Sectarians on the prowl.

I had an enlightening moment at a solidarity march for locked-out workers in Decatur, Illinois, last summer. As the marchers approached the auditorium where the rally would be held, we had to run a gauntlet of literature tables staffed by sectarian parties. I noticed that their operatives were scoping out the crowd, looking for flickering signs of interest, and I learned to my dismay that establishing eye contact could be taken as such a sign.

"Have you seen our paper?" was the opener. A woman behind one of the tables was but little affected when I responded that I used to sell it myself for a while more than twenty-five years ago. The encounter proceeded down a well-worn path--invitation to sign up for a mailing list to get news about goings-on in my area, enlistment of support for battles the party was fighting in one place or another (mainly in defense of their own cadre who are described as popular leaders of something or other), suggestions about attending an important meeting soon to be held in Chicago.

The scene reminded me of TV wildlife documentaries that depict predators lurking along the edges of herds of antelope or migrating wildebeest, ready to pluck off the weak and vulnerable.

Although sectarian groups by and large aren't vicious or ill-intentioned, they do prey on the fringes of movements, and with potentially destructive consequences. If they're prominent and militant enough, sectarian groups can obstruct effective action. Their fulsome, arcane debates and idiosyncratic combativeness also can drive away reasonable people who come to movements because they want to pursue concrete political goals.

What remains is a self-propelling spiral of ever-deeper irrelevance and alienation from meaningful political action. Because it reproduces itself like tenured mediocrity in universities, the cycle is almost impossible to break.

For some time now I've been wondering about how exactly to define the terms "sectarian" and "ultraleft." What separates these categories from styles of radical thought and practice that are more credible? Granted, in part the difference is only a matter of choosing sides in a debate: Ultraleftists and sectarians are the people who disagree with you. From that perspective, the difference is something like that between a religious sect and a cult, or between a durable party organization and a political machine.

A good friend remarks that he was raised in a cult in downstate Illinois that believes that God came to Earth in the form of a dove, had sex with a woman who some time later gave birth to the Messiah--a cult called Protestantism. (Just a reminder that all religious groups embrace beliefs that seem wacky to those who don't share them.)

Likewise, liberals who are committed above all else to reelecting Bipartisan Bill in 1996 frequently castigate as ultraleftists everyone who challenges him from the progressive side. The charge serves as a convenient way to avoid confronting criticisms, and it bears a family resemblance to red-baiting. Characterizing critics as ultraleftist places them beyond the pale of legitimacy, so you don't need to respond to anything they say.

Sectarianism can work in pretty much the same way. No one ever says, "Hi, would you like to join my cult?" or "I came to ask you to vote for the machine," or "I'd like to speak on behalf of my ultraleftist sectarian organization." Still, I suspect that there is a distinct style of politics on the left that most of us would recognize as sectarian.

Here's how the logic works. One's party or organization has the unambiguously correct program, strategy, and line. The purpose of activism, therefore, is to gain adherents for the party. Political struggles are important not so much in themselves, but because they provide a forum for propagating the organization's line and identifying potential recruits. So you go into activities primarily to push your group's agenda. Thus the obligatory ten-minute, five-part question at public meetings.

Ultraleftism is more difficult to define because it depends on some notion of a range of reasonable or appropriate left stances. But it, too, exists.

Ultraleftism is a distinct political tendency. At bottom it is a refusal to take into account the ways that existing political realities limit possibilities for action. Ultraleft politics confuses means and ends, muddles the distinctions among goals, strategy, and tactics. Historically, for instance, ultraleftists have dogmatically opposed participating in coalitions with liberals or mainstream politicians.

This tendency severs the idea of commitment to principle from the need to make realistic assessments of the options that exist in the fluid here-and-now; to analyze tough-mindedly our strengths and weaknesses; to think seriously and instrumentally about how to build a constituency within a social base (to "unite the many to defeat the few," for those nostalgic for old slogans).

Ultraleftism is a maximalist politics. It's much more about taking positions that express the intensity of one's commitments than about organizing or building anything. Rather than crafting language to build broad support for a substantively radical program, for instance, ultraleftists prefer potted rhetoric that asserts their bona fides, without concern for communicating outside the ranks of believers.

Sectarianism and ultraleftism have long histories, dating back even before Lenin's 1920 tract, "Left-wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder. But most recently they have arisen as a response--or nonresponse--to the disappearance of radical activism's apparent social base after the 1960s. The decline of large-scale anti-war activism and black-protest mobilization put radicals in the unsettling position of developing increasingly revolutionary political rhetoric as the constituencies for that rhetoric withdrew.

The result was a turn inward. People who had formed organizing collectives were befuddled by their failure to connect meaningfully with the groups they wanted to organize. The focus shifted to inventing elaborate rituals of collective purification. (I remember being instructed on a 1969 visit to the Fort Dix Coffeehouse Project in the GI movement that the staff believed that closing the bathroom door was a sign of petit-bourgeois individualism.)

From there it was only a short step to the wildly esoteric rhetoric and debates--purgers and purgees accusing one another of being "Mensheviks" and the like--and internecine struggles of the late 1970s.

Lack of connection to palpable constituencies makes it possible to convince oneself of all manner of ridiculous fantasies. One such is the claim I've heard that Farrakhan's Million Man March was actually a "one-day general strike."

Indeed, this sort of politics is perhaps predisposed to such bizarre ideas because it isn't rooted in a close analysis of the history that we're living; it tends to be driven by slogans and anachronistic analogies ("When Mao was on the way to Yenan," or "When the Bolsheviks were organizing for power"). To that extent, its practitioners don't have a subtle, or even credible, understanding of the world around them.

Relying on formulaic social theory and slogans makes it difficult to connect with the experience of ordinary people. And desperation to forge some kind of connection leads to the pursuit of any alliance, no matter how repugnant to progressive interests. Single-minded focus on an arcane objective makes it possible to rationalize anything. So, for example, trade-union activists who are unable to win rank-and-file workers over to their "revolutionary" programs will apologize for Farrakhan and the protofascist militia movement, soft-pedal opposition to sexism and homophobia, support tax-cut politics, and retreat from support for reproductive freedom and aggressive policy intervention to promote racial and gender equality.

The appeal of such defective politics is understandable. Nevertheless, we need a better politics than this. Instead of an ultimately self-defeating, feel-good approach, we need a politics that rests on careful, nuanced analysis of the social conditions we live in, grounded on and shaped by a concrete project of advancing the struggle for progressive social transformation.

We need, that is, a politics that proceeds from a subtle form of what used to be called historical materialism.