January 17, 2006: Millennial sectarianism
Is left sectarianism in English-speaking countries a legacy of Puritanism?
If yes, the tendency to splinter has deeper cultural roots than Idealist notions of programmatic purity by themselves. You can compare the strength and relative monolithicity of the Communist movement in Orthodox and Catholic Europe to its weakness and fragmentation in England and the U.S.
I'm not sure whether to take this thought literally, or to think of it as an analogy. The analogy, though, is interesting. Aren't the sectarian grouplets doing exactly what religious sects do, that is, awaiting the Second Coming? In this case, the second coming of the Russian revolution.
I mean that analogy more strictly than its silliness might imply. Waiting for the Second Coming implies the expectation that circumstances will repeat themselves fairly exactly in a context where that's not appropriate: where there's very little culture or history which lends itself to that expectation. Meanwhile, focus on the millennial formula leads people to lose sight of the specifics of our own national social formations.
Think of how narrowly oriented the millennial intellectuals are. In the '80s I could recap in detail the nuances of the debates between all of the major European revolutionary figures of the early 20th Century. But I couldn't tell you diddly about what became of the American Tories after their defeat in 1783. The question didn't seem important until after I left the cadre experience behind.
I think, I'm not the only one with this distorted intellectual formation. I think there aren't many on the Marxist left who can detail for you the history of the U.S. social formation in any kind of reasonable coherence. Yet as we know, that concrete analysis is supposed to be our precondition. We never did the analysis because in a real way we weren't focused in the right direction.
This is one of those "silences" on which I feel that an intelligent Left should focus. The silence of American specificity. Perhaps if we undertake the analysis, the tendency to splinter will be lessened? I suppose that's unlikely. But it's a nice thought.
