What is the left and the right?: Part - I

In response to my previous columns ‘A brief history of our left’, many students have expressed their dissatisfaction at the ‘incomplete’ and ‘partial’ presentation of history. The list of questions is long and it is challenging to respond to all of them. Some of them are as follows:

Something right is normally positive, so why do left-wingers think that rightist politics is wrong? What is the origin of these terms? Are all right-wingers bad and left-wingers good? How did the pro-China and pro-USSR split take place? Why did the left-wing in Pakistan support the 1978 revolution in Afghanistan? Were there any leftist groups that criticized or opposed it?

Why were the leftists in Pakistan sceptical about local bodies and did not advocate for them as they did for student associations and trade unions? Why do leftists support a statist economy? Why did the left in Pakistan overlap with ethno-nationalism? Are the PML-N, PPP, and the PTI leftist or rightist parties?

These are all interesting questions, and it is heartening to know that some of our youth are curious to know the answers. Yes, it is true that in everyday parlance something ‘right’ has a positive connotation and perhaps that is the reason that during the French Revolution (1789) the supporters of the clergy and the king sat on the right side of the head of the assembly. Those who questioned the religious and monarchical hierarchy ended up sitting on the left. Most historians agree that these terms originated then and there; and ever since, a ‘rightest’ is more of a self-righteous person who upholds the banner of religion.

Of course, being right is preferable; being self-righteous is not desirable. If you are confused about how ‘right’ can be ‘wrong’, try replacing ‘right’ with ‘self-righteous’ in your mind and you will feel better. It also means that many who claim to be left-wingers end up tilting towards the right when they start behaving in a self-righteous manner. Many left-wing activists and leaders end up being self-righteous and intolerant of other people’s views, harming their own credentials as harbingers of positive change in society. When a left-wing or right-wing party comes to power, it starts excluding others and both end up following a right (read self-righteous) path.

Though the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics originated in the late 18th century in France, they spread widely throughout Europe in the 19th century and in the rest of the world in the 20th. After the French Revolution, the leftists won and abolished the monarchy, beheaded the king and heralded a new dawn. But soon enough, those who overthrew the old regime became so self-righteous that they launched a reign of terror, eliminating all those who did not belong to the ‘revolutionaries’ and had any link with the old regime. The left moved to the extreme right.

If you find history tedious, read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens or watch a good movie based on this novel and you will get to know what terrible atrocities were taking place in the name of eliminating right-wingers who in the past had any soft corner for the clergy or the king. The revolution exhausted itself and France had to accept another emperor – Napoleon Bonaparte, who himself lost power at the hands of even more reactionary European powers. The entire 19th century in France was a rollercoaster journey in which the left and the right vied for power.

The year 1848 was a landmark year as two German thinkers – Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels – wrote a booklet ‘The Communist Manifesto’, which inspired left-wing politics for the next at least 150 years. Its basic idea was that the history of humankind is the history of class struggle in which those who control the means of production exploit the ones without any means. And the root cause of all injustices is the concentration of wealth in a few hands. History moved from primitive communism to feudalism to capitalism, which has outlived its utility as the working class will overthrow it to abolish private property.

There emerged various factions and groups within left-wing politics with varying degrees of opposition to the state and private property from anarchist communists, and nihilists to socialists, and syndicalist ideologies. All of them were averse to capitalists, clergy, and the state and advocated for a more egalitarian society and a more equitable distribution of resources. And these are the common features in most leftist groups and parties even today. The first leftist party that managed to stage a revolution and establish a communist government was the Russian Social Democratic Party which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

As mentioned earlier, whenever a leftist – or a rightist party for that matter – comes to power, it is likely to adopt a self-righteous posture and try to exclude the other. This goes against the principles of democracy but as Mao later remarked ‘Power flows from the barrel of a gun’. In the first half of the 20th century, most of the leftist groups around the world looked up to Moscow and the CPSU for guidance and inspiration. Left politics in India emerged in the 1920s and some communist individuals managed to set up the Communist Party of India (CPI).

The leftist groups in India also believed that a socialist revolution was not that far, and they would be able to snatch power from the capitalists and feudals to establish a classless society of working people. Leftists around the world received a boost when the Red Army managed to defeat Hitler’s Nazi war machinery and ‘liberate’ eastern European countries to set up communist governments there. Soon China also experienced a socialist upheaval resulting in the establishment of the world’s largest communist state in terms of population. With that many leftist governments coming up in just five years from 1945 to 1950, differences were bound to arise.

In India, the leftists followed an extremist policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s but soon changed tack and compromised with the Congress Party. Was Congress also a left-wing party? Here we come to some other terms such as centrist, centre-left and centre-right. Centrist parties try to keep a balance between the left and the right; you may call them opportunists as they vacillate from one side to the other depending on the circumstances. Centre-left parties want to change the status quo and are socially more liberal, believing in a more permissive society.

Unlike extreme or radical left parties, the centre-left does not believe in a violent overthrow of the entire system. They do not want to abolish private property but do consider state ownership of certain industries and services as a desirable objective. =

Centre-right parties tend to have a religious bend and believe in slight changes without disturbing the traditional fabric of society. Unlike extreme or fundamentalist right parties, they do not want to establish a theocracy and do not follow a racist or xenophobic agenda. So, the Indian National Congress was a centre-left party whereas the Muslim League was clearly centre-right.

Groups and parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, Khaksaar Tehreek, RSS, and Jana Sangh were clearly rightist parties with a tendency to become extremist and fundamentalist in due course. The centre-left Congress and the CPI in India developed a soft corner for each other, whereas the Muslim League tilted from centre-right to further right and targeted nearly all leftists and even centre-left groups and parties.

Internationally, Congress followed a non-aligned path with better relations with the socialist bloc, while the Muslim League joined the capitalist bloc that the US was leading.

To be continued

The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at:

mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk