What Is Sectarianism, Actually?
A Response to The RCP
Daniel Morley’s article on sectarianism, published in The Communist, sets out to answer a question that any small revolutionary organisation must eventually confront: is it sectarian to refuse unity with the broader left? The answer Morley gives is no. The argument he makes to reach it is more revealing than he intends.
The piece opens with a cliché: the stereotype of the venomous sect, the fetishist of principles, the denouncer of all comers. It then moves to distinguish the RCP from this caricature. Sectarianism, Morley explains, is not a matter of size, isolation, or refusal to work with others. It is a question of method. Sectarians impose “fixed formulas” onto the movement rather than applying genuine Marxist analysis to real conditions. Communists, by contrast, understand “the line of march” of the proletarian movement as a whole: its underlying process, its long-term direction. The RCP does this. The SWP does not.
This is a definition constructed to make its conclusion inevitable. Any organisation can claim to apply method rather than formula. The distinction Morley draws between sectarianism and genuine Marxism (formalism versus analysis, rigidity versus dialectical thinking) is available as self-description to every tendency on the left without exception. What would it look like for the RCP to be applying fixed formulas? The article provides no criterion. The definition is self-sealing: the RCP possesses correct method by assertion, and the assertion is protected from challenge by the very terms in which it is made. To question it is, presumably, to be guilty of formalistic thinking. This is not a scientific definition of sectarianism. It is a definitional manoeuvre.
What the manoeuvre conceals, first, is the Grant-fetish that structures the entire argument. The case against organisational fetishism is constructed as an exercise in founder exegesis. What did Ted Grant really mean by entrism? Was he committed to it as a principle, or only as a tactic? A 1946 document is produced; the correct interpretation is established; the political conclusion follows. Morley notes that Grant “did not fetishise any particular tactic,” but this awareness does not prevent him from spending the central portion of the article doing precisely what he warns against: deriving the political line from the correct reading of the founding figure. The argument against formula-worship is prosecuted as a formula. The authority invoked against fixed definitions is itself invoked as an unchallengeable reference point. This is not a contradiction the article can think its way around, because the contradiction is structural. An organisation whose theory of itself is built on recovering the authentic meaning of its founder’s texts is an organisation operating in a sectarian mode, whatever claims it makes about its method.
The second and deeper problem is the absent class. Morley claims that tactics “must vary in accordance with the actual class struggle” and must take account of “where consciousness is at.” This is the right principle. The article then proceeds to apply it without performing a single element of the analysis it demands. We are told that the working class “does not maintain the same loyalty or attitude towards the Labour Party” as in the past, and that “radicalised young people” are now reachable without the mediation of the mass organisations. These are assertions. They are not accompanied by any examination of what the current composition of the working class actually is, what the fragmentation of the post-2019 conjuncture has produced, what forms of political consciousness have emerged from a sustained period of defeat, or what organisational forms might be adequate to a class whose relation to traditional labour institutions has genuinely shifted. The actual shape of class consciousness (how it is formed, through what experiences, in what sectors, under what political determinations) is nowhere the object of analysis. “Consciousness” appears in this article as a placeholder, invoked to warrant a conclusion that has already been reached by other means.
This matters because the claim to possess correct method stands or falls on whether the method is actually applied. Morley’s definition distinguishes the genuine communist, who understands the underlying process of the class struggle, from the sectarian, who substitutes fixed formulas for that understanding. If the understanding is never demonstrated, if “class consciousness has changed” is offered as a conclusion without evidence rather than a finding requiring substantiation, then the distinction collapses. The RCP’s claim to non-sectarian status rests on a methodological commitment it does not discharge. The formula against formulas is itself a formula.
The programme question confirms this. Morley defends the RCP’s tactical flexibility: the decision not to enter Labour, not to seek unity with other far-left organisations. But he nowhere examines the content of what is being propagated. “Revolutionary programme and perspectives” appears as a given, immune from scrutiny. How is the programme derived? From what analysis of class composition and the present conjuncture does it emerge? The article does not say, because the article does not ask.
This is not a marginal omission. The programme question is the central question of any serious revolutionary politics. A programme that crystallises from the actual experience of class struggle in its present configuration is a different thing entirely from one inherited from the tendency’s accumulated texts, preserved across successive conjunctures, and handed down to new cadres as the deposit of correct thinking. The first requires ongoing analysis of the class: of its composition, its fractures, its forms of consciousness, the defeats it has absorbed and what those defeats have produced. The second requires only the faithful transmission of existing positions and slogans. Morley’s article defends the RCP’s method as the former while its practice, insofar as this article represents it, is the latter. Tactics are subjected to conjunctural analysis, or at least the claim to such analysis is made. Programme is not. The argument for methodological flexibility is made entirely in the service of an unexamined political content, and it is precisely in that content that the organisation’s relationship to the class would have to be demonstrated.
The remaining moves in the article are worth noting. Morley attacks the SWP for applying a fixed formula: everything reduced to fighting racism, everything subordinated to the threat from Reform. The critique is substantively defensible and also a fixed formula in the Grantite tradition. The SWP always does this; pointing it out has been a standard move in the tendency’s rhetorical repertoire for decades; and the critique is deployed here without any analysis of why the SWP operates as it does, or what the actual political stakes of anti-racist campaigning in the current conjuncture are. The critique of formula-worship is delivered formulaically. Elsewhere, the RCP’s “recent growth” is offered as evidence that its current orientation is correct. Growth in membership is not evidence of political correctness. It is evidence of growth. Every sect has had its expansion phase, and the argument from organisational success is precisely the kind of move a sophisticated Marxist politics should know better than to make.
What the article reveals is the structural limit of the Grantite tradition’s theory of itself. That tradition has long distinguished itself through an emphasis on Marxist education: training cadres in method rather than formula, patient explanation directed at whatever layer of the class is currently in motion. The emphasis on theory against hollow activism, on analysis against voluntarism, is a genuine contribution. But the tradition consistently mistakes the propagandist model of the party (the organisation that possesses correct ideas and disseminates them to an as-yet-unconvinced working class) for the analytical and organic engagement with class composition that alone could ground a claim to understand the line of march.
The propagandist model has a particular theory of the relationship between organisation and class. The organisation thinks; the class, once educated, acts on what it has been taught. What this model cannot do is derive its political content from the class, because the class in this schema is the recipient of correct ideas rather than the source of the experience from which a programme would need to crystallise. The result is an organisation whose theory of itself is more developed than its theory of the class it claims to represent, and whose political content is therefore more likely to reflect the accumulated positions of the tendency than the actual conditions of the class in a given conjuncture.
This is not a problem of tactics. It is a problem of what the party is for. In a period of class fragmentation and sustained defeat, the question of organisational form cannot be separated from an analysis of what defeat has done to class consciousness, what compositions have emerged from it, and what a programme adequate to those conditions would require. That analysis is nowhere in Morley’s article. In its place is the assurance that the correct method is being applied, the correct cadres are being trained, and the correct line of march is understood. The formula against formulas.
Unfortunately this is all too common among the left, yet I think it perhaps speaks to a fundamental condition of autopoiesis - self-recognition of the inability to self-recognise. But I find this also rings true with the myriad attempts to 'find and speak to the workers,' to 'be with the workers,' as though some nebulous monoculture existed which needs simply to be appealed to as a marketing demographic would be.
The kernel of truth in this obsession with faction and class is I a psychological tendency amongst those that would see themselves builders of a new world, and to do so on the premise, essentially, of their own intuition (as much as people bloviate about 'the five heads of Marxism' and whatever spinoffs they prefer, the working 'method' is not scientific, it is tautological self-justification, i.e. dependence on purely inductive reasoning). The vast majority of today's communists are self-converted through a desire to find meaning, with no practical workplace consequence to any kind of organisational agitation.
To exist in this way is inevitably to create a self-conscious culture of in-culture factionalism and alienation from the revolutionary subject. To what extent this kind of Marxism has any future (zealous, self-justifying nostalgia for a form of class relation that plainly no longer exists) is perhaps indicated by the ever diminishing size and relevance of communist organisations more broadly, though I risk indulging on my own tautological reasoning here!