4 Key excerpts on "Leftist Ideology"

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  eBook - ePub

  Politics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • Peter Joyce(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  Collectivism emerged in the United Kingdom towards the end of the nineteenth century when various socialist organizations advocated a more vigorous response by the state to social problems, especially poverty, which would entail an enhanced level of government intervention in the economy and some redistribution of resources from the more affluent members of society. Some within the Liberal Party (the ‘new Liberals’) also moved towards advocating activity by both central and local government to improve social conditions. This resulted in legislation in the early twentieth century to benefit the poorer and weaker members of society and ultimately developed into the welfare state.

  Collectivism is traditionally closely identified with socialism, especially those who view state ownership of the means of production (achieved through policies such as nationalization) as the way to achieve a more just society. However, collective action can be organized through social units other than the state (such as communities that possess a wide degree of political autonomy) and may underpin economic ventures such as co-operatives in which people can work together and pursue common aims within a capitalist economic system.

  Left-wing political ideologies

  Key idea (4)

  The left of the political spectrum embraces a wide range of political ideologies, including anarchism, communism and socialism. All seek to promote fundamental social change based upon the redistribution of wealth and resources which typically entails the destruction of the existing social order through revolution.

  A number of political ideologies are identified as being on the left of the political spectrum. These seek the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a new social order based upon a fundamental redistribution of wealth, resources and power.

  ANARCHISM

  Anarchism literally means ‘no rule’ and is a form of socialism which rejects conventional forms of government on the basis that it imposes restraints on individuals without their express consent having been given. Accordingly, anarchists urge the abolition of the state and all forms of political authority, especially the machinery of law and order (which they view as the basis of oppression, providing for the exercise of power by some members of society over others). Most anarchists deem violence as the necessary means to tear down the state.

  Anarchists assert that government is an unnecessary evil since social order will develop naturally. Co-operation will be founded upon the self-interest of individuals and regulated by their common sense and willingness to resolve problems rationally. They assert that traditional forms of government, far from promoting harmony, are the root cause of social conflict. Private ownership of property, which is a key aspect of capitalist society, is regarded as a major source of this friction.

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  Public Policy and Private Interest

  Ideas, Self-Interest and Ethics in Public Policy

  • J.A. Chandler(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4    Policy, ideology and ideas Ideologies or fragments of ideological beliefs often determine perceptions as to whether there is a policy problem or opportunity and the willingness either to support, and implement, a policy initiative or to oppose and undermine its development. According to the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci ideologies ‘create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position (and) struggle’ (Gramsci 1971: 337). Ideology is, however, a contested concept that has many definitions. In populist sentiment ideology can be used as a pejorative term that condemns organised political views as dangerous and divisive excesses that underpin the rationale for authoritarian non-pluralist governments. However, as used by political researchers it is a term that can encompass both authoritarian views of political systems and also those that support democratic representative systems such as the predominant values within the United States or Britain. As a normatively neutral description it can simply be defined as ‘any more or less coherent systems of beliefs or views on politics and society’ (Leach 1991: 10). Ideology in the twenty-first century There has been a fashionable trend to claim that the strife between left and right wing policies is to be consigned to the history books. In 1960 Daniel Bell completed his influential work The End of Ideology in which he argued that the development of democracy in Western states signalled the end of ideological conflict. Francis Fukuyama (1992) has argued that capitalist democracy was gradually spreading throughout the world and would become the dominant and accepted mode of social development. In Britain efforts to bridge the gap between socialism and capitalism during the Blair Governments led to the idea of a Third Way in politics that they hoped would become the dominant framework for society (Giddens 1998)

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  Leftism Reinvented

  Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism

  • Stephanie L. Mudge(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  In this brief overview of the twentieth century’s three Western leftisms readers may recognize themes that are symptomatic of the period’s dominant “isms”: socialism, Keynesianism, and neoliberalism. In this sense, leftism’s reinventions are merely specific cases of more general political worldviews. And yet the making and remaking of leftism cannot be accounted for by simply chalking them up to ideologies out there. Rather, the analysis of leftism’s reinventions requires thinking about where political ideologies come from, how they manifest in the lives and activities of social actors, and how they intersect with politics and parties. I turn to this in the next section.

  ON THE STUDY OF “ISMS”

  The suffix “-ism” tends to appear when a worldview of temporally and socially situated people about the means and ends of government becomes a widespread basis on which political power is exercised. An “ism,” in other words, is a political ideology.14 A geographically and politically far-reaching “ism” is a hegemonic ideology—that is, a governing doxa or common sense, or what the French social thinker Michel Foucault described as a logic of the art of government.15

  The three “isms” that feature in the overview of leftisms just given—socialism, Keynesianism, and neoliberalism—are all essentially the same kind of analytical object: a political ideology with some original association with the orientations of historically and socially situated people. An implication of this understanding of political ideology is that its analysis is never strictly in the province of political sociology—that is, the sociology of power-seeking and political institutions. It is also, unavoidably, an object of the sociology of knowledge.

  Indeed, the sociology of knowledge has always taken ideology as a sociopolitical effect. Karl Mannheim described the major ideologies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany in these terms: “bureaucratic conservatism” reflected the perspective of Prussian state administrators; “conservative historicism” expressed the viewpoint of German academic historians and dominant bourgeois state leadership; “liberal-democratic bourgeois thought” (or what we might now understand as “old” liberalism) was the standpoint of the new industrial-era bourgeoisie; and so forth.16 Mannheim took for granted that ideologies expressed the sociostructural locations of their progenitors and that one must therefore locate the origins, background, and positions of the ideologists.

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  Marxism-Leninism and the Theory of International Relations

  • V. Kubalkova, A. Cruickshank(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There is probably nothing in Soviet and East European international behaviour that could not be understood along power political lines alone but it has to be remembered that for Marxist-Leninists it is not a question of theory or power: for them that theory is most truly marxist which contributes most to the acquisition and maintenance of power and 'national interests'; ideology, in other words, is neither an apology nor a disguise for power politics. Marxism-Leninist ideology is all about power politics. It is here, as Brezhnev has observed, to assist the 'world socialist society to become stronger today than yesterday and tomorrow more than today' because the ultimate ideological goals are 'inseparable from the struggle against imperialism, for the winning of political power by the working class in alliance with all the other contingents of working people, for socialism'. It is of course true to say that wherever there is conflict between the ideology and a particular foreign policy direction it is the foreign policy orientation that prevails, and the ideology adjusted to correspond. But in such circumstances the major premises and goals of the ideology remain intact, and what starts out as an a posteriori justification may well become an a priori guideline. In these terms one can forget the need to redefine the state in Third World countries, 64 what remains unchanged is the fact that the Third World is regarded as one of the fields over which the terminal battle of capitalism and socialism is being fought

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