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In this article, we examine three key, recently emergent sites of anti-austerity activism in Britain-Left Unity, the People's Assembly and Occupy-in order to explore to what extent and in which ways the traditional British left is in the process of reconfiguring itself. More specifically, we explore the 'points of contact' being developed, or not, amongst feminist, anarchist and Marxist/socialist activists. We argue that if we are seeing a mutation of the left at present, it concerns a noticeable (if partial and contested) 'feminist turn' in terms of the composition, ideas and practices of these sites.

This chapter provides a survey of four types of party organizational resources in the PPDB: members, money, staff, and territorial units. Findings include that around 3 per cent of voters now join political parties across the democratic world; that German and Spanish parties seem to be the richest in terms of absolute levels of funding, but parties in countries such as Austria and Norway are even stronger relative to the size of their economies or electorates; that party staffing levels are generally quite modest; and that countries where there is an emphasis on what is local tend to have the highest relative concentrations of party branches. Moreover, country differences consistently seem to outweigh party family differences in explaining variation in party organizational resources. The chapter concludes by proposing a composite index of party strength which enables us to construct a rank-ordering of 112 parties according to their overall organizational strength.

The study of parties that label themselves as Marxist-Leninist has, for the most part been subsumed in the exploration of the broader radical (or, far) left tradition in the post-1989 period. In an attempt to bridge this gap in the recent literature on radical left parties, this article attempts to uncover the (non) distinctiveness of Marxism-Leninism by studying empirically two European parties that are self-labelled as Marxist-Leninist — the Greek (KKE) and Portuguese (PCP) Communist parties. The central question we explore is whether there are significant similarities between these parties, so as to allow us to speak of Marxism-Leninism’s distinctiveness today. Overall, the two parties studied here have enough in common to testify to Marxism-Leninism’s ongoing distinctiveness with several qualifications, especially concerning ideology.

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