Revolutions can only be made in times of major and prolonged social crisis such as the aftermath of serious military defeat or during a prolonged economic crisis. No party however well rooted in the working class, and no matter how good its analysis and “line” can make a revolution without such a crisis.
Communist parties are faced with a difficult task in maintaining their bearings in non-revolutionary situations. Small revolutionary groups in non-revolutionary situations, groups which tend to be composed heavily of ex-students and intellectuals (many of whom may have colonized the working class) tend to blame failures of line and analysis for their failure to grow, to engage in heated internal debates about line and to split to form separate grouplets each hostile to all the others. Sectarianism is thus the inherent characteristic of non-revolutionary periods in which the Communist movement is small. In part, the sectarianism inherent in such situations is greatly aggravated by the class basis of small Communist movements which have recruited mainly from students and the intelligensia who have joined mainly for ideological reasons (rather than because of their own oppression). The experience of such people has been one of dealing with ideas in the abstract. Ideological polemics and rationalistic debate are endemic to university and coffee house life.
The only cure for this sectarianism is the discipline imposed by workers who become involved in revolutionary struggles through necessity. Needing unity in order to survive and advance, the working class has no interest in fratricidal and abstract polemics. The scientific analysis it needs is derived from the trial and error of practice summed up in authentic criticism-self-criticism. Only the integration of Communists into the mainstream of working class life and struggles will succeed in overcoming sectarianism.
In addition to the impeding effects of the petty-bourgeois basis of small left groups in non-revolutionary situations the special traditions of both American society and police provocation and manipulation play important roles in promoting sectarianism, dogmatism and ultra-leftism among American Marxists.
American radicals who like to think of themselves as freed from the values of American capitalist civilization decieve themselves. The wine of Marxism-Leninism is being poured into the old bottles of individualism. We are so conditioned to trust no one, to get all we can, and to give as little as we can, to think of ourselves first, to be self-righteous when convinced of something, to distrust collective activity and to lack faith in others, that all these aspects of individualism are manifested with a vengeance in the internal life of the American left. Once someone or some group becomes convinced that it has the correct interpretation all hell breaks lose, minor differences which are resolvable through comradely struggle and practice become magnified into fundamental differences of principle worth splitting or destroying organizations about. Our comrades come to be seen as the “road-blocks to revolution” which must be smashed before progress can be made.
The endemic divisiveness of the American left is consciously promoted by police agents who consciously use divisive tactics in order to tear left wing organizations apart thus destroying the potency of the left. The tactic of infiltrating left organizations, and once in a position of some respect, to side with minority factions, or to develop factions, which oppose the dominant tendencies whatever they might be, is a time tested police and wrecker tactic. The point is to promote disunity and distrust of the leadership, prevent it merging within similar organizations, if possible split the organization, and consequently demoralize as many leftists as possible. Such tactics were adopted by the American FBI in the 1960’s to deal with the rising new left; and Black power movements.
Under legal pressure from the Socialist Workers Party and some Black organizations, the FBI is being gradually forced to reveal the details of its program to destroy the New Left and Black radical groups in the period 1967-1971. (See the 1,000 pages of testimony and documents issued by the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Vol. 6, The F.B.I., 1976.): Agents were sent into Black organizations to disrupt and prevent their merger and growth. Agents sent into militant nationalist organizations emphasized the impossibility of working with whites and those sent into organizations like the Panthers emphasized the impossibility of working with cultural nationalists. Unsigned letters accompanied by fake police reports were sent to various radical organizations implicating one or another of their leaders as police agents. The radical organizations were led to believe that such information was being provided them by sympathizers in the FBI or local police when actually it was being sent as part of an overall destructive strategy. The Panthers and U.S. in California were provoked into violent warfare. The FBI tactics used on at least one predominantly white group – the Socialist Worker’s Party, have been exposed in great detail – do the Maoist groups think that they are so much less dangerous to the ruling class that the secret police has not bothered giving them the same treatment. When the full facts become known we are very likely to find that there has been wide scale infiltration and disruption of the entire left from the mid-sixties until today. It is not unlikely that the FBI played a major role in the destruction of SDS in 1969, in the split in the Panthers at about the same time, and in most of the splits and antagonisms of the Maoists during the mid-1970’s.