Compared with many advanced capitalist countries, the far left in Britain is relatively organisationally powerful. But in terms of its impact on the class struggle, the far left remains weak.
Part of the answer is the political situation, with 'now realism' dominant and the left on the defensive. But that is just part of the answer.
It not so much the diversity of the '57 varieties' of groupings on the British left that is the problem so much as the errors that almost all of them hold in common.
Almost all of them are undemocratic and sectarian in their political practice. Most in practice reject the united front, and seek to by-pass the problem of raising working class political consciousness by strident ropaganda, and freneticeffort This article will look only al those groupings which aim to build a mass revolutionary alternative to retormisin, and leave aside the varied currents - such as Tribune - which have thrown in their lot with the Kinnock camp, and thosesmall tendencies, such as Labour Briefing which seek only to act as a pres sure group within the Labour Party.
Regime
The propensity of British left groups to split over what may seem relatively minor tactical issues or political disagree ments reflects a general failure to establish democratic internal regimes which allow different Sept. 28, 1991 No. 8 viewpoints to coexist constructively.
One immediate effect of this is that since the early 1950s the left has been divided into a proliferating range of relatively small groupings, none of which has been able to grow even to the 10,000 member mark.
There has been an almost universal failure to implement Leninist democratic centralism, in which implementation of maiority decisions is coupled with full freedom within the organisation for minority currents to organise and debate out their differences.
Lenin's Bolshevik Party was always full of lively debate, with the full right of minority tendencies and factions to organise. Lenin himself was often in a minority of one. This is a far cry from the British Leninist sects, with their harsh and bureaucratic centralist internal regimes.
Caricature
A consequence of this is that miltant have been repelled oy many thousands the caricature of 'Leninism' and rejected it.
In the context of a relatively weak Communist Party, some of the British sects in the postwar period have from time to time grown to become relative ly large, some with thousands of members mobilised around an essentially unchanged core leadership.
However numerical growth on this basis cannot compensate for the qualitative development: all such groupings retain the potential for explosive fac tional divisions and splits at any time should their inner core leadership fall out, or a layer of members decide to challenge the received wisdom they have been fed.
Workers' movement It is not only the internal regimes that have been sectarian. The other main feature of the British left has been its generally sectarian political stance towards the organised workers' movement.
In Britain the trade union movement has always been central to workers' political development. Uniquely in Britain it was the unions that built the mass reformist workers' party, and Trotsky argued that the apparent separation of the trade union and Labour bureaucracies was simply a technical 'division of labour, making it extremely difficult for Marxists to separate out 'trade union work' work in the Labour Party.
The key strategic issue has always been how under these conditions they should relate to the mass of workers, and find ways politically to break decisive sections from their illusions in reformist trade union and Labourleaders to create the basis for a genuine mass revolutionary party.
In the 1930s Trotsky argued that British Marxists, too small in numbers to mount any serious challenge to Labour, should work inside the Labour Party and trade unions as well as relating to other layers of the working class.
Any perspective of building a mass revolutionary current
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