http://www.irishsocialist.net/publications_beyond_the_life_of_brian_sectarianism_and_the_left.html

Anyone who has been around the radical left for a while will have heard countless jibes about the “People’s Front of Judea”. The stubborn relevance of a Monty Python sketch from nearly thirty years ago suggests that left-wing sectarianism is as much of a problem as it ever was. And it’s as good a starting-point as any for looking at that problem.

What Monty Python were lampooning wasn’t the tendency of left-wing movements to split and criticise each other, per se. Some of the divisions on the Left are clearly unavoidable. The separations between anti-capitalists and believers in a “mixed economy” dominated by private business, or between defenders and opponents of the old Soviet regime, are clearly not a matter of trivial hair-splitting. Anyone who can tell the difference between left and right on the political spectrum should be able to appreciate that.

The real target of their satire was the almost pathological hatred that frequently exists between groups that appear to have 90% in common, even to a sympathetic left-wing observer. What remains of the radical, anti-capitalist left is often marred by this sort of futile carry-on. Anyone who glances through the archives of Indymedia Ireland will see enough evidence of it to induce despair.

What lies beneath it all, and what can be done about it? Well, a common denominator seems to be an approach that sees radical politics as a zero-sum game. One group has to win out at the expense of all the others and see its line adopted. In order for this to happen, it’s essential to criticise every other tendency on the left in the harshest possible terms. The closer a particular group may be to your own, the more urgent is the need to expose them.

This approach has roots of its own. A certain interpretation of Marxism that flaunts its claim to be a “science” is often involved. Countless books and articles have been written discussing this take on Marxism, asking whether it comes from the man himself or from later interpreters like Engels and Karl Kautsky. That’s not very important for us right now – what matters is identifying the trouble it can cause.

The people who see Marxism as a science of history and politics usually tend to speak about “laws” of social development. They often forget about the difference between disciplines like chemistry and physics and the study of human society – the law of gravity or the chemical properties of the elements may be subject to laws that are beyond our control, but history is shaped by the action of human beings. To paraphrase Marx himself, humans make their own history, though not without being weighed down by circumstances beyond their control.

What this means for socialist politics is that any programme or strategy is provisional and has to be open to constant revision. No matter how “scientific” you believe your theory may be, you can’t work out the perfect strategy in glorious isolation and then set about recruiting followers whose job is to play parts in a script you’ve already written. The best way to carry out the necessary revisions is through open debate and discussion among radical activists. The “zero-sum” approach set out above gets in the way of this. Instead of considering alternative points of view on their merits and trying to form a synthesis of the best insights from different sections of the Left, socialists of that ilk will hover around their rivals looking for opportunities to denounce them and seeking to magnify the differences as much as possible.

The whole idea of “Marxism” has caused a lot of trouble (famously, Marx greeted the news that a certain French group described itself as “Marxist” by remarking “in that case, I am certainly not a Marxist” – that’s one quotation that many latter-day Marxists would do well to remember). When you identify a political theory with the name of one man, you leave the door open for a theological approach, with the texts of Marx brandished like sacred scriptures.

More than a century after the man died, it may be time to conclude that calling yourself a Marxist causes more trouble that it’s worth. Considering that Marx contradicted himself, got things wrong, left gaps in his theories that needed to be filled, and didn’t live to grapple with some of the most important trends of modern history, we should be grateful that so much of what he had to say is still relevant and stop pretending that we know exactly what it means to be a “Marxist” today. At the very least, socialists need to acknowledge that there’s several different ways to be a Marxist – not an unlimited range of choices (it’s hard to imagine that Tony Blair would have won the admiration of Marx) but a broad spectrum all the same.

Instead, we find socialist groups telling us ad nauseam what the “correct Marxist view” of nationalism or gender politics or parliamentary democracy is, without showing the least embarrassment when they see other self-proclaimed Marxists disagreeing with them. The same elements are in the habit of saying that certain groups or individuals have “abandoned Marxism”, when they really mean that they have abandoned the particular version of Marxism favoured by the tendency in question. This mentality clearly has more in common with theology than science, whatever its pretentions.

More often than not, these groups are the same ones that believe Marxism and Leninism to be one and the same thing. According to their dogma, Lenin and the Bolsheviks came up with the only legitimate development of Marxist theory into the twentieth century, which was then preserved and extended by Leon Trotsky after the degeneration of the USSR. Most latter-day Trotskyist parties appear to believe that their own tendency is the only one to have stayed true to the path marked out by Trotsky before he was assassinated. From there it’s a short hop to concluding that they, and they alone, represent the spirit of Marxism in the modern age (and indeed claims of that sort have been made, without any ifs or buts, by many Trotskyist groups).

If we were going to name a single cause that has done more than anything else to create left sectarianism, this would have to be it: the mesmerising influence of the Bolsheviks, the belief that they came up with the best possible model of how radical socialists should organise which need only be applied with enough conviction for victory to be assured. Anyone who has read the more aggressive polemical writings of Lenin and Trotsky can be in little doubt that today’s “Bolshevik-Leninists” are trying to emulate their heroes by delivering the most virulent attacks on other left-wing currents they can muster. It can be comical at times, but more often it’s just depressing – the thought that young (and not-so-young) idealists honestly believe that by denouncing other socialists as charlatans and traitors, they are making a real contribution to great struggles for equality and freedom.

For anyone who believes in a version of socialism that’s both revolutionary and democratic, who wants to replace capitalism with democratic self-organisation and self-management, not the dictatorship of a party that claims to represent the working class, this kind of poisonous sectarianism has to be rejected out of hand. It may be a useful rule of thumb to assume good faith on the part of people we criticise – that we are trying to convince them that they see things the wrong way, not expose them as fraudulent enemies of the socialist cause. Even if their own sincerity is doubtful, there’s bound to be many people who take their arguments at face value and will respond better to a reasoned argument than a bitter harangue.

Needless to say, this approach has its limitations: sometimes a line has to be drawn and dishonest chancers will have to be exposed for what they are. But even then, a light touch is often more effective – and when the time comes to denounce someone as a “sell-out”, the insult will sting more if it hasn’t already been applied to every Tom, Dick and Harriet imprudent enough to disagree with you about anything.

The sectarianism which infects so much of the radical left can be toned down dramatically without collapsing into a wishy-washy “anything goes” relativism that prevents socialists from saying anything with the least bit of edge. If we don’t manage it, it’s safe to assume that opponents of capitalism will remain trapped in a marginal ghetto, without ever winning the support we need to transform society.

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