Leftism (Lenin, Engels)

1. "To attempt in practice today to anticipate this future result of a fully developed, fully stabilized and formed, fully expanded and mature communism would be like trying to teach higher mathematics to a four year old child." - in our era of self appointed pedagogues and supernannies, we might say that this second image presents leftists as communists with an attention deficit disorder.

2. Lenin's conceptual effort at defining the phenomenon itself will be familiar enough: leftism, or left-wing communism, involves a principled stance against any and all participation in parliamentary or bourgeois electoral politics, in unions, and even or especially in party discipline. The upshot of this repudiation of all compromises is a doctrinal 'repetition of the truths of "pure" communism', reduced to a frenzied, incendiary and semi-anarchist type of radicalism, also called 'petty-bourgeois revolutionism' or 'massism' ... Subjective impatience, in a characteristic oscillation between exuberence and dejection, between fanaticism and melancholy, thus takes the place of the arduous work of party organization.

Lenin: "it is tantamount to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness, instability, and incapacity for sustained effort, unity, and organized action, which, if indulged in, must inevitably destroy any proletarian revolutionary movement."

3. Engels: "What childish innocence it is to present one's own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!"