Left-wing in the context of "Social equality"

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.

Socialist systems are divided into non-market and market forms. A non-market socialist system seeks to eliminate the perceived inefficiencies, irrationalities, unpredictability, and crises that socialists traditionally associate with capital accumulation and the profit system. Market socialism retains the use of monetary prices, factor markets and sometimes the profit motive. As a political force, socialist parties and ideas exercise varying degrees of power and influence, heading national governments in several countries. Socialist politics have been internationalist and nationalist; organised through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions and other times independent and critical of them, and present in industrialised and developing nations. Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice. While retaining socialism as a long-term goal, in the post-war period social democracy embraced a mixed economy based on Keynesianism within a predominantly developed capitalist market economy and liberal democratic polity that expands state intervention to include income redistribution, regulation, and a welfare state.

The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International, was a political international which aimed to unite a variety of left-wing political groups and trade union organizations based on the working class and class struggle. It was founded on 28 September 1864 at a workers' meeting in St Martin's Hall, London, and its first congress was held in 1866 in Geneva.

The IWA's history was characterized by internal conflicts between different socialist and anarchist factions. The initial ideological struggle was between the communists or Marxists, centred around Karl Marx on the General Council, and the mutualists or followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The communists successfully displaced the mutualists as the dominant ideological trend at the Brussels Congress in 1868. The rise of Mikhail Bakunin's collectivist anarchist faction in the late 1860s led to a more intense conflict over the role of the state and political action in achieving socialism. The organization reached its peak following the Paris Commune of 1871, which was celebrated and defended by the International in Marx's influential address, The Civil War in France. The bloody suppression of the Commune, however, led to a period of harsh government repression against the IWA.

Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural materialism espouses analysis based in critical theory, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism is dedicated to developing the field, and has been published by the Raymond Williams Society since 1998.

The 1955 system (Japanese: 55年体制, Hepburn: 55-nen Taisei), also known as the one-and-a-half party system, is a term used by scholars to describe the dominant-party system that has existed in Japan since 1955, in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has held by itself or in coalition with Komeito (from 1999 to 2025) a government nearly uninterrupted, with opposition parties largely incapable of forming significant or long lasting alternatives, other than for brief stints in 1993–1994 and 2009–2012. The terms 1955 system and the one-and-a-half party system are credited to Junnosuke Masumi [ja], who described the 1955 system as "a grand political dam into which the history of Japanese politics surge".

The years of Japan under the 1955 regime witnessed high economic growth, leading to the dominance of the ruling party in the Diet, with an undergirded tight connection between the bureaucracy and the business sector. Due to a series of LDP scandals and the 1992 burst of the Japanese asset price bubble, the LDP lost its majority in the House of Representatives in the 1993 general election, which initially signalled the end of the 1955 system. However, the left-wing Japan Socialist Party, the long-time opposition which finally gained a majority, would soon lose much of its support after it decided to form a coalition government with the arch-rival LDP just a year later, leading to the JSP being refounded as the SDP in 1996, and its coalition partner regaining power. The LDP briefly lost power again in 2009 to the now defunct Democratic Party of Japan before regaining it in 2012, retaining power up to the present day. Nevertheless, it lost its majority in the House of Representatives in the 2024 general election, and its majority in the House of Councillors in the 2025 election, forcing it to run a minority government for the first time.

The Lebanese Civil War (Arabic: الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية Al-Ḥarb al-Ahliyyah al-Libnāniyyah) was a multifaceted armed conflict that took place from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 150,000 fatalities and led to the exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon.

The religious diversity of the Lebanese people played a notable role in the lead-up to and during the conflict: Lebanese Christians and Lebanese Sunni Muslims comprised the majority in the coastal cities; Lebanese Shia Muslims were primarily based throughout southern Lebanon and in the Beqaa Valley in the east; and Druze and Christians populated the country's mountainous areas. At the time, the Lebanese government was under the influence of elites within the Maronite Christian community. The link between politics and religion was reinforced under the French Mandate from 1920 to 1943, and the country's parliamentary structure favoured a leading position for Lebanese Christians, who constituted the majority of the population. However, Lebanon's Muslims comprised a large minority and the influx of thousands of Palestinians—first in 1948 and again in 1967—contributed to Lebanon's demographic shift towards an eventual Muslim majority. Lebanon's Christian-dominated government had been facing increasing opposition from Muslims, pan-Arabists, and left-wing groups. The Cold War also exerted a disintegrative effect on the country, closely linked to the political polarization that preceded the 1958 Lebanese crisis. Christians mostly sided with the Western world while Muslims, pan-Arabists, and leftists mostly sided with Soviet-aligned Arab countries.

Petru Groza (7 December 1884 – 7 January 1958) was a Romanian politician, best known as the first Prime Minister of the Communist Party-dominated government under Soviet occupation during the early stages of the Communist regime in Romania, and later as the President of the Presidium of the Great National Assembly (nominal head of state of Romania) from 1952 until his death in 1958.

Groza emerged as a public figure at the end of World War I as a notable member of the Romanian National Party (PNR), preeminent layman of the Romanian Orthodox Church, and then member of the Directory Council of Transylvania. In 1925–26 he served as Minister of State in the cabinet of Marshal Alexandru Averescu. In 1933, Groza founded a left-wing Agrarian organization known as the Ploughmen's Front (Frontul Plugarilor). The left-wing ideas he supported earned him the nickname The Red Bourgeois.

Political violence in Turkey became a serious problem in the late 1970s and was even described as a "low-level civil war". The death squads of Turkish right-wing ultranationalist groups, sometimes allied with the state, inflicted around 5,000 casualties with the motivation of acting against the resistance of the left-wing opposition. Most of the victims were left-wingers. The level of illegal violence lessened for a while after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, and was later overshadowed by the PKK insurgency in 1984 and the revival of the Maoist insurgency.

Centre-left politics is the range of left-wing political ideologies that lean closer to the political centre. Ideologies commonly associated with it include social democracy, social liberalism, progressivism, and green politics. Ideas commonly supported by the centre-left include welfare capitalism, social justice, liberal internationalism, and multiculturalism. Economically, the centre-left supports a mixed economy in a democratic capitalist system, often including economic interventionism, progressive taxation, and the right to unionize. Centre-left politics are contrasted with far-left politics that reject capitalism or advocate revolution.

The centre-left developed with the rest of the left–right political spectrum in 18th and 19th century France, where the centre-left included those who supported transfer of powers from the monarchy to parliament or endorsed moderate republicanism. Early progressivism and left liberalism evolved in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in Western Europe and the United States, while social democracy split from revolutionary socialism, which became associated with communism, and advocated reformist socialist positions. Social democracy became the dominant ideology in Western Europe during the post–World War II economic expansion and it spread to Africa after decolonization.