The Third Turning of the Dharma Wheel.
Movements are never uniform. Where humans meet to achieve a common purpose, more likely than not, divergences exist: on ends and means, on commitment and focus, on vision and motivation… Even the sort of movement Nechayev proposed in his mad catechism1 is composed by different tiers, and if in all other aspects it is an insane elucubration, at least in this aspect it correctly arrives at the inevitable necessity for heterogeneity.
The workers’ movement, and its scientific manifestation, Marxism, are no exception. The distinctions which bedeviled religious and political movements through the ages–Monophysites and Orthodox, Counter-remonstrants and Armenianists, Jacobins and Girondines, and so many others–have not and will not evade us on the sole basis that we constitute ourselves as a materialist movement. On the contrary, the tension between bourgeois power, as firm a hegemony as has ever existed, and the attempt to rid ourselves not of a particular oppression, but of oppression altogether, not of a particular form of class rule, but of class society altogether, inevitably results in the known dialectic of sectarianism and opportunism. Is there a synthesis that may lead us to victory?
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