CLASS NOTES
Reed, Adolph Jr.
CLASS NOTES Adolph Reed Jr. Sectarians on the Prowl Ihad an enlightening moment at a solidarity march for locked-out workers in Decatur, Illinois, last summer. As the marchers approached the...
...Ultraleftism is more difficult to define because it depends on some notion of a range of reasonable or appropriate left stances...
...Because it reproduces itself like tenured mediocrity in universities, the cycle is almost impossible to break...
...Here's how the logic works...
...The purpose of activism, therefore, is to gain adherents for the party...
...Relying on formulaic social theory and slogans makes it difficult to connect with the experience of ordinary people...
...I remember being instructed on a 1969 visit to the Fort Dix Coffeehouse Project in the GI movement that the staff believed that closing the bathroom door was a sign of petit-bourgeois individualism...
...Have you seen our paper...
...And desperation to forge some kind of connection leads to the pursuit of any alliance, no matter how repugnant to progressive interests...
...But it, too, exists...
...It's much more about taking positions that express the intensity of one's commitments than about organizing or building anything...
...or "I came to ask you to vote for the machine," or "I'd like to speak on behalf of my ul-traleftist sectarian organization...
...At bottom it is a refusal to take into account the ways that existing political realities limit possibilities for action...
...Single-minded focus on an arcane objective makes it possible to rationalize anything...
...was the opener...
...The result was a turn inward...
...So, for example, trade-union activists who are unable to win rank-and-file workers over to their "revolutionary" programs will apologize for Farrakhan and the protofascist militia movement, soft-pedal opposition to sexism and homophobia, support tax-cut politics, and retreat from support for reproductive freedom and aggressive policy intervention to promote racial and gender equality...
...something like that between a religious sect and a cult, or between a durable party organization and a political machine...
...Ultraleft politics confuses means and ends, muddles the distinctions among goals, strategy, and tactics...
...If they're prominent and militant enough, sectarian groups can obstruct effective action...
...Although sectarian groups by and large aren't vicious or ill-intentioned, they do prey on the fringes of movements, and with potentially destructive consequences...
...From that perspective, the difference is Adolph Reed Jr...
...So you go into activities primarily to push your group's agenda...
...Ultraleftism is a distinct political tendency...
...The encounter proceeded down a well-worn path—invitation to sign up for a mailing list to get news about goings-on in my area, enlistment of support for battles the party was fighting in one place or another (mainly in defense of their own cadre who are described as popular leaders of something or other), suggestions about attending an important meeting soon to be held in Chicago...
...The decline of large-scale anti-war activism and black-protest mobilizaljft put radicals in the unsettling position gf developing increasingly revolutionary political rhetoric as the constituencies for that rhetoric withdrew...
...His column appears in this space every other month...
...I noticed that their operatives were scoping out the crowd, looking for flickering signs of interest, and I learned to my dismay that establishing eye contact could be taken as such a sign...
...What remains is a self-propelling spiral of ever-deeper irrelevance and alienation from meaningful political action...
...One such is the claim I've heard that Farrakhan's Million Man March was actually a "one-day general strike...
...it tends to be driven by slogans and anachronistic analogies ("When Mao was on the way to Yenan," or "When the Bolsheviks were organizing for power...
...Likewise, liberals who are committed above all else to reelecting Bipartisan Bill in 19% frequently castigate as ultraleftists everyone who challenges him from the progressive side...
...Indeed, this sort of politics is perhaps predisposed to such bizarre ideas because it isn't rooted in a close analysis of the history that we're living...
...Instead of an ultimately self-defeating, feelgood approach, we need a politics that rests on careful, nuanced analysis of the social conditions we live in, grounded on and shaped by a concrete project of advancing the struggle for progressive social transformation...
...One's party or organization has the unambiguously correct program, strategy, and line...
...A good friend remarks that he was raised in a cult in downstate Illinois that believes that God came to Earth in the form of a dove, had sex with a woman who some time later gave birth to the Messiah—a cult called Protestantism...
...Lack of connection to palpable constituencies makes it possible to convince oneself of all manner of ridiculous fantasies...
...Sectarianism can work in pretty much the same way...
...This tendency severs the idea of commitment to principle from the need to make realistic assessments of the options that exist in the fluid here-and-now...
...Still, I suspect that there is a distinct style of politics on the left that most of us would recognize as sectarian...
...Thus the obligatory ten-minute, five-part question at public meetings...
...But most recently they have arisen as a response—or nonre-sponse—to the disappearance of radical activism's apparent social base after the 1960s...
...to analyze tough-mindedly our strengths and weaknesses...
...To that extent, its practitioners don't have a subtle, or even credible, understanding of the world around them...
...is a professor of political science at Northwestern University...
...Rather than crafting language to build broad support for a substantively radical program, for instance, ultraleftists prefer potted rhetoric that asserts their bona fides, without concern for communicating outside the ranks of believers...
...Characterizing critics as ul-traleftist places them beyond the pale of legitimacy, so you don't need to respond to anything they say...
...The focus shifted to inventing elaborate rituals of collective purification...
...As the marchers approached the auditorium where the rally would be held, we had to run a gauntlet of literature tables staffed by sectarian parties...
...Ultraleftism is a maximalist politics...
...Granted, in part the difference is only a matter of choosing sides in a debate: Ultraleftists and sectarians are the people who disagree with you...
...No one ever says, "Hi, would you like to join my cult...
...The scene reminded me of TV wildlife documentaries that depict predators lurking along the edges of herds of antelope or migrating wildebeest, ready to pluck off the weak and vulnerable...
...We need, that is, a politics that proceeds from a subtle form of what used to be called historical materialism...
...A woman behind one of the tables was but little affected when I responded that I used to sell it myself for a while more than twenty-five years ago...
...Just a reminder that all religious groups embrace beliefs that seem wacky to those who don't share them...
...The appeal of such defective politics is understandable...
...What separates these categories from styles of radical thought and practice that are more credible...
...For some time now I've been wondering about how exactly to define the terms "sectarian" and "ultraleft...
...Historically, for instance, ultraleftists have dogmatically opposed participating in coalitions with liberals or mainstream politicians...
...From there it was only a short step to the wildly esoteric rhetoric and debates— purgers and purgees accusing one another of being "Mensheviks" and the like—and internecine struggles of the late 1970s...
...Nevertheless, we need a better politics than this...
...Political struggles are important not so much in themselves, but because they provide a forum for propagating the organization's line and identifying potential recruits...
...The charge serves as a convenient way to avoid confronting criticisms, and it bears a family resemblance to red-baiting...
...Their fulsome, arcane debates and idiosyncratic combativeness also can drive away reasonable people who come to movements because they want to pursue concrete political goals...
...Sectarianism and ultraleftism have long histories, dating back even before Lenin's 1920 tract, "Left-wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder...
...to think seriously and instru-mentally about how to build a constituency within a social base (to "unite the many to defeat the few," for those nostalgic for old slogans...
...People who had formed organizing collectives were befuddled by their failure to connect meaningfully with the groups they wanted to organize...
Vol. 60 • June 1996 • No. 6
