sustaining the regime and therefore should not be underestimated...the DPRK regime was able to hold on to power by using imagined and real external threats, such as the nuclear and missile crises, to justify continuing domestic repression and reinforce its nationalist claims
