{{Short description|Broad Marxist current}} {{Use dmy dates|date=January 2021}} {{Expand French|date=July 2021|topic=gov}} {{About|the political current within Marxism specifically|the alignment within left-wing politics generally|Far-left politics}} In Marxism, '''ultra-leftism''' encompasses a broad spectrum of revolutionary Marxist currents. Ultra-leftism distinguishes itself from other left-wing currents through its rejection of electoralism, trade unionism, and national liberation. "Ultra-left" is also commonly used as a pejorative by some Marxist–Leninists, or some Trotskyists, to refer to extreme or uncompromising Marxist sects.<ref>{{Cite book |author-last=Muldoon |author-first=James |title=Building Power to Change the World: The Political Thought of the German Council Movements |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2020 |isbn=978-0-19-885662-7 |location=Oxford |pages=10}}</ref>
== Historical usage == {{Marxism sidebar|related}} {{left communism sidebar|related}} The term ''ultra-left'' is usually used to define a movement or branch of left communism developed by theorists such as Amadeo Bordiga, Otto Rühle, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, and Paul Mattick, and continuing with more recent writers, such as Jacques Camatte and Gilles Dauvé. This standpoint includes two main traditions, a Dutch-German tradition including Rühle, Pannekoek, Gorter, and Mattick, and an Italian tradition following Bordiga. These traditions came together in the 1960s French ultra-gauche.<ref>{{cite magazine|url=https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/endnotes-bring-out-your-dead |title=Bring Out Your Dead |magazine=Endnotes |volume=1 |date=2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170608124154/https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/endnotes-bring-out-your-dead |archive-date=8 June 2017}}</ref> The political theorist Nicholas Thoburn refers to these traditions as the "actuality of{{nbsp}}... the historical ultra-left".<ref>{{cite journal |author-first=Nicholas |author-last=Thoburn |url=http://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/cultural-critique/volume-84/2519 |title=Do not be afraid, join us, come back? On the "idea of communism" in our time |journal=Cultural Critique |number=84 |date=Spring 2013 |pages=1–34 |access-date=7 September 2017 |archive-date=9 August 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180809060526/https://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/cultural-critique/volume-84/2519 |url-status=dead }}</ref>
The term originated in the 1920s in the German and Dutch workers movements, originally referring to a Marxist group opposed to both Bolshevism and social democracy, and with some affinities with anarchism.<ref>{{cite book|author-first=Philippe |author-last=Bourrinet |url=http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.6346&rep=rep1&type=pdf |title=The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–68): 'Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin!' – 'All Workers Must Think for Themselves!' |publisher=BRILL |date=8 December 2016 |pages=8 |citeseerx=10.1.1.454.6346 |quote=As for the term 'ultra-left', which is often equated with 'sectarianism', it can only define those currents which historically split from the KPD between 1925 and 1927. Left communism never appeared as a pure will to be 'as left as possible'.}}</ref>
The ultra-left is defined particularly by its breed of anti-authoritarian Marxism, which generally involves an opposition to the state and to state socialism, as well as to parliamentary democracy and wage labour. In opposition to Bolshevism, the ultra-left generally places heavy emphasis upon the autonomy and self-organization of the proletariat. It rejected the necessity of a revolutionary party and was described as permanently counterposing "the masses" to their leaders.<ref>{{cite book |author-last=Broué |author-first=Pierre |title=The German Revolution, 1917-1923 |publisher=Haymarket Books |year=2006 |isbn=1-931859-32-9 |location=Chicago, IL |pages=402}}</ref> Dauvé also explained: <blockquote>The ultra-left was born and grew in opposition to Social Democracy and Leninism—which had become Stalinism. Against them, it affirmed the revolutionary spontaneity of the proletariat. The German communist left (in fact German-Dutch), and its derivatives, maintained that the only human solution lay in proletarians' own activity, without it being necessary to educate or to organize them{{nbsp}}... Inheriting the mantle of the ultra-left after the war, the magazine {{lang|fr|Socialisme ou Barbarie}} appeared in France between 1949 and 1965.<ref>{{cite magazine|author-first=Gilles |author-last=Dauvé |author-link=Gilles Dauvé |url=https://libcom.org/files/Gilles%20Dauv%C3%A9-%20The%20Story%20of%20Our%20Origins.pdf |title=The Story of Our Origins |magazine=La Banquise |number=2 |date=1983}}</ref></blockquote> One variant of ultra-leftist ideas was widely revived in the New Left of the 1960s, and particularly in the May 1968 moment in libertarian socialist movements such as Big Flame, the Situationist International, and autonomism.<ref>{{cite book|author-last=Pitts |author-first=Frederick Harry |title=Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2017 |isbn=978-3-319-62632-1 |location=Cham, Switzerland |pages=142 |language=en}}</ref>
== Pejorative usage == Used pejoratively, ''ultra-left'' is used to label positions that are adopted without taking notice of the current situation or of the consequences which would result from following a proposed course. The term is used to criticize leftist positions that, for example, are seen as overstating the tempo of events, propose initiatives that overestimate the current level of militancy, or which employ appeals to violence in their activism.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.socialistalternative.org/political-crisis-resistance/danger-ultra-leftism/|title=Danger of Ultra-Leftism|website=Socialist Alternative|language=en-US|access-date=13 December 2018}}</ref> The mainstream Marxist critique of such a position began with Vladimir Lenin's ''"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder'', which critiqued those (such as Anton Pannekoek or Sylvia Pankhurst) in the nascent Communist International who argued against cooperation with parliamentary or reformist socialists. Lenin characterized the ultra-left as a politics of purity—the doctrinal "repetition of the 'truths' of pure communism".<ref name=Idea2010>{{cite book|editor-last1=Douzinas |editor-first1=C. |editor-link1=Costas Douzinas |editor-last2=Žižek |editor-first2=S. |editor-link2=Slavoj Žižek |author-last=Žižek |author-first=S. |author-link=Slavoj Žižek |date=December 2010 |title=The idea of communism |pages=37 |location=London |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=9781844674596}}</ref><ref>Nicholas Thoburn "[http://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/cultural-critique/volume-84/2519 Do not be afraid, join us, come back? On the "idea of communism" in our time] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180809060526/https://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/cultural-critique/volume-84/2519 |date=9 August 2018 }}" ''Cultural Critique'' Number 84, Spring 2013, pp. 1-34</ref> Leninists typically used the term against their rivals on the left: "the Communist Party's Betty Reid wrote in a 1969 pamphlet ''Ultra-Leftism in Britain'' that the CPGB made 'no exclusive claim to be the only force on the left', but dismissed the groups to the left of the CPGB as the 'ultra-left', with Reid outlining the ultra-left as groups that were Trotskyist, anarchist or syndicalist or those that 'support the line of the Communist Party of China during the Sino-Soviet Split' (pp. 7–8)",<ref>"Introduction" in Smith Evan, Worley Matthew ''Against the grain: The British far left from 1956'', Oxford University Press, 1 December 2014</ref> the latter of which is associated with anti-revisionism.<ref>{{cite book |first1=Thomas W. |last1=Robinson |first2=David L. |last2=Shambaugh |author2-link=David Shambaugh |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Uq77jvNypkcC&pg=PA249 |title=Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice |publisher=Clarendon Press |date=1995 |pages=249–254 |isbn=978-0-19-829016-2 |via=Google Books}}</ref>
Trotskyists and others saw the Communist International as pursuing a strategy of unrealistic ultra-leftism during its Third Period, which the Communist International later conceded when it turned to a popular front strategy in 1934–35.<ref>e.g. John Molyneux "[https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/molyneux/1985/10/ultraleft.html What do we mean by ultra-leftism?]" (October 1985) in ''Socialist Worker Review'' 80, October 1985, pp. 24–25.</ref> The term was popularized in the United States by the Socialist Workers Party at the time of the Vietnam War, using it to describe opponents in the anti-war movement, including Gerry Healy.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Hansen|first1=Joseph|title=Marxism vs. Ultraleftism: The Record of Healy's Break with Trotskyism|date=September 1999|publisher=Pathfinder Press |isbn=0873486897|url=http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.114/it.A/id.420/.f|access-date=15 November 2016|archive-date=20 November 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081120040235/http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.114/it.A/id.420/.f|url-status=dead}}</ref>{{Page needed|date=November 2016}}
Ultra-leftism is often associated with leftist sectarianism, in which a socialist organization might attempt to put its own short-term interests before the long-term interests of the working class and its allies.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-4/mrl/introduction.htm|title=A Critique of Ultra-Leftism, Dogmatism and Sectarianism, Introduction|website=www.marxists.org|access-date=13 December 2018}}</ref> The term was used by the established currents of the Communist movement against "self-indulgent ultra-leftism [that] could only make it more difficult for the revolutionary left to win rank and file PCF members away from their leaders″.<ref>{{cite magazine|author-first=Ian |author-last=Birchall |author-link=Ian Birchall |url=https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/birchall/1988/05/may1968.html |title=The Left and May 68 |magazine=Socialist Worker Review |number=109 |date=May 1988}}</ref> For example, during the May 1968 events in France, ultra-leftism was initially associated with the opposition to the French Communist Party (PCF).<ref>{{cite book|author-last=Mehnert |author-first=Klaus |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fEnrDwAAQBAJ&q=ultra+left+may+1968+french+communist+party&pg=PA20|title=Moscow and the New Left |publisher=University of California Press |year=2021 |isbn=978-0-520-02652-0 |location=Berkeley, CA |pages=20 |language=en}}</ref>
== See also == * Anti-Stalinist left * Centrist Marxism * Libertarian Marxism * Left communism in China
== References == {{reflist}}
== Further reading == * Bahne, Siegfried, 'Zwischen' Luxemburgismus' und 'Stalinismus', die ultralinke Opposition in der KPD, in ''Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte'', 4/1961, pp. 359–383. * {{cite web|last1=Cunningham|first1=John|title=Invisible Politics - An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation|url=http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/invisible-politics-introduction-to-contemporary-communisation|website=Meta Mute|date=29 September 2009 |access-date=9 January 2017}} * Hoffrogge, Ralf. "[http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA452289550&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=fulltext&issn=17586437&p=AONE&sw=w&authCount=1&isAnonymousEntry=true Marcel Bois, Kommunisten gegen Hitler und Stalin--Die Linke Opposition der KPD in der Weimarer Republik. Eine Gesamtdarstellung]" ''Twentieth Century Communism'', no. 10, 2016, p. 139+. Academic OneFile, Accessed 7 September 2017. * O. Langels ''Die Ultralinke Opposition der KPD in der Weimarer Republik'' (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1984)
== External links == * [http://libcom.org/library Libertarian Communist Library – an archive of libertarian, left and ultra-left communist texts] * Gilles Dauvé (1969) [https://libcom.org/library/3-leninism-ultra-left "Leninism and the Ultra-Left"] in Gilles Dauvé and François Martin, ''The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement'', 63–75. Rev. ed. London: Antagonism Press. * Peter Camejo, [https://www.marxists.org/archive/camejo/1970/ultraleftismormassaction.htm Liberalism, Ultra-Leftism or mass action] * Abbie Bakan, [https://web.archive.org/web/20160308084524/http://web.net/sworker/En/SW2004/429-07-ultraleft.htm Ultraleftism: left words, sectarian practice] * [https://web.archive.org/web/20081030051603/http://www.luxemburgism.lautre.net/ International Luxemburgist Network (Anti-Leninist)]
Category:Far-left politics Category:Political spectrum Category:Political theories Category:Soviet phraseology