What is ‘the left’? What characterises the ‘left-wing’?
It’s sometimes suggested that ‘the left-right spectrum is too simplistic’, which is fairly obvious (what with it being, you know, one-dimensional) but which has sometimes prompted attempts to ‘replace it’, most commonly with ‘the political compass’, a two-dimension chart which has an economic axis from planning (left) to market (right) and a political axis from ‘libertarian’ to ‘authoritarian’.
I’m not too impressed with this. For a start, it always seems a bit invented – it’s designed to reflect logical differences in ideas, whereas part of the rationale for the left-right spectrum is to reflect ideological differences in orientations, i.e. sides in a conflict, not in an academic debate. But more importantly, if these two axes are to be separated, we might as well introduce more – an axis reflecting views about the roles of women, men, sex, and families, an axis reflecting views about science, nature, religion, and technology, and however many others.
But once you have five or six axes, you find that you haven’t actually helped yourself to understand real politics, just clarified certain logical distinctions about ideas – the question poses itself, why do positions on some axes correlate with positions on other axes? Why are feminists and socialists generally ‘on the same side’? And what you find yourself doing is looking for over-arching dimensions, such as ‘being on the side of the oppressed against the more powerful’ or something, and then you find that you’ve stumbled back to something very much like the left-right spectrum.
So let’s suppose that there is some meaning to ‘left-wing’, and in particular, let’s suppose that it is something like ‘supporting the oppressed against oppression’. Let’s take, for instance, the idea that ‘left-wing’ is in a certain sense defined by socialism, by the struggle of labour against capital. These definitions still leave questions about that real entity that’s called ‘the left’: what manner of beast is it?
