What Exactly is The Left?

A look at the liberal turn, and the long history of the betrayal of resistance movements and Anarchists

Jan 22, 2026

How it began

The history of resistance to domination is actually much older than what follows here, but for the sake of brevity we will save the full history for those with more time on their hands than I have available to me. In modern history, the “Left” began as a seating chart, not a moral achievement. In the French Revolution, supporters of the old order clustered to the president’s right, and supporters of revolutionary change clustered to the left. That physical arrangement became a political shorthand for opposing the Ancien Régime, and later, for being “progressive” in some broader sense. (History.com, 2016). But from the start, that left-side coalition contained a fracture that never went away. One branch wanted to abolish domination while another wanted to abolish certain forms of domination while keeping the sanctity of property, commerce, and “order.”

Early liberalism fought monarchy, aristocratic privilege, clerical authority, and inherited status. Yet it also treated property as a primary liberty, and it wanted a state strong enough to protect markets, contracts, and the social discipline required for “free” labor. Liberalism could be anti-king while remaining pro-capital. This is the first pattern most anarchists notice. The moment insurgent energy threatens property relations, liberals rediscover their love of police, armies, and “responsible” governance.

The Revolutions of 1848 made that pivot hard to miss. In France, the Second Republic created National Workshops to address unemployment, and when the state moved to close them, workers rose. The uprising was crushed by republican forces under Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who became notorious for the severity of the repression, and the Republic’s bourgeois wing consolidated power afterward (Britannica, 2026). If you want a single early snapshot of “the liberal left” choosing capital over the insurgent poor, 1848 is a clean one. A revolution that began with democratic promise and ended with the working class being treated as the internal enemy.

By the time socialist and anarchist currents matured as mass forces, the betrayal story had gained institutional form. The First International (International Workingmen’s Association) tried to hold together unions, socialists, mutualists, and anarchists under one roof. It broke over the question anarchists refused to stop asking. Do we build emancipation through the state, or do we dismantle the state as a machinery of domination? The definitive split came at The Hague Congress in 1872, where Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume were expelled and the organization’s center was moved away from its European base, effectively ending the International as a mass movement there (Musto, 2021). What gets remembered as a doctrinal dispute was also a struggle over control of who gets to speak for “the working class,” and by what organizational systems. The anarchist allegation was not merely that Marxists were wrong about the state, but that they were already practicing the politics of substitution by exchanging party for class, leadership for people, and command for coordination.

Then 1917 arrived, and the stakes stopped being theoretical. In the Russian Revolution, anarchists and other anti-authoritarians did not just disagree with Bolshevik strategy; many actively participated in the revolutionary overthrow of the old order, only to then find themselves suppressed when they refused to submit to the new one. Kronstadt, in 1921, was the emblem of this pattern. What happened was a revolt demanding a more genuine soviet democracy. A revolt that was immediately crushed by the Bolshevik state (Avrich, 1970). In Ukraine, the Makhnovist movement attempted large-scale anarchist organizing during the civil war and was ultimately defeated amid shifting alliances and conflicts with state forces. You do not have to romanticize any faction to see the recurring structure of centralized state socialism treating autonomous popular organization as a rival to their new-found Power Over.

Spain in the 1930s was the other canonical wound. Anarchists built unions, militias, collectives, and neighborhood structures at an astonishing scale, especially through the CNT-FAI. Yet the revolutionary horizon narrowed under the pressures of war, international alliances, and the strategy of Popular Front governance. The May Days of 1937 in Barcelona became a flashpoint, with bitter conflict among anti-fascist factions and the marginalization of radical revolutionary currents (University of Warwick, 2023; Beevor, 2006). Here, betrayal was not only repression. It was the slow administrative suffocation of a revolution in the name of winning the war, stabilizing legitimacy, and keeping allies. Meanwhile, Spanish anarchists kept repeating the same critique. You do not defeat fascism by rebuilding the same command structures that make fascism viable.

After 1945, the “left” label became even more misleading, because it started naming a whole spectrum of compromises. In much of Europe and North America, social democracy traded revolutionary aims for welfare states and labor rights within capitalist growth. That bargain improved lives for millions, but it also tied left parties to the management of capitalist accumulation and, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, often to imperial supply chains. Later, the neoliberal counteroffensive framed itself as inevitable, and many nominally left parties responded by reinventing themselves as market-friendly modernizers. “Third Way” politics openly tried to renew social democracy by accepting market discipline as the baseline reality (Giddens, 1998). The left became, in part, the humane management wing of the same economic order it once promised to replace. When anarchists say “betrayal,” they often mean that they have repeatedly observed not only a single knife in the back, but also a decades-long conversion to the governance of capital as common sense.

Enough with the Eurocentrism

The biggest problem in many “history of the left” narratives is that Indigenous and Global South histories are too often treated as a footnote to leftism. These histories are a different axis of struggle that exposes how shallow “left” can be when it is only about wages, industry, and parliamentary representation. Settler colonialism is not merely racism plus inequality; it is a structural project oriented toward the seizure of land and the elimination of Indigenous political existence (Wolfe, 2006). That means a politics that calls itself left while treating land return, sovereignty, and relational obligations to territory as secondary is not only incomplete, but rather, it is reproducing the core domination it claims to oppose.

This is why Indigenous theorists tend to be scathing about the way progressive language gets absorbed into institutions without changing the material basis of colonial power. Decolonization is not a metaphor for general social justice. It is about the repatriation of land and life, and it is unsettlingto the entire western political spectrum precisely because it threatens the legitimacy of the settler state and its property regime (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Similarly, critiques of the “politics of recognition” argue that states can concede identity and symbolism while leaving the underlying colonial relation intact, transforming resistance into a managed cultural category (Coulthard, 2014). And Indigenous resurgence traditions emphasize governance and freedom practices rooted in land, kinship, and refusal, rather than assimilation into state forms that were built to erase them (Simpson, 2017).

This reframes the liberal-left story in a sharper light. Liberalism’s historic “progress” often means expanding rights within the state while leaving the state’s territorial foundations untouched. In settler colonies, that territorial foundation is land theft and imposed jurisdiction. Liberal inclusion can therefore function as a higher-grade cage that only offers more representation inside a structure that remains illegitimate in its relationship to land. This is where anarchist and Indigenous critiques frequently converge, even while not being identical. Both are suspicious of the state as a solver of problems that the state created. Both are attentive to how domination reproduces itself through administrative normality.

In the Global South, the betrayal story has often worn a different uniform: the national liberation party that becomes a developmental state. Anti-colonial movements frequently needed broad coalitions to defeat empire, and many adopted socialist rhetoric or state-led modernization. Yet “development” has repeatedly meant extractivism, megaprojects, and territorial control, commonly imposed on Indigenous peoples and rural communities in the name of the nation. Bolivia’s TIPNIS conflict offers a vivid example. Controversy erupted over a highway project through an Indigenous territory and national park, producing a deep rupture between a left government’s developmental agenda and Indigenous land defense (Sánchez-López, 2015; Mongabay, 2015). To anarchists and indigenous resistance movements, the pattern is easily identifiable. The revolution becomes a state, the state becomes a manager of resources, and “the people” become an obstacle when they obstruct the paternalist plan.

From the late twentieth century onward, anarchism also evolved in ways that are hard to see if you only look at Europe and the United States. In Latin America, autonomy and horizontalism surged through movements that did not always call themselves anarchist but practiced anti-authoritarian coordination: Argentina’s neighborhood assemblies and worker-recuperated workplaces after 2001, or the Zapatista rebellion and autonomy-building from 1994 onward, which articulated a politics of Indigenous self-government, refusal of state capture, and transnational solidarity. Across these, the anarchist sensibility often appears as a recurring methodology, even when it is not explicitly identified as anarchism. This is not a coincidence, since much of anarchism draws from historical indigenous social relations and systems. While each indigenous community had their own names and variations for these methods, we know them as assemblies, federations, rotation of roles, refusal of vanguard substitution, and a skeptical stance toward parties that promise liberation later if you surrender autonomy now.

Meanwhile, post-1970s anarchism becomes unmistakably global in texture. Contemporary Indonesian anarchism, for instance, has roots in anti-colonial histories and re-emerged in late twentieth-century subcultures and labor solidarities after authoritarian repression (Anarchist Studies, 2022). African anarchist currents have also insisted that liberation cannot mean swapping colonial governors for local strongmen, and have explored both the “anarchistic elements” of many precolonial communal forms and the failures of postcolonial state projects (Mbah and Igariwey, 1997). In the Middle East, the Kurdish movement’s turn toward Abdullah Ocalan’s democratic confederalism drew explicitly on anti-statist and municipalist influences, including Murray Bookchin, and became one of the most-discussed contemporary experiments in non-state governance (Biehl, 2012). None of this fits neatly into the old “left parties vs right parties” story. It is the history of people building survival and freedom under conditions where the parliamentary left either cannot help them, will not help them, or will help only on the condition that autonomy dissolves into governance.

So are liberals counted as “the Left”?

When anarchists say we are tired of liberals and neoliberals holding the leftist label, we are really naming a definitional crisis. If “left” means “to the left of conservatives in parliament,” then liberalism can wear the label forever while serving capital in practice. If “left” means opposition to domination, then the label has to be earned structurally. We judge this by whether an ideology and its institutions expand people’s capacity to self-govern without coercion, whether they break the property logics that require dispossession, and whether they treat land, community sovereignty, and life-world obligations as foundational rather than decorative. On that definition, liberalism’s historic pattern is the predictable outcome of trying to reconcile emancipation rhetoric with the preservation of capital’s commanding position.

The anarchist memory of betrayal is, at its best, not a purity test. It is a diagnostic instrument for noticing when “the left” becomes a brand for managing people on behalf of an order it refuses to dismantle. The task is not to win the label. The task is to stop letting the label do the thinking.

Anarcasper

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