On 2011-11-30, at 12:36 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Thkat said, Riley's critique is of great importance in that it reasserts the
> grounds of ultra-leftism NOT in confidence but in the reverse: that is, all
> ultra-leftism tends to place great emphasis on the power of capitalism and
> the weakness of opposing forces. I had a brief exchange with Marv Gandall
> some months ago on this; he argued that ultra-leftism reflected
> over-conficence. But this has never been the case, and to see ultra-leftism
> in this way is to make all left politics unintelligible.
Hi Carrol,
I don't recall making that statement, but if I did, I must have had in mind the aborted revolutionary attempts in Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. These were based on an unwarranted confidence in the strength of the revolutionary forces in those countries. In Britain during the same period, there was a pro-Bolshevik faction led by Sylvia Pankhurst which also thought conditions were ripe for revolution in the UK and which, on that reading, rejected the Third International's call for Marxists to do preparatory work in the reformist Labour Party - an ultra-left stance which, as you know, was sharply criticized by Lenin in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. I don't see how you could argue that any of these failed revolutionaries "placed great emphasis on the power of capitalism and the weakness of opposing forces". Quite the opposite, with tragic consequences.
Of course, after the trade unions and socialist parties went into decline in the West, you got small bands of revolutionary youth who were, underneath their bravado, quite pessimistic about the potential for independent working class political action, revolutionary or otherwise. They therefore stood apart from its main organizations, focusing instead on building solidarity with national liberation movements abroad. Your critique that ultra-leftists tend to emphasize the power of capitalism would have some validity in their case in that they saw it as having successfully co-opted the working class in their own societies, although they masked this retreat by proclaiming their allegiance to an idealized international working class as well as subscribing to Mao's dictum that global capitalism was, in fact, just a "paper tiger".