hard left

hard left

1. (chiefly UK, politics) The section of the left wing that supports traditional socialist policies, distinguished from the social democratic centre-left and the communist and anarchist far left.
   • 1961, New Society:

     This new hard left includes several interesting social strands. There is the far left, close to the Communist Party, with its naive assumptions about the unity of interest and purpose among working class people

   • 1983, Janata:

     Though the Left is stronger in the party than ever before, it is divided into different factions such as "soft left", led by Michael Foot and Kinnock, "hard left" led by Tony Benn and the Tribune Group, and the "far left" consisting of various groups of Trotskyites.

   • 2015, Les Johnston, Marxism, Class Analysis and Socialist Pluralism (RLE Marxism): A Theoretical and Political Critique of Marxist Conceptions of Politics, Routledge, →ISBN:

     The debate around 'popular alliances' has come to the forefront of left debate in Britain and it has been suggested that this is giving rise to a radical re-alignment of the left; on the one side groupings devoted to a British 'historic compromise' of popular forces and movements (Eurocommunists in the Communist Party, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, sections of the women's movement, etc.); on the other side an alliance of old Trotskyist far left, the Labour Party hard left and sectarians within the Communist Party which is committed to an alliance against monopoly capitalled by the (male) industrial working class

2. (politics) Synonym of far left
3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see hard,‎ left.

hard left (comparative harder left, superlative hardest left)

1. (politics) Alternative form of hard-left