The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 71: Political Ideologies

Episode Date: January 30, 2015

A social scientific discussion and comparison of some of the major political ideologies in the world today, beginning with an overview of the origins, meaning, and limitations of the 'left-right' political spectrum, and continuing with an analysis of the historical origin and key beliefs of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, and other nationalist movements.

You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 71. Political Ideologies. I'm your host, James Fodor. So in this episode, we're going to have a look at some of the major political ideologies that exist in the world today and that inform political decisions and government policies around the globe. It should be noted that this isn't a politics podcast, this is a science podcast, so what I'm going to do here is just give an overview of what these different positions are and

how they relate to each other and a little bit of historical background, looking at these views from the perspective of political science. So I'm not going to try and determine which of them is correct or where they go right and where they go wrong or whatever. That's not the goal of this, nor am I going to talk about particular policies. I'm just going to look at these ideologies in fairly general terms to hopefully give you a bit of a better understanding of what these labels mean and how they fit into the political discourse and how these ideas shape the way that countries have been governed and continue to be governed in the world today. So with that caveat, let's get started by talking about probably the single most important

concept when understanding and discussing political ideologies, which is that of the left-right spectrum. So you've almost certainly heard of left-wing and right-wing and centrist positions before, but perhaps you don't know where these terms come from, because they're a little bit odd if you think about them. What does the left and right have to do with politics? The terms originated during the French Revolution. So during the French Revolution, there were people who supported the King, the traditional establishment, and there were people who wanted reform of various sorts. Those who were supporters of the Revolution, that is, they wanted reforms, stood on the King's left,

and those who were supporters of the King, and they wanted to maintain the King's powers stood on the King's right in the French National Assembly. And that is basically the origin of the terms, left wing and right wing. And subsequently, over the course of the French Revolution and later on in French politics, you basically had that same dynamic of innovators or people wanting more reform, people who were opposed to the king to varying degrees, sitting on the left of the king and the assembly, or just on the left-hand side of the assembly in general, because the king wasn't always there.

And those who were sort of more conservative or traditional, sitting on the right-hand side and sort of moderates in the center. You know, that dynamic varied over time, but that's the basic idea of where these terms came from, and they were later sort of picked up by other countries and used to describe opposing political sides. Today, it's, there's a lot of debate about how useful and relevant this sort of left-right spectrum is. In general terms, when people say right-wing, they mean some, they mean sort of a more traditional or conservative side that generally sort of supports, the status quo more, versus the left wing, which tends to be more interested in reform or progressive policies, more interested in protecting lower classes or working classes generally.

Those are very broad outlines of sort of what the difference is. And there are many, many scholars who study this who think that the left-right spectrum is not adequate to describe political diversity because there are lots of varying opinions and positions that one can take that aren't really captured just by this one sort of spectrum. It's also very important to note that although the left-right spectrum dynamic, I think, is present to some degree in pretty much all countries, and it sort of has been, basically, since the French Revolution, what constitutes those left-right extremes certainly differs between countries. So, for example, in the United States of America, what positions that would be considered left-wing there wouldn't necessarily be considered left-wing in France, or positions that would be considered sort of moderately conservative in

America might be considered extremely conservative in France, or maybe Sweden, which is another country that's sort of relatively more progressive or left-wing than the United States is. And similarly, if we look back at early British parliamentary positions and also those are the French Revolution and the American Revolution, positions that today would be. seen as quite centrist, sort of quite a moderate position, like, for example, supporting universal suffrage, everyone having a vote, or adults having a vote. I mean, that's something that basically everyone agrees on today. That used to be considered a fairly left-wing progressive position, whereas a conservative would oppose that. Likewise, sort of a separation between

church and state, that's generally fairly accepted to varying degrees these days, but that used to be considered a fairly sort of progressive left-wing position. And, and, consider, sort of a fairly sort of progressive left-wing position, and conservatives would sort of oppose that. So what counts as conservative and what counts the sort of left-wing progressive differs across times and across positions. Indeed, you could even get sort of flipped situations when you have left-wing governments in power. So, for example, in the Soviet Union, which had a communist government, particularly near the end of the period, conservatives would actually be people who sort of supported a more orthodox interpretation of Marxism or Stalinism and more controls on society, whereas the left in

some sense, although that term doesn't work so well here, but what you might have called the left or the progressives would have actually been more in favor of sort of market-oriented reforms or reforms about increasing freedoms of the press and things like that. So in some countries, particularly communist countries, today's communist China might be another example. You have an almost inversion of the idea of the left-right spectrum versus progressives and conservatives, because the establishment, people on the side of maintaining the establishment are conservatives, but the existing establishment is, or at least it's supposed to be, sort of left-wing or communist. And so there's a bit of confusion as to what a conservative becomes in that situation.

Anyway, we'll talk more about some of those terms like communism later on, but I just wanted to give an overview of what is meant by this sort of left-right spectrum. there are a whole lot of other distinctions that are also relevant to differing political positions as well I won't go through all of them at the moment I'll just sort of mention some of them so again the basic idea of left wing

left wing versus right wing is sort of how concerned are you for preserving traditional values, traditional social structures and the traditional allocation of sort of positions and resources in society that's sort of right wing. Also tends to be associated with nationalism, support for the country,

although that's not always true, versus left wing, which tends to be more supporting progressive, new values, individual freedoms, also caring for the needy and supporting the rights of workers and other sort of oppressed or lower class groups. That sort of tends to be what's associated with left wing.

But that's only one axis. There are lots of other questions or sort of issues in politics that aren't really captured by that. that spectrum. So some of these other ones include the idea of communitarianism versus individualism. A communitarianism, broadly speaking, says that society best functions when it works sort of as a collective or community or people band together and cooperate in lots of ways, versus individualism which says that essentially, or a position which holds, that essentially society is made up of individuals who act for their own self-interest and, you know, they can cooperate and be, you know,

participate in groups with others, but sort of fundamentally it's about individuals who are sort of seen as separate from each other, whereas communitarianism tends to focus much more on collective groups of people. That's not so well captured by the traditional left-right spectrum, because you can have, you could be an individualist on the left or a communitarian on the left and vice versa. That's another way of looking at political disputes. Another way of looking at political disputes is, well, the traditional term for it, the older term, is sort of clericalism versus anti-clericalism. this is a bit of an old term now, but certainly in the, say, 18th, 19th centuries in Europe,

there was a lot of concern about exactly sort of how much power or political power influences the church should have or the priests should have compared to the secular state. And so that was an important access to, I mean, that one fitted more, I think, along sort of left-right lines because right-wing, conservativeist types tended to be more supporting the church, whereas sort of left-wing, progressive types tended to be more anti-clerical. rural versus urban is another distinction which has traditionally been quite important, whether the focus is on sort of the needs of the city versus the needs of the country. Again, I would say traditionally, the association has generally been,

sort of left-wing has been more urban and right-wing has been more rural. I mean, that's certainly the case in, say, the United States today with the Republican and Democratic parties. More traditionally, that that dynamic has been the case because left-wing groups have tended to be associated first with bourgeois, meaning businessmen, I suppose, who were tended to congregate in urban areas. Later on, left wing was more associated

with, I guess, sort of socialist worker groups who, again, were sort of congregated in urban areas, and the conservative elements tended to be either peasants or the landed aristocracy who were associated with the rural areas. Another dichotomy concerns the

how open you want your country to be or your nation to be to trade with the outside world. So globalisation is the idea that world markets should become more integrated and independent, and there should be more trade and transfer of goods and people between countries. Ortaarchy is the opposite view, which holds that a nation should strive for economic independence, that it should sort of produce its own things and be relatively independent of other countries. Another distinction concerns the attitude to political change. So there's four terms here, which I'd like to discuss.

Radicals, progressives, conservatives, and reactionaries. I guess I'll start with progressives. Well, progressives and radicals go together because they are both people who want change. They want the political and social system to change. So typically these tend to be more left-wing. In fact, that's the basic origin of the left-wing, right-ring distinction. Remember, in the French Revolution was people who want to change on the left

versus people who wanted more to stay the same on the right. But people who want change have always been divided up, since the very early, since the very beginning of the French Revolution, really, have always been divided up between those who want lots of rapid change versus those who want more measured incremental slow change. Indeed, radicals and progressives might agree on the final goal, but they often agree on how rapidly to get there and the means by which they should use to get there.

So radicals want rapid change. A good example of these are at least a lot of Marxists. communists, basically, who support revolutionary change. That's a very rapid form of change, very extreme form of change, so they are radicals. Progressives tend to be those who favor more slow, moderate change, incremental change, and many, at least sometimes a socialist, particularly Fabian socialist, for example, sort of measured change, and many progressives or sort of left-wing people today would more lean towards the progressive rather than the radical side, but that's, of course, not universal.

Now, the other two groups here, conservatives and reactionaries, tend to want less change. They tend to want to stick with the existing status quo or traditional values or traditional ways of structuring society. But there's a distinction between conservatives and reactionaries. Conservatives basically just want to keep things the way they are, more or less, but reactionaries want to return to a previous way of doing things, return to a previous state. So reactionaries are actually a little bit like radicals in that they want change, but they're different in the sense that they want change to go back rather than forward in some sense, although they probably wouldn't describe it that way,

because again, that's like a derogatory way of phrasing it. They want to return society or the polity to back to a previous way of doing things. So, for example, in the French Revolution, you could describe Napoleon and some of his supporters as reactionary, because they brought back the monarchy and they restored the position of the Catholic Church, and a number of other things that were done by the revolution, although on the other hand, there were many things that they didn't restore, there were many changes that they did keep.

So, again, the story is often more complicated, but I'm just putting these concepts and terms out there to facilitate better understanding, not to sort of put a straight jacket around things and say that they are only this and only that. One final concept that I want to talk about is that of the two-dimensional axis, a political axis. One version of this is the Nolan chart,

which was created by a libertarian David Nod. Nolan, and so the original form is, I think, a little bit biased towards libertarianism, but it's being generalized now, and I think it's a bit more, it's a bit more neutral. It's an attempt to better represent political diversity by, instead of just talking about the position along a single left-right axis, which is quite limiting, it talks about position on a two-dimensional axis. One dimension corresponds basically to social matters, and the second dimension corresponds basically to economic matters. So the version that I refer to, which is taken from a website called the Political Compass, which I recommend checking out because it's quite an

interesting site, has a horizontal axis which goes from left to right, and this basically corresponds to how much intervention should there be by the government in the market, in the economic activity. Left-wing corresponds to more government activity like nationalization of industries and regulation of corporations and higher taxes, things like that. Right-wing corresponds to lower taxism, deregulation and privatization, that sort of thing. The vertical axis, they call libertarian versus

authoritarian, or I guess according to our term used earlier, we would call it anarchy versus authoritarian. I guess it's sort of equivalent in this case. Authoritarian basically wants to maintain central government control or at least restrictions

over social values or social practices. So that's generally associated with sort of things like promotion of family values, opposition to abortion, that sort of thing, whereas libertarian or anarchists, the sort of lower end of the vertical axis corresponds to typically more socially progressive ideas, you know, so pro-choice positions on abortion, for example. So I think this access is helpful because it allows for more finer distinctions to be made between political positions. So, for example, the United States Republican Party is typically described as being

socially conservative and economically or fiscally right wing. So that would put them into sort of the top right quadrant on the chart here. Of course, there's a lot of diversity, even among the U.S. Republicans, so I don't mean to stereotype here. It's just a way of understanding political diversity, whereas the U.S. Democrats would generally be considered to be more socially progressive, so that would put them further down on the vertical axis, and also more economically left-wink, so that would put them further to the left. Now, that's only sort of a relative position, of course, exactly how far apart parties are on these axis will differ, depending on exactly what positions one's considering and exactly how you weigh these things up.

In practice, in a lot of electoral democracies, the difference on this axis between major parties is actually not that great. In other words, compared to the total amount of variation you could theoretically have, or we have seen over the past 200 years, the amount of variation in positions that people actually vote for is actually quite small. That's enough on the left-right spectrum and other axes and ways of conceiving of political diversity and differing political positions. I now want to talk about some specific political ideologies, and I'm going to group them under a few key umbrellas. Now, it's important to understand that any attempt to classify political ideologies is fraught with danger,

basically, because there are so many different ways of doing it, and there are so many different positions that can be, you know, finely cut up and categorized and rearranged differently, that you're always going to have someone who thinks that their particular position is not represented properly or is not in the right category or whatever. The other thing is that a lot of these terms are very sort of emotive, and they have a lot of baggage to them, a lot of connotations, and so whenever you use them, you tend to sort of bring a whole lot of these concepts that you don't necessarily want. So it's very tricky. But nonetheless, we have to find some way of talking about the diversity of political positions. So that's what I'm going to attempt to do here. I'm going to,

the way I've decided to do it, and again, I'm emphasizing this, I'm not saying this is the correct or right way. It is a way, and I think it's a helpful way for our purposes. And so this is the way we're going to do it. I'm going to look at it in a very broadly sort of historical perspective. So I'm going to start with a group of positions that I'm calling conservatism, broadly sort of right-wing positions, but particularly they are the sort of positions that I think all the rest of political discourse in some sense reacts to. That is the traditional establishment, the sort of pre-French revolution. It was originally called the Ancian regime or something, I can't pronounce the French, but the old regime, the way things were with the king and the church and powerful positions

and the aristocracy and all that sort of stuff before the French Revolution, before lots of reforms were brought in. Now, I'm not saying. then conservatives support all those things, but I think the broad class of beliefs that can be called conservatives traces can be thought to trace their intellectual heritage from these sorts of ideas about preserving the establishment. So those are, this group called conservatism is the group that I'm identifying as temporarily primary in some sense. That is, they are the sort of primordial political position in the sense. Before there was anyone else, there were conservatives, that is the ruling elite, basically. Now, the next group that I'll go into

discuss is liberalism, or the next group of ideologies. Remember, each of these is a big group of ideologies. They're not a single entity. They're just very broad, loose groupings. Liberalism is, I think, the sort of first group of ideologies that came, that arose in reaction to conservatives more, particularly in reaction to the old regime. So particularly in the 17th century Britain and in 18th century France with the French Revolution and in 18th century America with the American Revolution. Many of the people who were engaged in these sort of activities and were criticizing the existing government, in particular, many of the founding fathers in America and many of the French revolutionaries held views that we could be broadly described as liberal.

Typically, they wanted more individual freedoms. We'll talk more about that later, but they were reacting against the conservative old regime sort of positions. And there's some confusion about the way the word liberal is used, particularly in the United States, and I'll come back to that as well. So the next... So that's... Liberalism is the next position that sort of came up to conservatism. Liberalism sort of arose in the 18th century.

Conservatism, as I said, sort of predates that. The next group of positions to come along, which I'm separating into three, although they're kind of linked as well. Socialism, Communism, and anarchism. Now, the reason I say they're linked is because historically there's been a lot of overlap and interplay between these groups.

They all traditionally have been fairly left-wing associated with the left-wing, with the working classes associated with often revolutionary, although not always, of course. All of these groups emerged basically in the 19th century. There's antecedents, of course, that go back further than that, but basically in their modern form arose in the 19th century as a reaction to industrialization. So socialism, communism, communism, and anarchism broadly came as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, whereas liberalism came as a reaction to sort of the old regime and the power of the church and the king.

So we've looked at conservatism, we've looked at liberalism, we've looked at socialism, communism, and anarchism. The next one that the next main group, or the last one that I'm going to discuss is essentially what I'm identifying as a 20th century collection of movements. This one's probably the least coherent of all. It's sort of a rag-tag group that I'm throwing together. But nonetheless, I think that there's a meaningful sense in which they do share some similarities. and this I'm calling nationalist-slash-reactionary groups. Now, many of these groups, as I said, emerged in the 20th century, often as a reaction to liberalism in part, sometimes the power of existing elites in part as well, but also importantly as a reaction to socialism and communism. So in this group sit a very diverse range of people, including, for example, Gandhi and many of the other pro-independent sort of anti-colonialist groups who were, I think, reaction.

into some of the ideas of liberalism and also incorporate a lot of socialist studies in their own thought, but they also had nationalist ideals which make them distinctive from socialists, and I'll talk more about that in a moment. Also in this group are fascists and Nazis, who I guess are sort of nationalist reactionaries, and I'll talk about those in a moment. So hopefully you see some sense in the broad groupings that I've outlined, that they're broadly historical, and that conservatism comes first, liberalism is roughly eighth-century, socialism, communism, communism, communism, communism, communism, roughly 19th century, nationalist and reactionary groups, roughly 20th century. And they all come as sort of a reaction to that which came before, and differing

historical circumstances that arose at the time. And of course, there's a lot of overlap between these groups, and many of them incorporate ideas from each other and so on. So it's only a way of looking at it, not a sort of hard and fast categorization. But now that I give in the broad overview, let me go back and look at each of these positions in turn and give a few more details about what these positions hold and what makes them distinctive. So starting with conservatism. Conservatism is one of the tricky ones to do, because there's no single set of policies that are universally regarded as conservative, because conservatism just refers to basically upholding the traditional way of doing things, and the traditional way of doing

things is different depending on where you are. So, for example, in the late 19th, early 20th century China, a conservative, I don't know if they use that term, but you could use that term, would have supported the imperial family and the traditional sort of Confucian way of doing things and the civil service and all that sort of stuff, whereas that would have been completely different to what a conservative in America at the same time, or even in America today, or in Europe would have supported, because there were differing systems, differing traditional values and traditional ways of doing things, and so what conservative meant was different depending on the circumstance. Nonetheless, typically in Europe, conservatism is associated with supporting the monarchy to

varying degrees. This is not true of conservatism in America, obviously, because all of American thought descends from, all of American political positions really descend to some degree, rather from the American Revolution, which fundamentally was liberal revolution. That is, it rejected monarchy, and it rejected a state church. The way that conservatism developed in Europe versus the United States is quite different in that respect. As I said, in Europe, conservatism tends to support, it tends to be fairly nationalistic. It tends to support the monarchy or the king or the traditional establishment. It depends whether there is a monarchy in the country.

So in France, conservatism doesn't support the monarchy. I mean, it used to when they was a monarchy. Nowadays, there isn't a monarchy, so it doesn't support that. Also tends to support the church. And again, not always. Tends to support traditional sort of values. This is associated with a position called social conservatism, which focuses on preservation of traditional values or family values.

Again, exactly what those are, differ between different countries. But often there's a sense of social conservatives have a sense. sense that modern innovations are threatening and eroding away traditional values and that this represents a threat to civilization, a threat to public morality, and there's a concern about this. That seems to be a powerful sort of trend in conservative thought, particularly social conservative thought. And this is, I think, common within both the European and the American varieties. American conservatism tends to focus much less on a sort of state church and, obviously,

not the king, but tends to focus on supporting the republic. The rule of law tends to be fairly Christian-oriented, though not always, and it tends to sort of be upholding of Western civilization and sort of classical, classicism in various varying degrees, as distinct from both modernism of various forms and socialism, tends to be opposed to that, and also from totalitarian governments. Conservatives seem to be particularly anti-antithetic, typically opposed to toward totalitarian governments. There's another sort of subcategory of conservatism, which is, traditionalist conservatism. I guess this is sort of one of the main branches of conservatism. This is often associated with Edmund Burke, who was, I think, 18th century British writer. The idea of, the collection of ideas that is described as traditionalist

conservatism often, against, tends to support tradition, hierarchy, tends to focus on high culture as opposed to sort of innovative or modern or sort of low, popular culture, tends to be suspicious of that, tends to be suspicious of cultural or social innovations. There's an idea that there is a lot of wisdom embodied in the way things have been done and traditional customs, and that it's unwise to tamper with that too readily. Conservatives might support sort of slow, careful, pragmatic reforms, but be sort of suspicious of very large or rapid reforms. Again, they're often focused on patriotism, so that's not necessarily national patriotism,

although it could be, but it could also be support of one sort of local area. So they tend to be less focused on sort of universal values like liberals and socialists tend to be, as I'll discuss later. Okay, so that's all I have to say on conservatism. Now let's look at the next ideology, liberalism. Liberalism is a political philosophy which emerged in roughly the 18th century, although a little bit in the 17th century as well with the writings of John Locke, British philosopher. but liberalism focuses on the sort of twin key ideas of liberty and equality. The motto of the French Revolution, liberty, fraternity, equality is often taken as a sort of a liberal maxim.

Another related one is life liberty property, which is I think John Locke came up with or one of the other British philosophers. So the core idea of liberalism, in so much as there is one, is focus on the individual and individual rights. So usually, at least classically, the idea of liberalism is that individuals come together in what's called a social contract to protect themselves from each other, basically. And this is how the state is formed. So the state is sort of an agreement between individuals to put an authority in place so that the authority can protect them from, you know, robbery and murder and rape and things like that so that they can protect

their individual rights of person and also their property rights. The idea is that, therefore, that this is what a state should focus, this is what a government should focus on doing, and that other activities are not legitimate. So, in particular, a state should, a government should

act in the interest of the people that, of the individuals that come together to form it. And so this is in contra distinction to classical, or the traditional idea of the divine right of kings, basically according to which the state was in some sense the personal property of the king. The idea of liberalism is that, no, it's the property in some sense of the group of people, individuals who come together to make up the state, and that it should

be, state policies should be conducted for their benefit, in particular to safeguard their personal rights and their property rights. So liberals typically support things like democratic elections, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, private property, civil liberties, that. And again, the revolutionaries in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, can broadly be described as liberals. Now, there's a tension in liberal thought, which goes back, I think, you know, right to the French Revolution, really, which is the tension between these ideas of liberty and equality. Liberalism supports both. They want people, a very important idea in liberalism was that people should be treated equally, because traditionally this was not the case.

Traditionally, the aristocrats got special treatment and different laws applied to different classes of people. The idea of liberalism was that everyone should be treated the same equality before the law, and that justice should be blind towards who the person is that it's considering. But this idea of equality was later broadened to talk about equality of outcomes, equality of opportunity, so trying to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, and trying to help people in disadvantaged circumstances. And this is how there came to be, I think, this confusion or at least differing usage of the term liberal in America and Europe. So in America today, the word liberal is typically used basically as a synonym with progressive,

typically wanting more government intervention and more social programs to help out vulnerable groups and also wanting more freedoms for questions of social policies like, for example, abortion or gay rights or something like that or issues like that. Now, these ideas are liberal ideas. However, there's a focus on one strain of liberal ideas, particularly a focus on certain types of liberty and a strong focus on the equality side of liberal thought. In Europe, the term liberal tends to refer more to classical liberals,

which I'll describe more in a moment, but with more of a focus on property rights, free market economics, and limited government. Now again, both of these are sort of genuine strains of liberal thought. It's not like one is a true liberalism and the other isn't. They're just sort of different directions you could take liberalism in and different directions in which liberalism historically has been developed. A big change occurred in the way that sort of this was understood,

occurred during the administration of President Roosevelt, who introduced the New Deal and a lot of welfare state policies. When the term liberalism used in America, typically it now refers to people who support those type of welfare state policies, that Roosevelt introduced. Now, someone who argued against those type of policies on the basis of needing to protect property rights, maintain a limited government, and things like that,

could also be described as a liberal, but they would be emphasizing a different strand of the liberal tradition. Again, it's this tension between liberty and equality and how that's understood. A few different subtypes of liberalism, what I'd like to mention. I already mentioned classical liberalism. This basically is sort of the original formulation of liberalism

taken from people like Adam Smith and John Locke. And focuses more on the property rights side of things and protecting individual liberties. Also tend to be focused on natural law, so sort of law and rights as set out by nature. This original form of liberalism was more applicable and was more of interest to the bourgeoisie. So that is people who had money, who were often merchants or professional, in various senses and often lived in urban settings, but did not have ranks, so they didn't have aristocratic privileges. They weren't the landed aristocracy. So they were interested in political reform that gave them more political rights and equality before the law and that protected their property from arbitrary confiscation by the crown. But they were much less interested in the sort of social leveling or the equality aspect, at least the economic equality aspect, because they already had property, they were already sort of privileged in that sense. So classical liberalism thus tends to more focus on the political rights, civil liberties, limited government, and a free market sort of approach. Libertarianism is basically a variety of classical libertism or an extension of it,

but it's a more modern concept, or it's a modern word at least. It's very hard to distinguish it from classical liberalism because classical liberalism and libertarianism overlap to a great extent, and also many libertarians have differing views on different things. Probably the single most important concept in libertarianism is that of individual liberty and freedom of choice. That's what libertarians are very much concerned about maximizing personal autonomy and voluntary association as distinct from coercive association, so state-mandated groups of various sorts. However, there's immense disagreement between libertarians about exactly what those concepts mean and exactly how to achieve them. So there are some libertarians who are sort of traditionally described as more right-wing because they are advocates of laissez-faire capitalism.

Lez-faire, by the way, is a term from the French, which means leave it alone. So an advocate of laissez-faire does not want the government to pass a lot of laws restricting what businesses can do or what individuals can do in the market. They don't want them controlling prices or owning factories and other things like that, whereas an interventionist would tend to support more of those sorts of things. right libertarians tend to support laissez-faire capitalism property rights, whereas libertarians socialist or left libertarians, who I'll talk about a little bit more when we get to socialism,

tend to favour common cooperative ownership and cooperative management. There's also a strand of libertarianism which basically fades into or merges with anarchists, anarchists being those who oppose any sort of centralized state. We'll get to those as well. So it's really libertarianism is an interesting one, because libertarians can be essentially liberals, or they can be essentially socialists, or they can essentially be anarchists,

depending on exactly how they interpret things. But really, it's a fundamental focus on autonomy and freedom of choice as being the central thing that one is concerned with. Okay, so that's liberalism. Now I want to move on to talk about the three sort of 19th century reactions to the Industrial Revolution and to liberalism to an extent, socialism, communism, anarchism. I'll talk about socialism first,

because socialism sort of leads into communism. Indeed, I think it's accurate to call communism a variant or a type of socialism. Anachism is not a type of socialism per se, but it is closely associated with it. So socialism is an ideology, which the most important ideal socialism is social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy. That's where the idea, that's where the social word comes from. Social ownership of means of production. The means of production are things like land and factories, machinery, and that sort of stuff. The things that are used, the physical things that are used to produce goods and services.

The idea of socialism is that in order to properly or fully attain the liberty and equality that liberals were so concerned with, because socialism is an extension of liberalism in some sense. It holds liberty and equality to be very important ideals, but it interprets them in different ways. And also, socialists typically think that in order to achieve those properly, in order to fully realize them, it's necessary to move away from a free market economy towards a collective control over the means of production so that people can have more equal access to the fruits of production, that is the goods and services are produced in society. Socialists tend to focus a lot on inequality, economic inequality and poverty.

So in the 19th century Industrial Revolution, there was a great deal of hardship, particularly in urban areas by many workers who worked long hours and were paid very little and had very poor conditions. There were a lot of accidents. Child labour was common. There were essentially no government restrictions to these sorts of things, all very limited. And capitalists, so that the people who owned the factories and owned the corporations had a great deal of power and money. And this degree of inequality of power and of resource and of living standards was seen as abhorrent to many. and that in order to rectify this, what you would need to do is socialize the means of production. So you would have to take the means of production away from the capitalists and have a collective ownership. Socialists also tend to emphasize that human behavior is shaped very much by the social environment,

social moors and values and cultural traits and things like that. So this is another difference between socialism and liberalism. Liberalism tends to focus on sort of natural law, individual rights, individuals as, singular agents who make decisions and act in their own self-interest. Whereas socialists tend to focus on how humans are social beings, how the individual identity is constituted by the social situation you are in and the relationships you have with other people. And they tend just to not be so receptive or to reject sort of strongly atomistic ways of representing people as individual agents who are sort of like atoms who bump into

each other and interact. And the other side to that is, of course, that by manipulating or changing social values and the structure of society and the economy, you can change the way people act. You can change the way the values that people have. And this side of socialism is, or the side of socialism that tends to be very optimistic about changing human nature by changing society is sometimes called utopian socialism, or at least that's a term that's sometimes been used. It's often, again, a derogatory term because it's sort of patronizing. but particularly in the early days in the 19th century, there were some movements of socialists who were extremely optimistic that essentially all evils could be conquered

if only you could restructure society so as to change the way humans behaved and related to each other. Another big criticism of socialist is wage labour, the wage system by which people sell their services or labour in exchange for money in exchange for wages. This is typically described by many socialists as being a form of slavery. They call it wage slavery. It's seen as exploitative in some ways, particularly when there's a great divergence.

Power between the people who buy labor, that is the capitalist, the employers, versus the people selling it, who are workers, lower classes, who often don't have many other options. And so that's the idea of slavery that they're forced into it by the fact that they don't have other options. So this is where the idea of socializing the means of production comes from. The idea is that if the workers and the lower classes could have access to means of production, that would enable them to have more choice, that would enable them to be freer in their actions. So this way, equality, equality of property in this case, or the access to the output of property, at least, leads to greater liberty, the ability to pursue one's own interests and have certain control over one's life.

So you see that this is a different way of thinking about liberty and a different way of thinking about equality. liberals tend to think or tended to think about liberty and equality as the freedom from government, from government laws and government restrictions, and equality before the law, so everyone was treated the same, whereas socialists tend to think about liberty as the ability to do what one wants or to pursue one's ends or to have control of one's life, and equality as being sort of having an equal share in the either ownership of production or at least the output or access to the output of production. So, again, similar ideas in some sense, but different ways of looking at them, leading to different focuses and different ways of talking about social problems.

Of course, I'm presenting liberalism and socialism as antagonist towards each other in some sense, and they have been historically in many cases, but also there are many attempts to merge the two and sort of crosses between them, combinations. So particularly there's a position called libertarian socialism. which basically is a version of socialism, but that rejects the state ownership of means of production. So this is important because it will lead into talking about communism in a moment. So basically, all socialists, to some degree or another, support the idea of social ownership of the means of production, you know, your factories and machinery and land and stuff like that.

Although it's also true that many groups who call themselves socialist don't actually support that anymore, particularly in Europe. But, again, this is a problem with words. At least the way I'm presenting socialism is that that's an important aspect of the idea, but there is disagreement about exactly how to do that and what society will look like once that is done. One version of socialism might be called state socialism. I say might be called because I don't think too many people call themselves state socialists. They usually use other labels, particularly some forms of Marxism, but we'll get to that. State socialists generally support that the government or the state coming in and nationalizing,

taking ownership of the means of production on behalf of the people. This is what happened in communist states. There was central planning, so central ownership of the means of production, then the state made plans about what would be produced and who would get what and things like that. And this has been a common method of instituting socialism in a lot of European countries or instituting at least degrees of socialism. In like France, for example, and Britain after World War II, there were socialist policies that were introduced to nationalize a lot of industries

and to introduce more planning from the top. This is what's called state socialism. It can be contrasted with libertarian socialism, which rejects state ownership of means of production, and indeed is quite critical of the state as an institution, and instead focuses on workers' self-management and decentralized power structures. So it sort of, again, merges into anarchism,

because libertarian socialism can sort of be a version of anarchism, again, depending on exactly how extreme the position is. So there's often a focus in libertarian socialism on direct democracy. That is, rather than electing representatives, you vote directly for the legislation or laws that are being proposed. And trade union, citizens, assemblies, workers councils, all done at a sort of a voluntary local level. This tends to be a sort of more popular position today among sort of left-wing groups. The sort of state socialist position tends to be less supported, less popular now since the collapse of the Soviet Union for reasons that I'll be. discussed in a moment. There's also another variant called democratic socialism is sort of,

in some sense you can think of it as a moderate position between libertarian socialism and state socialism, although that's also unsatisfactory because I guess many libertarian socialists and even state socialists might support the democratic system as well. But the idea of democratic socialism would be pursuing democratic, sorry, pursuing socialist goals within the framework of a democratic system, as opposed to, say, supporting revolution of some form, be that an anarchist revolution or the establishment of a state socialist regime. So I think a lot of democratic socialists or social democratic movements, they're also called, that's probably a better term, are what socialist movements are today in Europe. That is, socialist parties in Europe today,

many of them are actually sort of social democratic or democratic socialist. That is, they want more government programs to help the underprivileged classes and to help maintain equality and protect equality and they want more government intervention in various aspects of the economy to prevent corporations from exercising

undue power and in politics and environment and other things like that but they are fundamentally committed to maintaining the existing political system rather than overthrowing it with something substantially different

Okay, so that's socialism. Let's now move on to talk about communism. Communism is a particularly divisive word and concept and ideology, obviously. I'm going to use Marxism and communism interchangeably. Technically they're not the same. Communism refers to, well, the commune, which is an idea of a collective group who owns things in common and agrees things voluntarily. communism is just an ideology which wants society to be run by communists, basically, whereas Marxism is a particular ideology which derives from the teachings of Karl Marx, a mid-19th century German philosopher and political theorist,

and also Friedrich Engels, who was a friend of his, effectively their use interchangeably and refer basically to the same thing. So I'm going to use them interchangeably, even though some may take issue with that. So, as I said before, Marxism is effectively a version of socialism, and that it upholds the ideal or the goal of achieving collective ownership or social ownership of the means of production. So that's crucial for Marxism. But Marxism also incorporates a number of other ideological components, which are not necessarily parts of socialism. So I think of socialism as being much broader and communism being a particular type of socialism, but it's such an important type that I'm discussing it as a sort of a separate group. So Marxism incorporate, as I said, incorporates some particular ideas that don't have to be part of,

or aren't necessarily parts of just sort of ordinary socialism, more plain socialism by itself, vanilla socialism, so to speak. And in particular, that it incorporates a number of very specific philosophical ideas. So one is this idea of a dialectic. I don't want to discuss this in depth because this gets a bit philosophical, but I think it is important. A dialectic is a struggle between two opposites. in particular, the idea of Marxism is that throughout history there's been a dialectic of opposites,

in particular that Marx focuses basically on, in layman terms you might say the haves and the have-nots. There's been a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. And this has been manifested in lots of different ways. So, for example, in the Middle Ages, there was an economic system called feudalism, where you had the king at the top and then the lords and barons and then the bottom were all the peasants. And later on, this was replaced by different economic. system capitalism, where you had capital's business owners controlling the means of production, and you had the workers underneath them.

Marx thought that there are a number of these different economic systems which existed throughout history, and that they periodically, sort of one replaced the other, but he thought that there was an end to this. He thought that there was a sort of a final economic and political system which would eventually come into being, and this is what he called communism. according to Marx, there was an inherent conflict, this is again where the dialectic element comes up, an inherent conflict in capitalism. And this inherent conflict made it unstable.

Just as previous modes of production or economic systems and political systems eventually gave way to other ones, capitalism would also give way because it was inherently unstable. There was an inherent contradiction within it. And basically the inherent contradiction that, Marx identified was the position of the workers, because in order to make, capitalists were interested in making a lot of profit, making as much money as possible, basically. In order to do that, they needed a concentrated cheap labour force, you know, in urban areas, able to work and produce profits for them. But in order to make as much profits as possible, they needed to sort of exploit the workers as much

as possible. This leads to another idea which Marx had, which is out of surplus value. That is, The worker produces a certain amount of value, and the employer pays them only just enough to basically allow them to survive and keep working, and then takes all the rest of the workers' output for themselves, and that's called the surplus value. Marx considers this a form of exploitation. So because of the need to extract surplus value, and Marx also thought that there would actually be sort of a tendency towards having to continually increase the amount of surplus value that was extracted, but we didn't get distracted by that. because of the need to concentrate all his workers together and have them educated to a degree, at least enough to, you know, work, and also the need to extract as much surplus value from them, Marks thought that inevitably there would be collectivization, there would be an uprising of the workers against their capital suppressors,

because, of course, there are far more workers than there are capitalists. And they, in urban centres, they have the ability to communicate with each other and connect and exchange ideas, where previously as peasantry spread out throughout the country, they couldn't necessarily do that. So Marx thought that inevitably capitalism would lead to an uprising of the working classes, whom he called the proletariat, leading to revolution. And what he thought would happen is that the proletariat would essentially take control of the means of production. This is the socialization, the socialism idea, that they would take collective control of the means of production, and that they would use it for a common benefit, so that everyone would sort of have an equal share in some way.

The idea here is that the production would be according to one's contribution, rather than the workers doing all the work, and then the capitalist just taking off and exploiting the workers and taking off all the surplus value. The end goal for Marx was a state called communism, as I mentioned before. Now, according to Marx said less about this than, I guess, one might like, who wasn't necessarily exactly clear as to how it would work, but according to Marx, the communist state,

the end state, the final state that we would eventually get to, would be a classless, stateless society. So there'd be no state, there'd be no need for a government. All property would be held in common ownership, basically in a commune or in a collection of communes. It would be classless. So there wouldn't be workers and capitalists anymore. Everyone would just be part of the same class.

So Marxism was developed or was supposed to be, in some sense, a scientific theory, an economic theory in a sociological and a political theory. That is, Marx was saying that this is going to happen. He thought that he was doing an objective scientific analysis of history and that he was predicting what would happen in the future to capitalist societies. So it was supposed to be sort of scientific and objective in that sense. But it was also normative, that is Marx and many of his followers

wanted to bring about the revolution. They wanted it to happen sooner rather than later because they thought it was a good thing. So that's the basic idea of Marxism. Now, it's very, very important to distinguish this, what I've outlined, and a sort of classical Marxism, with Marxist Leninism, which is the version, or some would say the perversion,

of Marxist ideology, which was adopted by the Soviet Union and really most other communist governments throughout the world after, or mostly after World War II, Soviet Union was a bit earlier. Stalin, who came up with the term Marxism-Leninism, basically used it as a justification

of the ideology of the communist politics, which he led, and a way of justifying his rule. Marxism-Leninism was quite different in many ways to classical Marxism. Remember that the end goal of classical Marxism was a stateless society where everyone was equal, but that's not what Marxism-Lennonism was at all, really. Marxism-Lennonism involved a socialist state where there was actually a very strong central government, which was involved in central planning. So the central government owned basically all property, all significant property and all the land and other things,

And they made plans about who would produce what and who would get it and all that sort of stuff. And the idea was that the state was holding all of the property, sort of, in some sense, in trust for the people, as a way of modernising the country and developing society so as to move toward the eventual Marxist utopian state. So there was still some sense in which they were going to move towards and eventually reach the state of Marxist classless, stateless society that Marx had talked about. But they weren't there yet, and in the meantime, they needed what was called the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the idea that essentially you have to have a strong state that represents the proletariat in order to build up and get ready for full communism, essentially, at some point in the indefinite future. Now, Marxism and Landism was also strongly associated with modernizing, so building up industry and getting workers off the land and moving them into factories and building up heavy industry and things like that. A lot of people are very cynical about Marxism and Landism.

particularly these days, it's often considered to be sort of a justification by Stalin for his particular form of dictatorship, rather than sort of a genuine synthesis of Marxist and Lenin's this ideology. That's a bit controversial. It was more popular, Marxism and Leninism was more popular during the Cold War period when it was seen to be successful to a degree in generating economic development and improving living standards and also a sort of resisting American power, as a way of resist American power. That's why a lot of countries like, say, Cuba and various African countries in Vietnam, one of the reasons why it was a popular, well, it had some appeal to people in those countries,

at least, at least the elites who were responsible to these movements, not necessarily saying the population as a whole of those places. Anyway, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that sort of centrally planned, autocratic, so non-democratic form of socialism or communism, tends to be very much, per se. There tend not to be too many people who advocate for that these days.

People who call themselves Marxists or these days tend to support more classical forms of Marxism, and particularly Trotskyism. Trotsky was a contemporary of Lenin who opposed the idea of a, opposed the sort of strongly authoritarian sort of state that Stalin set up,

although he did support some other of Lenin's ideas like that. the dictatorship of proletariat. But anyway, or other Marxists will essentially support more anarchist ideas, because there is an inherent link between anarchism and communism, communism holding, or at least Marxism, classical Marxism, holding the ideal of a stateless society as the ideal end goal, and that's effectively an anarchist position. Having finished talking about communism, I now will just want to say a few brief words about anarchism, I've pretty much already outlined the key ideas. Basically, anarchism,

advocates a stateless society, operated according to voluntary forms of self-government. It's important to understand that, although sometimes anarchism is phrased as being the absence of laws or the absence of government, or the absence of rules, that's not really the idea of anarchism, or not most forms of anarchism anyway. Really, the idea would be, a better way of saying it would be the absence of compulsory organizations that you have to belong to, or the absence of imposed laws. There's an aversion, anarchist typically have an aversion to the use of force or compulsion to force people

to be part of organizations and to adhere to laws. So there would still be laws and rules and regulations and organizations in an anarchist world, or at least in most versions, it's just they would be voluntary. Now, exactly how that works out. Depends upon the version of anarchism. As I mentioned before, there's sort of right-wing versions of anarchism,

which tend to be much more friendly towards the free market ideals and private property. There are left-wing versions of anarchism which tend to focus more on workers' rights. They tend to be more friendly with the Labour Union. Labor unions and the Labour movements, and they tend to be more interested in worker self-management, worker cooperatives, things like this. Okay, so that's all I have to say about anarchism, because I've already mentioned it a number of times in talking about socialism and communism.

I want to finish up now by talking about this last group, the sort of hodgepod group of 20th century groups that I've collectively termed. nationalist and reactionary groups. And again, I think it is legitimate to put them together, even though I am stretching this a bit here, I acknowledge. The commonality is that I think they're reactionary in the sense that they're all reacting to both the liberal and the socialist ideals of the two previous groups. Also, I think that they're all nationalist to one degree or another.

Another thing I might add is that these are pretty much all 20th century developments, so that they come about in a... a different context, a different socio-political historical context, than socialism and liberalism and communism did. And so that's also another reason I think it's legitimate to sort of group them together. The first one that I'll talk about, as I mentioned before, is what's sometimes called left-wing nationalism, and this also is a very broad group.

Anyway, left-wing nationalism describes a form of nationalism, which particularly focuses on popular sovereignty and self-determination and also generally social equality. So often it's sort of quite left-wing, sort of progressive socialist in Bent, But there are some important differences. In particular, and I probably should have mentioned this before, socialists and especially Marxists, generally, or at least historically opposed nationalism.

That is, they opposed adhering to local or national forms of loyalty. Famously, at the outbreak of World War I, many of the socialists and labor groups, or at least some of them, opposed the war on the grounds that it was a nationalist war. The war was fought on national lines. socialist and Marxists tended to think that workers or the proletariat across all countries really formed one group and they should naturally see themselves as in opposition to the capitalist rather than in opposition to workers from different countries. So typically socialism, Marxism is sort of an internationalist movement.

It is supposed to be global in scope and often opposes, is opposed to local or national loyalties, or at least downplays them significantly. Now, left-wing nationalism is different because it incorporates many socialist elements, but also in the framework of a strong nationalism. So this is famously what Gandhi did. I mean, he wasn't exactly a socialist, although some of his positions overlap with socialism a bit, but he was certainly very interested in social equality

and the welfare of the poorer classes. But he was also very firmly a nationalist, so he was very interested in Indian. and particularly Hindu sovereignty, self-determination. And many other anti-imperialist, post-colonialist movements in other countries followed Gandhi's lead in these ideas. So, for example, the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela in South Africa also had some of the similar ideas.

Many forms of what have sometimes been called Arab nationalism or Arab socialism throughout the Middle East also fit into this category, share some of these ideas, although, of Of course, there are very important differences as well. But the key here that I want to emphasize, and the reason I put them in the one category, is that these groups take ideas from liberalism, they take ideas from socialism, but they look at them from within a somewhat different framework.

They look at them from within, often a non-European framework, reacting to colonialism, and they also look at it within a national framework, the national identity of whatever the group is, be it the Arabs or, I thought that's a nation, but Arab nationalism often wants it to be a nation. or Indian or whoever else. So that's why I think it's legitimate to group these.

That left-wing nationalism is reasonably distinct from the next group, several groups I'm going to talk about, although, again, I think there are commonalities, which is why I've grouped them under nationalist groups. But the next two groups I'm going to talk about, basically fascism and Nazism. And really, Nazism is a form of fascism. So fascism is the next big ideology to talk about.

It's a nationalist ideology, which, again, is why it fits under this umbrella group. But it's a much more radical form of nationalism, and it's also a more authoritarian form of nationalism, certainly, say, than African National Congress or Gandhi would have supported. Fascism is very much a reaction both to liberalism and communism in particular. One of the single most important aspects of fascism is that it is anti-communist. Opposition towards Marxism, opposition towards revolutionary socialism, that sort of thing is crucial to fascist movements. But it's not conservative either because it also wants to engage in social transformation. But it's a different type of social transformation than, say,

socialists and Marxists tend to want to engage in. So it places itself in opposition to traditional conservatism, to liberalism, and to socialism slash Marxism. So that's why it very much deserves its own grouping, because it places itself very clearly in opposition to all of these other groups. Fascism emerged in early 20th century. Basically, the term was actually invented by Mussolini, whom you've probably heard of, friend of Hitler in World War II.

Fascist movements are quite diverse, but they share some common features. Typically, there's a strong authoritarian element to it, so a veneration of the state. They tend to be very focused to us around a strong leader, a strong charismatic leader, so Mussolini and Hitler are two prominent examples. Franco in Spain is another example of a charismatic fascist leader. There's also a very strong focus on nationalism and nationalism. militarism. So probably the easiest way of recognizing fascist movements, because they often don't describe themselves as fascist, is just by looking at their symbolism. Fascist movements almost

inevitably use military-style uniforms that they typically like marches, they like parades, they like militaristic, bombastic-sounding music, they like militaristic-sounding slogans, they like symbols that look sort of quasi-military, sort of a brutal sort of look. A bit hard to describe, But if you look at different fascist movements in different countries, you can very clearly see the commonalities. And this is quite different to the way that, say, socialist will often portray themselves. Even though socialists can adopt martial, iconography and martial language at times as well, it's quite different to the way it's done in fascist movements. Particularly the focus on nationalism is very different.

And that's one of the key differences between fascism and socialism. Socialism identifies that the key, and also Marxism, identifies the key group of relevance as class, so whether you're a bourgeois or a proletariat, whereas fascism tends to identify the key group of interest as the nation or the cultural group. There's often an antipathy towards foreigners, a desire to protect the cultural values and the often racial purity of whatever the state is. Class conflict is diminished, in fact fascists tend not to like to talk about that

because that's seen as being harmful to national unity. Just as socialist typically don't like conflict between nations as that sort of undermines the unity of the proletariat. Likewise, fascists don't like class conflict because that undermines the unity of the nation. Fascist regimes also tend to be protectionist, so this is autarchy that I mentioned before in economic matters. They want to focus on self-sufficiency being independent

and separate from other nations. They tend to be expansionists, wanting to expand the territories, and recover lost territories for their nation. But it's also important that they reject many liberal values as well, that they're not particularly interested in freedom of speech or representative government or protection of individual liberties, because these are seen to be far less important than the state as a cohesive collective unit, often in the service of a charismatic leader is mentioned.

Now, Nazism was a version of fascism, a particular extreme form. It, of course, refers to the ideology that was, basically developed and propagated by Hitler and his supporters in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. Interesting historical point where the term Nazism comes from. Nazi is not a word, it's not a term that the Nazis themselves came over. They actually didn't like it because it was a derogatory term. The proper name for the Nazi Party was the National Socialistice Deutsche Arbiter Party, which in English means the nationalist socialist German Workers Party.

Now, interesting you can note here that the term socialist and workers, which is a typically socialist term, appear in the name, which is very interesting because Nazism was fascist. A fascistist ideology, which was anti-communist, but they also considered themselves socialists. So this is a very interesting point where Hitler sort of adopted some aspects of socialism, but rejected others, particularly rejected the Marxist elements. Rejected the elements particularly that he considered to be Jewish, but that's another issue. So, where does that name Nazi come from and all that? Well, Nazi are actually the two syllables of the first name of the party, Nazional, Nazi, as is pronounced in German, Naziional. So this was actually already a term Nazi, which was used as a sort of an insult to...

Nazism, as I mentioned, is a fascist ideology, but it also incorporates elements of scientific racism and anti-Semitism and Pan-Germanism. So basically, it's a very specifically racist form of, racist and German form of fascism. It is important to note that many other fascist movements were not explicitly racist, although they often idealized the nation or the state and the people of the country that it was based in. They didn't have the same systematic racist views that the Nazis did. The Nazis believed that the Germanic peoples or the Nordic race, also called the Aryans, were the marians, were the marians. They believed that there were many races of people that existed in a world, and that they could be arranged in a sort of hierarchy with the Aryans at the top, and at the bottom were the Jews,

and other races fit in between. Nazis were opposed to capitalism and Marxism. They wanted to restore Germany to the position of greatness, which they believed that the Aryan race, the Aryan people rightly deserved, and that had been stolen from them as a result of, particularly World War I, as a result of various other things, that they believed in essentially Jewish conspiracy theories to control the banks and the political elites to get them to do what they wanted. Nazis believed that essentially communism was a Jewish plot. They very much linked communism or Marxism and Judaism together. They considered them to be basically one and the same in some sense. A Jew was a communist and a communist was a Jew. And so they saw that both of those together as a

threat to the German people, and that's one of the key motivating factors in Hitler's ideology. Anyway, we needn't get into all of the quite nasty details of Nazism, but it is, I think, important to understand how it fits in to the framework of political ideologies. Pretty much no movements today describe themselves as fascist or particularly Nazi. However, there are neo-Nazi groups around which adopt some of the iconography of Nazi Germany and language of the racial superiority of their particular group and of the need to be suspicious of foreigners and oppose Marxists and capitalists and promote social unity and harmony and other things like that. Okay, so that concludes the lightning tour of political ideologies. We discuss conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, communism, and anarchism, and then nationalized.

nationalist slash reactionary groups, which emerged in the 20th century, and how they differed and how they all are interrelated to each other. Obviously, there's a lot more particular positions and variations which I haven't discussed, but hopefully this episode's given you some sense of how these things fit together and may make it a bit easier to understand these words as they use in the political discourse. So, thanks for listening, and if you like the podcast, check out the Facebook page. You can type in the Science Everything podcast on Facebook, and you can find links to past episodes and visual material to support the podcast to support the episodes and other things like that there.

So, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next time.