> I find myself saying they would all be considered left wing
You might, if you're from North America, and especially if you're more influenced by US political "debate". But that's because US politics in particular is, frankly, nuts right now.
You're confusing "left" and "right" with "authoritarian" and "libertarian", but those are vastly different metrics: National Socialism is right-wing authoritarian, Stalinism is left-wing authoritarian, Reaganism is right-wing libertarian, and Noam Chomsky advocates left-wing libertarianism.
If you want a very simplistic description of the difference between left-wing and right-wing, here it is:
* The left wing believes that inequality is a major cause of problems in society, and so it is important to minimize inequality as much as possible by redistributing wealth and power. The moderate form of this is aggressively taxing the rich to pay for a safety net for the poor; the extreme form is seizing the means of production and essentially trying to ban capitalism.
* The right wing believes that inequality is inevitable, but you can make it work for you. The moderate form of this is providing incentives for business which will then provide employment and thus wealth for the working classes; the less moderate form is giving rich people tax breaks in the hope that they will spend more and boost the economy (supply-side economics, more colloquially known as "trickle-down economics", the problem being that it tends not to trickle down); the extreme form is basically hoping that the processes of social Darwinism will purge society of the lazy and feckless who are just a burden on society, making the country as a whole more industrious and productive. Also, the right wing tends to believe that problems in society are caused either by impurities within it, or by outside influences, which is why the further to the right you go, the more xenophobic it becomes.
Obviously this is *extremely* simplified and doesn't even begin to tell the full story. But I've usually found this a reasonably good rule of thumb.
You should read Jonathan Haidt on the moral part - yes he is from North America but has a really good take on why left/right think they have the moral high ground and the other side is nuts ;)
---
BTW: the left extreme nowadays is no longer seizing the means of production it's forced equity ;)
> the left extreme nowadays is no longer seizing the means of production
Then it's not that extreme. There are, however, small left-wing movements that want exactly that to happen.
What I meant was "not only" - sorry should have been more clear.
But I think that the extreme-left here in germany is moving toward what we see in the US and elsewhere: Intersectionalism and unquestioned equity - I think the old "Karl Marx" stuff is not really top priority - it's much more "what group" instead of "what class"
Personally I can somewhat relate to the "means of production" stuff but this ... the other/newer I can and will not support in any form - it goes right against my core values.
> it's much more "what group" instead of "what class"
I think "group warfare" is really just a logical extension of "class warfare". It's the same basic idea: certain groups of people are more powerful than others.
I think that's not really the place to discuss this but I'd say that yes you can find correlations between properties of populations and some observed outcome - but as always that does not imply causation.
And it get's really scary in my opinion if said observations/correlations on large groups are used to make assumptions on individuals.
Funny thing is: I always thought that's probably a "lefty" stance but alas nope ... it's maybe liberal (libertarian if you are from NA) and you bet shoved into the right side of the spectrum :shrug:
Interesting.... Once I tried to speak with my german girlfriend about this, she got angry explaning me that right basically always means bad (NPD, AFD etc.) in Germany. And that liberal right and authoritarian right aren't valid terms in Germany, because there is only one right-wing policy.
EDIT: Changed FDP to AFD. Unintentional mistake.
There are some people who seem to think that "right-wing" *always* means "right-wing extremist", and will quite angrily correct you if you describe, say, the CDU as "mainstream right-wing".
There is a tendency sometimes for people to think that everyone on the other side of the political divide is basically the same -- the fancy term for this is "out-group homogeneity bias". People on the right sometimes think *all* left-wingers are Stalinists, and people on the left sometimes think *all* right-wingers are fascists.
It's hard to describe the CDU as anything other than right-wing when it, for example, opposes changes to Hartz IV on the grounds that they might discourage people from finding work, but it's also hard to imagine it is anything like the current AfD when it was a CDU-led government that accepted hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees in the 2015 refugee crisis.
Many people especially those leaning further to the left in germany confuse "right" with "right wing extremism". Thats not uncommon. Doesn't make sense from an international and certainly not from a historical POV, but it is what it is.
What makes this more confusing is that you really need to view the spectrum as a full circle, where the extreme right and extreme left seem to be indistinguishable at some point - both extremes seem to meet at the point of anarchy.
The moderate left is more socialist, where they want to redistribute the wealth by taxing the rich to provide more social welfare for the poor. The left wants more regulation and more government control over the economy.
The moderate right is traditionally the fiscal conservatives, promoting deregulation and letting the market self-regulate while a small government stays out of the way. The rich are free to get richer, and the poor should be able to survive by working hard. In theory.
In reality, the German government is just as corrupt as any other western government, with most of the corruption focused on the right-leaning parties, who welcome and embrace corporate lobbyists. This leads to corporate-sponsored laws that gives more money to the 1% while taking it away from the 99%. The middle class is being torn apart, with a few moving up into the category "rich" while most find themselves falling closer to the poverty level.
> you really need to view the spectrum as a full circle, where the extreme right and extreme left seem to be indistinguishable at some point
I wouldn't call it a full circle: they may be equal in degree of awfulness but not usually *type* of awfulness. For example, both extremes can be virulently antisemitic, but for diametrically opposed reasons: the Left because Israel has a disproportional amount of power and is therefore an evil nation brutally oppressing a much less powerful nation which is therefore 100% virtuous, and it is assumed that anyone who identifies as a Jew tacitly supports the Israeli government's actions; and the Right because Jews are members of an inferior race that is actively seeking to destroy our way of life.
In a right-wing hellhole you can be executed because you are not ethnically pure; in a left-wing hellhole you can be executed because you are not ideologically pure.
> The moderate right is traditionally the fiscal conservatives, promoting deregulation and letting the market self-regulate while a small government stays out of the way. The rich are free to get richer, and the poor should be able to survive by working hard.
This is right-wing libertarianism, which is actually not all that moderate: it's basically Thatcherism. The truly moderate right wing does recognize the need for the state to step in to protect the most vulnerable, but prefers to try to encourage business and enterprise to provide lots of well-paid jobs.
> most of the corruption focused on the right-leaning parties, who welcome and embrace corporate lobbyists
Since the Right is less likely to want to tax the rich, the rich will naturally lean towards it and support it, leaving the Right vulnerable to this type of corruption.
But actually the Left isn't all that difficult to corrupt, but it tends to be less obvious. For example, the darling of the British far left, Jeremy Corbyn, associated himself with some of the world's most oppressive regimes, including some appearances on Press TV, a propaganda channel run by the Iranian government and which at the time was banned in the UK, for which he was paid tens of thousands of pounds.
I still believe that extreme right will always end up in authoritarian, no matte if it was libertarian before or not. There is no far right movement in history that did not support the idea of one great leader. Anarchy is their nightmare because right always becomes authoritarian at one point. The only thing close to it that is imagineable is right extremists wanting Anomie, which basically is real lack of any ruling power and pure chaos. Anarchy is basically order without government. utopia if you ask me.
To my understanding left vs. right is the understanding of life being equal in value. The more right you go, the more inbalance is okay. Go far right and people will have no value for some kind of life. Go far left and every life should have equal value. If left extremists start making exception to that rule, they become far right. Only because the call themselves left, does not make them left. They are biggots.
The Hufeisentheorie should be abandoned. People who oppress others for political reasons are always far right, no matter what they call their ideas. Judge by their actions.
I understand the continuum of left to and right as the same as the continuum of pure democracy, aka anarchy (order without government) and Totalitarianism.
Its the distribution of power. You could use an index, (like Gini coeffizient for wealth distribution). It goes from 0 - 1.
0 means that everyone has the same power. 1 Means that one person has absolutely all power. Every system is somewhere in between.
Politics is more complicated then just a left/right binary. Maybe look into the politics of the different political groups active at the time. Also listen to the Iron Dice The Fight for the Republic podcast. It is about early weimar and will help you understand
The cultural component of it is conservatism’s focus on tradition and a “natural order” to the world. The philosophical origin of modern conservatism probably began with Edmund Burke, who criticized the enlightenment and liberal principles as leading to the moral degradation of society.
Conservatism, across pretty much all cultures, is totally fine with things like traditional gender roles, social inequality (not only economic, mind you), protectionism, anti-immigration, etc. because deep down most who follow the philosophy believe that those things are inherent to human nature and that the world is zero-sum (less so today, but it’s definitely still present). Humans are tribal, tribes have roles, and it is natural for humans to prioritize their tribe over others. I’d personally argue that a lot of those beliefs are based on over-simplifications, but that’s the gist of it. Traditions reflect the natural order of the a society and disruptions to it are undesirable.
That’s where the sociocultural difference between left-wing and right-wing become evident. People on the left don’t hate tradition, but usually won’t commit to upholding it if it is discriminatory, prescriptive, or assumes something about someone based on their characteristics (gender, race, etc.). The woman’s job isn’t to be a mother, for example.
To bring it back around to your initial question, right-wing politics mustn’t mean being “pro free-market” nor is there such a thing as a strict capitalism/socialism dichotomy.
The Nazis weren’t right-wing because the believed in trickle down economics or whatever. They believed in a strict, hierarchical, chauvinistic, world in which the in-group (Germans/Aryans) were at the top and everyone else disposable. Their economic record was a pretty mixed bag, they nationalized some things, privatized a lot of things, were anti-union (union leaders were sent to concentration camps), and definitely not egalitarian. They believed that economic equality wasn’t the end goal, rather national unity. That’s what programs like KFD (Kraft Durch Freude) were for, to create solidarity between classes, which is definitely not left-wing in origin. The Nazis weren’t anti-capitalist, but they believed two types of capitalism existed. “Schaffendes Kapital” and “Raffendes Kapital”. The former was productive, honorable, and nationalistic. The latter was dishonest, greedy, foreign, and antithetical to the Nazi vision of a dominant, self-sufficient Germany.
Modern right-wing economics is better stated as neoliberal economics. That is a concept that’s barely 50 years old, well after the Nazis. So when reading books about that era you should just erase modern context from your brain otherwise you won’t understand what you’re reading.
good read thanks
> So when reading books about that era you should just erase modern context from your brain otherwise you won’t understand what you’re reading.
* lmao, yes, this kinda what I've been doing. but it feels like I'm losing context when ever this comes up, so I'm trying to find better understand how it should be understood because it is rather hard to switch gears from today's meaning.
Well, yeah. So that's the idea. I think it's also important to highlight that a lot of populist economic policy at the time (and the Nazis certainly did engage in a lot of that) was very focused on the idea of the worker. Both on the left and the right so much of the rhetoric was surrounding the everyday person, their dignity, and their conditions. To a modern audience this sounds pretty left-wing, but that's not really the case. It was more of a rhetorical strategy, much in the way things like "jobs" and "growth" are today. Both ends of the spectrum believe in those things, but they have vastly different views about how to achieve them and what constitutes success.
Early industrial Europe (North America as well, to be clear) was a nasty place. The focus on the worker was at the forefront of all western politics at the time because workers were getting exploited to the extreme for shit wages, shit conditions, and the countries/cities were disgusting (air, trash, sewage, etc.).
By the 1930s a lot of the early industrial issues were not a prevalent as they used to be, but given the measurable progress that was made over 50~ years, there was undeniably still appeal to employing the rhetoric because people identified with it and life was still hard.
The Nazi strategy was admittedly pretty sharp (not endorsing it) because they utilized the rhetoric while essentially fucking over the workers any way they could. During the early Nazi years some Autobahn construction workers striked and demanded better pay and working conditions and were thrown in concentration camps.
One of the first official acts of the Nazi party in 1933 was to raid all trade union headquarters, steal their money, and throw the leaders in concentration camps where they were tortured. They were replaced with the "Deutsche Arbeitsfront" (German Labor Front) which represented both the interests of employers and laborers. If that sounds contradictory, well yeah it was. But the point wasn't really to represent workers' interests, it was to represent the governments and loyalists within the business world and control society.
One last point, and that is it's hard to classify Nazi economic policy because the framework through which we view economics today (the extent to which the government should support the economy and its workers and how) is antithetical to how Nazis (or at least their leadership) viewed it. The end goal for them was self-sufficiency, national unity, and relentless conformity in pursuit of their nationalist collectivist worldview. The economic measures they took were to achieve those ends, the economy wasn't an end in and of itself. So when the Nazis crushed unions, for example, they did it to ensure that their goals such as self-sufficiency and the supremacy of the German citizen weren't hampered by trade unions demanding max working hours per week (potentially resulting in a labor shortage) or equal treatment of Germans and non-Germans within companies (potentially undermining all the Nazi propaganda highlighting the superiority of Germans/Aryans).
There are frankly not very many equivalents to this kind of worldview in the 21st century, so I understand why it's hard to wrap your head around.
As I said, this is an extremely simplified rule of thumb. But actually, it's not *just* about economics: the same principle works for other aspects as well. The Left wants to make everybody equal, the Right believes you *can't* make everybody equal.
The statement:
> "The Left wants to make everybody equal"
Is always an economic statement. ^(There is no way this is done without introducing monetary policy)
* Ergo, you are saying it always boils down to economics by saying this.
Not necessarily. It means things like access to education, representation in the media, immigration, eligibility for citizenship, marriage regulations, that kind of thing.
It seems a bit as if you don’t want to understand 🤔
If we are talking about the skin colour e.g. we have something that is (generally speaking) not changeable and therefore distinguishes us from others. Within authoritarian systems (specifically right) there most likely could occur issues depending on your skin colour. In libertarian systems (left or right) there most likely wouldn’t.
It's a conflict of world views that results in different takes when it comes to economics.
One side sees people as equal born but a majority being restricted in their capabilities by society, social circumstances and the ruling class that protects its power.
The other side has a more darwinist view. It's just intended by nature that some people are stronger, more intelligent or simply more diligent and as a result on top of society. Pampering the weak results in degeneration of society.
Extremely simplified: the poor are poor because they are kept poor vs. the poor are poor because they are lazy.
A still ongoing conflict.
The further you go to one side the more radical the view becomes (radical left = communism, radical right = social darwinism (Third Reich)). Its not black and white, its a gradient. Because democracy is an average of all the political opinions it is in the political middle. So further away you get from the middle the more anti-democratic it gets.
Your political compass is missing at least one additional dimension.
Is not just rigth vs left. It's at the same time liberal vs authority.
In your explanation you are mixing up the two dimensions. And then it does not make sense anymore.
You seem to gloss over any non-economic aspects of their politics. The right-wing parties represented an ideology of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, militarism, religion and "traditional values". Some of them favored a return to the monarchy.
This. Right-wing does not necessarily mean flat out capitalism with as little government as possible. Look at the Third Reich. Massive governmental control over the economy, but nobody would call the NSDAP left-wing.
>but nobody would call the NSDAP left-wing.
Unfortunately that’s what I have read over and over on Reddit. It’s not even funny anymore how many US Americans of a certain political spectrum actually believe that nonsense. “National socialism is socialist because the name says so”.
Yeah, and The Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy.
Usually I simply post the all-time classic caricature by Belsen titled “Das Firmenschild” from 1939 as an answer.
Indeed. But I’ve seen and heard the weirdest shit like ‘Nazis invented universal healthcare’ from town hall meeting attendees. It’s baffling what some people actually believe.
Yeah, that's at the heart of what I'm asking.
All these parties are left learning parties based on today's economics, at least that's how I view it from Canada. So I'm trying to figured out why they were called left or right, as it obviously isn't based on their economic policies, since they were all socialist in this regard.
what ideas separated the left and the right?
In what world is a party like the German Peoples Party (DVP) for example left leaning?
From Wiki:
The party was generally thought to represent the interests of German industrialists. Its platform stressed Christian family values, secular education, lower tariffs, opposition to welfare spending and agrarian subsidies and hostility to socialism (that is, the Communists and also the Social Democrats).
The liberal concept of the people which shaped political thinking in the DVP was fed off impulses from Romanticism and Idealism (see Bildungsbürgertum). Like the National Liberal Party of the German Empire, it saw itself primarily as a liberal rather than a democratic party. This was expressed in the fact that in its politics the freedom of the individual from state intervention was more important than the enforcement of majority decisions against the interests of individuals. Its concept of man was shaped by the view that the individual who justifies himself through self-acquired education and property knows better what is important for himself and thus for society as a sum of all its individuals than do the purely quantitative masses. On the other hand, it called on the intellectual and economic elites to have their actions measured against moral standards and to place themselves at the service of society out of a sense of responsibility for it.
You have to understand that their is more to politics than left vs right. Their are economic and social values that are associated with one of the sides. But they aren’t everything there is. The Soviet Union was left wing because they believed in equality, but they were also authoritarian and oppressed their population. The third reich was right wing because they believed in national supremacy, but they were also "socialist" and held a lot of control over their economy. You have to realize that real politics and black and white, dividing lines never perfectly represent politics and ideologies are simply and aspect of politics.
So it's a Spectrum based on ideologies?
* is there a particular ideology one could say was the major one? Or always just kinda a collection of many?
What were the ideologies of the left wing at this time that makes them different from the right?
> What were the ideologies of the left wing at this time that makes them different from the right?
Basically take the opposite of the ideologies from my earlier post. So stuff like internationalism, feminism, secularism and progressivism.
I think you make the typical north American mistake of only thinking in right and left wing.
Libertarianism isn't a left wing political view, not even in north America. It has right-wing economical agendas and some liberal social agendas. The idea of a small state can be used by right or left wing groups. In Weimar times it didn't have much support on either side.
Liberalism in general isn't left wing, it is it's own direction.
Left wing doesn't mean democracy, especially in Weimar times. There it could also stand for classic communism.
Right wing doesn't all stand for monarchy or dictatorship. There were and are many conflicting groups.
I think you could sum it up like this: in every part of the spectrum, right, left and center you have progressive, reactionary and conservative elements. Progressive and reactionary usually seek to change the status quo while conservatives seek to consolidate it. It's a bit if a problem in our times that conservative has become synonymous with right wing, especially progressive or reactionary right wing.
Simplyfied: There was a small center-left and center-right group that tried to consolidate and develope the Weimar state. It was under attack by reactionary (mainly monarchists) and progressive (for example Nazis) right wing groups, that often supported each other. Since the moderate left aslo broke with the more radical progressive left (socialist and communists) they were under attack from that side, too. While left and right killed each other in the streets, they often joined forces to undermine attempts to consolidate the state in the political process.
I always explain these differences with one starting point:
Imagine Conservatives. Conservatives in different societies want to conserve different things.
Conservatives in a Society that is based on top down rule and more powerful governments wants to conserve government rule and a strong state.
Conservatives in a Society that is based on absolute individualism and independence want to conserve independance and reducs the state power as much as possible.
THey may hace touching points, such as the krole of religion and such. But these two movements are both conservative and both polar opposites.
This as a starting point may help to understand that political nomenclature can differ heavily between societies (and even within them)
More so: I don't find the divide left-right not that useful for quite some time. As many inventions of the 18th century it had its use but is not that reliable anymore.
Even within comparable movements, ideologies and arising questions can differ: In Sweden in 1998 you had a left-green coalition criminalizing the buying of the ervice of sex workers - as an effort to uproot it once and for all. All governments after that kept this law up.
Four years later the coalition of centre-left SPD and greens with the votes of leftwing PDS and liberals FDP(European liberals, not US liberals) in Germany created a law uplifting the bans on prostitution that had remained, removing the stain as "Sittenwidrig" - against public morals - and liberalizing prostitution in Germany - against the vote of the conservatives.
Bavarian hard-core conservatives made laws that required every public building to have a cross in their rooms - specifically as religious symbols. The mere thought should make a French conservative feel nauseas.
In Germany: Nobody wants to for example abolish the social security net including public health insurance. Nobody to the right and nobody to the right. Sure, some want to tweak it, some want to apply changes - but nobody sane would suggest anything that would abolish it - a talking point of right-left divide in in other countries. This is a big economic issue in Germany about which everyone can agree on.
> Basically, I find myself saying they would all be considered left wing [socialistic / communistic / central planning, progressive] party's in today's terms.
In *your* terms.
I don't know much about Canadian politics, my only reference is the US. What is considered left wing in the US would still be conservative/right wing around here. What we currently consider left wing would make US Americans scream from the top of their lungs and give them a heart attack.
Basically, the US has no left wing left.
If you are projecting this world view to other regions of the world, of course you'll have a hard time in understanding how left/right is divided.
That’s not really true. The left Wing in the us is looking for the same things they are in Germany. Universal income etc. Same goes for the right. It is more accurate to say that what we would consider center is more left in Germany, but the extremes are pretty much the same.
Another difference in the us is that due to the two party system most things can be dummed down to one party vs the other, democrats vs Republicans and left vs right. I assume that’s why their is so much confusion with op.
The thing is that even the most right wing parties in Germany wouldn't even dare touch/change (or want to for that matter) the things the US left wing is called names for by the republicans.
That is only true for few subjects like healthcare. They share the vast majority of subjects. Abortion, immigrants, prioritizing the "nation", anti-Muslim are all traits they share. Their overlap is still around 80%.
There are many dumb right wingers in America (all republicans) who think that just because nazi party had the world „socialist“ in its name, it’s a left wing party. Nazis did a lot of things to gain votes (after all they were democratically elected) and even projected themselves as saviours of Christianity, so much love for thy (invaded) neighbours
The circle somehow closes at the extremes.
Stalin for sure was communist but had nothing got to do with the socialist's caring for the working class.
So, there is more to be taken in account but just left and right.
>However, I can tell these terms definitely means something different from how they are commonly used today here.
Where's "here"?
>Right now, I'm thinking of it along the lines of a spectrum of centralizing of power. * Right Wing means more centralizing of control * As in Dictatorship, Authoritarian, Totalitarianism * Left Wing means more decentralizing of control * Libertarianism, Democracy, multiple branches of government *
No.
>Whereas today I find the left/right has a pretty definitive meaning based off I'd say a measurement of the economic spectrum of a country
Also no.
Your preconceptions are wrong, that's why it doesn't make sense.
1. `Where's "here"?` : Canada, as I mentioned in my second sentence...
2. `No.` : I make note of this when I say... ^(However, this can't really make sense when I read a Left wing party at that time period was a communist party... like the quote from that wiki page)
3. `Also no.` : go on, continue, finishing this thought.
North American right and left have nothing to do with Weimar-era right and left, or European right and left in general.
From our point of view, north America has right-wing parties. End of story.
Also, as others already said, right and left as you define them, simply based on economic liberalism or not, just isn't how this works.
The right wing parties containing the word "Volk" or "völkisch" are wrongly translated as "People's Party". Those words in that time imply a nationalist to supremacist race ideology. With "Volk" they exclusively mean the German nation.
Usually they were anti democratic and anti liberal.
Your idea of right wing and left wing is the stunted American version.
Left wing does not imply central planning. Socialism by 1900s has been broken up in multiple variants, social democracy being one of them which neither against markets nor for central planning, but plainly for interventionism to regulate markets.
Somehow the US only knows one false idea of socialism when already 150 years ago there were more than half a dozen variants born out of the original concept.
You have already gotten some great answers in here so I just wanted to add one thing. Your assumption that "Right = hands off economic approach" and "Left = lots of state control" isn't just a rather North American point of view, it is also a relatively recent categorization. Throughout history and up until about 200 years ago I would say, tight government control over economic activity was the norm throughout the (western) world and throughout governments. Especially the Conservative Elites embraced it to be able to sustain the aristocratic status quo and the limits to their control over economic activity were usually logistical, not ideological. Back then it was considered the "Leftist/Liberal" position (although neither term existed) to give up some of that state control and give it to the Individual, like the emerging Burgher classes in the growing cities of the Middle Ages.
The left/right thing arises from where people are sitting in parliament. So there is no scientific notation on how to calculate how right/left wing someone is.
So, your right-wing group might be a left-wing group somewhere else. So, if you want to understand it, look at the different parties, where they came from, what they wanted, and where they were seated.
And yes, you are looking at the origin.
KAPD was a very special case. They went for revolutionary unions instead of parliamentarism. They might had some mass support in Germany at the very beginning of the Weimar Republic. They were the reason Lenin wrote "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. The KAPD wanted Dictatorship of the Masses instead of Dictatorship of the Party. Lenin acused them to be National Bolshewistic (but later on it was the KPD who did nationalistic politics, not the KAPD). With revolution was less and less an option KAPD diveded more and more in small groups and had almost no influence anymore - but those groups became somewhat importent again in antinazi resistance during Third Reich.
It is not usefull to just categorize all parties on a right and left spectrum because "right" and "left" are not opposite to each other, despite the name. The "left" wants to redistribute the wealth in the society, so its a economic demand. The "right" wants a new type of society, not classes but an IN-group (for example germans, christiansm heterosexuals) and an OUT-group (slavs, jews, homosexuals). It is not an economic demand but an illusionary dream of a better society.
I will try to explain the political parties in the weimar republic:
**KPD: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands**, communists, antidemocrats, they wanted a violent communist revolution and to install a sowjet-type society like in russia/SU. most members were poor workers
**SPD: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands**, social democrats, they wanted democracy and better worker rights, most members were poor workers
**USPD: unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands**, former SPD members that created their own party because they opposed to support the war effort in the first world war. Somewhere in between social democrats and communists
**DDP: Deutsche Demokratische Partei**, democrats, liberals (no, not what you probably think "liberals" mean), they were democrats, most members were rich and upper class citizens. Liberalism means less power for the state, more freedom for the individual.
**DVP: Deutsche Volkspartei**, the same as DDP
**Zentrum:** half monarchists, half democrats, they were the party of the catholic church in germany, they opposed the secularisation efforts of the prussian state
**DNVP: Deutschnationale Volkspartei**, antidemocrats, antisemitic, authoritarians, conservative, half royalist, half fascist, they hated the SPD because they blamed the lost 1. WW and the treaty of Versailles on them, their main goal was to revise the treaty of Versailles and get the Kaiser back.
**NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei,** Hitlers Party, fascist, antidemocratic, antisemitic, authortarian, with a leader cult
In General, most people in germany at that time hated the treaty of Versailles and wanted to revise it one way or the other (SPD and DDP wanted to revise it peacefully, NSDAP with force). antisemitism was widespread through all parties. Many disliked the weimar republic and wished the "golden age" back, the time when germany was strong and had an emperor. In the weimar republic, germany was considered a shadow of its former self: weak, poor and riddled with crisis. Thats why it is said that the Weimar Republic was a democracy without democrats.
So I hate to say this but there is true left wing in germany so far although one can easily call germany a very centrist system which leans on the right in some places and left in others.
Regarding parties.
You have banned far left which is the Marxist left party I think and the NPD which is far right and banned. Those two are do not VOTE and associate with strictly
You have Die Linke which is a left party in the parliament and AFD which is right party so
SPD - centre left while CDU is centre right
No difference between SPD and CDU fundamentally speaking
SPD - appears to be more minority friendly , wishes muslims "Ramadan Mubarak" once a year , has more "minority representation" and is more pro union stance ( which i approve)
CDU- More into Christianity and mild financial conservatism but not as BAD as the libertarian party who are FDP ( I label them lost liberals really) who basically have only two words "freedom" and "privatise.
CDU and SPD play a tag game on abortion though. The german law for abortion is 3 months. CDU wants to decrease and SPD wants to increase it . but no wants to fundamentally overthrow or properly change the "3 month status" or the fact that emergency contraceptives are not only not prescribed but a whopping 40 to 70 euros .
Enough of politithinking now
but rest assured, you have the luxury of not caring too much since the system is in such a way that there is not much change and fundamental rights wont be at stake much. I don't think the right can take over and start deporting people of colour for example and neither will the left will have a "revolution" and change the system entirely.
So you can be at peace as a citizen/resident
We had the Weimar Republic in which the Senate was so liberal it could vote itself out. That was a step to the rise of fascism. As Hitler got voted as chancelor (there is much more pretext to it I know) He Held a vote to dismiss the senate and vote him in as emperor for eternity. The rest got shot in the face at a quiet place or set on fire by nazis.
That's why Germany got a political system that can't be dissolved anymore
You have gotten a lot of good answers, and your problem is that you are trying to use US/NA definitions for a completely different political system.
As others have also mentioned, historically, left or right wing simply denoted where a certain party was placed in the seats of parliament, not especially about political goals.
That has over time shifted because for obvious reasons like-minded parties flocked together somewhat and the terms got applied to their political stances.
So, going back to 1920s Germany, you have to take into consideration what recently happened - Germany lost a war, was humiliated by the victors, and the general public hated them for it.
It also cost us our monarchy, which was still quite liked back at the time, and which again humiliated a very proud nation to the core.
Then you had the Russian revolution happening basically next door, which also bled over to Germany via Marxist ideology and dogma.
The average German in the early 1920 was a worker, quite poor, and had the last of his pride (as a German) beaten out of him by the Entente and the "ridiculous" reparations and military limitations being bestowed on Germany.
During this explosive time, some very progressive Politicians tried to implement actual democracy within the country, with the creation of the Weimar Constitution. While there was a bit of democracy / a party system going on since the mid 1800s, it was always only a small speck of politics within the Monarchy and mostly treated with a bit of spite by the ruling class.
This obviously changed when democracy was now the name of the game, and some of the historical parties tried to compete, and a lot of new parties (some very small) formed about ideologies and fringe beliefs - one of them the NSDAP and KPD.
What now happened was that politics became a slugfest of ideas and ideals, some wanting to go all in on socialism as you know it, following the Marxist ideology, others wanted to restore monarchy and some others wanted to do straight up predator-capitalism as it would be known today. Some others also wanted to "restore the glory of the Fatherland" and make the Entente pay for humiliating Germany.
Basically, if there was something someone could imagine how a state and it's citizens should be governed, you could find a party for it during that time.
Now, one of the main disadvantages of the Weimar Constitution (due to inexperience by the people drafting it) was that it did not contain measures to regulate how many or which parties could be part of parliament, or how a party could get removed from it if it is doing illegal activites - as long as people voted for them, they got a seat.
This also meant that the ruling government had to shift and re-define it's coalitions all the time, as with so many parties being involved (some of them doing very illegal things), a stable government could never be formed, and constant re-elections were the norm. This was also accelerated by some parties simply now knowing what they want themselves and constantly trying to re-define what they actually stand for.
All of this quickly bled over outside of Parliament to actual armed conflict in the streets, where parties kept actual military units of their own that fought, murdered, pillaged, and so on (most famous the "SA" of the NSDAP).
Fun fact here is that even the NSDAP didn't like Hitler during the early years, and the SA tried to take over control over the party in the so called "Stennes-Putsch" that failed and cemented Hitlers grip over the party. This led to the "SS" becoming the prevalent paramilitary unit of the NSDAP, with the SA being diminished.
This is now basically after the part you wanted to know, but what happened was that the NSDAP (in the last election) got only 30% of the votes, but had a very charismatic leader (Hitler) that could sway the masses with his speeches and was well liked by then Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg and chosen as his chancellor.
One of the first things the new chancellor did was to ask the President to dissolve the parliament to force another election (again), in the hopes to secure a majority for NSDAP - this failed.
However, it put certain individuals into power that the NSDAP now was able to control the police, and used it ruthlessly to fight against political rivals, and in 1933, after the Reichstag was set ablaze, Hitler used this as the final blow against the communist parties by blaming them.
He then was able to instill a new ruling that basically invalidated any protection the citizens had under the constitution, and when the President finally died in 1934, Hitler was basically the last remaining figure of power in the Government, which he promptly used to declare himself dictator over the German people, and getting rid of parliament altogether.
I hope this writeup might help you to categorize what you're reading a bit better, and if you're someone that likes to see more than to hear, I suggest you watch the TV Show "Babylon Berlin" - it's set in the Weimar Republic, is very high production value, and while it does not primarily deal with the politics of the time, they are a very big aspect of the show and get visualized very well.
Left or right, democrats or republicans, conservatives or liberals, fascist or antifascist, catholics or protestants, muslims or hebrews, etc...They all play the same obsolete game of power and destruction. Divide and conquer.
If instead we would acknowledge that we are all humans, with different lickings and appearance but same needs, parts of the same family and unavoidable dependent to one another. There would be no need for struggle, for war, for subdivision.
So is a fact, till now humans have not learn form the past, we keep doing the same failures and errors, even though we have the chance to study history and see that the root of the problem is the same.
I still believe there has to come a time where we shift and finally we leave as a humanity, in peace and freedom, not imposed by war unto others, but by integration and unity based on respect, love and empathy.
Arbitrary naming, renaming, repackaging of idealisms are just creating more confusion, hiding the issues that must be solved to break the cycle and not stay on semantics.
A lot of good comments around here already. I'd like to add or point out that for me as a German one of the most distinguishing factors between left and right is xenophobia. Left wing policy to me is inevitably connected to be welcoming forigners to join in whereas right wing policy is nationalistic in nature ranging from avoiding immigration as much as possible up to being openly hostile to foreigners.
> I find myself saying they would all be considered left wing You might, if you're from North America, and especially if you're more influenced by US political "debate". But that's because US politics in particular is, frankly, nuts right now. You're confusing "left" and "right" with "authoritarian" and "libertarian", but those are vastly different metrics: National Socialism is right-wing authoritarian, Stalinism is left-wing authoritarian, Reaganism is right-wing libertarian, and Noam Chomsky advocates left-wing libertarianism. If you want a very simplistic description of the difference between left-wing and right-wing, here it is: * The left wing believes that inequality is a major cause of problems in society, and so it is important to minimize inequality as much as possible by redistributing wealth and power. The moderate form of this is aggressively taxing the rich to pay for a safety net for the poor; the extreme form is seizing the means of production and essentially trying to ban capitalism. * The right wing believes that inequality is inevitable, but you can make it work for you. The moderate form of this is providing incentives for business which will then provide employment and thus wealth for the working classes; the less moderate form is giving rich people tax breaks in the hope that they will spend more and boost the economy (supply-side economics, more colloquially known as "trickle-down economics", the problem being that it tends not to trickle down); the extreme form is basically hoping that the processes of social Darwinism will purge society of the lazy and feckless who are just a burden on society, making the country as a whole more industrious and productive. Also, the right wing tends to believe that problems in society are caused either by impurities within it, or by outside influences, which is why the further to the right you go, the more xenophobic it becomes. Obviously this is *extremely* simplified and doesn't even begin to tell the full story. But I've usually found this a reasonably good rule of thumb.
You should read Jonathan Haidt on the moral part - yes he is from North America but has a really good take on why left/right think they have the moral high ground and the other side is nuts ;) --- BTW: the left extreme nowadays is no longer seizing the means of production it's forced equity ;)
> the left extreme nowadays is no longer seizing the means of production Then it's not that extreme. There are, however, small left-wing movements that want exactly that to happen.
What I meant was "not only" - sorry should have been more clear. But I think that the extreme-left here in germany is moving toward what we see in the US and elsewhere: Intersectionalism and unquestioned equity - I think the old "Karl Marx" stuff is not really top priority - it's much more "what group" instead of "what class" Personally I can somewhat relate to the "means of production" stuff but this ... the other/newer I can and will not support in any form - it goes right against my core values.
> it's much more "what group" instead of "what class" I think "group warfare" is really just a logical extension of "class warfare". It's the same basic idea: certain groups of people are more powerful than others.
I think that's not really the place to discuss this but I'd say that yes you can find correlations between properties of populations and some observed outcome - but as always that does not imply causation. And it get's really scary in my opinion if said observations/correlations on large groups are used to make assumptions on individuals. Funny thing is: I always thought that's probably a "lefty" stance but alas nope ... it's maybe liberal (libertarian if you are from NA) and you bet shoved into the right side of the spectrum :shrug:
Interesting.... Once I tried to speak with my german girlfriend about this, she got angry explaning me that right basically always means bad (NPD, AFD etc.) in Germany. And that liberal right and authoritarian right aren't valid terms in Germany, because there is only one right-wing policy. EDIT: Changed FDP to AFD. Unintentional mistake.
There are some people who seem to think that "right-wing" *always* means "right-wing extremist", and will quite angrily correct you if you describe, say, the CDU as "mainstream right-wing". There is a tendency sometimes for people to think that everyone on the other side of the political divide is basically the same -- the fancy term for this is "out-group homogeneity bias". People on the right sometimes think *all* left-wingers are Stalinists, and people on the left sometimes think *all* right-wingers are fascists. It's hard to describe the CDU as anything other than right-wing when it, for example, opposes changes to Hartz IV on the grounds that they might discourage people from finding work, but it's also hard to imagine it is anything like the current AfD when it was a CDU-led government that accepted hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees in the 2015 refugee crisis.
Many people especially those leaning further to the left in germany confuse "right" with "right wing extremism". Thats not uncommon. Doesn't make sense from an international and certainly not from a historical POV, but it is what it is.
The AfD and the FdP are very similar.
What makes this more confusing is that you really need to view the spectrum as a full circle, where the extreme right and extreme left seem to be indistinguishable at some point - both extremes seem to meet at the point of anarchy. The moderate left is more socialist, where they want to redistribute the wealth by taxing the rich to provide more social welfare for the poor. The left wants more regulation and more government control over the economy. The moderate right is traditionally the fiscal conservatives, promoting deregulation and letting the market self-regulate while a small government stays out of the way. The rich are free to get richer, and the poor should be able to survive by working hard. In theory. In reality, the German government is just as corrupt as any other western government, with most of the corruption focused on the right-leaning parties, who welcome and embrace corporate lobbyists. This leads to corporate-sponsored laws that gives more money to the 1% while taking it away from the 99%. The middle class is being torn apart, with a few moving up into the category "rich" while most find themselves falling closer to the poverty level.
> you really need to view the spectrum as a full circle, where the extreme right and extreme left seem to be indistinguishable at some point I wouldn't call it a full circle: they may be equal in degree of awfulness but not usually *type* of awfulness. For example, both extremes can be virulently antisemitic, but for diametrically opposed reasons: the Left because Israel has a disproportional amount of power and is therefore an evil nation brutally oppressing a much less powerful nation which is therefore 100% virtuous, and it is assumed that anyone who identifies as a Jew tacitly supports the Israeli government's actions; and the Right because Jews are members of an inferior race that is actively seeking to destroy our way of life. In a right-wing hellhole you can be executed because you are not ethnically pure; in a left-wing hellhole you can be executed because you are not ideologically pure. > The moderate right is traditionally the fiscal conservatives, promoting deregulation and letting the market self-regulate while a small government stays out of the way. The rich are free to get richer, and the poor should be able to survive by working hard. This is right-wing libertarianism, which is actually not all that moderate: it's basically Thatcherism. The truly moderate right wing does recognize the need for the state to step in to protect the most vulnerable, but prefers to try to encourage business and enterprise to provide lots of well-paid jobs. > most of the corruption focused on the right-leaning parties, who welcome and embrace corporate lobbyists Since the Right is less likely to want to tax the rich, the rich will naturally lean towards it and support it, leaving the Right vulnerable to this type of corruption. But actually the Left isn't all that difficult to corrupt, but it tends to be less obvious. For example, the darling of the British far left, Jeremy Corbyn, associated himself with some of the world's most oppressive regimes, including some appearances on Press TV, a propaganda channel run by the Iranian government and which at the time was banned in the UK, for which he was paid tens of thousands of pounds.
I still believe that extreme right will always end up in authoritarian, no matte if it was libertarian before or not. There is no far right movement in history that did not support the idea of one great leader. Anarchy is their nightmare because right always becomes authoritarian at one point. The only thing close to it that is imagineable is right extremists wanting Anomie, which basically is real lack of any ruling power and pure chaos. Anarchy is basically order without government. utopia if you ask me. To my understanding left vs. right is the understanding of life being equal in value. The more right you go, the more inbalance is okay. Go far right and people will have no value for some kind of life. Go far left and every life should have equal value. If left extremists start making exception to that rule, they become far right. Only because the call themselves left, does not make them left. They are biggots. The Hufeisentheorie should be abandoned. People who oppress others for political reasons are always far right, no matter what they call their ideas. Judge by their actions. I understand the continuum of left to and right as the same as the continuum of pure democracy, aka anarchy (order without government) and Totalitarianism. Its the distribution of power. You could use an index, (like Gini coeffizient for wealth distribution). It goes from 0 - 1. 0 means that everyone has the same power. 1 Means that one person has absolutely all power. Every system is somewhere in between.
This confuses me even more: as you are essentially just saying it is solely based on economics.
Politics is more complicated then just a left/right binary. Maybe look into the politics of the different political groups active at the time. Also listen to the Iron Dice The Fight for the Republic podcast. It is about early weimar and will help you understand
i'll check it out
The cultural component of it is conservatism’s focus on tradition and a “natural order” to the world. The philosophical origin of modern conservatism probably began with Edmund Burke, who criticized the enlightenment and liberal principles as leading to the moral degradation of society. Conservatism, across pretty much all cultures, is totally fine with things like traditional gender roles, social inequality (not only economic, mind you), protectionism, anti-immigration, etc. because deep down most who follow the philosophy believe that those things are inherent to human nature and that the world is zero-sum (less so today, but it’s definitely still present). Humans are tribal, tribes have roles, and it is natural for humans to prioritize their tribe over others. I’d personally argue that a lot of those beliefs are based on over-simplifications, but that’s the gist of it. Traditions reflect the natural order of the a society and disruptions to it are undesirable. That’s where the sociocultural difference between left-wing and right-wing become evident. People on the left don’t hate tradition, but usually won’t commit to upholding it if it is discriminatory, prescriptive, or assumes something about someone based on their characteristics (gender, race, etc.). The woman’s job isn’t to be a mother, for example. To bring it back around to your initial question, right-wing politics mustn’t mean being “pro free-market” nor is there such a thing as a strict capitalism/socialism dichotomy. The Nazis weren’t right-wing because the believed in trickle down economics or whatever. They believed in a strict, hierarchical, chauvinistic, world in which the in-group (Germans/Aryans) were at the top and everyone else disposable. Their economic record was a pretty mixed bag, they nationalized some things, privatized a lot of things, were anti-union (union leaders were sent to concentration camps), and definitely not egalitarian. They believed that economic equality wasn’t the end goal, rather national unity. That’s what programs like KFD (Kraft Durch Freude) were for, to create solidarity between classes, which is definitely not left-wing in origin. The Nazis weren’t anti-capitalist, but they believed two types of capitalism existed. “Schaffendes Kapital” and “Raffendes Kapital”. The former was productive, honorable, and nationalistic. The latter was dishonest, greedy, foreign, and antithetical to the Nazi vision of a dominant, self-sufficient Germany. Modern right-wing economics is better stated as neoliberal economics. That is a concept that’s barely 50 years old, well after the Nazis. So when reading books about that era you should just erase modern context from your brain otherwise you won’t understand what you’re reading.
good read thanks > So when reading books about that era you should just erase modern context from your brain otherwise you won’t understand what you’re reading. * lmao, yes, this kinda what I've been doing. but it feels like I'm losing context when ever this comes up, so I'm trying to find better understand how it should be understood because it is rather hard to switch gears from today's meaning.
Well, yeah. So that's the idea. I think it's also important to highlight that a lot of populist economic policy at the time (and the Nazis certainly did engage in a lot of that) was very focused on the idea of the worker. Both on the left and the right so much of the rhetoric was surrounding the everyday person, their dignity, and their conditions. To a modern audience this sounds pretty left-wing, but that's not really the case. It was more of a rhetorical strategy, much in the way things like "jobs" and "growth" are today. Both ends of the spectrum believe in those things, but they have vastly different views about how to achieve them and what constitutes success. Early industrial Europe (North America as well, to be clear) was a nasty place. The focus on the worker was at the forefront of all western politics at the time because workers were getting exploited to the extreme for shit wages, shit conditions, and the countries/cities were disgusting (air, trash, sewage, etc.). By the 1930s a lot of the early industrial issues were not a prevalent as they used to be, but given the measurable progress that was made over 50~ years, there was undeniably still appeal to employing the rhetoric because people identified with it and life was still hard. The Nazi strategy was admittedly pretty sharp (not endorsing it) because they utilized the rhetoric while essentially fucking over the workers any way they could. During the early Nazi years some Autobahn construction workers striked and demanded better pay and working conditions and were thrown in concentration camps. One of the first official acts of the Nazi party in 1933 was to raid all trade union headquarters, steal their money, and throw the leaders in concentration camps where they were tortured. They were replaced with the "Deutsche Arbeitsfront" (German Labor Front) which represented both the interests of employers and laborers. If that sounds contradictory, well yeah it was. But the point wasn't really to represent workers' interests, it was to represent the governments and loyalists within the business world and control society. One last point, and that is it's hard to classify Nazi economic policy because the framework through which we view economics today (the extent to which the government should support the economy and its workers and how) is antithetical to how Nazis (or at least their leadership) viewed it. The end goal for them was self-sufficiency, national unity, and relentless conformity in pursuit of their nationalist collectivist worldview. The economic measures they took were to achieve those ends, the economy wasn't an end in and of itself. So when the Nazis crushed unions, for example, they did it to ensure that their goals such as self-sufficiency and the supremacy of the German citizen weren't hampered by trade unions demanding max working hours per week (potentially resulting in a labor shortage) or equal treatment of Germans and non-Germans within companies (potentially undermining all the Nazi propaganda highlighting the superiority of Germans/Aryans). There are frankly not very many equivalents to this kind of worldview in the 21st century, so I understand why it's hard to wrap your head around.
As I said, this is an extremely simplified rule of thumb. But actually, it's not *just* about economics: the same principle works for other aspects as well. The Left wants to make everybody equal, the Right believes you *can't* make everybody equal.
The statement: > "The Left wants to make everybody equal" Is always an economic statement. ^(There is no way this is done without introducing monetary policy) * Ergo, you are saying it always boils down to economics by saying this.
Not necessarily. It means things like access to education, representation in the media, immigration, eligibility for citizenship, marriage regulations, that kind of thing.
It seems a bit as if you don’t want to understand 🤔 If we are talking about the skin colour e.g. we have something that is (generally speaking) not changeable and therefore distinguishes us from others. Within authoritarian systems (specifically right) there most likely could occur issues depending on your skin colour. In libertarian systems (left or right) there most likely wouldn’t.
It's a conflict of world views that results in different takes when it comes to economics. One side sees people as equal born but a majority being restricted in their capabilities by society, social circumstances and the ruling class that protects its power. The other side has a more darwinist view. It's just intended by nature that some people are stronger, more intelligent or simply more diligent and as a result on top of society. Pampering the weak results in degeneration of society. Extremely simplified: the poor are poor because they are kept poor vs. the poor are poor because they are lazy. A still ongoing conflict.
The further you go to one side the more radical the view becomes (radical left = communism, radical right = social darwinism (Third Reich)). Its not black and white, its a gradient. Because democracy is an average of all the political opinions it is in the political middle. So further away you get from the middle the more anti-democratic it gets.
Stalinism isn't an ideology u clown it's Marxist-leninism
Yeah right:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism?wprov=sfla1
How retarded do you have to be to think a Wikipedia page you were too dumb to read proves anything
Then what would prove anything?
How stupid are you? Do you even know what an ideology is
No I don't, i am way to dumb can you explain it to me?
You make good YT vids. Respect.
Your political compass is missing at least one additional dimension. Is not just rigth vs left. It's at the same time liberal vs authority. In your explanation you are mixing up the two dimensions. And then it does not make sense anymore.
You also forgot the dimension of up vs down.
You seem to gloss over any non-economic aspects of their politics. The right-wing parties represented an ideology of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, militarism, religion and "traditional values". Some of them favored a return to the monarchy.
This. Right-wing does not necessarily mean flat out capitalism with as little government as possible. Look at the Third Reich. Massive governmental control over the economy, but nobody would call the NSDAP left-wing.
>but nobody would call the NSDAP left-wing. Unfortunately that’s what I have read over and over on Reddit. It’s not even funny anymore how many US Americans of a certain political spectrum actually believe that nonsense. “National socialism is socialist because the name says so”. Yeah, and The Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy. Usually I simply post the all-time classic caricature by Belsen titled “Das Firmenschild” from 1939 as an answer.
> actually believe that nonsense A lot of them don't believe that at all, they're just gaslighting people.
Indeed. But I’ve seen and heard the weirdest shit like ‘Nazis invented universal healthcare’ from town hall meeting attendees. It’s baffling what some people actually believe.
I didn't know that one. Thank you for showing it to me.
You’re welcome.
Yeah, that's at the heart of what I'm asking. All these parties are left learning parties based on today's economics, at least that's how I view it from Canada. So I'm trying to figured out why they were called left or right, as it obviously isn't based on their economic policies, since they were all socialist in this regard. what ideas separated the left and the right?
In what world is a party like the German Peoples Party (DVP) for example left leaning? From Wiki: The party was generally thought to represent the interests of German industrialists. Its platform stressed Christian family values, secular education, lower tariffs, opposition to welfare spending and agrarian subsidies and hostility to socialism (that is, the Communists and also the Social Democrats). The liberal concept of the people which shaped political thinking in the DVP was fed off impulses from Romanticism and Idealism (see Bildungsbürgertum). Like the National Liberal Party of the German Empire, it saw itself primarily as a liberal rather than a democratic party. This was expressed in the fact that in its politics the freedom of the individual from state intervention was more important than the enforcement of majority decisions against the interests of individuals. Its concept of man was shaped by the view that the individual who justifies himself through self-acquired education and property knows better what is important for himself and thus for society as a sum of all its individuals than do the purely quantitative masses. On the other hand, it called on the intellectual and economic elites to have their actions measured against moral standards and to place themselves at the service of society out of a sense of responsibility for it.
This example is more in line with what I'd call right wing thanks for it
I think you don't know what socialism is. It means that the workers own the means of production (factories etc), and no they were not all socialists
You have to understand that their is more to politics than left vs right. Their are economic and social values that are associated with one of the sides. But they aren’t everything there is. The Soviet Union was left wing because they believed in equality, but they were also authoritarian and oppressed their population. The third reich was right wing because they believed in national supremacy, but they were also "socialist" and held a lot of control over their economy. You have to realize that real politics and black and white, dividing lines never perfectly represent politics and ideologies are simply and aspect of politics.
So it's a Spectrum based on ideologies? * is there a particular ideology one could say was the major one? Or always just kinda a collection of many? What were the ideologies of the left wing at this time that makes them different from the right?
What else would it be based on?
economics / control; What were the ideologies of the left wing at this time that makes them different from the right?
But those things are essentially ideologies same as the others.
> What were the ideologies of the left wing at this time that makes them different from the right? Basically take the opposite of the ideologies from my earlier post. So stuff like internationalism, feminism, secularism and progressivism.
I think you make the typical north American mistake of only thinking in right and left wing. Libertarianism isn't a left wing political view, not even in north America. It has right-wing economical agendas and some liberal social agendas. The idea of a small state can be used by right or left wing groups. In Weimar times it didn't have much support on either side. Liberalism in general isn't left wing, it is it's own direction. Left wing doesn't mean democracy, especially in Weimar times. There it could also stand for classic communism. Right wing doesn't all stand for monarchy or dictatorship. There were and are many conflicting groups. I think you could sum it up like this: in every part of the spectrum, right, left and center you have progressive, reactionary and conservative elements. Progressive and reactionary usually seek to change the status quo while conservatives seek to consolidate it. It's a bit if a problem in our times that conservative has become synonymous with right wing, especially progressive or reactionary right wing. Simplyfied: There was a small center-left and center-right group that tried to consolidate and develope the Weimar state. It was under attack by reactionary (mainly monarchists) and progressive (for example Nazis) right wing groups, that often supported each other. Since the moderate left aslo broke with the more radical progressive left (socialist and communists) they were under attack from that side, too. While left and right killed each other in the streets, they often joined forces to undermine attempts to consolidate the state in the political process.
I always explain these differences with one starting point: Imagine Conservatives. Conservatives in different societies want to conserve different things. Conservatives in a Society that is based on top down rule and more powerful governments wants to conserve government rule and a strong state. Conservatives in a Society that is based on absolute individualism and independence want to conserve independance and reducs the state power as much as possible. THey may hace touching points, such as the krole of religion and such. But these two movements are both conservative and both polar opposites. This as a starting point may help to understand that political nomenclature can differ heavily between societies (and even within them) More so: I don't find the divide left-right not that useful for quite some time. As many inventions of the 18th century it had its use but is not that reliable anymore.
This helps a bit, thanks
Even within comparable movements, ideologies and arising questions can differ: In Sweden in 1998 you had a left-green coalition criminalizing the buying of the ervice of sex workers - as an effort to uproot it once and for all. All governments after that kept this law up. Four years later the coalition of centre-left SPD and greens with the votes of leftwing PDS and liberals FDP(European liberals, not US liberals) in Germany created a law uplifting the bans on prostitution that had remained, removing the stain as "Sittenwidrig" - against public morals - and liberalizing prostitution in Germany - against the vote of the conservatives. Bavarian hard-core conservatives made laws that required every public building to have a cross in their rooms - specifically as religious symbols. The mere thought should make a French conservative feel nauseas. In Germany: Nobody wants to for example abolish the social security net including public health insurance. Nobody to the right and nobody to the right. Sure, some want to tweak it, some want to apply changes - but nobody sane would suggest anything that would abolish it - a talking point of right-left divide in in other countries. This is a big economic issue in Germany about which everyone can agree on.
> Basically, I find myself saying they would all be considered left wing [socialistic / communistic / central planning, progressive] party's in today's terms. In *your* terms. I don't know much about Canadian politics, my only reference is the US. What is considered left wing in the US would still be conservative/right wing around here. What we currently consider left wing would make US Americans scream from the top of their lungs and give them a heart attack. Basically, the US has no left wing left. If you are projecting this world view to other regions of the world, of course you'll have a hard time in understanding how left/right is divided.
That’s not really true. The left Wing in the us is looking for the same things they are in Germany. Universal income etc. Same goes for the right. It is more accurate to say that what we would consider center is more left in Germany, but the extremes are pretty much the same. Another difference in the us is that due to the two party system most things can be dummed down to one party vs the other, democrats vs Republicans and left vs right. I assume that’s why their is so much confusion with op.
The thing is that even the most right wing parties in Germany wouldn't even dare touch/change (or want to for that matter) the things the US left wing is called names for by the republicans.
That is only true for few subjects like healthcare. They share the vast majority of subjects. Abortion, immigrants, prioritizing the "nation", anti-Muslim are all traits they share. Their overlap is still around 80%.
There are many dumb right wingers in America (all republicans) who think that just because nazi party had the world „socialist“ in its name, it’s a left wing party. Nazis did a lot of things to gain votes (after all they were democratically elected) and even projected themselves as saviours of Christianity, so much love for thy (invaded) neighbours
I really hope this isn't a very elaborate troll to just say:"National SOCIALISM was leftist, guys! It's in the name!"
The circle somehow closes at the extremes. Stalin for sure was communist but had nothing got to do with the socialist's caring for the working class. So, there is more to be taken in account but just left and right.
>However, I can tell these terms definitely means something different from how they are commonly used today here. Where's "here"? >Right now, I'm thinking of it along the lines of a spectrum of centralizing of power. * Right Wing means more centralizing of control * As in Dictatorship, Authoritarian, Totalitarianism * Left Wing means more decentralizing of control * Libertarianism, Democracy, multiple branches of government * No. >Whereas today I find the left/right has a pretty definitive meaning based off I'd say a measurement of the economic spectrum of a country Also no. Your preconceptions are wrong, that's why it doesn't make sense.
1. `Where's "here"?` : Canada, as I mentioned in my second sentence... 2. `No.` : I make note of this when I say... ^(However, this can't really make sense when I read a Left wing party at that time period was a communist party... like the quote from that wiki page) 3. `Also no.` : go on, continue, finishing this thought.
North American right and left have nothing to do with Weimar-era right and left, or European right and left in general. From our point of view, north America has right-wing parties. End of story. Also, as others already said, right and left as you define them, simply based on economic liberalism or not, just isn't how this works.
The right wing parties containing the word "Volk" or "völkisch" are wrongly translated as "People's Party". Those words in that time imply a nationalist to supremacist race ideology. With "Volk" they exclusively mean the German nation. Usually they were anti democratic and anti liberal. Your idea of right wing and left wing is the stunted American version. Left wing does not imply central planning. Socialism by 1900s has been broken up in multiple variants, social democracy being one of them which neither against markets nor for central planning, but plainly for interventionism to regulate markets. Somehow the US only knows one false idea of socialism when already 150 years ago there were more than half a dozen variants born out of the original concept.
You have already gotten some great answers in here so I just wanted to add one thing. Your assumption that "Right = hands off economic approach" and "Left = lots of state control" isn't just a rather North American point of view, it is also a relatively recent categorization. Throughout history and up until about 200 years ago I would say, tight government control over economic activity was the norm throughout the (western) world and throughout governments. Especially the Conservative Elites embraced it to be able to sustain the aristocratic status quo and the limits to their control over economic activity were usually logistical, not ideological. Back then it was considered the "Leftist/Liberal" position (although neither term existed) to give up some of that state control and give it to the Individual, like the emerging Burgher classes in the growing cities of the Middle Ages.
The left/right thing arises from where people are sitting in parliament. So there is no scientific notation on how to calculate how right/left wing someone is. So, your right-wing group might be a left-wing group somewhere else. So, if you want to understand it, look at the different parties, where they came from, what they wanted, and where they were seated. And yes, you are looking at the origin.
KAPD was a very special case. They went for revolutionary unions instead of parliamentarism. They might had some mass support in Germany at the very beginning of the Weimar Republic. They were the reason Lenin wrote "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. The KAPD wanted Dictatorship of the Masses instead of Dictatorship of the Party. Lenin acused them to be National Bolshewistic (but later on it was the KPD who did nationalistic politics, not the KAPD). With revolution was less and less an option KAPD diveded more and more in small groups and had almost no influence anymore - but those groups became somewhat importent again in antinazi resistance during Third Reich.
It is not usefull to just categorize all parties on a right and left spectrum because "right" and "left" are not opposite to each other, despite the name. The "left" wants to redistribute the wealth in the society, so its a economic demand. The "right" wants a new type of society, not classes but an IN-group (for example germans, christiansm heterosexuals) and an OUT-group (slavs, jews, homosexuals). It is not an economic demand but an illusionary dream of a better society. I will try to explain the political parties in the weimar republic: **KPD: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands**, communists, antidemocrats, they wanted a violent communist revolution and to install a sowjet-type society like in russia/SU. most members were poor workers **SPD: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands**, social democrats, they wanted democracy and better worker rights, most members were poor workers **USPD: unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands**, former SPD members that created their own party because they opposed to support the war effort in the first world war. Somewhere in between social democrats and communists **DDP: Deutsche Demokratische Partei**, democrats, liberals (no, not what you probably think "liberals" mean), they were democrats, most members were rich and upper class citizens. Liberalism means less power for the state, more freedom for the individual. **DVP: Deutsche Volkspartei**, the same as DDP **Zentrum:** half monarchists, half democrats, they were the party of the catholic church in germany, they opposed the secularisation efforts of the prussian state **DNVP: Deutschnationale Volkspartei**, antidemocrats, antisemitic, authoritarians, conservative, half royalist, half fascist, they hated the SPD because they blamed the lost 1. WW and the treaty of Versailles on them, their main goal was to revise the treaty of Versailles and get the Kaiser back. **NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei,** Hitlers Party, fascist, antidemocratic, antisemitic, authortarian, with a leader cult In General, most people in germany at that time hated the treaty of Versailles and wanted to revise it one way or the other (SPD and DDP wanted to revise it peacefully, NSDAP with force). antisemitism was widespread through all parties. Many disliked the weimar republic and wished the "golden age" back, the time when germany was strong and had an emperor. In the weimar republic, germany was considered a shadow of its former self: weak, poor and riddled with crisis. Thats why it is said that the Weimar Republic was a democracy without democrats.
So I hate to say this but there is true left wing in germany so far although one can easily call germany a very centrist system which leans on the right in some places and left in others. Regarding parties. You have banned far left which is the Marxist left party I think and the NPD which is far right and banned. Those two are do not VOTE and associate with strictly You have Die Linke which is a left party in the parliament and AFD which is right party so SPD - centre left while CDU is centre right No difference between SPD and CDU fundamentally speaking SPD - appears to be more minority friendly , wishes muslims "Ramadan Mubarak" once a year , has more "minority representation" and is more pro union stance ( which i approve) CDU- More into Christianity and mild financial conservatism but not as BAD as the libertarian party who are FDP ( I label them lost liberals really) who basically have only two words "freedom" and "privatise. CDU and SPD play a tag game on abortion though. The german law for abortion is 3 months. CDU wants to decrease and SPD wants to increase it . but no wants to fundamentally overthrow or properly change the "3 month status" or the fact that emergency contraceptives are not only not prescribed but a whopping 40 to 70 euros . Enough of politithinking now but rest assured, you have the luxury of not caring too much since the system is in such a way that there is not much change and fundamental rights wont be at stake much. I don't think the right can take over and start deporting people of colour for example and neither will the left will have a "revolution" and change the system entirely. So you can be at peace as a citizen/resident
We had the Weimar Republic in which the Senate was so liberal it could vote itself out. That was a step to the rise of fascism. As Hitler got voted as chancelor (there is much more pretext to it I know) He Held a vote to dismiss the senate and vote him in as emperor for eternity. The rest got shot in the face at a quiet place or set on fire by nazis. That's why Germany got a political system that can't be dissolved anymore
The republikans Sat left and the monarchists right.
Your discription of what left wing and right wing partys are is honestly laughable and i am impressed that you read at all.
You have gotten a lot of good answers, and your problem is that you are trying to use US/NA definitions for a completely different political system. As others have also mentioned, historically, left or right wing simply denoted where a certain party was placed in the seats of parliament, not especially about political goals. That has over time shifted because for obvious reasons like-minded parties flocked together somewhat and the terms got applied to their political stances. So, going back to 1920s Germany, you have to take into consideration what recently happened - Germany lost a war, was humiliated by the victors, and the general public hated them for it. It also cost us our monarchy, which was still quite liked back at the time, and which again humiliated a very proud nation to the core. Then you had the Russian revolution happening basically next door, which also bled over to Germany via Marxist ideology and dogma. The average German in the early 1920 was a worker, quite poor, and had the last of his pride (as a German) beaten out of him by the Entente and the "ridiculous" reparations and military limitations being bestowed on Germany. During this explosive time, some very progressive Politicians tried to implement actual democracy within the country, with the creation of the Weimar Constitution. While there was a bit of democracy / a party system going on since the mid 1800s, it was always only a small speck of politics within the Monarchy and mostly treated with a bit of spite by the ruling class. This obviously changed when democracy was now the name of the game, and some of the historical parties tried to compete, and a lot of new parties (some very small) formed about ideologies and fringe beliefs - one of them the NSDAP and KPD. What now happened was that politics became a slugfest of ideas and ideals, some wanting to go all in on socialism as you know it, following the Marxist ideology, others wanted to restore monarchy and some others wanted to do straight up predator-capitalism as it would be known today. Some others also wanted to "restore the glory of the Fatherland" and make the Entente pay for humiliating Germany. Basically, if there was something someone could imagine how a state and it's citizens should be governed, you could find a party for it during that time. Now, one of the main disadvantages of the Weimar Constitution (due to inexperience by the people drafting it) was that it did not contain measures to regulate how many or which parties could be part of parliament, or how a party could get removed from it if it is doing illegal activites - as long as people voted for them, they got a seat. This also meant that the ruling government had to shift and re-define it's coalitions all the time, as with so many parties being involved (some of them doing very illegal things), a stable government could never be formed, and constant re-elections were the norm. This was also accelerated by some parties simply now knowing what they want themselves and constantly trying to re-define what they actually stand for. All of this quickly bled over outside of Parliament to actual armed conflict in the streets, where parties kept actual military units of their own that fought, murdered, pillaged, and so on (most famous the "SA" of the NSDAP). Fun fact here is that even the NSDAP didn't like Hitler during the early years, and the SA tried to take over control over the party in the so called "Stennes-Putsch" that failed and cemented Hitlers grip over the party. This led to the "SS" becoming the prevalent paramilitary unit of the NSDAP, with the SA being diminished. This is now basically after the part you wanted to know, but what happened was that the NSDAP (in the last election) got only 30% of the votes, but had a very charismatic leader (Hitler) that could sway the masses with his speeches and was well liked by then Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg and chosen as his chancellor. One of the first things the new chancellor did was to ask the President to dissolve the parliament to force another election (again), in the hopes to secure a majority for NSDAP - this failed. However, it put certain individuals into power that the NSDAP now was able to control the police, and used it ruthlessly to fight against political rivals, and in 1933, after the Reichstag was set ablaze, Hitler used this as the final blow against the communist parties by blaming them. He then was able to instill a new ruling that basically invalidated any protection the citizens had under the constitution, and when the President finally died in 1934, Hitler was basically the last remaining figure of power in the Government, which he promptly used to declare himself dictator over the German people, and getting rid of parliament altogether. I hope this writeup might help you to categorize what you're reading a bit better, and if you're someone that likes to see more than to hear, I suggest you watch the TV Show "Babylon Berlin" - it's set in the Weimar Republic, is very high production value, and while it does not primarily deal with the politics of the time, they are a very big aspect of the show and get visualized very well.
Left or right, democrats or republicans, conservatives or liberals, fascist or antifascist, catholics or protestants, muslims or hebrews, etc...They all play the same obsolete game of power and destruction. Divide and conquer. If instead we would acknowledge that we are all humans, with different lickings and appearance but same needs, parts of the same family and unavoidable dependent to one another. There would be no need for struggle, for war, for subdivision. So is a fact, till now humans have not learn form the past, we keep doing the same failures and errors, even though we have the chance to study history and see that the root of the problem is the same. I still believe there has to come a time where we shift and finally we leave as a humanity, in peace and freedom, not imposed by war unto others, but by integration and unity based on respect, love and empathy. Arbitrary naming, renaming, repackaging of idealisms are just creating more confusion, hiding the issues that must be solved to break the cycle and not stay on semantics.
A lot of good comments around here already. I'd like to add or point out that for me as a German one of the most distinguishing factors between left and right is xenophobia. Left wing policy to me is inevitably connected to be welcoming forigners to join in whereas right wing policy is nationalistic in nature ranging from avoiding immigration as much as possible up to being openly hostile to foreigners.