In the United States, there are more than ten left-democratic groups and coalitions, while Britain hosts around twenty-two distinct active socialist and communist political groups. Similarly, India has numerous left-wing and socialist political parties. It is often joked that there are as many as fifty-eight leftist groups spread across the fifty-eight administrative divisions of Greater Warangal Municipality in the southern Indian state of Telangana (which was formerly part of Andhra Pradesh). Such political and ideological divisions within the left can be found across the world.
There are numerous left-wing political parties and groups that could operate as a formidable political force across the world, but the deep divisions within the left weaken all struggles against imperialism and patriarchal capitalism in its various forms. A disunited and fractured left weakens democratic, progressive, secular, socialist, and scientific movements that seek to uphold working class interests, human dignity and protect the natural world. These groups often direct considerable animosity toward one another, labelling each other as radical left, revisionist left, social democratic left, socialists, Maoists, Marxists, Leninists, ultra-left, reactionary left, structuralist and post-structuralist left, conservative and progressive left, soft and hard left, Stalinist left, Trotskyite left, Christian left, democratic left, far left and communist left. However, these lazy splits are not merely about political or ideological differences. Rather, the sheer volume of hatred they harbour for each other in the name of ‘self-critique and self-rectification’ is not only surprising but also deeply painful.
This hostility is not simply a product of political ‘oxytocin’ born from political and personal disagreements; it is also a symptom of lazy left puritanism—where individuals and groups believe they are purer than others. This puritan political intimacy promotes toxic religion like political cults and a priestly class, rather than driving the class organisation and leadership based on class consciousness for a genuine class struggles to emancipate working people from all forms of capitalism and its exploitative regimes. As people often joke, leftist groups spend more energy hating each other than organising themselves to fight for alternatives to capitalism, or to ensure that a socialist alternative is realised—one that upholds the interests of the people and protects the planet from capitalist plunder and imperialist wars.
Why are there so many divisions within left-wing politics? Are these merely a reflection of ideological disagreements, or do they stem from difference in individualistic leadership styles that continually generate differing rival organizations? Are the splits driven by policy and programmatic differences, or are they shaped by local socio-economic, religious, regional, and cultural realities? If these divisions are indeed inherent, where does the notion of ‘class’ stand within organizations ostensibly built around it, and how does it inform the nature of struggles rooted in ‘class consciousness’?
There is no single answer to these agonizing political questions and unresolved dialectics, which are frequently reduced to local material conditions and cultural conflicts shaped by the fraudulent politics of cultural relativists and their postmodern logic. This logic not only depoliticises ‘class’ but also removes the politics of ‘class conflict’ from the very core of ‘class struggle’—all in the name of challenging dominant narratives of power. In doing so, it offers micro, meso, and macro forms of representation as alternatives, effectively replacing working-class revolution rooted in solidarity.
There are local material, cultural, economic, religious, political, and regional conditions, but these are not independent of global, regional, national, and local processes of capitalist accumulation. Imperialist wars—from Afghanistan to Iran—have influenced the prices of every commodity and services people use in their everyday lives and the movements of every traveller, all in the name of security from terrorism. These conflicts have created conditions in which the security state has not only facilitated but also sanitised capitalist accumulation processes, effectively removing any local hurdles in the name of fighting terrorism to provide security to the citizens. Meanwhile, the climate crisis affects the life and livelihoods of farmers, agricultural workers, and fishing communities across the globe far more severely than it does so on corporations.
Class analysis and organisation are central to streamlining class consciousness beyond the territoriality defined by governing classes. Class is not an identity, but a relationship formed on the basis of common experience with the exploitative regimes of capitalism. It exploits and marginalises the working poor differently across places, times, conditions, and contexts. It cannot be outsourced to postmodern cultural relativists who hide behind particularities rather than develop connections based on shared experience to build solidarity in the struggles of working people.
It is true that a secular, urban worker in London does not share the same conditions as an Indian farmer confronting an agrarian crisis, and the historical fault lines are different. Yet what connects an urban poor person in London with a rural poor person in India or Africa is capitalist exploitation. This connection is central to avoiding the sectarianism of a puritan left that universalises or absolutises differences and fragmentations as disconnected uniqueness.
This connection and consciousness are central to developing policies, programmes, and strategic perspectives that bring unity to tactical divergence among different left groups and coalitions. It enables a common and collective understanding based on issues confronted by the working poor in different parts of the world, across various layers of exploitation—whether based on gender, race, caste, class, religion, region, or culture—under capitalism. This understanding is fundamental to building revolutionary consciousness, culture, and agency that uphold working-class interests locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. For example, too many Palestinian groups in UK and other parts of the world work for the welfare of the people of Palestine, but their fragmentation weakens the solidarity struggle for emancipation from Zionist war and occupation. Their unity as a political strategy to develop solidarity in struggles is the strategic need of the hour.
The opportunistic and individualistic leadership within organisational structures of the left politics divides the party or group based on personal differences in the name of ideological differences. It weakens the working class struggles as it replaces class struggles with personal feelings and positions on different issues. This differences produces personality cult driven politics and ruins revolutionary class struggles and destroys the collective class consciousness to group or individual consciousness. This is tragedy for the left politics and its mass organisations where labour aristocracy survive as a result nearly most of the left and socialist leadership does not composed of working class people but composed of labour aristocracy shaped by white Brahminical majoritarian order concomitant within the totalizing logic of capital.
Class consciousness, class organisation and class struggle in this terminal crisis, must be the synthetic project based on unity of working people and their struggle. It is the ruthless political labour of weaving these local, strategic, and programmatic differences into a unified anti-capitalist front without erasing their specific textures. If the Left fails to dialectically process these divisions—that is, to create a strategic unity that respects local autonomy while asserting a shared structural enemy—then ‘ working class’ becomes a mere rhetorical ghost. It will be invoked by every fragmented sect to justify its own existence, while capital happily consolidates its base. The task is not to wish differences away, but to build organisations where these contradictions can be debated within a shared revolutionary framework, rather than allowing them to fester into permanent organisational schisms. Without that, the ‘class struggle’ remains an abstract slogan, powerless against the very real, unified machinery of imperialist war and capitalist exploitation.
As capitalism faces its most terminal crisis, and Yankee imperialism in its last leg is attempting to create conflicts and wars across the world by using different historical fault lines to divert attention from this contemporary capitalist crisis, the united struggle against these two barbaric forces of history is also weakening, owing to perennial divisions within left politics. The left is divided on the issues of the American wars on Afghanistan to Iran and the Russian war on Ukraine. It has taken differing political positions on racism, gender discrimination, nationalism, and identity politics. In terms of political project, the left has failed miserably to understand the nature of the state, capitalism, the market, democracy, human rights, animal rights, and environmental issues. This division within left political and ideological praxis offers a much-needed opportunity for the capitalist and imperialist governing classes to consolidate their base and expand their unequal and exploitative regimes across the world.
It is time to build a unified, internationalist, and localised left movement—not only to uphold the interests of the working class but also to ensure world peace. Left unity alone can defeat all forms of capitalism, imperialism, and their cronies, thereby ensuring individual freedom, deepening democracy, and expanding secular citizenship. There is no alternative to a united-front strategy that fundamentally calls for left unity without any form of bureaucratic hurdles. The choices are clear; left unity or irrelevance.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect (North London News) editorial policy.
