I’m almost convinced that people don’t become ultraleft; they end up ultraleft. What type of confusion, abuse, bigotry, whatever- it doesn’t matter- turns someone into an ultraleft?
I’m at my wits end, are they just neoliberals that haven’t accepted that fact?
I have a question: are Trotskyists and ultras distinct?
[Incoming rant]
I have a friend in the UC grad student union (I’m currently not in the country but will be returning relatively soon to a UC myself). We used to live together and he’s pretty far left and all, but definitely always been a tad ultra. I was messaging him about orgs to join when I’m back when the craziest encampment action was happening. He said PSL has some members but seem “Stalinist”
. He even said several members in his union are from PSL (super cool honestly), but that they were refusing to push the union to actively vote a statement of solidarity with palestine or something. He was critical of them being too bureaucratic about stuff like that.
Then he told me about the Revolutionary Communists of America and said they seem pretty cool
. I thought hmmm okay I’ll check them out. They were recently founded (insert existential comic joke about leftist parties). They had a podcast and one episode was like “Why we are Leninists” and I was like 
.
I’m listening and hear a lot of Lenin, Marx, no Stalin though. They say “we get criticism for handing out flyers at protests but that’s because we want to build the party to solve all the protests!!1!”
. At this point I’m like no pls, next they bring up directly “a lot of people ask if we’re ‘Trotskyists’, haha the internet has such funny slang doesn’t it. Well, let’s just read what Trotsky said about…” blah blah basically yeah that Stalin re-established class society in USSR etc etc. 
So yeah I was pretty burned because it seems the trots get their marketing down pretty well these days. There were a few signs that slipped right past me.
Honestly imo Trots and ultras can feel very similar and they can come off as virtually identical.
I think there’s some key differences in how they approach things and how they go about what they do, but if you put me in a room with 5 trots and 5 ultras it would take me a while to figure out which was which.
It’s a lot like syndicalism vs council communism or Titoism vs market socialism or [CW for a hot take] platformism vs vanguardism/Bolshevism; maybe the road is slightly different or (lol) the ideological window-dressing is distinct but you end up at essentially the same place regardless. How much emphasis you want to put on the ideological currents behind these movements compared to assessing their impact and outcome, and how exactly you want to attribute things to either being ideologically-driven or a product of material conditions, is a personal matter imo.