This is an edited version of a piece by SR contributor Chris Brooks. It looks at how anglophone Marxist organisations frequently have a very confrontational and undialectical method of dealing with differences.

Generally, the Anglo-Saxon Trotskyists have a very different culture from the others which reflects in many ways the tensions between the intellectual traditions: empiricism versus enlightenment. This has expressed itself in a different reaction to divergences.Often, divergent views reflect partial understandings – accurate butpartial. Debate allows the two views to be combined in a new are moredeveloped synthesis.

However, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, there’s alot of emphasis on working out which side is more correct. In fact,both sides tend to be partially correct and therefore not fully correct. Furthermore, political disputes get quickly connected up to the people who hold those divergent views and what their supposed interests are.That means that views don’t get taken at face value, and insead are seen as instruments in a power struggle.As a result, discussions can go from nought to sixty in a nanosecond. None of this is helped by the internet, which encourages less well thought out comment.

The Anglo-Saxon tradition also placed a lot of emphasis on homogeneity of thought, not just unity of action. I can remember, for example, seeing a number of discussions in different parties about dialectics:in my opinion some overheated very badly, including a discussion in an organisation a decade ago; I don’t have the papers but do think at some point someone connected someone’s view on Ted Grant’s theory of the big bang to how hard they were selling the paper. We cannot take any pleasure in this, since this our movement and these are or common problems. People are very quick to spot the problem, butvery slow to develop synthesis.

Partial views are so very common, and lining up on sides leads to real disputes before the issues are fully explored, and the fundamentalcontradictions explored. One idea that James P Cannon repeated was to postpone the organisational disputes until after the political issues are resolved. Raising organisational disputes often diverts attention from the political contradictions and undermines the assumption of good faith and mutual trust that activist organisations need to develop.