Ultra-leftists and sectarians : Notes for a history of left-wing extremism

Ultra-leftists and sectarians :

Notes for a history of left-wing extremism

“In a September day, a few months after the prison of his comrades Sacco and e Vanzetti, an Italian anarchist

called Mario Buda, parked his horse-driven cart, near the Wall Street corner, in front of J.P Morgan company(...)

A few blocks ahead a frightened postman found some leaflets that warned: ‘Free the political prisoners or you will

die all!’, signed by the ‘American Anarchist Fighters’. The Trinity Church’s bells started to toll at midday, and

when they stopped the cart charged with dynamite and metal scraps exploded, converted into a fire ball full of

shrapnel(...) Buda did not like to know that J. P. Morgan was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded

(...) he was faraway in Scotland in his hunting summer-house. Despite that, the poor immigrant, with some stolen

dynamite, a heap of metal scraps and an old horse had provoked an unprecedented terror in the heart of

capitalism(...) The car-bomb was converted into a semi-strategic weapon comparable to the air force for its

capability of destroying important urban centers and headquarters. The suicide truck-bomb that devastated the

American embassy and the marines’ barracks in Beirut in 1983 (...) obliged Reagan to withdraw from Lebanon.”

(DAVIS, 2006-1)

The Marxist historiography established as its theoretical-methodological premise that ideas do not govern the

world’s fate, it is the world that commands the fate of ideas. Material interests condition the political

representations in contemporaneous societies. However, this formula, in general correct, is, by itself, insufficient.

Radical projects transform themselves also into material forces when they conquer influence among millions, and

start to be the fuel for historical transformation. Without the force of powerful ideas it would not be possible to

change the world.

In such an unequal and unjust world, the ruling classes could not keep the control of power – that is, the monopoly

of force – if they were not capable of presenting their needs as universal ones. In order to politically legitimize

their interests, they were based on, besides the fear of reprisals, the inherited costumes and alienating traditions,

which are the inertial forces that reinforce conservatism in contemporaneous societies.

The dominant culture manifests in an ideological repertoire and political vocabulary that are transformed by the

mediation of the clash of values and conceptions. This struggle expresses the world perceptions that are born from

a material experience and are formulated based on the social conditions in which the human beings are inserted,

that is, their class condition. The historians of the socialist movement could not put aside the same criterion to

explain the lower or greater influence of any of the egalitarian tendencies, at each country and at the epoch.

However, there has never been an immediate coincidence between the moods of the social classes and their

spokespersons. Both the proprietary and the dispossessed classes had divergences with the political organizations

that intended to translate into programs the needs brought up at each historical-concrete reality. A long minority

“exile” has been the destiny of the political tendencies that fought against the current.

A response for the division of the left between the program of the revolution and that of the reforms of the mode of

production, that is, for the difficulties of a unified class representation of labor, was sought by the Marxist

historiography – like Eric Hobsbawn’ Age of Extremes – in the history of capitalist itself, therefore, in the

capability of the system, under certain historical-economic circumstances and determined political conjunctures,

such as in Europe and the US in the end of the 19th century, or in the countries of the Triad in the thirty years after

1945, to absorb the partial demands, if threatened by the danger of the extension of revolutions. They did not

ignore also, the pressure exerted by the proprietary classes on the socialist movements, by giving incentives to the

moderate leaderships, which were also promoted. The organizations integrated into the defense of the regime of

bourgeois domination found, in conditions that favored concessions to the workers, a major political-social echo

for their program of reforms of capitalism.

On the one hand, since its foundation, the socialist movement has been international, and its outcomes were

indissociable from the confrontations between revolution and counter-revolution worldwide. The existence of

States that claimed to support the socialist project, in societies in which revolutionary processes led to the

expropriation of Capital, but remained isolated, has exerted a powerful authority over the world left during

decades: the “nationalism of the Soviet Union”, that is, the socialist campism - or Stalinism – has been one of the

most influent ideologies in the 20th century. Stalinism was not only the policy of the Third Period, or the policy of

the Popular Fronts, or the policy of pacific coexistence. The defense of the interests of these States – and of the

bureaucratic apparatuses that took their control – sacrificing the ideals of internationalism - has produced

important divisions in the proletariat.

However, beyond the ideological differences, other factors should be considered in the analyses about the division

in the left. The social stratification of wage labor has been turning more complex. It cannot be ignored that the

contemporaneous proletariat has been diversifying at such a degree that its representation by a single party is not

politically useful or even possible in the majority of urbanized societies. Despite this social diversity, it is

insufficient to attribute the divisions and even dispersions in the left only to social heterogeneity. Sociological

analyses have to be historically contextualized. There is a complex history of dispute between the visions about

which would be the possibilities and limits of capitalism, and that refers to the turnabouts of the revolutionary

processes in the 20th century. The revolutionary victories have inflamed militant hopes, theoretical renewal and

political unifications. And the defeats have fed the eclectic nomadisms of the parties, the theoretical dispersion of

Marxism, and, eventually, social diasporas in the intellectuality.

The political identities of the Marxist-inspired and working-class based left did not end in the border line between

the two big camps, reform and revolution. Two other political traditions have remained along the last hundred

years, centrism and ultra-leftism, although they have not always preserved an international organic continuity. The

subject of this article will be the presentation of the polemics with ultimatist currents, which are criticized in the

Marxist tradition by their imaginary identity with the interests of the revolution in the future. In this text we will

produce some notes about the place and the formulations of what we may call the tradition of sectarian

organizations that, with different vocabularies, deserve to be treated as heirs of 19th century’s anarchism.

Ultra-leftism is not the same as sectarianism

A superficial perception of the theme can lead to an undifferentiated association of ultra-leftism, sectarianism and

sects. This first perception, even if superficial, is not totally incorrect, but rather unsatisfactory. It is reasonable to

claim that ultimatist organizations were, predominantly, doctrinarian in theory, that is, they had a very closed or

conservative ideological framework, and sectarian defensive reflections. However, although closely associated,

neither the ultra-leftist groups were always more sectarian than the other currents in the socialist movement, nor

sectarians were always ultra-leftists. Ultra-leftism should not be identified, therefore, by professional historians, as

equal to sectarianism, even when accused as such by their political foes. In the Marxist tradition, sectarianism was

neither, necessarily, an accusation of extremism, nor a synonym of intransigence, although the sectarians have

been intolerants. This is still a superficial critique.

Ultra-leftism can be defined as a policy or even as a doctrine, if we consider that anarchism has preceded, in the

19th century, great part of what would be the repertoire of 20

th century‘s ultra-leftism. As to sectarianism, it was

more a method of interpretation of reality or a political conduct that has elected as its priority the defense of a

fixed body of ideas or the interests of a group. On the one side, political sectarianism was understood as

propagandism, that is, the permanent agitation of the same program, independently from the concrete situation,

and on the other hand, the preservation of the apparatus, a set of self-affirmation procedures. Sectarian tendencies

have much difficulty to accomplish the united front, even when possible agreements for joint campaigns were

possible, as they identified the possible allies, especially the closest ones, as enemies.

The whole subject is even more complex, because not all ultra-leftist tendencies have degenerated into sects. Sects

are hyper centralized and incorrigible organizations, that is, unable to react to the social and political pressures

from the milieus in which they decided to act. The anarchists of the “Friends of Durruti” in Cataluña in the years

1936/37 of the Spanish revolution, were ultra-leftists. They supported, still under the monarchic regime, the

legitimacy of vengeful armed actions, such as the bomb attacks against public buildings, and punitive attacks

against hated authorities. They inherited the fascination by terrorist tactics of the Irish Fenians, the Russian

esserists – the militants of the revolutionary socialist Party – and part of anarchism. Nonetheless, it would be

superficial or even unjust to consider them as a sect. They even have not had enough time to become politically so

homogeneous as to become a centralized organization. Despite the great leadership of Durruti, they were sensitive

to the external political pressures, and kept fraternal relationships with the Trotskyites. Their political initiative had

an impact on reality. They were neither politically nor socially marginal. They were capable of organizing the most

combative sectors of the proletariat in Barcelona in the struggle against capitalism and fascism. They won the

admiration of the left worldwide for their heroism in the trenches of the Civil War in Aragon, and were among the

martyrs of the defense of Madrid. They acted in a political united front with different left tendencies, such as the

Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and the youth of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) –in

distinct junctures and joined a military united front with all the republican forces against fascism. On the other

hand, some pro-Moscow Communist Parties, even when they conquered influence over millions, like the German

CP in the beginning of the 1930s, when it accused the social-democracy of being social-fascist, and their left

critiques as trotsko-nazis, could not be judged as “ultra-leftist” – despite its leftist abuses of Stalinist tactics known

as the Third Period – although their sectarianism has been legendary. The German CP was far from being a sect,

but during some years had a sectarian posture.

Ultra-leftism or sectarianism, as well as opportunism, are evaluations that are assigned to political orientations and

practices. There are more than few tendencies in the history of the world left embraced, once in a while, ultra-

leftist or sectarian tactics. The CP of Brazil (nota para diferenciar do atual PC do B?), for example, has oscillated

from ultra-leftist to opportunist positions regarding the government of Getúlio Vargas in the first years of the

decade of the 1950s. The judgment of an organization as a sect, however, should take into account other factors,

besides the political line: its social presence, its internal regime, and moreover, its capability of reflecting about its

own history and suffering the pressures from social sectors where it intended to penetrate. Sects have great

capability of resistance to the internal pressures (??Valério, são pressões internas ou externas?).

Ultra-leftism has sought consistency in a program. It is characterized by a substitutionist perspective: it proposes

for the laborers and the youth - or to another exploited and oppressed subject - projects, demands or actions that,

they, mostly, do not identify as their own, being ahead of the experience of the bulk of the working class. They are

willing, sometimes, based on the most radicalized sectors, to accomplish exemplary actions that frighten their

enemies and incentive their allies. They may or not adhere to armed actions, but their proposals are beyond what

the major battalions of the working class would be willing to accomplish or even accept, that is, those are

ultimatist policies.

The workerism of the ultra-left tendencies – Marxist or Anarchist – tended to be inversely proportional to their

real implantation in the working class milieus, which has been historically a minority, if not rachitic, in most

countries and revolutionary processes. Its origin was an overvalued appreciation of the political and social

relations of forces. The ultra-left policies underestimate the reactionary forces and the obstacles for the

mobilization and organization of the workers, starting by the lack of people’s self-confidence. But its voluntaristic

eagerness has demanded a strong identity and internal cohesion.

Sectarianism as well should not be identified as a synonym of a sect. Sectarianism is a product of doctrinarian

conceptions. Sectarians have been essentially propagandistic and fought for the apparatuses proper. Their

professorial attitude has been an obstacle for the unity of action with other tendencies. Marx and Engels have

criticized the French egalitarianist tendencies of the 19th

century as sectarian currents, as they extracted their

theoretical conceptions or political conclusions about the program from principles and not from the critique of

reality. They were moderate, but severe, in their assessment of the leading tendencies of the Paris Commune:

“Naturally, the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, both for their

praiseworthy and their unpraiseworthy aspects; as the Blanquists were for its political actions and omissions. And

in both cases the irony of history willed – as is usual when doctrinaires come to the helm – that both did the

opposite of what the doctrines of their school proscribed”. (ENGELS, at

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm)

Sectarians dedicated, even when they absorbed a Marxist vocabulary, to the divulgation of a historical, therefore

abstract, program, without trying a political intervention that could influence the real movement of workers. Those

who did not agree with the whole world outlook of sectarians were summarily identified as enemies – “Trojan

horses’ or “fifth column” – even though they were willing to accept the united front or the unity of action. They

were criticized for remaining satisfied with speaking to themselves. The ideologization of the political

intervention and self-affirmation, if not self-proclamation, was the common destiny of the sectarian tendencies.

Not always, however, ultra-leftists organize sects. Many ultra-leftists, even with sectarian “tics”, do not constitute

stable political groups, with their own finances and a regular press. They frequently were trade union leaders,

radical intellectual or popular leaderships who acted, moreover, individually, within the movementist limits of

circumstantial articulations and improvised, thus ephemeral, perspectives. Anarchist tendencies reappeared after

1968, in varied countries, with these characteristics, and did not establish organic links with the workers

movement. The formation of a working-class organization has frequently demanded decades of persistence. On the

other hand, not all sectarians build sects. And not all sects in the history of the workers’ movement were very small

groups.

Socialist sects were reduced to marginal sects. But marginality is not only a matter of size, although most sects

have been Lilliputian, that is, tiny ones. Political-trade unionist marginality reflects the relationship that sects

prefer to maintain with the workers and trade union movement and with other social movements. What defines a

sect is not its size, but its chronic marginality, its impermeability to the social and political pressure, and a

bureaucratically deformed internal regime, that is, being politically sterile. The anarchist and socialist sects were

predominantly stable and durable organizations, like Bordiguism in Italy, Spartakism in the US, and Healism in

England.

This is no simple subject: the great revolutionary organizations of the 20th century, like the Russian Bolshevism or

the German CP in the 1920s, had in some occasions sectarian symptoms, a defensive reaction of self-protection

against dangerous social or political pressures. Most sects have not surpassed dozens of members, although the

world left has known sects with thousands of members. Besides, sectarianism has equally infected the ultra-left

and reformist currents. Moderate currents were frequently very much prone to fronts with those who were

politically at their right, but were furiously sectarian with those who fought at their left.

The rivalry in the left has expressed the plurality of experiences and projects, supported by distinct social bases.

Sectarians are not, therefore, those who say what they think, even when they criticize the others. A clear political

delimitation and a strong ideological demarcation is not a confirmation that an organization is a sect. The contrary

of sectarianism is not tact or diplomacy, but the willingness to intervene in reality and learn from this intervention.

Sectarians would be those who sacrifice the possibility of a common step forward in the struggles, due to other

disagreements, confessing their impotence. Trotsky defined sectarianism in the 1930s, in the following terms:

“To a Marxist, discussion is an important but functional instrument in the class struggle. (...)To the sectarian

discussion is a goal in itself. (...)He is like a man who satisfies his thirst with salt water: the more he drinks, the

thirstier he becomes. Hence the constant irritability of the sectarian. (..) The sectarian sees an enemy in everyone

who attempts to explain to him that an active participation in the workers’ movement demands a constant study of

objective conditions, and not haughty bulldozing from the sectarian rostrum. For analysis of reality the sectarian

substitutes intrigue, gossip and hysteria”.TROTSKY, Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth InternationaL. At:

http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2009/05/sectarianism-centrism-and-fourth.html Access in 03/10/2013.

Sectarian, in this interpretation, would have been those currents that placed their ideological dogmas and rivalries

in the dispute of positions above the concrete needs of mobilization and/or organization of the laborers. Sectarians

despised the importance, in each situation, of a policy that could effectively put in movement the broad masses,

rendering secondary the terrain of the united front. They overestimated their influence and underestimated the

others’. When the severance of socialist collectives from the workers is politically durable, the social seclusion can

have very serious consequences. The popular wisdom teaches that fishes die out of the water. A feeble

implantation in the proletariat was, after years, inexorably fatal in the history of the Marxist left. Years after years

in a chronic minority condition, secluded from the real life of the popular masses and as refugees in student

milieus have led innumerable socialist groups, abnegated in their origin, to develop varied “manias” and

“phobias”: the first “flight forward”) was escapism in a literary world of commentators of the class struggle.

A small audience of ultra-leftist positions –when there is scarce willingness to struggle, or the experience of the

workers with capitalism is insufficient – greatly enlarges the frailties of small organizations, and stimulates

dangerous degenerations : a super-concentration of power in a few, or even in a single leader, who needs to

diminish, humiliate or politically destroy the others are rivals; the demonization of the debate of opinions hampers

coexisting with differences and strengthens an artificial homogeneity, which is not built around ideas anymore and

starts to be accomplished around the leaders. The organizations that do not find a path to build themselves in the

working class can be deformed into the form of sects, under the double pressure of adversity and the struggle for

the conservation of their apparatus, having at their head a leader who believes being “as infallible as the Pope”.

They often seek refuge in sterile propagandism, and demonstrate to be defenseless in face of the “lumpen”

pressures from bohemian milieus. Although frail, they were not been harmless.

The three classical ultra-leftist formulas

Other factors exerted a decisive role to explain the rivalries between the currents. Victories of the revolution have

stimulated reapproximations, and triumphs of the counter-revolution have provoked divisions. Social marginality

reaches socialist circles when they are inexperienced founding groups, and more severely when they live a long

reactionary situation and an overwhelming retrocession of the class struggle. Trotsky observed about this

phenomenon:

“Every working-class party, every faction, passes during its initial stages through a period of pure propaganda —

that is, the training of its cadres. The period of existence as a Marxist circle invariably grafts habits of an abstract

approach to the problems of the workers’ movement. He who is unable to step in time over the confines of this

circumscribed existence becomes transformed into a conservative sectarian. The sectarian looks upon the life of

society as a great school, with himself as a teacher there”. .(TROTSKY, Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth InternationaL

at

http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2009/05/sectarianism-centrism-and-fourth.html)

In a counter-revolutionary situation, the social removal from workers and the popular masses tends to be even

more serious. Under these circumstances, the organizations inspired by Marxism are under severe repression or

exile, therefore separated, even physically, from the social base that conditions their raison d’être. The closed

milieus of seclusion, understandable for security reasons, create the pressure to a hyper internal cohesion as a

defensive reflection, which can be only maintained by means of much internal struggle and intense ideologization.

The inexistence of liberties limits or prevents a public militancy, therefore an interaction with, and apprenticeship

in, the real movement of workers that educates in the tolerance of opinions, and in the correction of aprioristic

conceptions. The danger of repression hampers the functioning of the regular collective organisms, favoring

individual decisions or those made among few, deforming the participatory internal regime. The Marxist currents

had, in these conditions, invariably few choices, except resisting and waiting for better days. Shared ideas

strengthen an identity or the sense of belonging.

The Marxist party that inspired the model of the CPs founded after the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik fraction,

has affirmed itself not only struggling against the opportunist adaptations, but has also survived by resisting to the

ultra-leftist pressures. Lenin wrote his classical “The Infantile sickness of leftism in communism” , in response to

the polemics that have preceded the Second Congress of the 3rd

International, when part of the recently organized

European sections experienced strong leftist pressures:

“In 1908 the ‘Left’ Bolsheviks were expelled from our Party for stubbornly refusing to understand the necessity of

participating in a most reactionary parliament. [14]

[The ‘Lefts’] based themselves particularly on the successful

experience of the 1905 boycott. When, in August 1905, the tsar proclaimed the convocation of a consultative

"parliament", [15]

the Bolsheviks called for its boycott, in the teeth of all the opposition parties and the Mensheviks,

and the "parliament" was in fact swept away by the revolution of October 1905. [16]

(...)The boycott proved correct at the time, not because nonparticipation in reactionary parliaments is correct in

general, but because we accurately appraised the objective situation, which was leading to the rapid development

of the mass strikes first into a political strike, then into a revolutionary strike, and finally into an uprising (...)It

would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other

conditions and other situations.(...) Today, when we look back at this fully completed historical period (...), it

becomes most obvious that in 1908-14 the Bolsheviks could not have preserved (let alone strengthened and

developed) the core of the revolutionary party of the proletariat, had they not upheld, (...) that it was obligatory to

combine legal and illegal forms of struggle, and that it was obligatory to participate even in a most reactionary

parliament”. (LENIN, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch04.htm )

Ultimatism was, in the appreciation inspired in bolshevism, the “chemically pure” expression of voluntarism.

Ultra—leftism was criticized since the “foundational” discussions with the anarchists in the 1st International, for

presenting ultimatums to the mass of laborers, despising their moods or the quality of their organization. There

were, grosso modo, three classical forms of ultra-left tactics:

(a) It manifested as a call for actions that the masses were not willing to accomplish, such as boycotting the

elections, occupation of factories and public buildings; continuation of strikes to the very end; or the more

common and indefectible call to a general strike; the substitutionism assumed also the militarist form, the terrorist

intimidation of the ruling classes by the exemplary action of the righteous commandos.

(b) It was translated in the form of radical watchwords, like the classical debate about the indices of salary raise

- 10% or 50%? – or rather the always recurrent polemics about the amounts of minimum wages and wage floors;

or the inescapable “down with the government” , which the masses still did not understand, either because they

had no enough self-confidence or because their political experience was insufficient;

(c) It assumed the form of an organizational ultimatism: to abandon the unions with moderate leaderships, as

their leaderships were “yellow”, no matter if the majority of the movement recognized or not their leadership.

The common element of all ultra-leftist tactics would be contempt for the masses’ process of syndical and

parliamentary learning.

Can ultra-leftists find a social base?

Marxist historians have insisted that, in revolutionary situations, the political experience of the masses being

dramatically unequal, a minority sector of the vanguard tends to become detached from the broad masses, and

precipitates itself in premature combats. The German revolution has experienced, more than once, the

misadventure of its July journeys, improvised insurrections in immature conditions:

“It was finally the hero of the 25th of November, the former lieutenant Dorrenbach, head of the division of the

People’s Navy, linked to Liebknecht, who tilt the scales: there were, according to him, divisions within the forces

of order, he himself counted on the Navy Division, and he assures that several thousand men, with 2,000 machine

guns and 20 trucks gathered in Spandau, where the Spartakist Von Lojewski heads the soldiers’ council, are ready

to support the Berliner workers. He convinces Lebedour and Liebknecht, and a great majority, against a small

group led by Richard Müller and Daümig, decided to proceed and try to overthrow the government. A

Revolutionary Committee is designated(...) which ‘proclaims the overthrow’ of the government(...)It should be the

beginning of the insurrection.” (BROUÉ, 1997, 72)

It was the beginning of a repressive counter-offensive that led to the decapitation of the leadership of the German

CP with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The history of political revolutions in densely

urbanized societies in the 20th

century suggests that, during revolutionary crises, “ultra-leftist” policies may find a

social base among the most radicalized sectors, or those most suffering with exploitation. Such a vanguard may be

feel attracted by precipitated actions, not respecting the democracy of the own movement, or despising the limits

of the relation of forces, thus opening the flank for repression to hit afterward indiscriminately the whole working

class.

In some exceptional circumstances, in the heat of revolutionary crises, ultra-leftists may conquer influence on

some sectors, although still remaining as a minority. The Russian revolution had its famous “July Journeys”, when

a sector of the bulk of Petrograd’s working class has thrown itself in the streets to topple the government, opening

the path for the repression that imprisoned a good part of the Bolshevik leadership, and led Lenin underground.

This was also the case of Germany, for several times, between 1918 and 1923. Young Spartakist militants were

leading the occupation of the SPD’s daily newspaper, the Vörwarts, in December 1918, in a reprisal against the

intervention in the Berlin police. This “exemplary” action of the vanguard has disseminated the mistrust and

divided the majority of the workers, still under the influence of the leadership of Ebert and Scheidemann, but who

had stood solidarily against the firing of the leader of the USPD who was the commandant of the Capital Police,

and was persecuted by the SPD government.

Another, more recent, example, refers to the Portuguese Revolution, when activists under the influence of the

extreme left organizations, mostly Maoists, decided to occupy the newspaper “República”, the SP’s quotidian, and

Rádio Renascença, the Catholic Church’s radio: an “exemplary” action of a vanguard sector provoked a profound

division and fed a huge mistrust of the sector of the working classes that recognized the social-democracy as their

leadership and served as a pretext for the SP – and the Catholic Church, which had collaborated with the fascist

regime during almost half a century!!! – to successfully call hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in

defense of the democratic liberties.

The impatience of those who support a project which is in a hurry

Most militants of the egalitarian cause have been engaged in political militancy, in all times, still very young, with

the passionate predisposition of changing the world, and the hope that these transformations would be fast. The

generous hearts of the youth animate a will that is in a hurry. The world in which we are destined to live is too

much unjust, and there are no reasons to think that it can improve without struggling. Historians of the left

organizations have exposed, innumerable times, the generosity and courage of several generations of socialists.

But the lack of personal interest, the dedication, the heroism, when it precipitates into substitutionism, cannot

prevent defeats. Gorender in his classical Combate nas Trevas, has stated:

“The post-1964 armed struggle (...) in my opinion, has the meaning of a delayed violence. Not having been

unleashed in March-April 1964 against the rightwing military coup, the armed struggle started to be tried by the

left in 1965 and definitively unleashed since 1968, when the adversary dominated the State apparatus, had full

support in the Armed Forces ranks and had destroyed the main organized mass movements. Under unfavorable

conditions, each time more removed from the working class, the peasants, and the urban middle classes(...) the

Brazilian left was motivated by its own reasons and have reinforced them with ideas of international impact in the

1960s (...) The defeat was inevitable. The Marxist-inspired Brazilian left has just not taken to the arms when the

historical conditions determined it should do it. In the beginning of 1964, the biggest mass movement in the

national history was impetuously advancing.” (GORENDER, 1987, 249/250)

But saying that the transformation of society occurs because it is necessary is not to same as saying that it is

possible when it is necessary. The inertial forces of conservatism of the same laborers, reinforced by the

bureaucratic apparatuses that the bourgeoisie and its State protect - and finance – may contain for decades the

social dissatisfaction within the institutional limits of the regimes of domination, up to the moment the crisis

reaches such a dramatic severity that starts a revolutionary situation. A long waiting time has been invariably the

destiny of the majority of those who joined the cause of socialism.

Nevertheless, there are no shortcuts that replace the political experience of millions of workers. The social

revolution has shown to be, innumerable times, impossible, if the exploited and oppressed social subjects do not

gain confidence in themselves, and do not build their independent organizations, and support a leadership with a

project to struggle for power. This practical experience has times and measures that are historical, because the

popular masses, even when they start to lose confidence in their old leaders, prefer to be badly organized, rather

than unorganized. They do not abandon their old bureaucratized organizations only by the force of the arguments

employed by the revolutionaries, but in function of the shocking incidence of extraordinary events. The slowness

of this learning process of the masses exasperates the voluntaristic youth. The substitutionist conceptions were

historically the common denominator to all ultra-leftisms, since the formation of anarchism, still in the 19th

century.

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, the impatience in the bohemian and politically ingenuous milieus. The

rhetorical extremism has always been appropriate to the immaturity of small juvenile circles, having therefore little

responsibility. But the main challenge that will condition the political evolution of these collectives will be their

capability of building or not links with the workers and their struggles. The “demolishing” critiques to the other

currents are limited to literary untidy expressions, whenever they do not undergo effective proofs of responsibility

leading struggles, with all their consequences. The willingness to join the popular struggles has been the entrance

examination of all left currents that aimed to be seriously considered. Getting closer to the workers and people’s

struggles, detaching themselves from bohemia, breaking with social marginality and achieving maturity and

internal equilibrium – forging stable class commitments, this is the inescapable “primary school” exam that

decided the future of ultra-leftist groups. But only this has shown to be still insufficient.

Social marginality is only one of the factors that condition ultra-leftism

Leftist organizations may conquer and maintain some proletarian implantation. The conditions that prevent the

crystallization of embryonic organizations into sterile factions are more complex. Without the internationalist

militancy and the self-critical openness to identify their errors, without a healthy organic functioning, by means of

collective organisms that control the leaders and favor the collaboration under objective bases, without an

intervention that contextualizes the tactical presence at each struggle in light of a national political response, and

without an increasing Marxist culture widening the theoretical repertoire of the militants, no socialist organization

has survived, immune, to the opportunist and sectarian pressures. Historically and internationally, the destiny of

the circles that did not develop self-control mechanisms was that of incorrigible sects.

One of the irritating traits of the polemics in the left, when the ultra-left groups are present, especially among those

with heavy student presence, were the harsh debates about the “most secondary tactic” and the apocalyptical

judgments about their adversaries, preventing no few times, even the most elementary unity of action. Associated

to the need of permanent differentiation, exaggerating artificial differences, and inciting an undifferentiated

mistrust, student ultra-leftist groups do not hide their inconsolable fury when they realize they are misunderstood,

and therefore, are a minority. They have attributed the marginality of their proposals to real or imaginary

bureaucratic hurdles, ignoring the will of the majority, or despising the higher or lower inclination to struggle, that

is, the mood of workers and students. The political impotence is addictive, and they use the pretext of marginality

as an alibi for their weakness. The ultra-left groups start to believe in the strength of such an intense desire that

does not distinguish the borders between reality and will, and is transfigured into magic thought. This is why, the

more marginal they are among the workers, the more workerists they are: the ideologization of a proletariat that is

presumably willing to immediate revolutionary actions sufficed to excite the fantasy of the ultra-leftists, but not

enough to find forces to overcome their social Diaspora from the laborers.

The substitutionism of the workers by the most active vanguard: the common denominator of ultra-leftism

Since the origins of the modern workers’ movement in Europe in the 19th century, when the influence of the model

of Masonic secret organizations was still great among the egalitarians, and Blanquism was a synonym for

communism in the French proletariat, the most politicized and combative of the old continent, substitutionism has

been always a powerful temptation. After all, only in extraordinary situations, that almost never repeat within the

timeline of one generation at each society, have the big working masses thrown themselves into revolutionary

actions.

A project animated by a grandiose program of moral refoundation of civilization, a plan set up a priori about how

social life would be reorganized, elaborated by a clairvoyant leader, and assured by the resolute decision of an

inflexible leadership, based on a disciplined organization, and articulated with the support of an activist vanguard,

this is the plan of all conspiracies. The substitutionism of the action of the working masses by the initiative of an

audacious and energetically determined minority, has been the common denominator of the most varied ultra-

leftist currents. Trotsky’s citation about the subject of sectarianism relates to the pressures that bolshevism has

undergone during and after the Revolution of 1905:

“In the meantime, it is by no means difficult to find in the history of the Russian party the precursor of the present

policy of the German CC: he is none other than the deceased Bogdanov, the founder of ultimatism. As far back as

1905 he deemed it impossible for the Bolsheviks to participate in the Petrograd Soviet, unless the Soviet

recognized beforehand the leadership of the Social Democrats. Under Bogdanov’s influence, the Petrograd Bureau

of the CC (Bolsheviks) passed a resolution in October 1905: to submit before the Petrograd Soviet the demand that

it recognize the leadership of the party; and in the event of refusal – to walk out of the Soviet. Krassikov, a young

lawyer, in those days a member of the CC (Bolsheviks), read this ultimatum at the plenary session of the Soviet

The worker deputies, among them Bolsheviks also, exchanged surprised looks and then passed on to the business

on the order of the day. Not a man walked out of the Soviet. Shortly after that Lenin arrived from abroad, and he

raked the ultimatists over the coals mercilessly. ‘You can’t,’ he lectured them, ‘nor can anyone else by means of

ultimatums force the masses to skip the necessary phases of their own political development.’

Bogdanov, however, did not discard his methodology, and he subsequently founded an entire faction of

‘ultimatists’ or ‘up and outers’, called Otzovists. They received the latter nickname because of their tendency to

call upon the Bolsheviks to get up and get out from all those organizations that refused to accept the ultimatum

laid down from above: ‘you must first accept our leadership.” '. (TROTSKY, What Next? Vital Questions for the

German Proletariat, 1932. At: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1932-ger/next01.htm#s3

The issue was posed again with acute importance in the beginning of the 1930s in Germany, when the KPD

embraced the formula of social-fascism to define social-democracy’s tactics. In Latin America, after the victory of

the Cuban revolution, when a wave of great struggles was threatening to spread, ultimatism assumed a militarist

form, and thousands of young students and workers engaged heroically, although awkwardly, in the project of

mimicking what has been the odd experience of the 26th

of July Movement led by Fidel Castro, enthused by Che

Guevara’s example.

Two historical polemics

Ultra-leftist arguments refer to two historical debates in the Marxist tradition: how to defend the program of the

revolution, when the majority of the workers and youngsters still have hopes in the reform of the system, that is,

when the electoral illusions that society could be possibly changed by the ballot box are still alive; and, when the

processes of bureaucratization are irreversible, how to articulate the unity of action with the plurality of

organizations that aim to represent the working class in the class struggle.

The first theme reassumed its importance, as the abstention is already a phenomenon that deserves the attention of

historians, moreover among the working classes of the European States, where the popular attendance to polls was

very high in the past and crumbled – as in France, since Miterrand’s second mandate – or even in the US, where

since one decade almost half the potential electors do not come to vote, even in presidential elections. More than

few socialist militants have asked themselves, in the last two decades, if the best tactics would not be the spoilt

vote or boycotting the elections. It was a historical lesson, according to the tradition of revolutionary Marxism that

the transformation of society and the defeat of capitalism could not happen by placing a vote in the ballot box.

Only the magnificent and imposing strength of the organized and struggling masses could defeat capitalism. But,

warned, Marx and Engels, if the working class loses the horizon of politics, that is, the instinct for power, taking

refuge into self-defensive trade unionism, it would lose everything. These are the lessons inherited from the

demarcation with anarchism:

“Se diz que toda ação política traz consigo o reconhecimento do existente. Mas, o existente existe e não se importa

como o nosso reconhecimento. Acaso seria reconhecimento empregar os meios que o existente nos dá, para

protestar contra o existente? Nós queremos a abolição de classes. O único meio para isso é o poder político nas

mãos do proletariado. E nos pedem que não façamos política? Todos os abstencionistas se chamam a si mesmos

revolucionários. A revolução é o ato supremo da política e quem a deseje, tem que desejar também os meios que

preparam a revolução(...) Tudo depende de que política, se a exclusivamente proletária, não como cauda da

burguesia” (Engels, 1988,124) – Valério, ver livro da citação para procurar em inglês…

Political escapism would not solve the key issue: by hiding from the majority opinion hold by the people, the

activists could feel more comfortable among them, but they would remain a minority. The presentation to elections

would remain one of the most efficient tactics for a massive campaign of political education. According to

Marxism, socialists would not help the workers to free themselves from the influence of the parties representatives

of Capital’s world view, by hiding from the political debate in society.

Would it be inevitable the bureaucratization of the working-class organizations?

For the historians of the socialist movement, the understanding of the several ways of volunteering for the

militancy in collective organizations, in each society and in each epoch, it is still more complex. The mistrust

among young activists regarding the increasingly bureaucratized permanent trade union and political

organizations, has not ceased to increase along the 20th century, especially in societies in which have democratic-

liberal regimes consolidated in the post-Second World War. The model of old working-class movement of the end

of the 19th century agonizes in Europe, whenever it has ceased to exist at all. It seems that we are facing a new

historical epoch.

In the long half century from the defeats of the democratic revolution in 1848 up to the First World War, a new

social reality has arisen in England, France and Germany, among other countries: the existence of a network of

trade union, associative and recreational mass organizations in which the world of labor participated and

recognized itself. Dozens of daily newspapers, most of the working class associated in trade unions and thousands

of militants in socialist parties – with a plurality of tendencies – that conquered millions of votes, ensured a social

to weight parties with a clear cut class identity and capability of political intervention.

This proud social movement, possibly the most powerful in history, seems to have lost the capability of attracting

the new generations after the years 1970s, whereas in Latin America the dynamics of reorganization was inverted.

Social decadence, chronic unemployment, crisis of representation and higher depoliticization have influenced the

search for other social solutions and have reinforced other identities. Minority actions with great visibility,

although with strong antisocial traits – such as in Paris’ outskirts – express the explosive disposition of a new

internationalized proletariat and have conquered worldwide sympathy.

After the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, all left parties started to be seen, in a higher or

lower degree, as highly suspicious, even by part of a radicalized vanguard, including in Latin America. The social

bureaucratization and political adaption seem inevitable in the eyes of the younger generation. The building of

collective organizations, be they trade union or political, is linked to the own kernel of the socialist project. History

has demonstrated, according to Marxism, that it would not be possible for the working class to affirm itself as an

independent class without being organized in a unified way, in order to act collectively. The disciplined action

would be vital, both in the trade union and the political domain. The working class has discovered collectivism in

its association to work and in the decisive hour of class combat. Without permanent organizations it would not be

possible for a collective action to succeed.

However, unions and parties are collectives that demand a division of tasks, specialization, therefore an apparatus.

Apparatuses tend to develop their own and autonomous logic of needs, and their control is not possible without an

intense participation. Nevertheless, although the bureaucratization of the working-class organizations is a

historical trend, it does not seem to be a fatality. It depended on the higher or lower intensity of the adhesion of the

working classes to their organizations. There is no curse that has prevented them to learn and develop self-control

mechanisms over their trade union and political leaders. Surely, this has shown to be difficult. In the

contemporaneous epoch, no class has been socially, cultural and politically homogeneous, but these distinctions

have never prevented the class struggle to open the path to build the unity during the struggle. The subjective

inequalities – an expression of the experiences- are not smaller and express the differences of trade union,

political and ideological experiences. Gorender lucidly synthesizes the terms of the problem:

“In the strict area of the political parties, the fidelity of the workers’ parties to those they represent is not taken for

granted. It is unimaginable for a bourgeois party to defend the interests of the working class against those of the

bourgeoisie. The contrary, however, occurs and it is not a surprising episode: workers’ parties can, as the say goes,

‘play into the hands’ of the bourgeoisie, in detriment to the proletariat’s fundamental or conjunctural interests. The

relation between the proletariat as a class and its political representation, be it with the parties or with the

leadership, is, as it can be perceived, much more problematic than for the bourgeoisie”. (GORENDER, 1999,

p.49/52.)

The ultra-leftists distrust stable organizations that could only be sustained by the force of the mandates, an indirect

representation that is supported by the mood of the great majorities. What happens is that the mood of most of the

workers, in reactionary situations, are far from being revolutionary. They have disqualified, therefore, the place of

the organization and action of the masses, and have overemphasized the exemplary role of vanguard sectors: it is

not a coincidence that one of the anarchist-inspired tendencies has coherently embraced political terrorism.

Terrorist methods have had again an important resonance in the last twenty years in the world’s most conflagrated

region, with the appearance of radical secular and religious nationalist organizations, without any reference in the

socialist tradition: the Middle East.

Conspiracy: when necessity turns into virtue

The socialist left has lived harassed by repression, along the history of the last 150 years, in innumerable

dangerous situations, in which even the physical survival of their members has been threatened. In this field of

organization tasks, the existence has also conditioned the conscience, and forged a “culture” that influenced in the

life of all currents, including ultra-leftist ones.

The permanent pursuit under the threat of an implacable repression demanded from the incipient communist

movement in many countries, during the years that followed the victory of the Russian revolution, it was not

uncommon a strict clandestinity. However, in the following decades, the transformation of what had been a need of

survival into a virtue. The European and Latin-American communist parties, before World War II, when the

struggle against Nazi-fascism was raging, kept semi-legal parallel structures that administered reserved finances,

covered press houses and international trips, among other activities. In the second half of the century, under the

conditions imposed by the “Cold War”, the conspirative methods were preserved, even when the institutional

participation was possible.

The subject of the relations with the legality of a State that was a social enemy, which controls the police and the

military repressive forces, influences the mass media and criminalizes the anti-capitalist militancy, was also a

watershed. Marx had, in his time, innumerable reservations regarding the predominant mentality of clandestinity

in the League of the Just – that he called, with a pinch of malice, the “League of the Essenes” – which was

imbibed of Blanquism - common in the radical, semi-Jacobin, semi-socialist and anti-clerical circles-, and that

have proliferated in all Europe by means of the organizations influenced by the Masons. His hostility to these

sectarian conceptions in matters of organization was such that the change in the statutes of the League was,

together with a split about what he considered as a “sentimental communism” , one of the sine qua non conditions

he required to join in the second congress of 1847. A historical reconstruction of this process by which Marx and

Engels approached the workers’ organizations of their time, can be found in Löwy:

“All strictly conspirational traits of the organization of the Just were eliminated : the exaggerated importance of

secrecy – the article 2 of the old Statute that defined the League as an ‘essentially secret association’ was

suppressed and it was proposed that the public propaganda would run by means of manifestos; the mystical rituals

for the admission, which are typical of the sects in the Masonry, etc, etc... “ (LÖWY, 1972, p. 209.)

When Marx articulated the First International, the reference of the socialist organization was the workers’ party – a

unified organization, one section in each country – still very much undifferentiated from the unions and the mutual

help associations, the fraternities and the cooperatives. In the transition between the 19th

and the 20th century

within the European socialist parties, the first ones to achieve mass influence, several political factions started to

coexist : the Bernstein debate on the possibility of a pacific electoral transition provoked the differentiation

between two main camps, although between them appeared centrism and ultra-leftism. These camps expressed the

diverse political-social experiences of the several wings : electoralist MPs, fanatical nationalist intellectuals,

bureaucratized union leaders, employees of the organizational apparatus of the Second International parties proper,

and at the other end, the rand-and-file militancy, and the younger student activists. Most manual workers remained

loyal to their historical leadership – in France, Jaurés, in Germany, Bebel – who arbitrated between the reformist

tendencies, the center, and the revolutionary left.

The unity of this workers’ movement was sustained up to the victory of the October revolution, except for Russia,

after 1912, where the Bolsheviks built themselves as an independent fraction, through their various vicissitudes. In

the Third International, at the moment of the debate about the twenty-one conditions demanded for the filiation to

the newly-formed sections, the ultra-leftists attributed to the legal existence of the workers’ movement, when

started the First World War, their opportunistic flaws, and to the virtues of bolshevism ‘s clandestinity, its

internationalist reflexes.

One class, several programs, various different parties

The epoch in which the Marxists were all in a unique party ended, paradoxically, with the victory of the first

socialist revolution. The struggle of the working-class movements has confirmed that, despite the fact the

proletariat is, comparatively, the less heterogeneous class of modern society, it has also internal objective and

subjective differentiations that prevent a political representation in only one party. Workers of production or

service, manual or intellectual workers, those linked to the big companies or those who are employed by small

businesses, concentrated along the big cities or dispersed by the countryside, educated or illiterate : many are the

objective diversities. The political and ideological differences could not be small, and translated distinct social

pressures. It is not surprising that capital and its agents strain so much to exert influence in the proletariat’s ranks,

exploring quarrels and fomenting rivalries.

The workers have to undergo the material and historical experience of organizing in different forms: unions,

associations, factory or enterprise councils, and finally parties. But we have to recognize that there are many

different types of parties. Electoral and struggling parties, mass parties and vanguard circles, reformist, centrist,

revolutionary and ultra-left parties; therefore, they have been building a memory of the anti-bureaucratic struggle,

along time and at the international scale. The difficulty of representation of the working class was, therefore,

symmetrical to the easiness in which the bourgeoisie improvises its leadership by making use of the human

material originated in other classes.