The Communists supported the Peadar O'Donnell "broad front" position, which was in line with the Comintern Popular Front strategy that had been launched following the jettisoning of its "Third Period"
ultra-leftism in the wake of the Nazi triumph in Germany.
The result was a new Communist Party characterized by crazy, sectarian
ultra-leftism. A primary culprit was the Communist International, pulling naive idealists into organizational, strategic, and tactical schemes derived from backward Russia, hilariously inappropriate to the most dynamic capitalist country in the world.
BEN ISITT: In my opinion, the
ultra-leftism manifest in some of the comments in this thread is far more problematic than Olivia Chow's variant of social democracy.
Also, though this is not an argument that McGuire would sympathise with, his
ultra-leftism inevitably consigned him to the margins, and he flitted about between too many different organisations, not bothering to consolidate his influence in any of them.
Reluctance to accept the movement's decline led to a certain frustrated
ultra-leftism, such that the equation of de Gaulle with Hitler seemed an angrier expedient rather than a sober assessment of the balance of forces.
But Fosl does not fully describe or explain the turmoil that erupted in SNCC, or the processes that led a number of white radicals into the
ultra-leftism of the early 1970s.
In these works, Hinton bends the stick to criticize
ultra-leftism; these groupings split and wrecked mass movements, allowing rightist forces to pick up the pieces and maintain power.
School, and some faculty and students blamed my
ultra-leftism for the School's demise.
Even the
ultra-leftism that sprouted in the late sixties probably doesn't merit being described as Communist.