“Ultra lefts” typically hold overly dogmatic views about what is and isn’t real socialism. They don’t recognize most AES states today (with perhaps the exception of the DPRK) and they brand ruling communist parties as revisionist at best or outright bourgeois. The so-called “Maoists” fall into this category for example. I use quotation marks on “ultra-left” because as Lenin pointed out when refering to “left-wing” communists, they are not actually further left but rather a different manifestation of petty bourgeois revolutionism.

Their incorrect analysis of AES states leads them to absurd conclusions such as the one exemplified above, namely that the PRC are supposedly just another rival imperialist power and that the “correct” stance is to take neither side. This “neither Beijing nor Washington” line mirrors another ultra-left group, the Trotskyists, who in the first cold war took the “neither Moscow nor Washington” line and branded the USSR with the nonsensical label “social-imperialist”. They use “leftist”, revolutionary-sounding language but the result is the renunciation of anti-imperialist forces.