In certain instances—especially in the news media—far left has been associated with some forms of authoritarianism, anarchism, communism, and Marxism, or are characterized as groups that advocate for revolutionary socialism and related communist ideologies, or anti-capitalism and anti-globalization.
Far-left terrorism consists of extremist, militant, or insurgent groups that attempt to realize their ideals through political violence rather than using democratic processes.
[22] Communism is the belief that humanity should abandon class divisions in favor of a communist society organized around the needs and abilities of its citizens.
Modern communism is a form of revolutionary socialism based on support for the communist society described in the writing of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, known as Marxism.
[23][24][25] Offshoots of Marxism include Leninism, Marxism–Leninism (which was distinct from both of its eponymous ideologies), Maoism, Eurocommunism, anarchist communism, and others.
[32] Proponents of the horseshoe theory interpretation of the left–right political spectrum identify the far left and the far right as having more in common with each other as extremists than each of them has with centrists or moderates.
[40] In medieval Europe, some philosophers argued that Jesus believed in shared ownership of property and that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was contrary to his teachings.
[40] The term socialism first came into use in the early 19th century to describe the egalitarian ideas of redistribution promoted by writers like François-Noël Babeuf and John Thelwall.
Inspired by the French Revolution, these writers objected to the existence of significant wealth, and Babeuf advocated a dictatorship on behalf of the people that would destroy those who caused inequality.
[43][41] Socialism was recognized as a coherent philosophy in the 1830s with the publications of British reformer Robert Owen, who self-identified as socialist.
[49] Bakunin argued that peasants rather than the working class should lead a socialist revolution, and he popularized calls to violence among the anarchist movement.
[26] East Asian anarchism developed in the 1900s during the Russo-Japanese War, based on the ideas of Japanese writer Kōtoku Shūsui, who was in turn inspired by Peter Kropotkin.
[57] The state ideology developed during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921, setting the preservation of Bolshevik power as the highest priority to assure the building of socialism as well as seeking to spread communist revolution to other nations.
[59] By 1922, as Russian SFSR became one of the founding countries of Soviet Union, it responded to widespread hunger and poverty with the New Economic Policy, which restored market enterprise for smaller industries.
[62] This also entailed the Great Purge in the late 1930s, an interpretation of Lenin's revolutionary violence that saw hundreds of thousands of Stalin's opponents killed, often to be replaced by ambitious loyalists.
[66] As mass production became more common, the traditional style of labor that anarcho-syndicalists objected to ceased to exist, preventing any significant resurgence in the movement.
[37] Following Stalin's death, the workers of several Eastern European countries staged revolutions against communist rule, which were suppressed by the Soviet military.
[72] The New Left developed in Western Europe as an alternative to communism in the 1950s, taking positions on social issues and identity politics.
[73] The association of Marxism–Leninism with the Soviet Union also caused Eurocommunism to be developed as a democratic communist movement in Western Europe, but it only briefly saw electoral success in the 1970s.
[76] As with the Soviet Union, the newly formed People's Republic of China carried out purges of political enemies, killing millions of land owners.
[80] By the late 1970s, Maoism in China was replaced by the ideology of Deng Xiaoping, which restored the private sector and market pricing.
[91] In reaction to the neo-liberal turn of European social-democracy under the Third Way, populist left-wing parties and politicians emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a Eurosceptic, anti-globalist response to the Great Recession.
[8] While left-wing populist parties were in power in the 2010s, they were often forced to put aside their strong anti-neoliberalism and accept neoliberal policies, either proposed by their larger allies or imposed due to the international context.
[92][93][94] In Europe, the support for populist left politics comes from three overlapping groups: far-left subcultures, disaffected social democrats, and protest voters—those who are opposed to their country's European Union membership.
Two clear distinctions emerge: first, "education [...] tends to statistically significantly lower chances of voting for radical right but increases the chance of voting radical left"; and second, radical-left voters tend not to share the social nationalism of the radical-right, instead having a socio-tropic, or other-regarding, bias based on the ideological concern for economic egalitarianism.