Political spectrum?

[DBusby]

Can someone please explain to me the basics of the political spectrum. Can you give details of far left political parties? any websites on the political spectrum for beginners?

[bernardo]

(A) Political Spectrum: The terms 'left' and 'right' derive from where people used to sit in the National Assembly in the French Revolution. Right means reactionary, wanting to go back to an old system, or preserving the current system, including social hierarchies or inequalities in wealth. Left means wanting to change, reform, or abolish, which includes creating equality of wealth. Those on the far left want to abolish private property and create a society in which everything is owned (and controlled and distributed) collectively ' in practice this means nationalised ownership by the state, and control by the ruling communist or socialist party.

(B) Parties on the far left: The Revolutionary Internationalist Group in the 1950s evolved into the Militant Tendency in the 1970s, and started a process of infiltrating the Labour Party as a way of controlling it. These Militants were gradually expelled from the Labour Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and formed the 'Socialist Party' in about 1992.

[bernardo]

The 'Socialist Party of Great Britain'(SPGB) was formed in 1904 and is a purist party which wants a world-wide government and the abolition of money. It is opposed to nationalisation as it regards it as a form of state capitalism, rather than proper socialism (collective ownership) by the workers.
The 'Socialist Labour Party' (SLP) was formed in 1996 by Arthur Scargill, former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. Scargill is an old-fashioned Marxist syndicalist who believes in 'Democratic Centralism' (ie rigid control by the party leadership and discipline by party members).
The 'Workers' Revolutionary Party'(WRP) is a small Trotskyite party which has existed since the 1960s, and underwent internal strife and splits in 1985. It has always been very small but it had a lot of publicity in the 1970s because the actress Vanessa Redgrave was a prominent member of it. Redgrave and others subsequently broke away from the WRP and formed the 'Marxist Party'.

[bernardo]

The main party on the far left used to be the 'Communist Party of Great Britain'(CPGB) which existed 1920 to 1991 and had 5 MPs at various times between 1920 and 1950. In 1991 it became the 'Democratic Left' which was a broad coalition of environmentalist, feminist, anti-nuclear and human-rights issues rather than a traditional Marxist party. When it changed in 1991, a small group split off and continued with the same name 'CPGB'. The hardline 'Communist Party of Britain' (CPB) broke away from the CPGB in 1988 due to concern about the CPGB drifting away from strict Marxism.
The 'Socialist Workers' Party'(SWP) is a Trotskyite party which exists mainly in the form of selling newspapers and going on marches and demonstrations with SWP banners and placards.
The 'Revolutionary Communist Party'(RCP) existed briefly in the 1980s but then evolved into a neo-market magazine called 'Marxism Today'.
The 'Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)'(RCPBML) is a hardline Stalinist Party founded in 1979 which is preparing for a workers' revolution and greatly admires the communist governments in North Korea and Albania before 1991.

[bernardo]

In 1999, the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Tendency) and various other groups including the SWP and the CPGB formed the 'Socialist Alliance'(SA) as a broad umbrella organisation in an attempt to co-operate in elections and to avoid the various bitter factional in-fighting which has always been a feature on the far left. This evolved to form the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in Scotland which has been moderately successful, but the SA has recently split up ' the Socialist Party (formerly Militant) thinks that the SA has been taken over by the SWP, and so the SP (formely Militant) has now formed the 'Socialist Alternative'.
The SLP has consistently refused to co-operate with the Socialist Alliance, and Arthur Scargill denounces the SA as a 'rag-tag collection of Trotskyite splitters'.
The main ideological divide on the far left is between the Stalinists (who believe in 'Socialism in one country' and rigid internal party control) and the Trotskyites (who believe in world-wide revolution and more grass-roots diversity and pluralism). Stalinists accuse Trots of not being socialist, and Trots accuse Stalinists of being too dictatorial. The main such groups in the UK at the moment are the Trotskyite SA (and SSP) and the Stalinist SLP.

[bernardo]

No matter how much they hate each other, all of these groups - whether they be Stalinist, Trotskyite, Marxist, Leninist, socialist, social-democratic, or revisionist - are united in their vitriolic condemnation of the bourgeois capitalist hierarchy which rules the oppressed workers of AnswerBank by limiting answers to 2000 characters. :-)