Sects and Sectarians

...Numbers do not count, only Correct Insight...

...360 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 sion" and on maintaining that "the thing we need is a militant organization of agents" (What Is To Be Done), has consequences for that organization, which, even if only partially anticipated, determine to a large extent its further development and the conduct of its members...

...The more we restrict the membership," writes Lenin, "to persons who are engaged in revolution as a profession," the more efficient will the organization be...

...And yet sects also tend to be strongly authoritarian and subject to the powerful control of charismatic leaders...

...Members of the sect who have family or other social obligations in the outside world, whose outside roles might possibly lead to conflicts with their roles as sectarians, are likely to be less controllable, less devoted to the exclusive service of the organization, hence less reliable...

...While Martov's draft stated that anyone who "Personally and regularly cooperates under the guidance of one of [the party's] organizations" should be considered a member of the party, Lenin's draft stated that only those who personally participate in one of the party's organizations should be considered a party member...

...the wider community of political men—only to find that their words had no echo, their gestures remained empty and their appeals unanswered...

...It is engaged in a perpetual search for hidden malefactors...

...A sect, as the Latin etymology suggests, consists of men who have cut themselves off from the main body of society...

...The petty bourgeois intellectuals," writes James P. Cannon, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, with characteristic contempt, "are introspective by nature...

...30-44...

...Hatred among Protestant sects which originally split over comparatively minor theological differences was often more pronounced than antagonism between Protestant and Catholic...

...J The sect, by its exclusive structure, creates a morality opposed to that of the rest of society...

...A well-known sect leader, James P. Cannon, illustrates this mechanism when he hints darkly: "Almost since the beginning of the Trotskyist move ment in this country...

...Thus the maintenance of the organization as such superseded the ostensible purposes for which it had come into being...

...it was nourished by moral indignation and Utopian idealism...

...But when the working class reaches maturity, all sects become a reactionary phenomenon...

...The sect became convinced that it had come "at the wrong time"—but don't sects, as it were, always come at the wrong time?—it gloried in this situation and made no efforts to break out of it...

...Whereas the open group affords him expression within its structure, the sect sees in him only the potential renegade...

...What had once been the exigencies of a specific situation was now erected into a kind of frozen dogma...

...To the sectarian a man who dissents is not only in error, he is in sin...

...This kind of negative democratization or equalization of the members of the sect does not contradict but rather complements their subjection to authoritarian control...

...Similarly, many sects have looked with disfavor upon their members' occupational activities...

...the loyal members are reassured that the group as a whole has not failed but only some traitors...

...Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 367 2. The Radical Sect in America A formal sociological analysis cannot do justice to ideological contents...

...What counted most heavily now was simply sect belongingness, not specific ideas or attitudes...

...11 The sect is never tolerant...

...The development of sensibility, of a sense of discrimination, of esthetic or psychological refinement has always frightened the sectarian, being viewed as the first step towards the sin of subjectivism, that is of heresy...

...Oxford University Press 1947, and Roger Caillois' article "L'esprit des sectes" in Rennaissance (New York), vol...

...The history of radical sects records few cases in which an opposing faction has not been accused of going over to the bourgeoisie, or petty bourgeoisie, as the case may be...

...The social structure of the sect must be reproduced in the personality structure of the member...

...The sectarian is genuinely surprised—no element of cant is involved here—if the outsider measures his conduct by ordinary yardsticks...

...That they [an internal opposition] are full of `grievances' against the party `regime.' I always get suspicious when I hear of grievances...

...The sectarian knows and given that knowledge any new evidence appears as simply irrelevant...

...and that (against your will and unconsciously) you have found yourselves at the tail of the monarchist bourgeoisie...

...Small, exclusive, centripetally organized groups need to preempt the total personality of their members if they are to withstand actual or potential attack from the outside...

...Any tentativeness in this respect is foreign to him for it would render his elite position untenable and his claims for deference invalid...

...There is no other school that is worth a moment's consideration...

...Insofar as the relatively small size of such elite groups does mean the total involvement of the members, every conflict situation is likely to involve their total personality...

...I am aware that socialists have often used it differently, and that with them it has come to have a derogatory connotation...

...Since outside contacts necessarily detract from the members' obligations to the group, sects have looked with suspicion at family responsibilities...

...The interested reader is referred to The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff, ed...

...Most of them have again and again made efforts to reach out to the world, to merge themselves with the great mass of their fellows, to branch out into...

...The sect does not strive for large membership, on the contrary it may even find it advantageous to suffer a loss of membership if this involves the elimination of men inclined toward compromise and meditation...

...Emily Dickinson speaks somewhere of the pathos of the poet who "always writes letters to the world, but the world never answers...

...Writes James P. Cannon, who heads a sect which is also strongly bureaucratized: "What is the next thing we hear...

...All sect members are brothers, co-equal participants in the pneuma of salvation...

...Admission that such defeats are due to the strength of the antagonists would be an admission of weakness...

...It is easier to deal with the heretic if it can be shown that "objectively" he has sold out...

...Such groups must continuously engage in self-purification drives, and so they must constantly breed heresy and schism...

...Centralized control is usually facilitated by organizational structures in which the ordinary member participates only segmentally and sporadically so that a small leadership clique can legitimize its control by referring to its total involvement in, and greater sacrifices for, the tasks of the organization...

...To the sect, every internal dissension appears to endanger the mobilization of concerted energies for the struggle with the outside world...

...The sect defines as heretics all those who propose alternatives where the group wants no alternatives to exist...

...Thus, insensibly, the sectarian began to forget the generous motives for which the sect had once been established...

...Trotsky entitles one of his factional articles "From a Scratch to the Danger of Gangrene...

...Hence the fear of "petty-bourgeois" interests in art, literature, philosophy or sociology among modern radical sects...

...Just as celibacy was one of the means by which the Church attempted to insure total allegiance of the clergy, so the sect will look with disfavor at the kinship and other social obligations of its adherents...

...The ideal sectarian is one who is only a sectarian, a man without any other qualities...

...We may note in parenthesis that such linking of dissent with disease is extremely frequent in radical sectarian literature...

...But such was the state of American society that his appeal found no echo, his eager offers of help no response, his idealism was derided as impracticality and hypocrisy by the very men whom he wanted to help...

...They measure the world's agony by their own inconsequential aches and pains" (The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, p. 6...

...The true believer is unable to profit from experience, unable to correct his vision in the light of new evidence...

...And if marriage wasn't frowned upon in all radical sects, emphasis was always at least upon marriage with an "insider," which would not detract from devotion to the sect...

...moreover, they can reaffirm their righteousness by uniting in action against the "traitors" and thus overcome any feelings of personal inadequacy...

...This will be easier for those of us who, at one time or another, have actually been sectarians...

...We deal here with a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: the sectarians were deeply convinced of their rejection and this conviction in itself, in addition to all the objective factors which were certainly present, led them further to accentuate outside hostility...

...Hence what is forbidden to the outsider may be perfectly legitimate for the insider since he speaks in the name of a higher morality...

...366 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 The religious believer claims that empirical facts have nothing to do with superempirical realities, that these are separate realms, and he is, of course, quite correct...

...the political sect, as distinct from the political party which aims at encompassing a high proportion of the mass of electors, consists of specifically qualified members, "professional revolutionaries," certified Marxists or Alte Kaempfer...

...It is precisely the memory of former closeness which adds fuel to present antagonism...

...Common subjection to authority favors leveling and, as Simmel has said, "insofar as a number of people are equally subject to one individual, they are themselves equal...

...yet his insistence on "restricting the membership of this organization to persons who are engaged in revolution as a profes • The following discussion is deeply indebted to the sociological writings of Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Roger Caillois, though no special reference to their work will be made in the body of the article...

...A conflict within the sect is thus likely to lead to much more deepgoing consequences than in larger groups...

...no one, no group, ever `split off' from the Socialist Labor Party...

...The open group can allow the coexistence within its ranks of conflicting and heterogenous elements and will be able to shift its ideological content or its value orientation in accord with the balance of power of the various elements which make up its structure...

...Given these contradictions, sects are forced either to develop bureaucratic structures which negate theoretical equality by instituting factual inequality, or continuously to breed dissent and expulsion of those members who resist the authority of the center—or they combine both patterns in an uneasy equilibrium...

...1944...

...Such is the tragedy of the American radical sect, from the early experiments in communitarianism or single-tax panaceas to DeLeonism and Trotskyism...

...Aufumn 1954 • DISSENT • 369...

...Augustine puts it with classical brevity: "Not we have persecuted you, but your own works...

...But not only does the sect require uniformity among its members, it also desires an undifferentiated character structure...

...We must train people," writes Lenin, "who shall devote to the party not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives...

...We are confident of our future because we believe we have the correct understanding and tactic, and because we know we have the body of militants with the grit and tenacity to carry on...

...The struggle against inner enemies strengthens the cohesion of the remaining purified worthies...

...Furthermore, it should be clear that I am employ...

...The morality of the sect is a morality of extremes, it cannot tolerate reservations...

...Thus Lenin could write: "Do you see now, comrades of the New Iskra, where your turn toward Martynovism has landed you...

...Many sects have looked with disfavor, or suspicion, upon those of their members who possessed special occupational skills...

...Do not anybody despair because of our small numbers, or because the movement of the left in general is so isolated today...

...A group which from its inception is conceived as an elite struggle group must oblige its members to participate continuously in the selection Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 363 and reselection of those who are "worthy," that is, those who do not question or dissent, precisely because its very existence is based on the "purity" of its membership...

...Everything must be sacrificed to cohesion, and the cohesion of the sect can only be maintained if dissent is excluded...

...The closed group, on the other hand, cannot come to terms with internal divergences and hence can react to expression of dissent only by branding it as heresy...

...We are like the American abolitionists of a hundred years ago...

...Yet when all this has been said, it remains to state emphatically that the radical sect is an obstacle, not an aid, in the development of a socialist movement in America...

...They have formed a restricted and closed group which rejects the norms of the inclusive society and proclaims its adherence to a special set of rules of conduct...

...But since in the sect all members do fully participate in the activities, authoritarian control always encounters the resistance of equally involved sectarians who claim a share in power...

...ing a typological procedure—no actual sects will ever in all aspects embody all the features of the typological model...

...Such were the twists of history in nineteenth and twentieth century America, that rather than being able to link himself to significant mass movements the radical was perennially rejected and thrust into the isolation of the sect...

...This is especially noteworthy in cases where the sect has suffered defeat...

...Tolerance is always felt by the sectarians to be a deplorable weakness...

...The matteroffact practicality of the labor movement, its insensitiveness to doctrine and idealism, led to his isolation...

...The sect thus often tends to "invent" inner enemies in order to strengthen its solidarity...

...Yet authority relations within the sect show great strain and tension...

...Those members who bear the burden of being scapegoats, through their sacrifice cleanse the group of its failings, and in this way reestablish its solidarity...

...All this one can only view with pain and sympathy and terror...

...It might be suggested that the prevalent use of "party names" in radical sects is perhaps more easily understood as an outward symbol of 362 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 the newly achieved elite status and the decisive break with the outside world of one's past, than by the need to secure protection against the police...

...Max Shachtman feels that "through the bloodstream of the party's youth must run a powerful resistance to the poison of clique politics and subjectivism" etc., etc...

...There can be no common measure, he feels, between "their morals and ours," since they represent the• past and we the future, they are the children of darkness and we the children of light...

...One of the symbols of this surrender of the social obligations of the outside world is the tendency of the "reborn" to change his name after initiation...

...What counted now was simply the maintenance of the organization...

...Since the sect tends continually to produce heresy it is understandable that sectarians will often spend considerably more time and energy on the persecution of heretics than on the pursuit of their avowed aims...

...Allegiance is expected to be total and hence hesitation, an act of deliberation and reflection, is suspect...

...Fourth International, Feb...

...That is why it is generally quite useless to argue with a sectarian since the purpose of argumentation is precisely to adduce new evidence in the light of which belief is to be tested...

...The original radical impulse of the sectarian was likely to be born out of a revolt against the injustice, the cruelty, the insensitivity of American capitalist society...

...From Max Weber, Gerth and Mills, ed...

...A many-sided development of the personality of the member is likely to bring into play attitudes and thoughts which cannot be easily controlled...

...hatred between members of various radical political sects is more violent than their antagonism against the "class enemy...

...he wanted, out of the generous impulse of his conviction, to change the human condition of his fellowmen...

...Thus a recent split-off from the American Trotskyists proclaims in the first issue of its magazine, The American Socialist: We are part of the stream of history...

...The very structure of the sect, quite apart from its ideology, is likely to lead to a number of characteristic patterns of behavior, and it is these I propose to discuss.* I am quite aware that there are fundamental differences between, say, a fundamentalist sect and the political sects of the modern socialist movement, but I shall try to show that the structure of sects as such breeds certain common patterns...

...The initial radicalism led to rejection by the outside, but this rejection in turn led to an accentuation of sect characteristics which made a return to the world impossible...

...II-III, pp...

...When the history of this epoch is written," says James P. Cannon, "they'll discover that the only really moral people were the Trotskyists...

...Lenin's organizational principles cannot be fully understood unless seen in the historical context of the struggle against the police regime of Czarism...

...The large group may be lenient, the sect must adhere to the axiom that "who is not for me is against me" This helps explain the famous disAutumn 1954 • DISSENT • 361 pute on organizational matters which led to the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903...

...A similar pathos inheres in the life of the radical sectarian in America...

...IV Mention has already been made of the strong leveling tendencies within the sect...

...Yet we have not fully understood the radical sect if we allow analysis to rest at this point...

...Hence sectarians look in their own ranks for dissenters and potential heretics who hampered unity and contributed to weaknesses...

...To understand the sectarian fully one must place oneself in his position, one must, so to speak, temporarily "become a sectarian...

...By attacking the unanimity of group feeling the dissenter obtrudes an element of personal choice into a structure which is based on unanimity of choice...

...Writes Arnold Petersen, National Secretary of the Socialist Labor Party...

...The party is inclusive, the sect is exclusive...

...The religious sect, as distinct from the Church which contains within its fold both saints and sinners, consists of the visible community of pure saints...

...We need a new generation of radicals who, like those who built the Debsian Socialist Party, go out into the world of their fellowmen and inquire after their needs, desires, wishes, not men who in their cloistered virtue know the correct prescriptions...

...It is easy enough to laugh at the sectarian, but what he enacts is pathos, not farce...

...Sects cannot afford toward their members the leniency of larger groups...

...The exclusive group, being unable to avail itself of the advantage of large numbers, must attempt to offset it by the intensive exploitation of the loyalty of its members...

...True, rejection by the world led to withdrawal, but such an attitude once established began to develop an autonomy of its own...

...The political sectarian, as distinct from the religious sectarian, didn't want to save his own soul...

...We are like Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass and John Brown...

...The microcosm of the sect replaced the macrocosm...

...While the renegade will fight against his former group and give it occasion to draw more closely together, the heretic will proselytize among actual or potential adherents of that group...

...The socialist movement either adapted itself to prevailing strands of opinion, thus losing much of its radical inflection, or it was thrown into isolation and in a reflex of defensiveness accentuated its sectarian characteristics...

...It is less dangerous for the sect if the dissenter goes over to the enemy than if, as a heretic, he forms his own rival group, for as a heretic he continues to compete for the loyalty of the members of his former group even after he has left it...

...its functioning has been impeded by an internal disease which poisoned the bloodstream of the party organism . . ." and thus inferentially suggests that lack of success was due to internal sabotage...

...To avoid possible misunderstandings, let me stress that the concept of sect is used here in the sense that sociologists generally do...

...Sheer survival of the community of the faithful primed interest in spreading the message for which they had originally gathered together...

...Two Tactics) . To the sect, vilification, slander, persecution are always justified 364 • DISSENT • Au+umn 1954 against the heretic...

...Yet one must understand that "science" in the system of these sectarians has a totally different connotation than it has in the world outside—it connotes a symbol of faith, not a method...

...Where the larger group can afford to leave its members leeway in opinions, attitudes and conduct, the sect must ever strive completely to subjugate the individual...

...Thus Calvin could write: "God has been good enough to reveal to me Good and Evil," and James P. Cannon can state emphatically: "The body of doctrine and methods known as Trotskyism is indubitably the genuine Marxism of our time . . . there is no other movement, there is no other school that has answered anything...

...As St...

...ExcresAufumn 1954 • DISSENT • 365 tenses removed from a body are `expulsions'—that and nothing more .. . the SLP has no interest whatever in refuse deposited in the `garbage can,' " (quoted in Robert J. Alexander, "Splinter Groups in American Radical Politics," Social Research XX, 3, 1953) . III The true believer is always convinced that he has a special hold on the Truth...

...The very structure of the sect forces the members to take decisive stands in matters both public and private...

...Where the church-type organization strengthens its inner cohesion by allowing various conflicting tendencies to exist within its ranks, the political or religious sect must continuously expel dissenters to maintain or increase cohesion among the remaining "worthy" participants...

...The sect attempts to achieve uniformity and homogeneity through de-individualization...

...What appeared mere hairsplitting soon was shown to involve the basic difference between organizing an inclusive party and an exclusive sect...

...Evidence, in fact, does not concern him...

...George Santayana once defined a fanatic as "a man who redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his ends"—this definition may be applied with equal justice to the sectarian...

...Do you understand that your political philosophy has turned out to be a rehash of the Osvobozhdeniye philosophy...

...Fourth International, Spring 1954, p. 51) . The sect tends to be torn between two opposite organizational principles, either the extreme bureaucratization of the Church or Army (and consequent loss of sect characteristics) or a structure where all are generals, but where there is always the danger of a pronunciamento...

...Conviction that one indubitably has gotten hold of the Correct Insight into the workings of the Spirit—among secular radical sects usually referred to as History—helps to overcome any feelings of weakness that may crop up among the sectarians when they contemplate their numerical weakness...

...The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, p. 53...

...The Free Press 1950...

...The dissenter, unlike the heretic or renegade, has not left the group either to join the ranks of the enemy or to set up a rival group of his own...

...The Church and the party aim at attracting all men of good will, the sect aims at recruiting an elite of religiously or politically qualified "performers...

...Since it regards the outsider as not participating in grace, as not belonging to the select, as not yet having the fortitude or capacity to adhere to revolutionary principles, it sees him as an exponent of a lower morality...

...Bossuet, with profound insight, defined a heretic as "a man who has personal ideas...

...If sects exist with a measure of historical justification for their existence, it but indicates that the working class has not yet ripened for an independent historic movement...

...Sexual promiscuity, so frequent in the Communist Party and other radical organizations, has often had the same function as celibacy in the Catholic clergy—lasting attachment to "outsiders" and permanent outside social obligations could be reduced to a minimum by celibacy in one case, by promiscuity in the other...

...While the larger society or group may regard compromise as a virtue, the sect sees in it only a sign of disloyalty...

...From the point of view of the sectarian, a man who reflects for himself is indeed a dangerous man since he asserts a right to personal examination of conduct in an organization which is based on a rejection of the right to establish personal standards...

...Incessantly engaged in struggle with the outside and providing no room for internal differences, these groups will react violently not only against the heretic but also against every form of dissent as an attack upon the very basis of the group's existence...

...Any departure from its norms is immediately perceived as an attack upon the very basis of its existence...

...The expulsion of individuals from the party constitutes removal of unfit material...

...The dissenter is, in a sense, even more dangerous to the sect than the renegade who has gone over to the enemy, for the dissenter claims belongingness...

...I know of no better way to end these remarks than to quote a passage from Marx which stands at the close of the history of the American radical movement that the late Lilian Symes and Travers Clement wrote some 20 years ago, and which remains even more apposite today than it was then: "The development of socialist sects and the development of a genuine labor movement have at all times been in inverse ratio...

...Despotism thrives on uniformity...

...The popularity of this image among sectarians is readily under standable: disease calls for purification, elimination, expulsion...

...True believers have a perennial tendency to account for defeat without in terms of "treason" within...

...Such members, the sect feels, are more difficult to control than others, for the pull of their work is likely to decrease their exclusive devotion to the movement...

...Heresy derives from a Greek word meaning to choose or to take for oneself...

...The paradox, however, is only apparent...

...The 368 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 world was now perceived as hostile and threatening as a whole, salvation was more and more to be found only within the confines of the organization of the worthy...

...The impulse to go out into the world atrophied...

...In some such organizations, as long as a man was willing to keep within the brotherly community, no matter what his opinion, he was accepted...

...The sect requires the unreserved devotion of the individual to the rationale of the group...

...But when the secular sectarian claims that his beliefs are validated by "science" and at the same time rejects the continual process of self-correction which is the very essence of scientific method, one is apt to be somewhat annoyed...

...In addition to attempting to reduce to a minimum the outside social contacts of its members, and to encompass their total personality, the sect has a tendency to level off individuality...

...Let them first prove that they are not heretics and not schismatics, and then complain...

...But in its sociological usage no value judgments are intended or involved...