Left-wing politics
Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. In politics, the term Left derives from the French Revolution. The word wing was first appended to Left and Right in the late 19th century, usually with disparaging intent.
About Left-wing politics in brief
Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. In politics, the term Left derives from the French Revolution as the political groups opposed to the royal veto privilege generally sat to the left of the presiding member’s chair in parliament. The word wing was first appended to Left and Right in the late 19th century, usually with disparaging intent. Since then, left-wing has been applied to a broad range of movements, including the civil rights movement, feminist movement, LGBT rights movement and anti-war movement as well as a wide range of political parties. In Europe, the Eastern avant-garde was called leftist across Europe, thus identification of Picasso’s Guernica as leftist and condemnation of the Russian composer Shostakovich’s opera in Pravda. The following positions are typically associated with left- wing politics, from anarcho-syndicalist advocacy of a council-based self-managed communism to Keynesian economic beliefs from industrial democracy and welfare state through industrial and welfare economics. In the U.S., leftists such as social liberals, progressives and trade unionists were influenced by the works of Thomas Paine, who introduced the concept of asset-based egalitarianism which theorises that social equality is possible by a redistribution of resources. After the Reconstruction era in the aftermath of the American Civil War, the phrase \”the Left\” was used to describe those who supported trade unions, the civilrights movement and the anti- war movement. More recently, left and right-wing have often been used as synonyms for Democratic and Republican parties, or assynonyms for liberalism and conservatism, respectively, since the Right was viewed as populist in the Western world in the 1960s.
The term Left was later applied to republicanism in France during the 18th century,. followed by socialism, including anarchism, communism, the labour movement, Marxism, social democracy and syndicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The June Days uprising during the Second Republic was an attempt by the Left to re-assert itself after the 1848 Revolution, but only a small portion of the population supported this. The influential Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 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. 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 International Workingmen’s Association, sometimes called the First International, brought together delegates from many different countries, with many different views about how to reach a classless and stateless society. The Second International became divided over the issue of World War I, among them Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, saw themselves as further to the right. The phrase ‘left’ is used to refer to those who oppose the war.
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This page is based on the article Left-wing politics published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
