Membership, office space and print-runs are a pretty misleading guide to an organisation’s health – and to its strategic chances. To take few of the many examples on the British far left, Workers’ Liberty might be – only just – bigger than Socialist Outlook or Workers’ Power. However its apparatus is more substantial than that of the other two organisations put together: more professional organisers, bigger printing press and print runs, a monthly magazine, a ostensibly non-party newspaper, a youth paper and a whelp of polemical pamphlets. Rather like the SWP, when it bought its first big printing press for its old Cotton Gardens office, the number of projects seems limited only by the capacity of the press.

In fact, small organisations are deformed when they build an over-large apparatus. Members have to super-exploit their own resources to support the apparatus and their publications. Fundamental political revisions are developed within the apparatus and published -- as fait accompli – for the members to contest through structures that apparatchniks themselves never had to win. In effect, a member has no control over a big apparatus unless they join it. Sadly, this deformation is not even the main danger of a over-large apparatus.

This approach to building an organisation encourages them to measure their progress numerically. That’s the big danger. It’s much more important – and more challenging – to gauge how well you are looked upon by the people who work with in the movement, how committed and realistic members are, and how far they are making a real contribution to the wider movement. These questions are most vital warning signs for socialist organisations, which, by their nature, are currently minority organisations prone to semi-sectarian and factional decline even if their apparatus expands.

Don’t think you already know what you need to know

This is the big point of difference between Socialist Democracy and much of Trotskyism in the Anglo-Saxon world – if not Trotskyism elsewhere. The global political situation and forms of production seem to be going through a period of substantial discontinuous change. It’s not just that the post-Cold War world has been different. We are in a post-post-Cold War with a international capitalist structure that has significantly evolved and strengthened its productive processes.

That emerging chaotic productive process has significant political and ideological changes. The global rule of business law becomes more necessary – and the US aims for Nato to be the way to do it. Anti-capitalist arguments and movements have become more fragmented and less convincing to many. Capitalist ideology is getting poorer: there is a real obscurantist, anti-enlightenment and introspective-linguistic decay in political and critical theory.

The traditional socialist response is to encourage struggle, build solidarity when it occurs and win people to socialism in the heat of the movement. The Anglo-Saxon left largely concentrates on the ideological, political and economic implications of the union struggle. Yet today’s anti-capitalist struggle increasingly fights for social inclusion – against oppression, environmental destruction, poverty, anti-welfare and anti-democratic attacks. The far left faces a gap of skills, competencies and experiences: our contribution is less valuable there than it is in the trade union and student unions. It’s a huge credibility gap.

The solution: spot what we don’t know and, with modesty, see if we can pick it up. It’s not just that the left has to a lot to learn from Reclaim the Streets or the anti-deportation campaigns. Here’s a more marginal example: Socialist Democracy is, by part of the British left, called "Parksist, not Marxist". That’s because we’ve shown a bit of interest in the campaigns against building on public land, like school playing fields, allotment gardens and parks. For the record, the "Land Question" is not the top issue today. However we know these movements are often significant working class mobilisations.

Of course, we are more than happy to steal a good idea when we hear it: there’s no party pride in this magazine! However we think distinctly local solutions and novel tactics are usually the best. Instead, much of the left appeals to past tactics, as if these were principled orthodoxy or sure-fire solutions. Such an attitude has led to the ‘cloning’ of organisations – look at the embarrassing mini-SWP and mini-Militant organisations around the globe. It means that the weaknesses of the off the shelf solution are copied. Often many of the strengths of the earlier example are weakened or lost in a new setting.

It also has a political weakness. Between us, the truth about the marxist movement is this: tactics were never our strongest point. At its best, the marxist movement learnt tactics from the mass movement. The mass movement was often, at key moments, ahead of the marxist movement. Marxism’s key strength is that it is a framework for the analysis of dynamic relations from an anti-capitalism and revolutionary viewpoint. It help identify the broad trends in the development of capitalism and human life, and the key fronts on which the capitalist class will take the offensive next.

Much of the left, however, defines itself by tactics. Left groups attack each other over tactical choices yet hardly ever raise the key ideological and global viewpoints that working people and their allies need to see the way the world is moving. That means that the far left had – with some honourable exceptions – nothing to say about the ‘New Times’ debate apart from carping over what Gramsci really wrote. The left had little to day about what the US attack on Iraq and Serbia had to do with a strategy to force Russia, China, Ukraine and the countries of the Arab East out of the ‘global community’ and into a new cold war alliance.