Why do far left parties tend to fragment so much?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I must hesitantly use the right-left terms even though I am uncomfortable defining them. Yet, this well-known Monty Python scene resonates pretty well: Monty Python - Life of Brian - PFJ Splitters - YouTube
I remember a Swedish poster here saying that Swedish right wing parties have a tendencies to be able to hold up even despite having major differences in outlook while the left parties have a lot of squabbling.

If we look at the 2005 French elections (2007 French presidential election - Wikipedia), we can see that it includes the Revolutionary Communist League, the French Communist Party, Workers’ Struggle and the Workers’ Party. Surely they are not very far apart. If they’d stuck together, especially with José Bové who isn’t that far off, they could have had close to as many votes as the Front National.

In the 2002 elections, if the WS, RCL, FCP, RPL and WP had stuck together (2002 French presidential election - Wikipedia) they would have come quite close to having as many votes as the center-left Socialist Party. While it’s clearest among French far left parties, it does seem to be common for far left groups, whether parties or another political associations, to split even though they have a lot in common.

Even in the Russian Revolution, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks had disagreements but still had a lot in common. They could easily have been different factions of the same party while cooperating on the major agreements they did have.

In some ways, it reminds me of the almost cellular division-like multiplication of Protestant churches. An outsider like me is left wondering why a denomination would consider the dunk/sprinkle issue a major motive for splitting.

In a religion which emphasizes personal redemption, being a purist is understandable but among people who want to form a government, with all the horse-trading and compromises that entails, I have difficult seeing why a Maoist, a Trotskyist, a Leninist and any number of different shades of red can’t agree to disagree on the finer points of their political programs so they can form party to more easily push through what they do agree on.
So, does anyone care to speculate as to why that is?

Before anyone mentions it: Yes I’m aware that there’s less splitting in the US and the UK. Those political systems very much punish that kind of splitting.

2

WAG/oversimplification - by definition, progressive movements are about hypotheticals - things that have either never been tried, or never been tried purely enough, whereas conservatives are at core about returning to some version of the past. The universe of possibilities is much larger than the universe of realities, so there’s more space for them to flourish.

3

It’s not just a left thing. There is a HUGE amount of inter-group/party warfare in the Tea Party affiliated organizations. At the local and regional level a lot of them are at each other throats. Maryland’s Republican party is a prime example of this.

4

That’s a good point, but it also supports Irruncible’s hypothesis. The Tea Party isn’t really conservative - they want radical changes to American society. Conservative groups have a lot of cohesion, because everyone in them wants more-or-less the same thing: what they already have. If a political movement is about radical change, the first hurdle is figuring out what it should be changed into.

5

I’d say as you go further out on the political spectrum, ideological purity becomes even more important. I’ll never forget the endless arguments I had with people who were determined to throw their vote away on Nader in 2004 because Kerry, or any Democrat, couldn’t meet such a rigid test.

6

Internal conflict is only significant when it’s over principles. Right-wing conflicts tend to be less involved with challenging one another’s message than with determining who has the right purity and intensity to carry the common message.

7

This is incorrect in my experience. I don’t think this distinction is as clear as you think it is. “Message” and ideological purity are not distinct entities in these battles. A number of these battles are all about the “messages” (public statements and voting records) of one candidate vs another.

8

When I say “the message” I’m talking about party policy. I’m not familiar with the races you are talking about, but I’m willing to bet it’s a lot like last year’s Republican presidential primary. The goal of that contest was to demonstrate exactly two things… first, the purity and intensity of one’s conservative credentials vis-a-vis public statements and voting records, as you said, and second, the electability of the candidate. At the national level the much-hyped conservative civil war is still only about how to gain and preserve power, not over the principles that political power should serve.

9

Left is so undefined. They can’t call themselves communist…
They can’t call themselves socialist, because thats just means closet communist…

Unions are now effective only in specialised workforces , where they get their workers pay far above the public servant or small office lawyer ?
Meanwhile existing left of the major parties are filled with high paid lawyers and commerce graduates, even business managers.

10

There is, or, at least, used to be ( I do not have much contact with that world now) plenty of splittism on the far left in the UK. Indeed, that was presumably exactly what Monty Python was satirizing. If you don’t have this so much in America, it may be because the American far left, such as it is, does not, for the most part, seem very interested in forming parties at all.

Of course, where you get this is not in large parties that have some reasonable hope of getting real power, like the Labour Party, which certainly does not count as far left in Britain, but in tiny political groupings that have no chance of any real power, and thus, really, little to lose by becoming smaller. In those circumstances, satisfaction with ones ideological purity may seem more important than holding together a coalition that might achieve something. You aren’t going to achieve anything (in the short term, anyway) any more with 500 supporters than you are with 50.

Why this seems to more prevalent on the far left than the far right (if it really is so) I do not know. Possibly HMS Irruncible is on to something, but it may be just an illusion due to the fact that few people to the left of center (and perhaps even those who are not too far from the right of center) have much interest in or taste for following the minutiae of far right politics. One does sometimes hear about splits amongst the various little neo-fascist groups that exist in the UK and Europe, but I, for one, really do not want to know too much about the details. It is not like I am going to prefer one side over the other.They will both max out my detestation meter.

The Tea Party is not really to the point here. They are not that small (and sadly, not that far to the right of center) in America now, and have real access to power, and realistic hopes of gaining more. In those circumstances, one would expect them to stick together despite internal ideological differences, just as large parties like the Democrats and Republicans do.