The crisis of today’s western revolutionary politics is that it’s been at a crossroads for years now, but hasn’t yet decided where it wants to go. This is the gap in preparedness that exists between the Global South’s liberation struggles, and the leftists inside the imperial sphere who seek to emulate these struggles. In these colonial countries, and in the United States most of all, the left was unready (as well as unwilling) to organize the masses amid the watershed moment of October 7. And as this deficiency has become more apparent, more leftists have been embracing adventuristic action, believing their only recourse is to abandon all restraint or strategy.
We can rescue the working-class movement from this thinking, if we gain a clear sense of what path forward exists for a movement that’s in our situation. The world we’re now living in is one of delayed revolutionary progress, where imperialism has been facing revolts within a growing number of places but this hasn’t yet tipped the power balance. We’ve gotten closer with the worker uprisings in Bolivia and Kenya, but Washington is on the advance in many other countries. And a critical part of why the U.S. has kept expanding its aggressions is because Gaza’s holocaust still hasn’t been stopped.
If the imperialists could starve Gaza, they know they can starve Cuba, and so on. America’s institutional left has no effective response to this, because its institutions were set up by finance capital. And because the Democrats reacted to October 7 by deciding to purge the compatible left, the Democrat front orgs that have given leftists assistance are incrementally cutting off support.
For the individuals who’ve relied on the Democrat NGOs, and sincerely believe in the revolutionary cause, there are two paths: go into the masses, or resort to ultra-left adventurism. To steer the communist movement away from the latter direction, we’ll have to explain with clarity what ultra-leftism means, which Lenin already did for us. Lenin thoroughly deconstructed the reckless thinking of the radicals who don’t want to build a real mass movement, and these analyses are critical for countering the “pan-leftist” sentiments that say ultra-leftism isn’t a problem.
Among the examples of ultra-leftism that Lenin described, the underlying theme is hubris. He wrote of “the fabulous, howling stupidity that the autocracy can be ‘saved’ from the crowd by soldiers, and from the revolutionary organisations by the police, but that there is no salvation from individuals who hunt down ministers!!” Referring to the “economists,” who believed that narrow workplace organizing is enough on its own, Lenin observed how left-wingers who advocate for terrorism share economism’s rejection of popular organization:
This fabulous argument, which we are convinced is destined to become notorious, is by no means simply a curiosity. No, it is instructive because, through a sweeping reduction to an absurdity, it reveals the principal mistake of the terrorists, which they share with the “economists” (perhaps one might already say, with the former representatives of deceased “economism”?). This mistake, as we have already pointed out on numerous occasions, consists in the failure to understand the basic defect of our movement. Because of the extremely rapid growth of the movement, the leaders lagged behind the masses, the revolutionary organisations did not come up to the level of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat, were incapable of marching on in front and leading the masses.
Ultra-leftism, particularly the kind of ultra-leftism that I’m tackling here, comes from a desire to attain political strength when one fundamentally doesn’t know how to gain this strength. Its adherents grasp for easy ways to strike blows at the ruling class, expecting that if somebody takes the most drastic action at the right moment, the revolution will automatically come. Lenin pointed to how the adventurists speak about political struggle as if it can only happen through dramatic bursts:
How well we know this Language of people who are free of the constraint of firm socialist convictions, of the burdensome experience of each and every kind of popular movement! They confuse immediately tangible and sensational results with practicalness. To them the demand to adhere steadfastly to the class standpoint and to maintain the mass nature of the movement is “vague” “theorising.” In their eyes definitiveness is slavish compliance with every turn of sentiment and ... and, by reason of this compliance, inevitable helplessness at each turn. Demonstrations begin— and blood thirsty words, talk about the beginning of the end, flow from the lips of such people.
When this strategy inevitably fails to build popular power, the ultras give up, and move on to pushing adventurism during the next spontaneous upsurge:
The demonstrations halt— their hands drop helplessly, and before they have had time to wear out a pair of boots they are already shouting: “The people, alas, are still a long way off....” Some new outrage is perpetrated by the tsar’s henchmen—and they demand to be shown a “definite” measure that would serve as an exhaustive reply to that particular outrage, a measure that would bring about an immediate “transference of strength,” and they proudly promise this transference! These people do not understand that this very promise to “transfer” strength constitutes political adventurism, and that their adventurism stems from their lack of principle.
This is the cycle that the participants in movements will keep falling into unless they receive the proper guidance, and learn how to go into the masses on a truly substantial level. They’ll react to the failures of anti-popular policies by becoming either reformists or adventurists, as articulated by Gus Hall in Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism:
When such policies fail–when they do not result in revolutionary victories, those who honestly believe in them face a dilemma. They can go one of three ways. Some give up the struggle. They use many excuses, but in essence they accept the status quo. They move into positions of opportunism. Others, in frustration, move into isolation by accepting the path of anarchism. This path destroys cadre as a meaningful revolutionary force. But most, however, draw the correct conclusions. They move into struggles and movements based on mass concepts. They draw the necessary conclusions that one’s revolutionariness can be measured only in the framework of moving masses into struggle.
How do we recruit and lead those within this majority who will seek to keep moving the struggle forward? Part of our task is to combat the ultra-lefts themselves, who absolutely pose a large and growing threat within movement spaces. The biggest problem, though, is the right opportunists, who today look like the social democrats which have rebranded themselves as “democratic socialists.”
Hall said that “It is impossible to struggle against the incorrect concepts of petty-bourgeois radicalism without a consistent and sharp struggle against the forever present influences of Right opportunism. The pressures towards Right opportunism are the most consistent in any capitalist country. They remain the chief danger to the revolutionary movement in the broad mass organizations of the people and the working class.” Within left politics, the socdems are the ones with the biggest platform and the most institutional power, because they’re among the imperialists; they’re part of the left only in terms of their branding. And right now, they’re using a highly effective rhetorical method for winning over those with class consciousness: they’re pivoting away from the idpol that defines modern ultra-leftism, and centering an economistic kind of populism.
Such politics indeed represents the greatest threat, because this rhetoric is capable of making social democracy look like the mass movement that we so desperately need. It could win over not just leftists but also disillusioned MAGA voters, recapturing tens of millions of Americans who’ve been heading in a revolutionary direction. And among politically active left-wingers who are looking for an alternative to the ultra-left groups, this politics will look attractive. Conversely, many other leftists will react to the fortification of imperialism by embracing adventurism. The only thing that can stop this diversion from succeeding is if we build working-class power that’s actually independent, and that’s actually based in the broad working population. Anything less, and the cycle of defeat will continue.
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