chat

Everyone with a position that calls for an immediate implementation of a thing that actually requires several steps to occur first. Essentially anyone with a "press the communism button" mentality instead of a "communism is a movement over time to abolish the old order of things" mentality.

For example, someone demanding that China implement a fully socialist command economy like the USSR. This analysis is deeply flawed because the conditions China exists in are not the same as the USSR, China does not have 100% of the resources it requires within its landmass, China requires access to the global market for many things, notably 75% of its oil requirements are imported. If China did not have a market economy it would be cut off from the global markets as it would serve no value to the international bourgeoisie who function as a faction that wants China to have access to those markets so they can profit from investing in it. China would be sanctioned and it would undergo enormous hardship. They must first achieve self sufficiency before this is even possible, getting off oil, getting off uranium (also a key import), among other things. Thorium reactors and solar are concrete steps towards this but these are just a couple of major examples.

It is an ultraleft position to hold the view that China should press the socialist economy button. The ultra left is not considering the conditions properly when they take this position. A development process must occur first to bring about the conditions where that action is possible.

Almost every position that anyone would call ultra will usually fit into this.

Historically, from what I understand, it was people who understood theory but sat on the sidelines while Monday morning quarter-backing revolutions. While revolutionaries were out doing stuff, testing ideas, coming up with new theory, the ultras would nitpick every action as wrong. They were always around for a debate and criticism but conspicuously didn't have much to contribute otherwise. They're overly academic about action and dogmatic about theory.

The reason it comes up is because people think they're doing something useful (whether they are or not) and are criticized for it (whether valid or not). It feels like someone being unnecessarily critical of a productive action (whether actually productive or not). Since it's an internet debate and nobody wants to be owned, the person doing the action will never see it as unproductive or the criticism as necessary. The ultra will always want to see the action as unproductive and feel there is nothing harsh about their criticism.

We had a self-proclaimed ultra at one point. They would write paragraphs every week about why ultras are the correct tendency. They were banned several times. I assume they're still around under an alt and learned not to be so obvious. But I also assume people are looking for ultras when criticized because it's the internet and nobody wants to be owned.

I've never seen "ultra" used as anything but an insult for someone using Marxist language to make an absurd point, and I don't know if it has any actual formal definition underneath all of that.

However, what I do know, is that every time I hear about ultras I picture Ultros from Final Fantasy 6

Usually Leftcoms with occasional Trots and Councilcoms of the sort that oppose any left unity, are against parliamentary involvement or at least extremely sectarian about such, and lack critical support for any and all AES projects, even the fairly universally supported ones like Cuba.

More colloquially online and in RL, the person claiming that any project that isn't immediately organising the working class for revolution is succdem pseudo-fascism, and organising with any non-communist org, especially religious, is actual fascism and thus we should shut this soup kitchen we co run with Anarchists, Cliffites, Sikhs, the local mosque, and the Jesuits down immediately!

Other communists might have ultra positions (i'd say most have one or two axes to grind) but are generally not ultras and you should consider that someone just has a bad take before calling them an ultra.

When it's used by a user against another user here, I agree that it's just as you described. When its a user here talking about people or tendencies outside of hexbear, that's up for debate

Isn't "ultra" an actual branch of tendencies in the way "leftcom" is, basically the late-20th century version of leftcoms? Like I think they're technically ML derived, but have gone hard towards ideological purity while modern MLs seem to have dropped that in favor of desperately clinging to any surviving AES project. Like an ultra position on China would be a further escalation of the Hoxhaist position, not only denouncing the post-Deng revisionist economics and their revisionist foreign policy but actively calling for their destruction either on ideological grounds or because they believe the collapse of China would also bring down the US (this isn't a hypothetical, I've seen this exact argument made as part of an otherwise quite good explanation of 20th century economic development throughout Asia and the Pacific, from a source that claims ideological descent from the "ultraleftists" of the Cultural Revolution).

At least that's the sort of academic leftcom-ish ones. There's also the gonzalite sort who do shit like waging a protracted people's war against the local DSA bookclub and who are probably fed psyops.

Ultras are people who think AES (USSR, China, DPRK etc.) are imperialists and red fascists that are just as bad as Western capitalism, and need to be toppled and replaced by the proletariat revolutions of the world.

They’re closer to the Trotsky’s permanent revolution position but somehow even more extreme than that.

I thought it was value form nerds tbh. Too detail oriented. Dogmatic and inflexible. But sometimes with interesting insights, cause, well, these are the people reading strange inaccessible theory. Which is not necessarily worthless.

I think the idea of an "ultra" is flawed because the idea of left wing communism from the first half of the 20th century had many different types. There were mostly the Italian and German ones who believed completely different things. Like the German ones were anti lenin (who Lenin was writing about in his book an infantile leftism) and the Italians were supposed to be "more left wing than lenin" and the most pure leninists of whatever during the era of Stalin.

I think you only really see Italian ultra's now because it's mostly a response to post ussr collapse communism and also the fact that a lot of new communists will say things like "the ussr was communist" when in reality they were never able to reach that material conditions.

I think bordiga, the main Italian left communist, was correct with his analysis that the ussr never reached communism. I think anyone who says that they did or that china is currently communist needs to actually read Marx.

The parties in charge may be striving for communist, and the economies are centralized socialist mixed economies but they definitely aren't communist. I don't even think the CPC would claim China is currently communist.

Bordiga also had a good analysis of Italian fascism and some other things but his own ideas that weren't just analyzing other things usually sucked.

His non centralized organic centralization thing is really fucking stupid and obviously we see now with China how a centralized economy is the best.

He also while imprisoned by Mussolini said some funny things about Hitler and Mussolini ", bringing in communism" or something which I think was probably a joke while he was imprisoned but it's 100% funny. He also died from lasagna cuz Italian.

I think the online rise in bordiga comes from baby leftists who haven't read any theory and say shit like "the ussr was communist" or other things that were just blatantly wrong. And this pushes them towards an icon who they view goes against these people who are loud online and don't read.

I mean I understand it, so many "leftists" and "communist" haven't read a lick of marx and then they say the most idiot shit ever and you kinda wanna distance yourself from them.

But they are kinda choosing a stupid person to represent themselves by doing so. They also treat bordiga like he was Jesus which is weird.

Ultras is a branch who reject the idea of building a dual power structure and instead aim for an immediate overthrow of the current system then starting from 0 point, often without any material base to back up their ideas. That's usually how I see the term being used.

They can be ideologically appealing to some, because they offer immediate solutions. They will analyze history and see there was issue with producing commodities during a time in the Soviet Union, then they will say "Idiot Stalin why didn't the guy just press the commodity production switch?" Completely ignoring the fact that they Soviets have been bombed to the ground during the anti-fascist resistance.

I think it's because they, what people call Ultras nowadays, lack real-world experience and are basically a gamer, even if they don't play computer games. They discredit actually existing socialism too, because in their game they can do it "better."

Marxism without, Leninism, without Praxis.

Ultra to me means an online marxist who considers themselves to be ultra unironically. I went on the ultraleft subreddit to find an example of their ideology for you

Maybe another way to put it is often when I see the term being used it feels like its serves a similar purpose to the "tankie" label's utility for anarchists and liberals.

Online discussion often falls into lobbing insults and floating signifiers at each other. It is the nature of online discussion, and depends on the personal qualities of the people arguing rather than their professed ideologies.

What does it mean to you and do you have any thoughts you feel like sharing regarding the role it plays in online leftist spaces?

I think that the term plays a fine role in leftist spaces. It is used as a thought terminating cliche, but a lot of the times, the thoughts being terminated come from a place of profound ignorance. Not every discussion is useful and it helps to have some guardrails against wasting your time.

I think that much of the "online left" falls into ultraleft/sectarian or reformist/opportunist camps. Oftentimes individuals will find themselves rapidly oscillating between the two. On the surface this might seem contradictory, but hear me out.

Marxism is a materialist philosophy. In order to understand any given situation, we not only analyze the reciprocal relations of all the factors in the situation, but we also have to understand the historical development of that situation, and how that has changed over time to give rise to this situation. You need to balance the particular situation, and the general situation. You can use the two, and the relationship between the two, to develop a deeper understanding of everything that is happening. This is the power of Dialectical Materialism - you gain this ability to cut through the flurry of immediate events and gain a deeper understanding of a given event in life. I'm making it sound like a super-power, but as I explained earlier, it's just looking at events through how they happened and how they're connected. It's simple, really. Where political disagreements arise is in this kind of analysis. Everyone is more or less a rational actor, and so a lot of political disagreements come down to a difference in how people have interpreted various events.

Ultraleftism and Opportunism are similar in that they are natural conclusions that people fall into when they isolate a current situation away from the complexity of factors that make up the situation into one or two factors, and really focus in on those. These factors might be the most important in a situation, but it can lead to the individual viewing these factors as absolute and immutable. That's where you get Ultraleftism. To understand it though, I'm gonna talk a bit about Reformism.

Reformism came about in the decades leading up to the First World War in large part because of the intense pace of development of Capitalism. Standards of living among the proletariat were improving and bourgeois democracy was stable, and thus the Second International was bent in a very Reformist direction. The reformists of that era viewed the trend that they existed within as a permanent feature of Capitalism - Marx wasn't around to correct them, and thus he must've missed something. This, of course, led to philosophical stagnation, and today the parties that come from that tradition don't even consider themselves Marxist.

A lot of Ultraleftism comes from the period after the First World War. Where Reformism came around in the era in which Capitalism was ascending, in the period between the World Wars, Capitalism was in severe decline. Standards of living were falling and bourgeois democracy was unstable and in the middle of a massive collapse. In this period, we can see that the political struggle in the world boiled down to 'Socialism or Fascism'. In a sense, we can see that even as far back as 1917 - Kerensky's government was weak and in danger of imminent collapse, and the two alternatives for Russia were the Bolsheviks and Kornilov - Socialism and (proto-) Fascism respectively.

Looking at all of these events occurring around them, the Ultraleftists concluded their analysis of events - that the situation was 'Socialism or Fascism' - just as they should've started their analysis. They are applying dogmatic theory to reality without understanding the underlying mechanisms within anything they're looking at. And boiling down the struggle to 'Socialism or Fascism' in the 1930s didn't work a lot of the time, because the working class broadly didn't understand the knife's edge that Capitalism was walking on in that period.

The Bolsheviks didn't adopt an Ultraleft position with regards to Kornilov vs Kerensky. The Ultraleft position would be to side with neither and attack both. But Lenin and the Bolsheviks didn't do that. They sided with Kerensky against Kornilov, but did not compromise on their position. They didn't take any kind of ownership over the policy of Kerensky while simultaneously defeating Kornilov. They denounced Kerensky for creating the conditions that allowed for the Kornilov Affair to occur in the first place. As a result, the Bolsheviks were able to maneuver themselves through the crisis of March 1917, and exploded in popularity, ultimately paving the way for their victory in October of that year. They turned the theoretical position of 'Bolshevism or Counter-Revolution' ('Socialism or Fascism') into a material reality.

In short, Ultraleftism is the dogmatic application of theory without understanding the material circumstances that lead to the development of those circumstances, or the way in which those circumstances are bound by various factors.

This stick can be bent too far in the other direction - that being Opportunism or Reformism. If your perspective is too narrow, you can also fall into the trap of assuming that the obstacles that exist for a revolutionary movement are immutable or omnipotent. This can lead to Reformism - believing that a revolutionary movement of the working class is impossible, and thus incremental economic demands are the only way forward - or Opportunism - compromising core Marxist principles to achieve limited aims in lieu of building a revolutionary movement (class collaborationism is a really common Opportunist mistake).

This answer is rather vague. "Ultraleftism is when you do Marxism wrong" isn't very helpful in terms of being a guide to action. Marxism is a science, but an inexact science. That's why debate and discussion are so important. And that's why theory is only half of it - you need to apply your theory to reality in order to determine if it's accurate or not. Test it against something, and if it's wrong - then it won't work. If it's right, it will. But you need to be able to analyze it correctly, and draw the correct conclusions from it. That's a tricky business, and that's part of the reason why we're stuck in the mess we are now.

😠

to me it means "crank nerd who read too much 'knowledge' either from idiot authors or with an inability to understand it and has had their mind warped into a pretzel like it's gone through Amigara Fault"

I got called an ultra by my favourite streamer hasan hasanabi piker and it ruined my week /joke

It's not a word I have put a lot of thought into. I've never run into someone I would call and ultra. It's a term I've only seen in reference to other people I have no connection to. It hasn't been defined to me by anyone either so this is entirely based on how I have seen it used.

Generally an ultra is someone who has unlimited critiques of revolutionary movements with no understanding or analysis of the material constraints placed upon them while contributing very little to their own. They are also people do the whole, "they weren't real communists" thing a lot.

MkUltra was great and I love acid