Tactics generally flow from strategy, but at times it becomes difficult to reconcile the use of certain tactics with decided upon theoretical objectives.  Rather than adjust the tactics, and remove them from the playbook, the tactics take on a larger significance than the theory.  The theory finds itself subjugated.

In this way, an entire school of thought can find itself repressed and humiliated by its inability to change its tactical approach.  The entire premise of a legal movement, a legal party, and a legal presence in the media, university campuses, and electoral politics turns into its opposite when a tactic of using name and likeness brings the party and the newspaper into conflict with the law.

How is this situation tolerable?  Only if theory becomes irrelevant, ignored, sidelined, or left for later.  Only if the development of theory no longer retains its primacy; only when such /work/ is no longer seen as work but distraction or worse, senseless raving or babble.  Only then can it be tolerated.  Lenin’s revelation of his April Theses met criticism from Plekhanov, who claimed he was raving, but Plehkanov responded to the content, proving Plekhanov’s inconsistency.  Trotsky defended Lenin’s return “from the mountain-top”, supported him wholly, and called his consummate thought both work and ownership.