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(See political spectrum and left-right politics for more on the merits/limitations of this kind of classification.) The terminology of left-right politics was originally based on the seating-arrangement of parliamentary partisans during the French Revolution. The more ardent proponents of radical revolutionary measures (including democracy and republicanism) were commonly referred to as leftists because they sat on the left side of successive legislative assemblies. As this original reference became obsolete, the meaning of the terms has changed as appropriate to the spectrum of ideas and stances being compared.
The term is also often used to characterize the politics of the Soviet Union and other one-party " communist stateThis article is about one-party states ruled by Communist Parties. For information regarding communism as a form of society, as an ideology advocating that form of society, or as a popular movement, see the main Communism article. In common speech in thes", although many (perhaps most) on the political left (including many Marxists) would not consider their own politics to have anything significant in common with any of these states.
The term "Left" was first used in the early days of French revolution. When the National AssemblyThe National Assembly is the name of either a legislature, or the lower house of a bicameral legislature in some countries. The best known, if not first, National Assembly, was that established following the French Revolution in 1789, known as the Assembl first met, the reformers set on the left side of the meeting hall, while supporters of monarchy and nobility sat on the right. Originally, it wasn't meant to be a political statement, but as the factions within the National Assembly formed, the label stuck.
Although it may seem ironic in terms of present-day usage, the original "leftists" during the French Revolution were the largely bourgeois supporters of laissez-faire capitalism and free markets. As the electorate expanded beyond property-holders, these relatively wealthy elites found themselves clearly victorious over the old aristocracy and the remnants of feudalism, but newly opposed by the growing and increasingly organized and politicized workers and wage-earners. The "left" of 1789 would, in some ways be part of the present-day "right", liberal with regard to the rights of property and intellect, but not embracing notions of distributive justice, rights for organized labor, etc.
The European left has traditionally shown a smooth continuum between non-communist and communist parties (including such hybrids as eurocommunism), which have sometimes allied with more moderate leftists to present a united front. In the United States, however, no avowedly socialist or communist party ever became a major player in national politics, although the Social Democratic Party of Eugene V. Debs and its successor Socialist Party of America (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) and the Communist Party of the United States of America (in the 1930s) made some inroads. While many American "liberals" would be "social democrats" in European terms, very few of them openly embrace the term "left"; in America, the term is mainly embraced by New Left activists, certain portions of the labor movement, and people who see their intellectual or political heritage as descending from 19th-century socialist movements.
The " New Left" has had varying degrees of unity since its rise in the 1960s, and can be seen as a coalition of numerous distinct movements, including (but not limited to) feminists, greens, some labor unions, some atheists, some gay rights activists, and some minority ethnic and racially oriented civil rights groups. Many Greens deny that green politics is "on the left"; nonetheless, their economic policies can generally be considered left-wing, and when they have formed political coalitions (most notably in Germany, but also in local governments elsewhere), it has almost always been with groups that would generally be classified as being on the left.