The Political Studies class you should've had in High School.

So with the world rollicking in the state of dismay it currently is i've been having ALOT more political conversations. I usually sought them out but now they come to me which has been a bit of a double edged sword.
Whilst i love talking about politics, challenging views and having mine challenged i have found myself going over the same questions over and over and over. I have no problem answering them but lately its been getting a little tiring.
So. i resolved to change this slightly. I resolved to make the intro into politics you should've been given in high school.
That sounds a bit condescending doesn't it? "ugh you filthy plebs don't even understand basic politics" i say as i thumb my nose and walk away.

No. No. God, No.

The reason for this naming is that in our society being knowledgeable about politics just isn't valued. Despite the fact that politics shapes literally everything in our society, we are not expected to know anything about it.
I feel like its like we are put into a society wherein all our contracts are written in Hindi yet for some reason our teachers don't teach us Hindi.

If we do not have a good knowledge of politics we will never have a government or a state which actually represents us. We will never be able to understand exactly what republicans mean when they call Obama a "socialist". We will always be misled when Politicians talk of "growth". We will find ourselves voting for people whose views are completely opposed to our own, and we wont even realise it. 

To vote without knowing what we are voting for is like driving a car blindfolded.

So lets get into the basics.

This nifty little chart is a handy way of placing all political ideologies on a spectrum. This way we can compare and contrast them.

So what does this all mean?

This spectrum is placed on two axes. Left-right and Authortarian-Libertarian.

Left       -      Right

You hear left/right being thrown around a whole bunch but often the people talking about it shift what constitutes left and what constitutes right. Then we start getting people saying that Labour (in NZ) or the Democrats (in the US) are left wing parties when all their policies point to the right.

So there are a few things that determine whether a party is left wing or right wing and it is entirely based on where they stand in regards to capitalism.
As this stands, certain parts are a gross simplification, but this is supposed to give you an easy overview of politics.

For a party to be called right wing it must believe in, support and enshrine the right to property.
This is more easily thought of as the right to own.
This means that if one were to own say, a clothes factory, he has the right to use it as he wishes. He can employ people to work it. He would pay the workers what they are willing to work for and sell the clothes they create. He would use that money he made selling the clothes to pay his workers for their time then take the extra money left over for himself.

To be called left wing you must believe in, support or even enshrine the right of workers to the product of their labour. Which means that the means of production must lie in the hands of no one but the people working it.
What does the means of production mean?
The means of production is anything that is used to produce goods. A weavers loom that makes cloth would be the means of production that allows clothes to be made. A lumber milling factory would be the means of production that allows lumber to be milled.
Essentially, the means of production are the tools and the area where you can make stuff.
So to be a left wing party you must support the idea (whether fully or mostly) that no one can own factories/looms/kitchens/other means of production. The owner of the clothes factory would not be allowed to take the profit made from the selling of the clothes the workers made in his clothes factory. This is because he did not help in making the clothes himself, he only owned the factory within which people made clothes for him. So if he was not a worker in the factory, he has no claim to the products or the factory they were made in.

Authortarian                -                Libertarian.

Authoritarian and libertarian get thrown about also. Mainly to score political points in the former and confuse political positions in the latter.

Authoritarian refers to the amount of state power the political system advocates. This can take many different forms. for example, the Soviet union was an Authoritarian Left state. This was because the state had almost complete control of the land, resources and means of production. It also had the power to dictate social 

Authoritarian Right