From what I saw he’s a “Orwell is a great socialist author” and “the USSR was fascist” kind of terminally white bourgeois British dude. Did he, like, watched a Hakim or JT video before accepting?? I hope it’s because he’s having a redemption arc or something
What is an ultra? I’ve never really understood that term
Ultra leftism is the ideological dogmatism/idealism of people who consider themselves to the left of ML. In Marxism there is a line struggle between dogmatism and revisionism. Dogmatism means holding onto the word of theorists religiously rather than being pragmatic and studying material conditions. Revisionism/opportunism means unreasonably altering past theory and being pragmatic in terms of self-preservation rather than the furthering of the movement. Ultras are dogmatic. There is a dialectic between theory and practice. For a principled communist theory informs practice and practice informs theory, this is called praxis. Ultras tend to put to much emphasis on theory while revisionists tend to put too much emphasis on practice.
There is another dialectic between adventurism and tailism. The right deviation of Marxism tends to advocate tailing the backward sections of the masses, while adventurists want to ignore the masses and do extreme actions on their own. The principled vanguardist stance is that we should meet the masses where they are but try to bring them up to a higher level of consciousness and organization. Ultras are the adventurists, revisionists are the tailists.
Both sides of the deviation tend to denounce certain past experiments. Ultras will usually say an experiment wasn’t pure enough, while a revisionist might say it went too far. Examples of left deviations include Gonzalism, Hoxhism, Trotskyism, and sometimes anarchism. Examples of right deviations include the reformism, “patriotic socialism,” and economism. To be clear, deviations can have both right and left aspects. Revisionists are often dogmatic too.
A final note is that deviations tend to specifically address those they disagree with as the opposite pole of deviation. I’ve only heard Patsocs derogatorily call people Ultra-leftists, while I’ve only heard Gonzalists speak of revisionism.
Further reading: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Revisionism https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Ultra-leftism https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
Wow thanks for the effort post. You also explained what praxis was to me which is something I didn’t realize I didn’t understand. Very cool 👍