Left-wing politics
[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.
[8] The word wing was first appended to Left and Right in the late 19th century, usually with disparaging intent, and left-wing was applied to those who were unorthodox in their religious or political views.
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 the centre-left, especially social democrats who adopted the Third Way.
[23] Mikhail Bakunin thought the lumpenproletariat was a revolutionary class, while Mao Zedong believed that it would be rural peasants, not urban workers, who would bring about the proletarian revolution.
[5] One of the foremost left-wing advocates was Thomas Paine, one of the first individuals since left and right became political terms to describe the collective human ownership of the world which he speaks of in Agrarian Justice.
[28][32] Following the Russian Revolution, environmental scientists such as revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov and the Proletkult organisation made efforts to incorporate environmentalism into Bolshevism and "integrate production with natural laws and limits" in the first decade of Soviet rule, before Joseph Stalin attacked ecologists and the science of ecology, purged environmentalists and promoted the pseudoscience of Trofim 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.
In Australia, the left-wing Builders Labourers Federation, led by the communist Jack Mundy, united with environmentalists to place green bans on environmentally destructive development projects.
Its members held several influential positions within the party, including both the former Principal Speakers Siân Berry and Derek Wall, himself an eco-socialist and Marxist academic.
James Hansen, Noam Chomsky, Raj Patel, Naomi Klein, The Yes Men and Dennis Kucinich hold similar views.
[43][44][45][46][47][48] In climate change mitigation, the Left is also divided over how to effectively and equitably reduce carbon emissions as the center-left often advocates a reliance on market measures such as emissions trading and a carbon tax while those further to the left support direct government regulation and intervention in the form of a Green New Deal, either alongside or instead of market mechanisms.
Through its unifying goal, nationalism strives for centralisation (both in specific territories and in a ruling elite of individuals) while it prepares a population for capitalist exploitation.
Various Fourth Internationalist groups around the world who describe themselves as Trotskyist see themselves as standing in this tradition while Maoist China formally supported the theory of socialism in one country.
Several scholars have linked this form of left-wing nationalism to the pressure generated by economic integration with other countries, often encouraged by neoliberal free trade agreements.
[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.
[59] In Soviet Russia, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin originally embraced an ideological principle which professed that all religion would eventually atrophy and resolved to eradicate organized Christianity and other religious institutions.
Early utopian socialist thinkers such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and the Comte de Saint-Simon based their theories of socialism upon Christian principles.
Other common leftist concerns such as pacifism, social justice, racial equality, human rights and the rejection of capitalism and excessive wealth can be found in the Bible.
This view has been criticized by several Marxists, especially Trotskyists, 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.
[66] However, Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg,[67] Clara Zetkin,[68][69] and Alexandra Kollontai,[70][71] who are supporters of radical social equality for women and have rejected and opposed liberal feminism because they considered it to be a capitalist bourgeois ideology.
Prominent socialists who were involved in early struggles for LGBTQ rights include Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, Harry Hay, Bayard Rustin and Daniel Guérin, among others.
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.
After Napoleon III's 1851 coup and the subsequent establishment of the Second Empire, Marxism began to rival radical republicanism and utopian socialism as a force within left-wing politics.
The influential Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published amidst the wave of revolutions of 1848 across Europe, asserted that all of human history is defined by class struggle.
They predicted that a proletarian revolution would eventually overthrow bourgeois capitalism and create a stateless, moneyless and classless communist society.
[78][79][80][full citation needed][81] During the 20th century, war resulted in a dramatic intensification of the pace of social changes, and was a crucial catalyst for the growth of left-wing politics.
[82] Since the Right was populist, both in the Western and the Eastern Bloc, anything viewed as avant-garde art was called leftist across Europe, thus the identification of Picasso's Guernica as "leftist" in Europe[83][page needed] and the condemnation of the Russian composer Shostakovich's opera (The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District) in Pravda as follows: "Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural, human music".
[85] The United States Department of Homeland Security defines "left-wing extremism" as groups that "seek to bring about change through violent revolution, rather than through established political processes".
[87][88][89][90][91] In China, the term Chinese New Left denotes those who oppose the economic reforms enacted by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and 1990s, favour instead the restoration of Maoist policies and the immediate transition to a socialist economy.
[93] In the same period, the term soft left was applied to supporters of the British Labour Party who were perceived to be more moderate and closer to the centre, accepting Keynesianism.
