Is the British party ultraleft?¶
Core Argument¶
Here the author mounts a sustained polemic against a comrade, Stuart, whose criticisms of the British section’s proposed tactic are dismissed as a dishonest and mechanical misapplication of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism. The core argument is that Stuart has ripped Lenin’s warnings against ultraleft sectarianism from their historical context and used them as a universal formula to condemn a specific, conjunctural manoeuvre. The author insists that the real question is not whether Bolsheviks use manoeuvres in general—a point Stuart pretends is at issue—but when and where a particular turn is appropriate. Time, place, and the objective relation of forces are everything.
The chapter draws heavily on Lenin’s 1920 text and on Trotsky’s 1936 advice to the British movement. The author deploys Trotsky’s own words against Stuart: Trotsky, who had earlier advocated entry into the Independent Labour Party (ILP), later demanded a sharp break with it, arguing that remaining inside to win a few waverers was “sheer formalism” when hundreds could be won in the Labour Party. The author’s key claim is that Stuart’s method would create a false contradiction between Lenin and Trotsky, and between Trotsky and himself, because it ignores the decisive factor of timing. A tactic correct in one period can be reactionary in another.
The polemic is directed squarely at Stuart, but through him at a broader tendency within the Fourth International. The author accuses Stuart of “Oehlerism in reverse”—a reference to the ultraleft sectarianism of the American Oehlerites—arguing that mechanically placing a plus sign where they placed a minus is no more Marxist than their original error. The specific objections Stuart raised—that the proposed tactic would exaggerate the ILP’s revolutionary potential, confuse sympathisers, and strengthen the opportunist leadership—are compared point-for-point to the objections the ultralefts of 1919–20 made against working in parliament and the Labour Party. The author’s central rhetorical move is to turn Stuart’s own accusation of “mixing one’s tenses” back on him, arguing that it is Stuart who has confused the grammar of politics by treating a conjunctural judgement as a timeless principle. The chapter thus functions as a defence of the British section’s tactical flexibility against a charge of opportunism, re-framing that charge as a species of abstract, anti-dialectical dogmatism.